{"data":{"id":14690,"title":"Monthly Studio Report: April 2015","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/14690-Monthly-Studio-Report-April-2015","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/14690","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/14690","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly Reports","images":[{"id":3461,"name":"4_29_15PirateAttackCutlass10.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/6o7do9fg9kc85r\/source\/4_29_15PirateAttackCutlass10.jpg","alt":"","size":8793506,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:24:54+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3461","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3461\/similar"},{"id":3463,"name":"WIP_Component_Array_02.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/3a4rjh0lrqapzr\/source\/WIP_Component_Array_02.jpg","alt":"","size":309654,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:44:37+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3463","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3463\/similar"},{"id":3465,"name":"Vanguard_section.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/cgo9oloy9j2tkr\/source\/Vanguard_section.jpg","alt":"","size":430922,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:46:55+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3465","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3465\/similar"},{"id":3467,"name":"Vanguard_under_attack.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/325b8ehxdae9br\/source\/Vanguard_under_attack.jpg","alt":"","size":1971039,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:51:11+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3467","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3467\/similar"},{"id":3469,"name":"Shader_ball.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/fg7jc766y5homr\/source\/Shader_ball.jpg","alt":"So as you can see just by applying solid values I\u2019m already very far along. For this paint I\u2019m going for a pearl sheen and a nice light blue color. The next phase in the process is adding in base texture maps. These are broad strokes and are meant to break up the surface. I typically use textures as overlays and let the engine drive the actual color and glossiness. This way we can reuse material later on.","size":25317,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:58:52+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3469","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3469\/similar"},{"id":3471,"name":"Shader_ball3.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/ff4fxgd8rn8wlr\/source\/Shader_ball3.jpg","alt":"This detail pass adds some brush stroke patterns and little air bubbles to make the surface more believable. Now since this a painted metal its time bring in the metal with the paint. In the interest of time I will skip the process for creating the metal and just show how I\u2019m blending them.","size":30279,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:58:54+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3471","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3471\/similar"},{"id":3472,"name":"Shader_ball4.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/89kkptfweud9pr\/source\/Shader_ball4.jpg","alt":"This is the metal I will be blending with. The next step is to combine the two materials and use a mask to tell the shader where the two materials should blend.","size":38951,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:58:56+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3472","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3472\/similar"},{"id":3473,"name":"Shader_ball5.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/weefbbax4nswar\/source\/Shader_ball5.jpg","alt":"So here is our final material I hope that this was interesting for you guys and gave you a little insight into my day to day workflow at Cloud Imperium.","size":50579,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T22:58:57+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3473","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3473\/similar"},{"id":3474,"name":"Austin.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/qzfm92nubja20r\/source\/Austin.jpg","alt":"","size":919129,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:45:53+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3474","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3474\/similar"},{"id":3475,"name":"Foundry42.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/sdaa7lhjxeybxr\/source\/Foundry42.png","alt":"","size":9971918,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:42+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3475","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3475\/similar"},{"id":3476,"name":"BHVR.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/uscua6u0cgm4ur\/source\/BHVR.jpg","alt":"","size":3473990,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:45:54+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3476","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3476\/similar"},{"id":3477,"name":"Illfonic2.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/oyh33j9zoob4zr\/source\/Illfonic2.jpg","alt":"","size":1052043,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:11+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3477","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3477\/similar"},{"id":3478,"name":"Illfonic1.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/dznwytlw0tk70r\/source\/Illfonic1.jpg","alt":"","size":1532740,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:51+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3478","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3478\/similar"},{"id":3480,"name":"Turbulent1.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/zyuj062hmvbzcr\/source\/Turbulent1.png","alt":"","size":736879,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:49+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3480","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3480\/similar"},{"id":3481,"name":"Turbulent2.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/ha8kg92azlm0er\/source\/Turbulent2.png","alt":"","size":1550123,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:59+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3481","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3481\/similar"},{"id":3482,"name":"MC1.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/ilsyfopjsomjur\/source\/MC1.png","alt":"","size":1232845,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:21+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3482","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3482\/similar"},{"id":3483,"name":"MC2.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/qzj76zmnns612r\/source\/MC2.png","alt":"","size":41132,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:18+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3483","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3483\/similar"},{"id":3484,"name":"MC3.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/vcm4i6dcxoutvr\/source\/MC3.png","alt":"","size":39820,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2015-05-01T15:46:50+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3484","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3484\/similar"},{"id":3485,"name":"Battlebuddies.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/vnojwmeaelmmhr\/source\/Battlebuddies.jpg","alt":"","size":103345,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2015-05-02T00:30:11+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3485","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/3485\/similar"},{"id":30963,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/vjhp2njbokvxb\/source.png","alt":"","size":4895804,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-05-02T18:53:45+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/30963","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/30963\/similar"},{"id":31194,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/dyu8i559admn1\/source.png","alt":"","size":3831731,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-06-06T16:13:24+00:00","api_url":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Citizens,\nWelcome to the April 2015 Monthly Report! It was a busy month for the Star Citizen team, with the worldwide teams going full speed ahead on updates to Arena Commander, Star Marine, Squadron 42, the persistent universe and more. As we speak, Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.2 is available on the PTU. Thanks to the community, we\u2019ve identified a number of bugs that the team is hard at work squashing today\u2026 expect an update on that next week. This is also your last weekend to pledge for a Hull series ship during the concept sale; check it out! We\u2019ll also be putting out a more comprehensive update on Star Marine early next week, letting you know exactly what we\u2019ve been working on these past few weeks. Until then, enjoy finding out what we\u2019ve been up to in April!\n\nGreetings Citizens,\n\nApril is over; man, that was fast! We\u2019re trying things a little differently with this month\u2019s report: instead of a single voice, we\u2019ve given each team member the opportunity to contribute directly. And below this report, we\u2019ve added a little background about what one of our artists does. You\u2019ll have to let us know what you think in the comments but we believe it creates a much more dynamic update! Without further ado, let\u2019s go to the department updates written by those who make up the departments.\n\nDesign\nOne of the items we\u2019ve been working on in the Design department is Pirate Swarm is a mode within the map of Broken Moon. It features Pirate pilots using UEE ships that will attack the players. The number of waves has been reduced for play times to be more manageable, waves have been balanced as well to allow players a chance to reach the end. The Swarm modes have been played a bunch over the time since Arena Commander has been released, but we want to give you more than just static waves of the same ones over and over. Moving forward we want to get away from the term of Vanduul or Pirate Swarm and make it just \u2018Swarm\u2019.\n\nWhat does that mean?\n\nWe want to give you options in which you can customize your gameplay.\n\nThat doesn\u2019t tell me anything!\n\nHmm, how would you like to choose what enemies you fight? How would you like to select how many waves you want to go up against? Moving forward we really want to give you those types of options. The ability to make your play experience painfully difficult as a true swarm of enemies zero in on you, or if you just want to jump in and test a new weapon set up, then spawn a single easy wave to check it out. This is a simulation, you should have the ability to set up your training simulation as you please, and we aim to give you that option.\n\nGOST is coming! GOST is a modular system we\u2019re developing that allows us to more directly control the varied methods of interacting with our ships. Previously hard-coded archetypes of accessing, entering, sitting within, and navigating throughout ships will instead be authored by situation-specific logical components, granting us greater freedom than ever before. One example of the advantages of this system is that in the Hornet F7CM, instead of being auto-seated in the pilot\u2019s seat, you\u2019ll be able to deploy the access ladder, then choose to retract it, sit in the pilot\u2019s seat, or sit in the copilot seat. Multi-crewed ships will reap even larger functional benefits, especially while dashing from the radar station to the hangar deck in the heat of battle or while simply taking a leisurely stroll to the lounge. Interact with your ships however you\u2019d like\u2014it\u2019s all possible with GOST.\n\nOverall, April has seen a lot of great progress for our long-term itemization in Star Citizen. With the continued work on all of the ship components, we\u2019ve been working on a full overhaul and standardization of all of our component sizes. Having these in place is going to help with all aspects of ship design and development. From the ground up, we can use these sizes to build out much more detailed component plans for each of our ships, as well as starting to help us plan out just what our increased modularity of ship components will mean when putting together a loadout.\n\nHaving these sizes locked in, we\u2019ve already started planning out some of the possible component swapping that will be available in the future. Some of our current experiments are exploring Power Plants, Shield Generators, and Cooling systems sharing more interchangeable placement. This is still going to take a lot of testing and tuning to make sure these choices feel meaningful enough to make while also keeping the overall power of each ship balanced.\n\nAnother set of components we\u2019ve needed to rethink the sizing on are our Ammo Boxes, Battery Packs, Fuel Tanks, and Ballast systems. With our resized components, these all now share the same size, allowing them to easily be replaced with one another. Running a ballistics-heavy ship? Bring some extra ammo. Need to make a long-range flight next? Swap that ammo out with some spare fuel tanks. While not all of these components are adjustable on a ship currently, they\u2019re going to help play a major part in loadout customization.\n\nThis month we took on tangibility mechanics \u2013 what has affectionately been called \u201cgrabby hands\u201d \u2013 as a vital step towards bringing the cargo system to life. The basic premise is that everything is physical, that human scale objects can be picked up and manipulated, placed and tossed around with a level of fidelity and control that really brings the environment alive. Moving things around is great, and from our early prototypes it feels more natural and responsive than has ever been seen done before, but that\u2019s only the first problem \u2013 doing it with animations that flow naturally while remaining responsive for gameplay and visibly correct in both first and third person is a whole extra level of complexity. It\u2019s all pretty well documented here.\n\nFor all its challenges, this level of detail and interactivity is the path to a universe that feels real, from seeing a stranger flipping a coin to walking into your hangar and truly feeling at home. It extends beyond just the picking up of items, so I\u2019ve also created early examples of direct interaction with buttons, dials, throttles, even computer screens. Being able to sit in your cockpit and manually pick out individual buttons to press, or directly pulling levers and valves to tweak and tune components for repair, or just walking up to a screen and being able to instantly interact intuitively and naturally without switching into a new mode \u2013 these are the things that make the art of Star Citizen tangible.\n\nEngineering\nThis month we implemented a new 3D-to-2D \u201cpoint of view\u201d radar in the style of Wing Commander\u2019s radar. Though range can be harder to discern with this radar it makes it very easy to know where your contacts are around you and which way to turn to get them in view. We started by using Wolfram Mathematica to rapidly prototype the math necessary to map a 3D direction onto the display, creating both an interactive output and a test output using a generated array of test points so we could see any mistakes that needed fixing. Once we were sure the math was correct we brought it all into C++ and hooked it up to the flash through a custom dock item field, then attached the flash to the front HUD of an Avenger to test it. This new radar type will be appearing in certain ships soon.\n\nWhile the AI devs over in the UK have nowadays mostly been working on character-based AI for Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe, we\u2019ve been focused on the maintenance of spaceship-based AI as you see in the Vanduul Swarm game mode. Most recently, we\u2019ve begun prototyping wingmen commands, the ability for the player to assign specific goals such as \u201cattack my target\u201d or \u201cdefend me\u201d to his wingmen instead of just having them engage enemies as they please. This work will also work well towards our ability to create complex combat scenarios and missions in which AI ships will have different objectives to fulfill specific roles in the fleet. In the future, we expect to be working more in supporting Randy Vazquez, an LA technical designer who started working for us in the past couple of months and specifically focuses on AI encounter systems.\n\nContinue bug support on release stream; crashes, mp de-syncs, unexpected behavior, and all around shenanigans. Prep work for radar system 2.0, signature system 2.0, vehicle params, and physical based damage. The improved radar system will be handle designer driven entries, threaded performance improvements, coherent abstraction so player and vehicles can use the same system with adjusted parameters, and more. The improved signature system will extend the designer driven system because calix demands more power, allow signatures to mask other signatures ( sun blocking ir signatures ), introduce the concept of frequency, and expand signature emission profiles. The vehicle params are a important step to reduce load times and allow external system to construct information on how a vehicle could be built without the need of spawning said vehicle. The params will also be used to cache resources. Physical damage will allow our kinetic projectiles damage to be based off kinetic energy and control how vehicles handle damage from physical hits and collisions.\n\nArt\nThroughout April members of the Santa Monica ship team have been coming together to update the Freelancer. This process has been an intricate one as it touches many facets of the games core mechanics including some new up and coming features. Coordination between studios has been crucial to this update. Concept artists in the UK have been hard at work fleshing out the Starfarer\u2019s design and with this has come a particular aesthetic that solidified the MISC look in the Star Citizen universe.\n\nUnity among manufacturers is a must so artists here in Santa Monica are applying those concepts to the Freelancer interior and exterior areas. This update has involved many changes such as proper metrics for character interactions, creating zones for cargo and adding areas for modular components. Maintaining the original experience and purpose of the ship will of course be maintained. As a whole the Freelancer has increases in size but the interior has remained a narrow and functional space as the previous design intended; allowing players to be immersed in the multi crew experience of a personal ship.\n\nThroughout the community there has been a lot of feedback concerning the Freelancer, and we\u2019ve listened! Worries about entering the cargo bay while it is full, accessibility to the back turret and the small mid-section as well some other issues have all been addressed. (No more clipping through bathrooms or popping up and down while trying to get to your bed). When the update is completed we believe the community will be pleasantly surprised.\n\nThings have been busy as usual in the Concept department here in Santa Monica. We did a bit of concept work on the freelancer back turret and body before moving on to help where we could with the art for the Hull concept sale. That ship is looking gorgeous and we are excited for you all to see what we have done.\n\nOmar has been doing some amazing work on the characters. He spent a few weeks in Austin working with the team there and they have all made some really amazing progress. He will be heading to the UK office for a few weeks to continue moving forward with character stuff. We can assure you that the character team is creating some really cool stuff and we know you are all going to be really excited when you see what they have been working on. Hopefully we will get Omar back in the concept department soon to work on ship stuff.\n\nWell that wraps up the Santa Monica portion of this report. Hope you\u2019ve enjoyed your tour through our development efforts for the month voiced by those on the front lines. As always thank you to everyone in the community for their continued support and for making this game possible. It is a real pleasure to be able to work on such an amazing universe with such an amazing community!\n\nCheers,\nCIG Santa Monica Team\n\nHi my name is Daniel Kamentsky and I\u2019m an Associate 3D artist at CIG in Santa Monica. You might know me from my time working on TNGS as a part of time shimapan. My role at CIG has recently shifted away from modeling and more towards surfacing.\n\nAs real time rendering evolves, with new rendering techniques such as PBR (physically based rendering) there is a growing demand for artists that specialize in the creation and application of materials. As one of these artists it\u2019s my job to think about the more micro level of detail while the other ship artist focus on the modeling and large shapes.\n\nSo what does it mean to be a surfacing artist? Well for me it\u2019s about being fascinated with small details and different surface types. Being a surfacing artist requires you to have a deep understanding of the way different materials react to light, how different materials are used in reality, and how to accurately create these materials with in a real time engine.\n\nAnyways as an artist I\u2019m better at showing rather than saying (or writing) so let me walk you through my process in creating a material in this set of images. So for this demo I\u2019m going to create a painted metal material. With physically based rendering you are able to create believable materials with simple solid base colors. So with that in mind the first thing I normally do when making my materials is start by blocking in some solid values.\n\nHi everyone!\n\nApril showers have blessed Central Texas this month and we\u2019ve been hard at work on many fronts. We\u2019ve seen record concurrency numbers with the 1.1.1 game update, and experienced multiplayer connectivity issues as a result. We mobilized all resources to focus on this issue, and you\u2019ll see more detail on these activities from several teams in the detailed reports. We\u2019ve got a lot to share, so please check out some detailed info from the teams in the Austin studio!\n\nPersistent Universe Team\nArt\nThe month of April saw many developments within the Art Department of CIG Austin. We hosted an Environment Mini-Summit where our friends from Foundry 42, BHVR, and Illfonic came to visit to discuss long term planning for Star Citizen Environments. There are a lot of cross-studio dependencies that require face-to-face time to discuss in more depth, and it is very valuable to interact with people in person that we work with on a daily basis across the world. All in all the Summit was a success, and our Global Environment Leads Ian Leyland and Cort Soest have helped establish a firm foundation upon which to build the best environments possible. Our focus specifically for the PU this year will be fleshing out the \u201cFirst 5\u201d planetary landing zones, wrapping up our first batch of shops that will be found on those landing zones, and R&D on creating modular space stations that will serve a variety of functions in the PU.\n\nOur character team has been solely focused on supporting the FPS character revisions this month. There was a lot of work to do to help bring these characters up to speed with the rest of the amazing work Illfonic has been doing to make Star Marine look the best it can. We\u2019ve added armor plating to help beef up the Medium Marine a bit more, tweaked materials and colors to help both the Marines and Outlaws look like they belong to the same unit, and Josh Coons even jumped over from the Ship Team for a while to help bring the Outlaw helmets up to the next level. These characters are looking fantastic, and we\u2019re really excited for you guys to get to run around with them very SOON!\n\nOther things the Art Team has been up to this month include concept work for Hangar weapon racks and Holo-Kiosks for the Astro Armada shop, concept work on shielding and radiators for space stations, explorations into Blue Collar clothing sets, flickering job board VFX for the TDD shop, and texturing work for the mobiGlas asset.\n\nOur Animation Team has been supporting various aspects of the project, including prone weapon sets for FPS, and Grabby Hands animations for testing out picking up and putting down objects. Lead Animator Bryan Brewer has been testing and debugging the brand new skeleton we are going to be moving our characters over to in order to improve various aspects of the character\u2019s proportions and range of motion. Our entire animation team is now transitioning over to helping retarget our whole library of animations (over 2,000!) to this new skeleton.\n\nDesign\nThere were many discussions and meetings that took place this month amongst our designers in order to break down what we are calling the \u201cGame Loop\u201d for our upcoming Social Module release. Where does a player start when he\/she logs in? What do they experience as they participate in various activities around a landing zone? What happens when they interact with REDACTED??? All very important questions that ultimately helped shape the design for Shopping, Storage, NPC setup, and more. We\u2019ll continue to break these down even further as we progress into next month.\n\nPete Mackay has been adding extensive developments to his newly dubbed \u201cShip Cruncher\u201d tool (formerly Thruster Calculator). It\u2019s a pretty robust tool that allows designers to balance discrete item parameters, create baseline ship items for each item type, properly size ship gear and visualize granular changes on a macro scale, and collect robust data sets for each ship. The Ship Cruncher also does several different physics calculations to determine how fast a ship can change direction, its top speed, its turn radius, etc. It\u2019s an all-inclusive package that will significantly help with ship balancing in the future.\n\nEvan Manning has been adding data to the Star Map to be used by our friends at Turbulent for the release of the Star Map on the Platform side. There is a lot of information to be documented and Evan has been doing a great job of ensuring every element in each system is in its proper place.\n\nWork continues on fleshing out various occupations within the Persistent Universe. Tony Zurovec continues to whittle away at the details of the Pioneer occupation, and Rob Reininger and Nate Blaisdell have taken cracks at initial passes on the Mercenary\/Escort and Bounty Hunter occupations, respectively. Before long we\u2019ll have more detailed breakdowns of how each of these occupations will work in the PU.\n\nEngineering\nApril was a busy month for our engineering team, as many of them were recruited to support the live patch that went out the first week of the month.\n\nOur Server Team paused their work on the Multiplayer Hangars feature in order to work closely with DevOps and QA to improve and strengthen our Instance Manager, our Matchmaking Service and other services. As a result, we have had a dramatic decrease in reports of issues related to inability to load into multiplayer matches. Congrats to our hardworking team for this splendid accomplishment!\n\nWe have other, longer term systems in the works that continue to progress closer towards completion. These systems are being worked on out of Austin with strong cross-over with Manchester and Denver (by our friends at Wyrmbyte)\u2026such as: Unique Global Entity ID system, Generic Instance Manager, Player Info Server, Presence Server, Universe Simulator, HUB Server, and Player Persistence. Much of this work is slated to have deliverables of first iterations in the month of May\u2026the team is definitely making some solid progress!\n\nThe team has also been working with tools such as RAD Telemetry to help them profile our server metrics, in order to support the ongoing task of optimizing server performance. They have started profiling our live builds and analyzing the results with fine toothed combs to identify areas to focus on to implement improvements.\n\nWork also continues on our various tools systems, including support for such items as the Sandbox Editor, Trackview and our Asset Validation Tool. And development continues to progress quickly on our various AI Editors\u2026such as our Useable Editor and our Character Archetype Editor\u2026which are needed by our design team to help bring our worlds to life.\n\nAnd while juggling all of these tasks the team has also been busy working on such things as finalizing 64-bit networking support for our Large World system, finalizing work on the iPredictor (movement prediction) system, creating a series of prototypes for the Mining Occupation, and helping support other systems that are live or in the works, such as REC and Multi-Seat Ships.\n\nFinally, behind the scenes our team has been hard at work re-optimizing our development stream workflow, which will help us streamline our development to ultimately be more efficient and stable. Everyone is looking forward to this new workflow, which has been rolling out step-by-step over the past several weeks.\n\nWell, that\u2019s it in a nutshell for the month on April, 2015! We\u2019ll be back with more next month!\n\nLive Operations\nQA\nFor the month of April QA has been busy on multiple fronts. With the release of 1.1.1, our concurrency rose to a level we had not seen before. This exposed aspects of our back-end infrastructure that were preventing successful connections to multiplayer matches. QA worked closely with DevOps and our server engineers in a full investigation. After multiple hot-fixes to our servers, the issues were dramatically improved. Subsequently a call was made for everyone to help participate in a scheduled stress test. The turnout was such that we were able to surpass our previous concurrency record and were happy to see our back-end system could handle this increased load.\n\nMelissa Estrada has been assisting our developers in the Frankfurt studio to track down and regress editor issues they\u2019ve encountered when doing comparison testing of our version of the editor to pure CryEngine SDK. Melissa also headed up an initiative to log all errors found in the game logs which will be a huge help in ensuring we have a cleaner game for the release of Star Marine. The team assisted our Global Environmental Tech Lead Cort Soest to filter unused maps in the editor to reduce internal build space by more than 100GB helping to enhance work efficiency.\n\nOur checklists have been updated to include more Star Marine and Squadron 42 features as well as deeper checks to the editor. With help from Jeffrey Pease, efforts have been made to improve the patch notes creation process which help to more easily incorporate multiple members of the QA team that can assist in the event that someone is absent.\n\nMiles Lee has made significant progress in developing test automation. As a result, we are able to automate the capturing of performance data for each of our various builds. He is also working on automating our build sanity checks and assisting DevOps with the development of a headless client system that will enable us to automate stress tests on our back-end infrastructure.\n\nThe team was also continually testing Star Marine. FPS specialists Tyler Witkin and his UK counterpart Glenn Kneal ensured production was notified of all issues found that day and highlighted any severe outstanding issues that were blocking or significantly hindering testing.\n\nOur QA team was also fortunate enough to visit Professor Paul Toprac and his aspiring game developers participating in the Capstone GAMMA program at the University of Texas. We had a lot of fun playtesting and providing feedback on their projects.\n\nNext month we plan to incorporate Social Module in our regular testing. We will be working very closely with Jake Ross to ensure we begin testing each aspect of the Module as soon as it is available.\n\nGame Support\nThe month of April was quite busy for everyone, including Game Support!\n\nWe\u2019re continuing to learn and refine our processes of communicating and working with players, particularly on the Live Service Notification forums and on Reddit. We\u2019ve seen nothing but appreciation from players for these efforts, which means we\u2019re doing something right! Our goal of serving live players with information is carried out by giving you the most accurate and updated information on the health of the service, what kind of game experience you can expect as a player, and what we\u2019re all doing to make it better (especially on patch days!).\n\nBehind the scenes, we\u2019ve made some changes that will ultimately result in you getting a better, faster response. We\u2019re closely working with Customer Service, Community, and DevOps on a daily basis to make sure that you get the right timely support. We\u2019ve got a good plan and we\u2019re excited to start getting to where you would want us to be as a service provider.\n\nOn a more visible level, we\u2019ve also begun the work of running and managing stress tests, and we\u2019ll be involved in many more of these. The rollout of 1.1.1 and increased concurrency resulted in multiplayer instability, and we worked with multiple teams to identify and address the more common issues. To properly test these fixes, we coordinated with the player base in what turned out to be an incredibly successful test which set new concurrency records for Star Citizen. Not only was this helpful, but it was fun!\n\nLastly, we\u2019ve spent some time internally on creating some plans on what we\u2019re going to need to support future modules, namely the upcoming Star Marine module, which for us basically means supporting an entirely new game! We\u2019ll be excited to roll these plans out in the coming weeks and months as we expand our services to better support the growing community and ever-expanding needs of the Star Citizen universe.\n\nIT\/Operations\nThe IT team has been hard at work improving internal systems, planning for future systems, growing storage, and fine tuning service performance. The term explosive growth is often used when talking about storage and in our case, we\u2019re no different. As our dev teams continue to produce content and collaborate, we need to make the results of their work available to all teams within the company. As storage needs grow in LA for example, we must grow storage in all other studio locations to match so that data can be replicated locally to each team.\n\nGrowth of storage space is not the only aspect we\u2019ve been focused on this month. Storage performance can also become an issue when lots of people need access to the same things at the same time. We\u2019ve already surpassed the capability of standard replication methods and found it necessary to build our own in order to keep up with demand. I\u2019m proud to say that the IT team has come up with some very creative and innovative strategies to make better use of existing systems and believe me, we push hardware to the limits here at Cloud Imperium Games.\n\nFor example, one of our replication systems pushes about 900 mb\/s for about 12 hours each day pushing content to 5 replication targets simultaneously. It is important for this data to get to each studio as quickly as possible so the performance demand on the servers is pretty high. To solve this problem we\u2019ve built a custom flash storage system in in order to provide the IOPS we need for this process. Each upgrade seems to expose new areas we can improve on. In this example we got our replication going so fast that it began to bog down servers on the receiving end so we\u2019ve been upgrading those servers where necessary as well.\n\nWhile the IT team has been continuing to provide support to individual developers around the world it seems like storage and replication tuning have been our main focus this month. Next month we\u2019re looking forward to building even better systems to help the dev teams crank out content even faster.\n\nDev Ops\nApril was a month of firefighting and stability improvements! We launched patch 1.1.1 and worked to fix stability issues with our Instance Manager, Party, and Matchmaking services. After two weeks of deploying hotfixes from our Server Engineering team, stability increased. Due to some of the stability issues we have had over the last few patch releases, CIG has decided to change our approach to Operational Deployments. What this means to the players is that they should not expect Friday patch releases, or releases late at night. Instead we will be aiming for a more tempered roll out of patches and hotfixes to our live environment, taking full advantage of our PTU environment for config and game testing. We hope this will lead to more stable releases for our players.\n\nThe DevOps team has also been hard at work building the base infrastructure for the live environment, PTU, and internal test environments. Work on the new launcher and patcher continues, and we am sure you all will be as excited to use it as we are. We will be demo\u2019ing it very soon with an upcoming PTU test and getting feedback and usability testing on it. Work on our automated dynamic infrastructure scaling system continues, around 40% of this system is already deployed live, and we expect the rest to begin operating over the next month. Internally, we continue to re-build our build server, change how we merge code and data between working branches, build better crash reporting, and work on automated testing.\n\nThere is still a lot of work to do to rework our internal data pipeline to get it to the point that both CIG developers and players do not have to patch and move around massive amounts of data each time there are minor changes. The DevOps team is working on a large roadmap to fix this with help from our engineering and tech art teams in Austin and Germany while being supported by our IT staff on the hardware build out. A full completion of this plan will take many months to roll out, but should drastically reduce the time it takes for a game build to be generated, the time for developers to test their changes, the size of patches, and the amount of data developers need to grab each morning. More on this plan in the months to come.\n\nAnimation\nThe UK animation team has expanded in to a group of five ready to tackle and implement the ongoing Imaginarium shoot as it comes in. As well as being on hand for any block out animations needed here at Foundry 42 we\u2019ve been doing some of the back end work to get the databases and tracking in place that are necessary to keep on top of a project as large and ambitious as Squadron 42.\n\nEngineering\nThere are a couple of big ticket items coming to their first major milestones for the end of April. Firstly you will hopefully have your first taste of the new tutorial mode in Arena Commander. This has proved to be much more of an undertaking than originally planned, mainly because of just how deep our control systems go and then the complexity of trying to show the player how everything works. Sometimes when you are so close to a project you don\u2019t always appreciate the bigger picture and realise just quite how much we\u2019ve accomplished. We know most people internally who have played through the tutorial (including some of the QA team) have learnt something new about the game!\n\nSecondly we\u2019ve been doing a lot of work in the last few months converting all the game\u2019s \u201centity Ids\u201d from a 32 bit number to a 64 bit number. The entity Id is a unique identifier for each \u201cthing\u201d in the game, which can be stored and referenced very quickly, and for a computer is much more natural way of accessing items than something more human readable like a name string for example. For a normal single player game, and standalone multiplayer games, 32 bits is plenty (it gives you about 4 billion possibilities) but for an MMO game it proves to be woefully inadequate. The plan is that everything in the universe will have its own unique Id or a \u201cglobal entity Id\u201d as we\u2019re now calling it, so every item in every database and on every server can be accessed via its own identifier. So as you traverse your way across the universe in your ship, with your particular loadout, with your cargo stored, and a couple of hitchhikers, and are hopping from one system to the next, it makes it much more straightforward technically to transfer all of that information from the server your currently on and onto the next, seamlessly. The fundamental change is actually a fairly simple one, the knock-ons where the code was assuming all these Ids would be 32 bits required a huge amount of fixing and is what takes the majority of the time. This process looks like it is now coming to an end much to the relief of the engineer in charge.\n\nGoing into May our gameplay engineers are really focusing in on our charge for the S42 vertical slice, many mechanics of which are now in the polish stage. This is the time where you start to see parts of the project really come together, you see a game instead of a collection of bits. Exciting times!\n\nAudio\nThis past April for CIG Audio was mainly us keeping busy continuing our work in moving to Wwise. We\u2019re really digging in now; assets are all across, banks created, bussing hierarchy etc. is built, and it\u2019s giving us an opportunity now to refactor and improve while tying things together with Cryengine as much as we can. It\u2019s a big push as Cryengine has only relatively recently begun supporting Wwise and there\u2019ll still be a lot for us to do ourselves on that side, as we progress this year. We\u2019re very much looking forward to releasing with it, but we\u2019ve got plans beyond the standard tools associated with Wwise, for example automated Foley and footsteps that are driven systematically. It\u2019s possible to spend so much time labouring over these, it\u2019s a complete no-brainer to attempt to go the auto route with them.\n\nWe obtained some great new tools from Nugen Audio, one of which is going to be key in maintaining a good consistent loudness normalisation level for dialogue particularly, hugely useful.\n\nAs we mentioned last month, we\u2019ve welcomed two new Sound Designers: Darren Lambourne, and Matteo Cerquone. Darren\u2019s joined us from Ninja Theory where he worked on some amazing sounding titles. Matteo has joined as a junior, having come through the ranks at Vancouver Film School who turn out same excellent game sound designers.\n\nFinally, we\u2019ve welcomed a Dialogue Specialist, Bob Rissolo. Bob is straight into the deep end with a live-action shoot, helping to record great dialogue performances and ensuring we maintain the quality we need there. He\u2019ll be moving from the US to join us at Foundry 42 which will be a real change for him and hopefully one that proves fruitful.\n\nLuke and Pedro have been really hard at work on the Tutorial this month, which we hope you\u2019ll enjoy from a sonic aspect, it\u2019s highly evocative stuff in many ways!\n\nPhil has kept on plugging away at the social module, along with Tom who\u2019s been putting in great groundwork on S42 too.\n\nStefan has kept pushing on with FPS work \u2013 our Foley session at Pinewood was great, gave us an excellent kicking-off point for the different armour types. We\u2019re still going to keep improving it through recording our own Foley assets as well, however. Can\u2019t stop tweaking! He\u2019s continuing the work on the guns which is a sophisticated system in its own right, getting one\u2019s head around the HDR system is a tough first job but he\u2019s definitely getting there. We still have more environmental aspects of the weapons audio to record though, there\u2019s going to be a lot of audio data devoted to weapons in this game, that\u2019s for sure.\n\nThanks for listening!\n\nArt\nWow \u2013 April just flew by, we squeezed another birthday in while managing to keep all the plates spinning for Sq42 :) Good progress is being made on the Vanduul fleet, ships and shape language, patina paintovers, turret design, its an ever growing pandoras box of tasks. We\u2019ve also spent a lot of time and effort on the FPS weapons needed for the campaign, this includes attachments (scopes, grips, rail systems) and also grenades, while also planning on making the existing weapons PBR correct. We\u2019ve also started working with an new UK based concept company to help us solve the growing amount of tasks generated by the Cap ships and level design.\n\nEnvironments\nWe\u2019ve been focusing on our Vertical Slice section for Sq42 \u2013 this means we take a section of a level and take it up to final art quality. We\u2019ve got some fancy new tech fresh from the rendering department which will enable us to build our modular levels much more cheaply. We\u2019re also starting to make some real progress on how props are going to be done in both Sq42 & the PU, they will basically follow our same master material system which will utilise the same started texture resource as our environments, this will mean that we can dress our levels to a much higher standard. And lastly we\u2019ve been putting the final touches and fixes to the new Tutorial section in Dying Star \u2013 we hope you like it. Ian has also taken on the role as Global environment lead and is pushing through the many lessons we\u2019ve learnt to our partner studios who have been helping make what you see today.\n\nShip Team\nThis month, the Foundry 42 ship is hard at work preparing a lot of assets for the Cinematic shoot in London. This is an ongoing process, making sure Cinematic Directors and Chris Roberts have everything that they need to shoot all the cinematics for Squadron 42.\n\nThe ship team in Manchester is working on multiple capships full force, and we are making really good process. Our goal is to make these massive ships a living and breathing world for the player to explore. The Idris and Javelin and Bengal are all going into final production, to meet the F42 standards! A huge undertaking. The Starfarer production is also making good headway, Matt is systematically working through the whole ship ,a big project, his second project after the Gladiator. We are also working on a Xi\u2019an Cargo ship, a ship that is needed in SQ42.\n\nCharacters\nWe\u2019ve been concentrating heavily on the mocap\/Pcap shoot, the camera rig is now in London with Andy and is being put through its paces capturing the actors as they arrive for the shoot \u2013 cant wait to see a digital version of (redacted). All in all exciting stuff!\n\nHey all!\n\nFirst off, we\u2019d like to say that it\u2019s fantastic to be able to report to you our progress on the BDSSEtm every month. In our book, being able to interact directly with the community is the number one perk of open development.\n\nHere\u2019s what the BHVR team has been up to in April. Some of you asked us for the loooong version, so here it is:\n\nPushing towards the social module\u2019s first release, we\u2019re focused mainly, but not solely, on supporting and polishing the shopping experience. Planetside locations are going to be rich in adventure, encounters and interactions, but before we get to present to you the fancier game scenarios and mechanics, we are focused on the essentials, so let\u2019s start with those:\n\nWhen you\u2019ll finally get to exit your hangar on foot and make your way up to planetside, we want you to have a good time visiting the various shops and markets available. Take a moment to familiarise yourself with these names if you haven\u2019t already: Astro-Armada is a high-class ship dealer, Casaba-Outlet is a clothing and apparel franchise, Cubby-blast is a shop unique to ArcCorp-Area18 which will answer all of your personal weaponry needs, Dumper\u2019s Depot is a scrap metal shop where you\u2019ll find ship parts (in perfect condition for now), and last but not least the medical-unit offers medical services for that special moment when you get shotgunned in the face.\n\nThe shopping experience effort is on various fronts: On the design side, our level designers are putting together the physical and logical components needed in the levels: racks, shelves, items on shelves, the shops themselves, etc., as well as supporting our artists who are making these locations\u2019 visuals gorgeous and reusable. Game Designers are synchronizing everyone\u2019s work to fit the concepts and coming up with realistic solutions to epic problems that obviously come along the way (like \u2026 every five minutes).\n\nOur UI team has been all over the place! They created some cool logos this month for \u201cInterdimension Software\u201c, \u201cElectronic Access\u201d as well as a \u201cStar Marine\u201d logo animation, along with decals for the Nyx planetside location. The mobiGlas and its Augmented Reality (AR), which are the main gateways into the shopping interface, are being enhanced with various visual components and other features such as reworked notifications for lobby, shops and hangars. We are not able to have the full polished set of features just yet, but giving it to you in its current state is very exciting. We\u2019re looking forward to reading your feedback on its usability and visuals.\n\nAll of this is extremely exciting to us as we\u2019ve written, discussed and iterated on these designs for a long time (centuries in spacecrab-time) and we\u2019re finally seeing it all come together. Note that this first release is far from the final shopping experience we\u2019re striving for. It is what we call \u201cPhase one\u201d as in \u201cSet phasers to one\u201d.\n\nIn other news, other Planetside locations are still being developed. Mariana, Odyssa, Crusader and Hurston Designs have passed from 2D level layouts to the whitebox stage. If you recall, we\u2019ve stated in previous reports that we would get faster and faster in the development of Planetsides thanks to the Tag, Room and Tier systems. The four planets mentioned fit under the same Architectural style as ArcCorp, making them great candidates to prove that we can build them efficiently. So far so good! You can dig up more info and concepts about these Planets; it\u2019s available on this very site.\n\nAs mentioned above, our little army of artists has spent a good amount of time \u2018arting-up\u2019 the various shopping locations, but also working on an all new modular set to be used in future planetside locations. For this new set, we\u2019ve integrated a better pipeline that makes our work more efficient and with better visual results. We can\u2019t wait to show you those results!\n\nYou\u2019ve probably seen mock-ups of the holotable revamp. We are continuing the effort on this side as well. The visuals are still being defined while our engineers are making slight tweaks and fixes. To preserve its functionality for the soon to be released modes, we cannot dive in the full revamp just yet. You\u2019ll understand that before making it better we\u2019ll need to break it. Of course we don\u2019t want you to end up with a broken holotable. For now you\u2019ll see tweaks such as better visual cues for the REC equipment versus owned equipment.\n\nSomewhat related to the holotable, but also affecting various systems throughout the game, we have made some progress on the holo-object refactor to reduce entity usage. In a nutshell, this means better performance which directly translates to more players in multiplayer instances!\n\nOur engineers are also hard at work supporting the FPS access, the loadout customization in the lobby and the multi-crew lobby implementation. On top of that, the chat feature has been updated to support basic features and private conversations. These aren\u2019t accessible to you yet but they\u2019ll come in handy when we finally roll out the multiplayer hangars, which our guys are actively working on.\n\nWe also had a very fruitful day-long meeting with Turbulent where both of our teams joined forces for skyLine, the Starmap. We can\u2019t say much about this feature just yet except that it\u2019ll be super awesome, promise! We can\u2019t wait to use it!\n\nAs usual, we prepared some cool Flair Objects for the subscribers and for past stretch goals. Hope you liked our little April\u2019s Fools prank; we\u2019ve heard that it actually made the game FPS much better ;). The Khartu-Al Takuetsu starship model has been given, and we\u2019d like to thank the community for reporting and helping us find an insidious error that prevented it from appearing in hangars. (Don\u2019t tell anyone, but we\u2019re working on a special extra something for the 23million stretch goal reward\u2026which was also a Khartu-Al).\n\nNext month\u2019s flair will be the first of a new series. The Puglisi collection items are especially nice pieces. They have strong visuals and also have a great fiction around them (thanks to Haddock for that!).\n\nOkay, we\u2019re running out of coffee and are very low on \u201cspace ink\u201dtm, so until next time, have fun in the \u2018verse!\n\nAhoy Star Citizens! It\u2019s been another busy month for the FPS team. Over the past few weeks we\u2019ve been focused on getting the feel of movement and gun-play really dialed in, along with implementing zero g locomotion and interactions. Read below for the details\u2026\n\nEngineering\nThe engineering team spent a lot of time and effort making sure all of the variables and parameters that designers were requesting were available to them for tweaking. This doesn\u2019t just include player speed and weapon damage, but also things like breathe duration based on stamina from sprinting and how that affects aim on each of the weapons. They can now tweak how long a breath is, the pause at the top and bottom of a breath, how far that will throw off the player\u2019s aim, etc\u2026 This allows the designers to fine tune everything to get all the weapons feeling exactly how they want in every situation. In addition, the stock CryEngine hint system was rewritten. The hint system is what was used to provide recoil and inaccuracy when continually firing a weapon. The general consensus was that the stock system didn\u2019t provide enough control, so one of our engineers rewrote it from scratch to give tons of control over which direction the gun will recoil and what the limits are for up and down movement. Again, this is something that will give designers a much finer level of control in tuning the weapons moving forward.\n\nAnother big task that has been going on is network optimization. There was quite a bit of traffic being passed from the client to the server and vice versa that just didn\u2019t need to be there\u2026 so a few of the guys here have been profiling all of the network traffic and stripping out what isn\u2019t necessary and restructuring what is there to be much more efficient in terms of data size. It\u2019s gotten much, much better over the last few weeks and there is still more that can be optimized. In the end, this will mean less lag and a much smoother experience for you Citizens! We know you understand how important it is to have as little network lag as possible, especially when playing a shooter!\n\nArt\nThe art team has been focused on polishing ALL of the current weapons in the game, mostly making sure the materials are all up to Star Citizen standards (and you know how high that bar is!). A full lighting pass was also completed on the Gold Horizon space station level. The Astro Arena level that you saw at PAX East has undergone a complete rework on the art side to give it more depth and bring some more contrast in as a whole. Polish work on the VFX for all of the weapons is ongoing. We also want to make sure that the weapon effects in FPS are lining up with those used in ships. Similar technologies should have similar effects, even if the scale has been reduced. Lastly, work started on taking all of the Gold Horizon set pieces and making them conform to the standard tier set system so they can be used in any persistent universe locations.\n\nDesign\nThe design team was mostly focused on tweaking the feel of movement and gun-play over the last few weeks. Now that they have all of the parameters needed exposed to them, they have been dialing in breathing, aiming down sights and recoil. Work also continued on a new map and game mode. The new mode will focus on some asymmetrical gameplay, which we are all very excited about! All of the modes that are being worked on for the FPS module are there to simulate actual scenarios that players could run into in the persistent universe. Things like infiltrating a held location quietly, possibly stealing cargo, or just running protection. With the open nature of the game and how many options the player will have in Star Citizen it\u2019s hard to imagine every possible case, but we think we have a solid handful of situations that you might run into.\n\nAnimation\nThe animation team has been busy creating new assets for Sata Ball. There are quite a few unique animations to that mode for interacting with the ball, mostly having to do with passing and shooting the ball around the arena. The new mocap data will also be rolling in shortly, at which point the animators will start hooking up all of those new animations. The largest bit of work here is going to be the movement transitions and jukes. These animations make the characters lean into and out of sprinting, running and walking states and gives a good sense of weight to the animations overall. The last bit to mention here is re-tweaking the animations that are present in the game for aiming, shooting, reloading and swapping weapons. After the designers are happy with the timing and feel on all of those elements, it\u2019s up to animation to get everything synced back up again.\n\nWe know you are all really excited for the release of the FPS, and we are too! We just want to make sure that you get something really special when it drops! So please bear with us, it\u2019s coming very soon and we think it will be worth the wait!\n\nHere\u2019s what we\u2019ve been up to for the month of April, up here in Montreal.\n\nRSI\u2019s new style\nFirst off, RSI has a new homepage now. It\u2019s been our main focus for the past weeks to release this new design, aiming to deliver more content at a glance, in a more legible layout with minimal unused space. We also spent a lot of time optimizing this new design so that it would be handled better on a wider range of devices and browsers, starting with significantly reducing the homepage\u2019s total size, including the videos.\n\nNew pages, like the new Dev Tracker page, will consistently be based on this new layout, and we\u2019ll also continually transition the rest of the existing website to use this format when we add functionalities, like in the new Press page.\n\nThe Community Hub\nThe next big item we\u2019ve been working on is the long-announced Community Hub. As we get further along into its development, here are some of its key features. This new section will be located right at the root of the Community section, and is designed to receive and feature almost exclusively fan content : \u201cCitizen Spotlight\u201d will allow all fans to upload and display their own creations about Star Citizen (including but not restricted to screenshots, play sessions, rigs, cosplay, music, models\u2026), while \u201cDeep Space Radar\u201d will aggregate all external contents that fans can find about Star Citizen outside of Roberts Space Industries. Among other things, the Hub will also feature registered Star Citizen streamers and fan podcasts.\n\nThis new section implies a sizeable new architecture to be able to handle that much content, and we have been finalizing its visual and technical design throughout this last month. We have since started implementing the data models and static visual integration, and are moving on to data handling.\n\nWe really want a page the community can \u201cown\u201d with it\u2019s own content.\n\nNew tool in the works\nA new project is coming up, in size on par with the Community Hub, that we\u2019ve been internally calling the Issue Council. Its baseline is that there is a growing need for a centralized Bug Report system for Star Citizen : a way for the community to build up a database of bugs and issues in all aspects of the game (and the website), regulated by the entire community, and then streamlined to the development teams. With this system, players will be able to report issues, have them confirmed (or contested) by other players, and follow the eventual fix in the game. This new module has been in concept for a while now, and we have started implementation.\n\nStarmap\nStarmap work continues. Much progress done on the back end to ensure that the architecture of the universe updates will work for the many different components that will need them, the web Starmap being only one of those. Most of the heavy front end work this month was focused on developing the asset pipeline to bring interesting assets to our (pun) \u201cAstrometrics room\u201d. Having generic shapes and iconography is important for this type of app but having actual good looking models and\/or texture and animation will be important to properly represent the SC Universe. This pipeline is specific to WebGL as we have now officially moved off the Unity prototype we demo\u2019ed back in December\/January.\n\nThis visual language must also be common with the game and so many design meetings with all of the teams involved were needed. There is still alot of work left!\n\nContent and updates\nApril came with its own concept sale, and the Hull Series is currently heavily featured on our brand new homepage. With it, came the rework of the Cargo system which got recently reflected into the Ship Stats, and of top of that update we have also started a conjoint task with the game designers to update some of the most outdated ships in the catalog. First in the list is the Aurora LX, which finally got its beauty renders in the store.\n\nLeaderboards opt-out\nThe most active players may also notice that it is now possible to opt out of the Arena Commander Leaderboards, directly from your settings page. If you opt-out, we will still keep receiving your game data and calculate your personal; statistics and performance, but they will remain invisible to anyone until you choose to opt back-in again. While invisible, you effectively also \u201crelinquish\u201d your potential public rank.\n\nCCU system\nAs you know the current CCU system has been outgrown with so many ships now flyable. Design and basic implementation work has been done this month to bring you an alternate way to CCU. May should have more substantial progress on this subsystem. With more ships becoming flyable, this system will be required so that you can properly upgrade your existing Alpha\/LTI pledges without sacrificing those precious items.\n\nAsk a Web Dev\nFinally we have also stepped up our forum presence this month on the Ask a Dev \u2013 Website thread. So if you have questions about us, our process, or upcoming features, ask away and look for the guy with the 1-UP mushroom!\n\nThis was another heavy month of planning out the roadmap of features for Star Citizen. We worked a lot with the Frankfurt, Manchester, and Austin teams in particular to continue identifying common AI needs across different Star Citizen modules and working out how to best minimize duplication of effort and getting all the crucial AI features in place as they\u2019re needed. This is tricky enough when you\u2019re just making a regular game, but with the ambitious scope of Star Citizen, multiple modules and a constant stream of releases, it becomes something that needs to be constantly worked on and tweaked.\n\nDesign\nThe main design work we did this month was on improving the Kythera AI system to be more multithreaded. Certain aspects of Kythera are already run on separate threads, such as generating navigation meshes, but a lot of aspects such as behavior processing and perception are still run on a single thread. For most games with a small number of active AI this really isn\u2019t a problem, but as we all know, Star Citizen throws normal out the window! To be able to efficiently update hundreds or thousands of AIs, it becomes critical to be able to break up as much processing work as possible into small, independent jobs and run them across multiple threads.\n\nOur work last month on the job system helped set us up to be able to create small tasks as needed, but the figuring out how to safely and efficiently break up things like behavior processing is the hard part. It involves creating a framework that can determine which bits of code are dependent on other bits of code and therefore need to run after them, and which can be run independently. You then need to be able to efficiently schedule all of these. Oh, and it\u2019s also handy to have your framework setup in such a way that it\u2019s hard for programmers using it to accidentally create dependencies that shouldn\u2019t be there and mess all of the scheduling up!\n\nEngineering\nWe made a nice feature improvement to our Kythera Inspector debugging tool this month, which is the addition of behavior tree visualization for recordings. As we\u2019ve mentioned previously, Inspector allows designers to record everything that AI does while they\u2019re playing the game, and then replay it to see exactly what the AI was doing at any point. This is an invaluable tool for tracking down bugs.\n\nOne thing that was missing, though, was being able to properly visualize their behaviors. This was something you could do in real time via some on screen debugging, but it wasn\u2019t accessible in a user friendly way from inside the inspector. Now, when we play back recordings we can get a nice view of the behavior tree that any AI is currently running, and what state it\u2019s in. We don\u2019t yet have the ability to see this while the game is running, just on recordings, but that\u2019s something we\u2019ll be adding soon.\n\nAnother interesting feature we\u2019ve been working on is a big improvement to our spline joining code. We\u2019ve mentioned previously how we allow designers to create various splines to define attack paths or fancy maneuvers to take ships through tight obstacles that they might otherwise avoid, but one issue we\u2019ve found with this feature is that it can be tricky to get the ship to the start of the spline in a smooth and realistic way.\n\nOften we want the ship to have a specific orientation and velocity when it hits the start of the spline, but we need to get the ship there from whatever its current orientation and velocity are, in a way that is within that ship\u2019s maneuvering capabilities, and without forcing it to slow down any more than absolutely necessary.\n\nOur existing solution did a reasonable job most of the time, but would sometimes give bad results, so we decided to figure out how to do it right. This is actually a much trickier problem than you might think. Tricky enough, in fact, that our resident astrophysicist Ben Lowing called in a second astrophysicist, and the two of them worked out a detailed solution to the problem. It\u2019s now been mostly implemented, though there have turned out to be some extra subtleties to the problem that we will continue to address next month.\n\nGreetings, Citizens! Community Manager Jared \u201cDisco Lando\u201d Huckaby here in fantastic Southern California, where the sun always shines and the taxes always debilitate. Yeah, it\u2019s me. I can barely believe it myself. Let\u2019s jump right in, shall we?\n\nOur Community Content Manager Jenny Varner relocated and joined us from her native land of Texas. While she\u2019s struggling to adapt to our local customs, and continues to insist that breakfast tacos are superior to burritos, she\u2019s finding her place amongst the family here at Cloud Imperium Games. In addition to managing all our social content, she\u2019s also hard at work producing video segments for Around the Verse, running our weekly livestream Reverse the Verse, and laying the groundwork of our extended support for community content creators.\n\nFor myself, I joined the team this month after years in YouTube exile. As Community Manager, my focus will be in improving the connections between you Citizens and our development team on the forums. While we have an unparalleled level of access between the fans and our team when we account for four weekly video broadcasts, weekly comm-links, and the variety of additional posts, we can always strive to do better, and that\u2019s our goal. In addition to that, I\u2019ve been editing Around the Verse for the last two months, trying to bring a little of our team\u2019s personality to the forefront. We\u2019re not the standard video game company, and we\u2019re not interested in putting out the standard video game company community content.\n\nThat leads us to our biggest milestone as a Community Team this month, Around the Verse #42. I don\u2019t have to tell you the significance of that number to everyone on this team. Each week we do our best to bring you the information we have available to share, and to present it in the best fashion we can. As with everything else we do, we\u2019ll continue to do our best to improve our efforts each and every week, and with this milestone, I created a special Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy themed intro to the show with the help of Ryan Archer, and Star Citizen Angry Peas. Thanks Peas.\n\nAnd as always, none of this is possible without me our subscribers, who\u2019s contributions make these productions possible. I know we say that every month, but this is the first time I get to say it, and I\u2019ve seen firsthand this month the level of dedication and hard work the folks on this team put into serving the community. It\u2019s our collective hope, that the recent additions to the team combined with the established regulars who\u2019ve been here for so long will allow us to reach more of you, and more effectively, than ever before.\n\nBen is telling me that I have to stop talking, now. I\u2019m going to keep typing for as long as he let","de_DE":"Gr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger,\nWillkommen zum Monatsbericht April 2015! Es war ein arbeitsreicher Monat f\u00fcr das Star Citizen-Team, mit den weltweiten Teams, die mit voller Kraft an den Updates f\u00fcr Arena Commander, Star Marine, Squadron 42, das anhaltende Universum und mehr arbeiten. W\u00e4hrend wir sprechen, ist Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.2 auf der PTU verf\u00fcgbar. Dank der Community haben wir eine Reihe von Bugs identifiziert, die das Team heute hart bei der Arbeit ist.... erwarte ein Update dazu n\u00e4chste Woche. Dies ist auch Ihr letztes Wochenende, um w\u00e4hrend des Konzeptverkaufs ein Schiff der Hull-Serie zu versprechen; sehen Sie es sich an! Wir werden auch ein umfassenderes Update \u00fcber Star Marine Anfang n\u00e4chster Woche herausbringen, damit Sie genau wissen, woran wir in den letzten Wochen gearbeitet haben. Bis dahin genie\u00dfe es, herauszufinden, was wir im April gemacht haben!\n\nGr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger,\n\nApril ist vorbei; Mann, das war schnell! Mit dem Bericht dieses Monats versuchen wir es etwas anders: Statt einer einzigen Stimme haben wir jedem Teammitglied die M\u00f6glichkeit gegeben, direkt etwas beizutragen. Und unter diesem Bericht haben wir einen kleinen Hintergrund hinzugef\u00fcgt, was einer unserer K\u00fcnstler macht. Du musst uns mitteilen, was du in den Kommentaren denkst, aber wir glauben, dass es ein viel dynamischeres Update schafft! Ohne weiteres gehen wir zu den Updates der Abteilungen, die von denjenigen geschrieben wurden, aus denen sich die Abteilungen zusammensetzen.\n\nDesign\nEiner der Punkte, an denen wir in der Designabteilung gearbeitet haben, ist Piratenschwarm ist ein Modus innerhalb der Karte von Broken Moon. Es zeigt Piratenpiloten, die UEE-Schiffe benutzen, die die Spieler angreifen. Die Anzahl der Wellen wurde reduziert, damit die Spielzeiten besser beherrschbar sind, auch die Wellen wurden ausgeglichen, damit die Spieler die Chance haben, das Ende zu erreichen. Die Schwarm-Modi wurden seit der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Arena Commander immer wieder neu gespielt, aber wir wollen Ihnen mehr bieten als nur statische Wellen der gleichen Art. In Zukunft wollen wir vom Begriff des Vanduul- oder Piratenschwarms wegkommen und ihn nur noch zum Schwarm machen.\n\nWas bedeutet das?\n\nWir m\u00f6chten dir Optionen geben, mit denen du dein Gameplay anpassen kannst.\n\nDas sagt mir gar nichts!\n\nHmm, wie w\u00fcrdest du gerne w\u00e4hlen, welche Feinde du bek\u00e4mpfst? Wie m\u00f6chten Sie ausw\u00e4hlen, gegen wie viele Wellen Sie antreten m\u00f6chten? In Zukunft wollen wir Ihnen wirklich diese Art von Optionen anbieten. Die F\u00e4higkeit, dein Spielerlebnis schmerzhaft schwierig zu gestalten, da ein wahrer Schwarm von Feinden auf dich zukommt, oder wenn du einfach nur einsteigen und eine neue Waffe testen willst, dann laiche eine einzige einfache Welle, um sie zu testen. Dies ist eine Simulation, du solltest die M\u00f6glichkeit haben, deine Trainingssimulation nach Belieben einzurichten, und wir wollen dir diese M\u00f6glichkeit geben.\n\nGOST kommt! GOST ist ein modulares System, das wir entwickeln, das es uns erm\u00f6glicht, die verschiedenen Methoden der Interaktion mit unseren Schiffen direkter zu steuern. Bisher fest programmierte Archetypen des Zugriffs, Einlassens, Sitzens und Navigierens auf Schiffen werden stattdessen durch situationsspezifische logische Komponenten erstellt, die uns mehr Freiheit als je zuvor geben. Ein Beispiel f\u00fcr die Vorteile dieses Systems ist, dass Sie in der Hornet F7CM, anstatt automatisch auf dem Pilotsitz zu sitzen, die Zugangsleiter ausfahren und dann einfahren, auf dem Pilotsitz sitzen oder auf dem Beifahrersitz sitzen k\u00f6nnen. Mehrk\u00f6pfige Schiffe werden noch gr\u00f6\u00dfere funktionale Vorteile haben, insbesondere wenn sie in der Hitze der Schlacht von der Radarstation zum Hangardeck eilen oder einfach nur einen gem\u00fctlichen Spaziergang zur Lounge machen. Interagieren Sie mit Ihren Schiffen, wie Sie es w\u00fcnschen - mit GOST ist alles m\u00f6glich.\n\nInsgesamt hat der April viele gro\u00dfe Fortschritte f\u00fcr unsere langfristige Detaillierung in Star Citizen gemacht. Mit der kontinuierlichen Arbeit an allen Schiffskomponenten haben wir an einer vollst\u00e4ndigen \u00dcberholung und Standardisierung aller unserer Komponentengr\u00f6\u00dfen gearbeitet. Diese an Ort und Stelle zu haben, wird bei allen Aspekten des Schiffsdesigns und der Entwicklung helfen. Von Grund auf k\u00f6nnen wir aus diesen Gr\u00f6\u00dfen sehr viel detailliertere Komponentenpl\u00e4ne f\u00fcr jedes unserer Schiffe erstellen und damit beginnen, zu planen, was unsere erh\u00f6hte Modularit\u00e4t der Schiffskomponenten bei der Zusammenstellung einer Verladung bedeutet.\n\nNachdem diese Gr\u00f6\u00dfen festgelegt wurden, haben wir bereits damit begonnen, einige der m\u00f6glichen Komponententauschm\u00f6glichkeiten zu planen, die in Zukunft verf\u00fcgbar sein werden. Einige unserer aktuellen Experimente befassen sich mit Kraftwerken, Schildgeneratoren und K\u00fchlsystemen, die eine austauschbarere Anordnung aufweisen. Dies wird immer noch viele Tests und Abstimmungen erfordern, um sicherzustellen, dass sich diese Entscheidungen sinnvoll genug anf\u00fchlen und gleichzeitig die Gesamtleistung jedes Schiffes im Gleichgewicht gehalten wird.\n\nEin weiterer Satz von Komponenten, die wir ben\u00f6tigt haben, um die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe zu \u00fcberdenken, sind unsere Munitionskisten, Batteriepacks, Kraftstofftanks und Ballastsysteme. Mit unseren verkleinerten Komponenten haben diese nun alle die gleiche Gr\u00f6\u00dfe, so dass sie leicht gegeneinander ausgetauscht werden k\u00f6nnen. Ein ballistisches Schwerlastschiff zu leiten? Bringt etwas zus\u00e4tzliche Munition mit. M\u00fcssen Sie als n\u00e4chstes einen Langstreckenflug machen? Tausch die Munition gegen ein paar Ersatztanks aus. Obwohl nicht alle diese Komponenten auf einem Schiff derzeit einstellbar sind, werden sie dazu beitragen, eine wichtige Rolle bei der Anpassung von Ladevorg\u00e4ngen zu spielen.\n\nIn diesem Monat haben wir die Greifbarkeitsmechanik - liebevoll \"grabby hands\" genannt - als einen wichtigen Schritt zur Umsetzung des Ladungssystems betrachtet. Die Grundannahme ist, dass alles physisch ist, dass menschliche Skalenobjekte aufgenommen und manipuliert, platziert und herumgeworfen werden k\u00f6nnen, mit einem Grad an Treue und Kontrolle, der die Umgebung wirklich lebendig macht. Das Bewegen von Dingen ist gro\u00dfartig, und von unseren ersten Prototypen an f\u00fchlt es sich nat\u00fcrlicher und reaktionsschneller an als je zuvor, aber das ist nur das erste Problem - es mit Animationen zu tun, die nat\u00fcrlich flie\u00dfen, w\u00e4hrend sie auf das Gameplay reagieren und sowohl in der ersten als auch in der dritten Person sichtbar korrekt sind, ist eine ganze Extra-Ebene an Komplexit\u00e4t. Es ist hier alles ziemlich gut dokumentiert.\n\nBei all seinen Herausforderungen ist dieser Detaillierungsgrad und diese Interaktivit\u00e4t der Weg zu einem Universum, das sich real anf\u00fchlt, vom Anblick eines Fremden, der eine M\u00fcnze wirft, \u00fcber das Betreten Ihres Hangars bis hin zum echten Zuhause. Es geht \u00fcber das blo\u00dfe Aufnehmen von Gegenst\u00e4nden hinaus, deshalb habe ich auch fr\u00fche Beispiele f\u00fcr die direkte Interaktion mit Tasten, Drehreglern, Gaspedalen und sogar Computerbildschirmen erstellt. In Ihrem Cockpit sitzen und manuell einzelne Kn\u00f6pfe zum Dr\u00fccken ausw\u00e4hlen, oder direkt Hebel und Ventile ziehen, um Komponenten zur Reparatur zu optimieren, oder einfach nur auf einen Bildschirm gehen und sofort intuitiv und nat\u00fcrlich interagieren k\u00f6nnen, ohne in einen neuen Modus zu wechseln - das sind die Dinge, die die Kunst von Star Citizen greifbar machen.\n\nIngenieurwesen\nDiesen Monat haben wir ein neues 3D-zu-2D \"point of view\" Radar im Stil des Wing Commander Radars eingef\u00fchrt. Obwohl die Reichweite mit diesem Radar schwieriger zu erkennen ist, ist es sehr einfach zu wissen, wo sich Ihre Kontakte um Sie herum befinden und in welche Richtung Sie sich drehen m\u00fcssen, um sie in Sichtweite zu bringen. Wir begannen mit Wolfram Mathematica, um schnell den Prototyp der Mathematik zu erstellen, die notwendig ist, um eine 3D-Richtung auf dem Bildschirm abzubilden, und erstellten sowohl eine interaktive Ausgabe als auch eine Testausgabe mit einer erzeugten Reihe von Testpunkten, so dass wir alle Fehler sehen konnten, die behoben werden mussten. Sobald wir sicher waren, dass die Mathematik korrekt war, brachten wir alles in C++ ein und schlossen es \u00fcber ein benutzerdefiniertes Dock-Elementefeld an den Flash an, um es dann an das vordere HUD eines R\u00e4chers anzuschlie\u00dfen. Dieser neue Radartyp wird in K\u00fcrze auf einigen Schiffen erscheinen.\n\nW\u00e4hrend die KI-Entwickler in Gro\u00dfbritannien heutzutage haupts\u00e4chlich an charakterbasierten KI f\u00fcr Squadron 42 und das Persistent Universe arbeiten, haben wir uns auf die Wartung von raumschiffbasierten KI konzentriert, wie Sie im Vanduul Swarm Spielmodus sehen k\u00f6nnen. K\u00fcrzlich haben wir mit dem Prototyping von Wingmen-Befehlen begonnen, der F\u00e4higkeit f\u00fcr den Spieler, seinen Wingmen spezifische Ziele wie \"Angriff auf mein Ziel\" oder \"Verteidigung\" zuzuweisen, anstatt sie einfach nur Feinde angreifen zu lassen, wie es ihnen beliebt. Diese Arbeit wird auch gut zu unserer F\u00e4higkeit beitragen, komplexe Kampfszenarien und Missionen zu erstellen, in denen KI-Schiffe unterschiedliche Ziele haben, um bestimmte Rollen in der Flotte zu erf\u00fcllen. In Zukunft werden wir voraussichtlich verst\u00e4rkt Randy Vazquez unterst\u00fctzen, einen LA-Techniker, der in den letzten Monaten bei uns angefangen hat und sich speziell auf KI-Begegnungssysteme konzentriert.\n\nFortsetzen der Fehlerunterst\u00fctzung im Release-Stream; Abst\u00fcrze, mp-Desynchronisationen, unerwartetes Verhalten und alles rund um Shenanigans. Vorbereitungsarbeiten f\u00fcr Radarsystem 2.0, Signatursystem 2.0, Fahrzeugparameter und physikalische Sch\u00e4den. Das verbesserte Radarsystem wird von Designern gesteuerte Eingaben, Leistungssteigerungen mit Gewinde, koh\u00e4rente Abstraktion sein, so dass Spieler und Fahrzeuge das gleiche System mit angepassten Parametern verwenden k\u00f6nnen, und mehr. Das verbesserte Signatursystem wird das vom Designer gesteuerte System erweitern, da Calix mehr Leistung ben\u00f6tigt, es Signaturen erlauben, andere Signaturen zu maskieren (\"sun blocking ir signatures\"), das Konzept der Frequenz einzuf\u00fchren und die Emissionsprofile von Signaturen zu erweitern. Die Fahrzeugparameter sind ein wichtiger Schritt zur Reduzierung der Ladezeiten und erm\u00f6glichen es dem externen System, Informationen dar\u00fcber zu konstruieren, wie ein Fahrzeug gebaut werden k\u00f6nnte, ohne dass das Fahrzeug gelaicht werden muss. Die Parameter werden auch zum Caching von Ressourcen verwendet. Physischer Schaden wird es erm\u00f6glichen, dass der Schaden unserer kinetischen Projektile auf kinetischer Energie basiert und steuert, wie Fahrzeuge mit Sch\u00e4den durch physische St\u00f6\u00dfe und Kollisionen umgehen.\n\nKunst\nDen ganzen April \u00fcber trafen sich Mitglieder des Santa Monica Schiffsteams, um den Freelancer zu aktualisieren. Dieser Prozess war ein komplizierter Prozess, da er viele Facetten der Kernmechanik der Spiele ber\u00fchrt, einschlie\u00dflich einiger neuer, aufkommender Funktionen. Die Koordination zwischen den Studios war f\u00fcr dieses Update entscheidend. Konzeptk\u00fcnstler in Gro\u00dfbritannien haben hart daran gearbeitet, das Design des Starfarer zu konkretisieren, und damit ist eine besondere \u00c4sthetik entstanden, die den MISC-Look im Star Citizen-Universum festigte.\n\nDie Einheit der Hersteller ist ein Muss, so dass die K\u00fcnstler hier in Santa Monica diese Konzepte auf den Freelancer Innen- und Au\u00dfenbereich anwenden. Dieses Update hat viele \u00c4nderungen mit sich gebracht, wie z.B. richtige Metriken f\u00fcr die Charakterinteraktion, das Erstellen von Zonen f\u00fcr die Ladung und das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von Bereichen f\u00fcr modulare Komponenten. Die Beibehaltung der urspr\u00fcnglichen Erfahrung und des Zwecks des Schiffes wird nat\u00fcrlich beibehalten. Insgesamt hat der Freelancer an Gr\u00f6\u00dfe zugenommen, aber das Innere ist ein enger und funktionaler Raum geblieben, wie es das vorherige Design vorsah; so k\u00f6nnen die Spieler in das Multi-Crew-Erlebnis eines pers\u00f6nlichen Schiffes eintauchen.\n\nIn der gesamten Community gab es viel Feedback \u00fcber den Freelancer, und wir haben zugeh\u00f6rt! Die Bef\u00fcrchtungen, in den Laderaum einzudringen, w\u00e4hrend er voll ist, die Zug\u00e4nglichkeit zum Heckrevolver und dem kleinen Mittelteil sowie einige andere Fragen wurden bereits angesprochen. (Kein Clipping mehr durch die Badezimmer oder das Auf- und Absteigen beim Versuch, zu Ihrem Bett zu gelangen). Wenn das Update abgeschlossen ist, glauben wir, dass die Community angenehm \u00fcberrascht sein wird.\n\nIn der Konzeptabteilung hier in Santa Monica war wie immer viel los. Wir haben ein wenig Konzeptarbeit an dem Freelancer-R\u00fcckenturm und der Karosserie geleistet, bevor wir weitermachten, um zu helfen, wo wir mit der Kunst f\u00fcr den Verkauf des Hull-Konzepts helfen konnten. Dieses Schiff sieht wundersch\u00f6n aus und wir freuen uns darauf, dass ihr alle seht, was wir getan haben.\n\nOmar hat einige erstaunliche Arbeit an den Charakteren geleistet. Er verbrachte ein paar Wochen in Austin und arbeitete dort mit dem Team zusammen, und sie alle haben einige wirklich erstaunliche Fortschritte gemacht. Er wird f\u00fcr ein paar Wochen ins britische B\u00fcro gehen, um mit dem Charakterzeugs weiterzumachen. Wir k\u00f6nnen euch versichern, dass das Charakter-Team einige wirklich coole Sachen kreiert und wir wissen, dass ihr alle wirklich begeistert sein werdet, wenn ihr seht, woran sie gearbeitet haben. Hoffentlich werden wir Omar bald wieder in der Konzeptabteilung haben, um an Schiffsmaterial zu arbeiten.\n\nNun, das schlie\u00dft den Santa Monica-Teil dieses Berichts ab. Ich hoffe, Sie haben Ihren Rundgang durch unsere Entwicklungsarbeiten f\u00fcr den Monat genossen, der von denjenigen an der Front ge\u00e4u\u00dfert wurde. Wie immer vielen Dank an alle in der Community f\u00fcr ihre kontinuierliche Unterst\u00fctzung und daf\u00fcr, dass sie dieses Spiel erm\u00f6glicht haben. Es ist ein echtes Vergn\u00fcgen, an einem so erstaunlichen Universum mit einer so erstaunlichen Community arbeiten zu k\u00f6nnen!\n\nProst,\nCIG Santa Monica Team\n\nHallo, mein Name ist Daniel Kamentsky und ich bin ein Associate 3D-K\u00fcnstler bei der CIG in Santa Monica. Sie kennen mich vielleicht aus meiner Zeit, als ich an TNGS als Teil der Zeit Shimapan arbeitete. Meine Rolle bei der CIG hat sich in letzter Zeit von der Modellierung hin zur Oberfl\u00e4chenbehandlung verlagert.\n\nDa sich das Echtzeit-Rendering weiterentwickelt, steigt mit neuen Rendering-Techniken wie PBR (Physically Based Rendering) die Nachfrage nach K\u00fcnstlern, die sich auf die Erstellung und Anwendung von Materialien spezialisiert haben. Als einer dieser K\u00fcnstler ist es meine Aufgabe, \u00fcber die mikroskopische Detailtiefe nachzudenken, w\u00e4hrend sich der andere Schiffsk\u00fcnstler auf die Modellierung und die gro\u00dfen Formen konzentriert.\n\nWas bedeutet es also, ein Oberfl\u00e4chenk\u00fcnstler zu sein? F\u00fcr mich geht es darum, von kleinen Details und verschiedenen Oberfl\u00e4chen fasziniert zu sein. Als Oberfl\u00e4chenk\u00fcnstler m\u00fcssen Sie ein tiefes Verst\u00e4ndnis daf\u00fcr haben, wie verschiedene Materialien auf Licht reagieren, wie verschiedene Materialien in der Realit\u00e4t verwendet werden und wie Sie diese Materialien mit einer Echtzeitmaschine pr\u00e4zise erstellen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nJedenfalls bin ich als K\u00fcnstler besser darin, zu zeigen, als zu sagen (oder zu schreiben), also lass mich dich durch meinen Prozess f\u00fchren, ein Material in diesem Satz von Bildern zu erstellen. Also werde ich f\u00fcr diese Demo ein lackiertes Metallmaterial erstellen. Mit physikalisch basiertem Rendering sind Sie in der Lage, glaubw\u00fcrdige Materialien mit einfachen Uni-Basisfarben zu erstellen. Mit diesem Gedanken im Hinterkopf ist das erste, was ich normalerweise tue, wenn ich meine Materialien herstelle, dass ich anfange, einige solide Werte einzugeben.\n\nHallo zusammen!\n\nAprilschauer haben Central Texas diesen Monat gesegnet und wir waren an vielen Fronten hart bei der Arbeit. Wir haben mit dem 1.1.1.1-Spiel-Update Rekordzahlen bei der Parallelit\u00e4t gesehen und dabei Probleme mit der Mehrspieler-Konnektivit\u00e4t festgestellt. Wir haben alle Ressourcen mobilisiert, um uns auf dieses Thema zu konzentrieren, und Sie werden mehr Details zu diesen Aktivit\u00e4ten von mehreren Teams in den detaillierten Berichten sehen. Wir haben viel zu erz\u00e4hlen, also schaut euch bitte die detaillierten Infos der Teams im Austin Studio an!\n\nHartn\u00e4ckiges Universumsteam\nKunst\nIm Monat April gab es viele Entwicklungen innerhalb der Art Department der CIG Austin. Wir veranstalteten einen Umwelt Mini-Gipfel, bei dem unsere Freunde von Foundry 42, BHVR und Illfonic zu Besuch kamen, um die langfristige Planung von Star Citizen Umgebungen zu diskutieren. Es gibt viele studio\u00fcbergreifende Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten, die eine pers\u00f6nliche Zeit erfordern, um tiefer zu diskutieren, und es ist sehr wertvoll, mit Menschen pers\u00f6nlich zu interagieren, mit denen wir t\u00e4glich auf der ganzen Welt zusammenarbeiten. Alles in allem war der Gipfel ein Erfolg, und unsere Global Environment Leads Ian Leyland und Cort Soest haben dazu beigetragen, ein solides Fundament zu schaffen, auf dem wir die bestm\u00f6glichen Rahmenbedingungen schaffen k\u00f6nnen. Unser Fokus speziell f\u00fcr die PU wird in diesem Jahr darauf gerichtet sein, die \"First 5\" planetarischen Landezonen zu konkretisieren, unsere ersten Gesch\u00e4fte, die sich auf diesen Landezonen befinden, einzurichten und F&E zu betreiben, um modulare Raumstationen zu schaffen, die eine Vielzahl von Funktionen in der PU erf\u00fcllen.\n\nUnser Charakter-Team hat sich in diesem Monat ausschlie\u00dflich auf die Unterst\u00fctzung der FPS-Charakterversionen konzentriert. Es gab eine Menge Arbeit zu tun, um diese Charaktere mit dem Rest der erstaunlichen Arbeit, die Illfonic geleistet hat, um Star Marine so gut wie m\u00f6glich aussehen zu lassen, auf den neuesten Stand zu bringen. Wir haben eine Panzerung hinzugef\u00fcgt, um das Medium Marine ein wenig mehr zu st\u00e4rken, optimierte Materialien und Farben, damit sowohl die Marines als auch die Outlaws so aussehen, als ob sie zur gleichen Einheit geh\u00f6ren, und Josh Coons sprang sogar eine Weile vom Ship Team her\u00fcber, um die Outlaw-Helme auf die n\u00e4chste Stufe zu bringen. Diese Charaktere sehen fantastisch aus, und wir sind wirklich begeistert, dass ihr bald mit ihnen herumlaufen k\u00f6nnt!\n\nAndere Dinge, die das Art Team bis zu diesem Monat durchgef\u00fchrt hat, sind Konzeptarbeiten f\u00fcr Hangar-Waffenst\u00e4nder und Holo-Kioske f\u00fcr den Astro Armada-Shop, Konzeptarbeiten f\u00fcr Abschirmungen und K\u00fchler f\u00fcr Raumstationen, Erkundungen von Blue Collar-Kleidungssets, flackernde Jobb\u00f6rse VFX f\u00fcr den TDD-Shop und Texturierungsarbeiten f\u00fcr die Anlage mobiGlas.\n\nUnser Animationsteam hat verschiedene Aspekte des Projekts unterst\u00fctzt, darunter anf\u00e4llige Waffens\u00e4tze f\u00fcr FPS und Grabby Hands-Animationen zum Testen von Aufnehmen und Ablegen von Objekten. Lead Animator Bryan Brewer hat das brandneue Skelett, auf das wir unsere Charaktere \u00fcbertragen werden, getestet und debuggt, um verschiedene Aspekte der Proportionen und des Bewegungsumfangs der Figur zu verbessern. Unser gesamtes Animationsteam stellt sich nun darauf ein, unsere gesamte Bibliothek von Animationen (\u00fcber 2.000!) auf dieses neue Skelett zu \u00fcbertragen.\n\nDesign\nEs gab in diesem Monat viele Diskussionen und Meetings unter unseren Designern, um das, was wir den \"Game Loop\" nennen, f\u00fcr unser kommendes Social Module Release aufzuschl\u00fcsseln. Wo beginnt ein Spieler, wenn er sich einloggt? Was erleben sie, wenn sie an verschiedenen Aktivit\u00e4ten rund um eine Landezone teilnehmen? Was passiert, wenn sie mit REDACTED??? interagieren? Alle sehr wichtigen Fragen, die letztendlich dazu beigetragen haben, das Design f\u00fcr Shopping, Storage, NPC-Setup und mehr zu gestalten. Wir werden diese noch weiter aufschl\u00fcsseln, bis wir in den n\u00e4chsten Monat kommen.\n\nPete Mackay hat sein neu genanntes Werkzeug \"Ship Cruncher\" (fr\u00fcher Thruster Calculator) um umfangreiche Entwicklungen erweitert. Es ist ein ziemlich robustes Werkzeug, das es Designern erm\u00f6glicht, diskrete Artikelparameter auszugleichen, Basis-Schiffselemente f\u00fcr jeden Artikeltyp zu erstellen, Schiffsausr\u00fcstung in der richtigen Gr\u00f6\u00dfe zu erstellen und granulare \u00c4nderungen auf Makroebene zu visualisieren und robuste Datens\u00e4tze f\u00fcr jedes Schiff zu sammeln. Der Ship Cruncher f\u00fchrt auch mehrere verschiedene physikalische Berechnungen durch, um festzustellen, wie schnell ein Schiff die Richtung, seine H\u00f6chstgeschwindigkeit, seinen Wendekreis usw. \u00e4ndern kann. Es handelt sich um ein All-Inclusive-Paket, das in Zukunft bei der Schiffsbilanzierung entscheidend helfen wird.\n\nEvan Manning hat Daten zur Sternenkarte hinzugef\u00fcgt, die von unseren Freunden bei Turbulent f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung der Sternenkarte auf der Plattformseite verwendet werden sollen. Es gibt viele Informationen zu dokumentieren und Evan hat gute Arbeit geleistet, um sicherzustellen, dass jedes Element in jedem System an seinem richtigen Platz ist.\n\nDie Arbeit an der Ausgestaltung verschiedener Berufe innerhalb des Persistenten Universums geht weiter. Tony Zurovec k\u00fcrzt weiterhin die Details der Pionierbesetzung, und Rob Reininger und Nate Blaisdell haben bei den ersten \u00dcberg\u00e4ngen in den Berufen S\u00f6ldner\/Skorte und Kopfgeldj\u00e4ger Risse genommen. Bald werden wir detailliertere Aufschl\u00fcsselungen dar\u00fcber haben, wie jeder dieser Berufe in der PU funktionieren wird.\n\nIngenieurwesen\nDer April war ein arbeitsreicher Monat f\u00fcr unser Engineering-Team, da viele von ihnen rekrutiert wurden, um den Live-Patch zu unterst\u00fctzen, der in der ersten Woche des Monats ver\u00f6ffentlicht wurde.\n\nUnser Server-Team hat seine Arbeit an der Funktion Multiplayer-Hangars unterbrochen, um eng mit DevOps und QA zusammenzuarbeiten und unseren Instance Manager, unseren Matchmaking-Service und andere Dienste zu verbessern und zu st\u00e4rken. Infolgedessen haben wir einen dramatischen R\u00fcckgang der Berichte \u00fcber Probleme im Zusammenhang mit der Unf\u00e4higkeit, in Mehrspielerspiele zu laden, zu verzeichnen. Herzlichen Gl\u00fcckwunsch an unser flei\u00dfiges Team zu dieser gro\u00dfartigen Leistung!\n\nWir haben andere, l\u00e4ngerfristige Systeme in den Arbeiten, die dem Abschluss immer n\u00e4her kommen. Diese Systeme werden von Austin aus entwickelt, mit einer starken Frequenzweiche zu Manchester und Denver (von unseren Freunden bei Wyrmbyte)....wie z.B....: Einzigartiges globales Entit\u00e4ts-ID-System, Generic Instance Manager, Player Info Server, Presence Server, Universe Simulator, HUB Server und Player Persistence. Ein Gro\u00dfteil dieser Arbeit ist geplant, um Ergebnisse der ersten Iterationen im Monat Mai zu haben.... das Team macht definitiv einige solide Fortschritte!\n\nDas Team hat auch mit Tools wie RAD Telemetrie gearbeitet, um ihnen zu helfen, unsere Servermetriken zu profilieren, um die laufende Aufgabe der Optimierung der Serverleistung zu unterst\u00fctzen. Sie haben damit begonnen, unsere Live-Builds zu profilieren und die Ergebnisse mit fein gezahnten K\u00e4mme zu analysieren, um Bereiche zu identifizieren, auf die sie sich konzentrieren k\u00f6nnen, um Verbesserungen umzusetzen.\n\nDie Arbeit an unseren verschiedenen Werkzeugsystemen wird ebenfalls fortgesetzt, einschlie\u00dflich der Unterst\u00fctzung von Elementen wie dem Sandbox Editor, Trackview und unserem Asset Validation Tool. Und die Entwicklung unserer verschiedenen KI-Editoren....wie z.B. unseres Useable Editor und unseres Character Archetype Editor...die von unserem Designteam ben\u00f6tigt werden, um unsere Welten zum Leben zu erwecken.\n\nUnd w\u00e4hrend des Jonglierens all dieser Aufgaben hat das Team auch an Dingen wie der Fertigstellung der 64-Bit-Netzwerkunterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr unser Large World-System, der Fertigstellung der Arbeiten am iPredictor-System (Bewegungsprognose), der Erstellung einer Reihe von Prototypen f\u00fcr den Bergbauberuf und der Unterst\u00fctzung anderer Systeme, die live oder in Arbeit sind, wie REC und Multi-Seat Ships, gearbeitet.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich hat unser Team hinter den Kulissen hart daran gearbeitet, unseren Entwicklungsablauf zu optimieren, was uns helfen wird, unsere Entwicklung zu rationalisieren, um letztlich effizienter und stabiler zu sein. Alle freuen sich auf diesen neuen Workflow, der in den letzten Wochen Schritt f\u00fcr Schritt eingef\u00fchrt wurde.\n\nNun, das ist es kurz und b\u00fcndig f\u00fcr den Monat April 2015! N\u00e4chsten Monat kommen wir mit mehr zur\u00fcck!\n\nLive-Betrieb\nQA\nF\u00fcr den Monat April war die QS an mehreren Fronten besch\u00e4ftigt. Mit der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von 1.1.1.1 stieg unsere Parallelit\u00e4t auf ein Niveau, das wir bisher nicht erreicht hatten. Dies offenbarte Aspekte unserer Backend-Infrastruktur, die eine erfolgreiche Verbindung zu Multiplayer-Spielen verhinderten. Die Qualit\u00e4tssicherung arbeitete bei einer umfassenden Untersuchung eng mit DevOps und unseren Serveringenieuren zusammen. Nach mehreren Hotfixes auf unseren Servern wurden die Probleme drastisch verbessert. Anschlie\u00dfend wurde ein Aufruf an alle gerichtet, um an einem geplanten Stresstest teilzunehmen. Die Beteiligung war so gro\u00df, dass wir unseren bisherigen Concurrency-Rekord \u00fcbertreffen konnten und uns freuten, dass unser Backend-System diese erh\u00f6hte Belastung bew\u00e4ltigen konnte.\n\nMelissa Estrada hat unsere Entwickler im Frankfurter Studio dabei unterst\u00fctzt, Editor-Probleme aufzusp\u00fcren und zu beheben, die sie beim Vergleichstest unserer Version des Editors mit dem reinen CryEngine SDK gefunden haben. Melissa leitete auch eine Initiative zur Protokollierung aller Fehler, die in den Spielprotokollen gefunden wurden, was eine gro\u00dfe Hilfe sein wird, um sicherzustellen, dass wir ein sauberes Spiel f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Star Marine haben. Das Team unterst\u00fctzte unseren Global Environmental Tech Lead Cort Soest bei der Filterung ungenutzter Karten im Editor, um den internen Bauraum um mehr als 100 GB zu reduzieren und die Arbeitseffizienz zu verbessern.\n\nUnsere Checklisten wurden aktualisiert, um weitere Funktionen von Star Marine und Squadron 42 sowie tiefere \u00dcberpr\u00fcfungen an den Redakteur zu integrieren. Mit Hilfe von Jeffrey Pease wurden Anstrengungen unternommen, um den Erstellungsprozess von Patch Notes zu verbessern, die dazu beitragen, mehrere Mitglieder des QA-Teams leichter einzubinden, die im Falle einer Abwesenheit von jemandem helfen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nMiles Lee hat bei der Entwicklung der Testautomatisierung erhebliche Fortschritte gemacht. Dadurch sind wir in der Lage, die Erfassung von Leistungsdaten f\u00fcr jeden unserer verschiedenen Builds zu automatisieren. Er arbeitet auch an der Automatisierung unserer Build-Sanity-Checks und unterst\u00fctzt DevOps bei der Entwicklung eines Headless-Client-Systems, das es uns erm\u00f6glicht, Stresstests auf unserer Backend-Infrastruktur zu automatisieren.\n\nDas Team testete auch kontinuierlich Star Marine. Die FPS-Spezialisten Tyler Witkin und sein britischer Kollege Glenn Kneal stellten sicher, dass die Produktion \u00fcber alle an diesem Tag gefundenen Probleme informiert wurde und hoben alle schwerwiegenden offenen Probleme hervor, die die Tests blockierten oder erheblich behinderten.\n\nUnser QA-Team hatte auch das Gl\u00fcck, Professor Paul Toprac und seine aufstrebenden Spieleentwickler zu besuchen, die am Capstone GAMMA-Programm an der University of Texas teilnehmen. Wir hatten viel Spa\u00df beim Spieltesten und Feedback zu ihren Projekten.\n\nN\u00e4chsten Monat planen wir, das Sozialmodul in unseren regelm\u00e4\u00dfigen Test zu integrieren. Wir werden sehr eng mit Jake Ross zusammenarbeiten, um sicherzustellen, dass wir jeden Aspekt des Moduls testen, sobald es verf\u00fcgbar ist.\n\nSpielunterst\u00fctzung\nDer Monat April war f\u00fcr alle sehr arbeitsreich, inklusive Game Support!\n\nWir lernen und verfeinern unsere Prozesse der Kommunikation und Zusammenarbeit mit Spielern weiter, insbesondere in den Live Service Notification Foren und bei Reddit. Wir haben nichts als Anerkennung von den Spielern f\u00fcr diese Bem\u00fchungen gesehen, was bedeutet, dass wir etwas richtig machen! Unser Ziel, Live-Spieler mit Informationen zu versorgen, besteht darin, Ihnen die genauesten und aktuellsten Informationen \u00fcber den Zustand des Dienstes zu geben, welche Art von Spielerlebnis Sie erwarten k\u00f6nnen und was wir alle tun, um es zu verbessern (besonders an Patchtagen!).\n\nHinter den Kulissen haben wir einige \u00c4nderungen vorgenommen, die letztendlich dazu f\u00fchren werden, dass Sie eine bessere und schnellere Antwort erhalten. Wir arbeiten t\u00e4glich eng mit dem Kundenservice, der Community und DevOps zusammen, um sicherzustellen, dass Sie rechtzeitig den richtigen Support erhalten. Wir haben einen guten Plan und freuen uns darauf, dorthin zu gelangen, wo Sie uns als Dienstleister haben m\u00f6chten.\n\nAuf einer sichtbareren Ebene haben wir auch mit der Durchf\u00fchrung und Verwaltung von Stresstests begonnen, und wir werden an vielen weiteren beteiligt sein. Der Rollout von 1.1.1 und die erh\u00f6hte Parallelit\u00e4t f\u00fchrten zu Instabilit\u00e4t bei Mehrspielern, und wir arbeiteten mit mehreren Teams zusammen, um die h\u00e4ufigsten Probleme zu identifizieren und zu l\u00f6sen. Um diese Korrekturen richtig zu testen, koordinierten wir uns mit der Spielerbasis in einem unglaublich erfolgreichen Test, der neue Concurrency-Rekorde f\u00fcr Star Citizen aufstellte. Das war nicht nur hilfreich, sondern es hat auch Spa\u00df gemacht!\n\nSchlie\u00dflich haben wir intern einige Zeit damit verbracht, einige Pl\u00e4ne zu erstellen, was wir brauchen werden, um zuk\u00fcnftige Module zu unterst\u00fctzen, n\u00e4mlich das kommende Star Marine Modul, was f\u00fcr uns im Grunde genommen bedeutet, ein v\u00f6llig neues Spiel zu unterst\u00fctzen! Wir werden begeistert sein, diese Pl\u00e4ne in den kommenden Wochen und Monaten umzusetzen, wenn wir unsere Dienstleistungen erweitern, um die wachsende Gemeinschaft und die st\u00e4ndig wachsenden Bed\u00fcrfnisse des Star Citizen-Universums besser zu unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nIT\/Betrieb\nDas IT-Team hat hart daran gearbeitet, interne Systeme zu verbessern, zuk\u00fcnftige Systeme zu planen, den Speicher zu erweitern und die Serviceleistung zu optimieren. Der Begriff explosives Wachstum wird oft verwendet, wenn es um Lagerung geht, und in unserem Fall sind wir nicht anders. Da unsere Entwicklungsteams weiterhin Inhalte produzieren und zusammenarbeiten, m\u00fcssen wir die Ergebnisse ihrer Arbeit allen Teams im Unternehmen zur Verf\u00fcgung stellen. Wenn der Speicherbedarf beispielsweise in LA steigt, m\u00fcssen wir den Speicherplatz in allen anderen Studio-Standorten entsprechend erweitern, damit die Daten lokal an jedes Team repliziert werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDas Wachstum des Speicherplatzes ist nicht der einzige Aspekt, auf den wir uns diesen Monat konzentriert haben. Die Speicherleistung kann auch zu einem Problem werden, wenn viele Personen gleichzeitig Zugriff auf die gleichen Dinge ben\u00f6tigen. Wir haben die M\u00f6glichkeiten der Standard-Replikationsmethoden bereits \u00fcbertroffen und fanden es notwendig, eigene zu bauen, um der Nachfrage gerecht zu werden. Ich bin stolz darauf, dass das IT-Team einige sehr kreative und innovative Strategien entwickelt hat, um bestehende Systeme besser zu nutzen, und glaubt mir, wir bringen die Hardware hier bei Cloud Imperium Games an die Grenzen.\n\nSo bewegt beispielsweise eines unserer Replikationssysteme t\u00e4glich etwa 900 mb\/s f\u00fcr etwa 12 Stunden, um Inhalte auf 5 Replikationsziele gleichzeitig zu \u00fcbertragen. Es ist wichtig, dass diese Daten so schnell wie m\u00f6glich in jedes Studio gelangen, so dass der Leistungsbedarf an den Servern ziemlich hoch ist. Um dieses Problem zu l\u00f6sen, haben wir ein kundenspezifisches Flash-Speichersystem aufgebaut, um die IOPS bereitzustellen, die wir f\u00fcr diesen Prozess ben\u00f6tigen. Jedes Upgrade scheint neue Bereiche zu er\u00f6ffnen, die wir verbessern k\u00f6nnen. In diesem Beispiel haben wir unsere Replikation so schnell gestartet, dass sie anfing, die Server auf der Empf\u00e4ngerseite zu blockieren, so dass wir auch diese Server bei Bedarf aktualisiert haben.\n\nW\u00e4hrend das IT-Team weiterhin einzelne Entwickler auf der ganzen Welt unterst\u00fctzt, scheint es, dass Storage- und Replikationstuning in diesem Monat unser Hauptaugenmerk war. N\u00e4chsten Monat freuen wir uns darauf, noch bessere Systeme zu entwickeln, die den Entwicklerteams helfen, Inhalte noch schneller zu verbreiten.\n\nDev Ops\nApril war ein Monat der Brandbek\u00e4mpfung und der Stabilit\u00e4tsverbesserung! Wir haben Patch 1.1.1.1 ver\u00f6ffentlicht und daran gearbeitet, Stabilit\u00e4tsprobleme mit unseren Diensten Instance Manager, Party und Matchmaking zu beheben. Nach zwei Wochen, in denen Hotfixes von unserem Server-Engineering-Team bereitgestellt wurden, stieg die Stabilit\u00e4t. Aufgrund einiger Stabilit\u00e4tsprobleme, die wir in den letzten Patch-Releases hatten, hat die CIG beschlossen, unseren Ansatz f\u00fcr Operational Deployments zu \u00e4ndern. Was das f\u00fcr die Spieler bedeutet, ist, dass sie keine Freitags-Patch-Releases oder Releases sp\u00e4t in der Nacht erwarten sollten. Stattdessen streben wir einen gem\u00e4\u00dfigteren Rollout von Patches und Hotfixes in unsere Live-Umgebung an und nutzen dabei die Vorteile unserer PTU-Umgebung f\u00fcr die Konfiguration und den Spieltest. Wir hoffen, dass dies zu stabileren Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen f\u00fcr unsere Spieler f\u00fchren wird.\n\nDas DevOps-Team hat auch hart daran gearbeitet, die Basisinfrastruktur f\u00fcr die Live-Umgebung, PTU und interne Testumgebungen aufzubauen. Die Arbeit an dem neuen Launcher und Patcher geht weiter, und wir sind sicher, dass Sie alle genauso begeistert sein werden, ihn zu benutzen wie wir. Wir werden es sehr bald mit einem kommenden PTU-Test demonstrieren und Feedback und Usability-Tests dazu erhalten. Die Arbeiten an unserem automatisierten dynamischen Infrastruktur-Skalierungssystem gehen weiter, rund 40% dieses Systems sind bereits live im Einsatz, und wir gehen davon aus, dass der Rest im Laufe des n\u00e4chsten Monats in Betrieb gehen wird. Intern bauen wir unseren Build-Server weiter um, \u00e4ndern die Art und Weise, wie wir Code und Daten zwischen den Arbeitszweigen zusammenf\u00fchren, erstellen bessere Crash-Berichte und arbeiten an automatisierten Tests.\n\nEs bleibt noch viel zu tun, um unsere interne Datenpipeline so weit zu \u00fcberarbeiten, dass sowohl CIG-Entwickler als auch Spieler nicht jedes Mal, wenn es kleinere \u00c4nderungen gibt, massive Datenmengen patchen und bewegen m\u00fcssen. Das DevOps-Team arbeitet an einer gro\u00dfen Roadmap, um dies mit Hilfe unserer Engineering- und Tech Art-Teams in Austin und Deutschland zu l\u00f6sen, w\u00e4hrend es von unseren IT-Mitarbeitern bei der Hardwareentwicklung unterst\u00fctzt wird. Eine vollst\u00e4ndige Fertigstellung dieses Plans wird viele Monate in Anspruch nehmen, sollte aber die Zeit, die f\u00fcr die Generierung eines Game Build ben\u00f6tigt wird, die Zeit, in der Entwickler ihre \u00c4nderungen testen k\u00f6nnen, die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe der Patches und die Menge an Daten, die Entwickler jeden Morgen ben\u00f6tigen, drastisch reduzieren. Mehr zu diesem Plan in den kommenden Monaten.\n\nAnimation\nDas britische Animationsteam hat sich auf eine Gruppe von f\u00fcnf Personen erweitert. ady, um den laufenden Imaginarium-Shoot in Angriff zu nehmen und umzusetzen, sobald er eintritt. Neben der Bereitstellung von Block-Out-Animationen, die hier in der Gie\u00dferei 42 ben\u00f6tigt werden, haben wir einige der Backend-Arbeiten durchgef\u00fchrt, um die Datenbanken und das Tracking an Ort und Stelle zu bringen, die notwendig sind, um bei einem so gro\u00dfen und ehrgeizigen Projekt wie Staffel 42 die \u00dcbersicht zu behalten.\n\nIngenieurwesen\nEs gibt ein paar gro\u00dfe Ticketartikel, die zu ihren ersten gro\u00dfen Meilensteinen f\u00fcr Ende April kommen. Zuerst wirst du hoffentlich deinen ersten Vorgeschmack auf den neuen Tutorial-Modus in Arena Commander bekommen. Dies erwies sich als viel mehr als urspr\u00fcnglich geplant, vor allem wegen der Tiefe unserer Steuerungssysteme und der Komplexit\u00e4t des Versuchs, dem Spieler zu zeigen, wie alles funktioniert. Manchmal, wenn man so nah an einem Projekt steht, sch\u00e4tzt man nicht immer das Gesamtbild und merkt, wie viel wir erreicht haben. Wir kennen die meisten internen Leute, die das Tutorial durchgespielt haben (einschlie\u00dflich einiger Mitglieder des QA-Teams), haben etwas Neues \u00fcber das Spiel gelernt!\n\nZweitens haben wir in den letzten Monaten viel Arbeit geleistet, indem wir alle \"entity Ids\" des Spiels von einer 32-Bit-Zahl in eine 64-Bit-Zahl umgewandelt haben. Die Entit\u00e4ts-ID ist ein eindeutiger Identifikator f\u00fcr jede \"Sache\" im Spiel, der sehr schnell gespeichert und referenziert werden kann, und f\u00fcr einen Computer ist der Zugriff auf Elemente viel nat\u00fcrlicher als etwas, das besser lesbar ist, wie zum Beispiel eine Namenszeichenkette. F\u00fcr ein normales Einzelspielerspiel und eigenst\u00e4ndige Multiplayer-Spiele sind 32 Bit reichlich vorhanden (es gibt Ihnen etwa 4 Milliarden M\u00f6glichkeiten), aber f\u00fcr ein MMO-Spiel erweist es sich als \u00e4u\u00dferst unzureichend. Der Plan ist, dass alles im Universum seine eigene eindeutige Id oder eine \"globale Entit\u00e4ts-ID\", wie wir sie jetzt nennen, hat, so dass auf jedes Element in jeder Datenbank und auf jedem Server \u00fcber seine eigene Kennung zugegriffen werden kann. Wenn Sie also in Ihrem Schiff Ihren Weg durch das Universum zur\u00fccklegen, mit Ihrer besonderen Auslastung, mit Ihrer gelagerten Ladung und ein paar Anhaltern, und von einem System zum n\u00e4chsten springen, macht es es Ihnen technisch viel einfacher, all diese Informationen vom Server auf den n\u00e4chsten zu \u00fcbertragen. Die grundlegende \u00c4nderung ist eigentlich eine ziemlich einfache, die Knock-Ons, bei denen der Code annahm, dass all diese Ids 32 Bit lang sein w\u00fcrden, erforderten eine riesige Menge an Fixierung und sind das, was die meiste Zeit ben\u00f6tigt. Dieser Prozess sieht so aus, als w\u00fcrde er nun zur Entlastung des verantwortlichen Ingenieurs zu Ende gehen.\n\nBis in den Mai hinein konzentrieren sich unsere Gameplay-Ingenieure wirklich auf unsere Verantwortung f\u00fcr die vertikale Scheibe S42, von der sich viele Mechaniken derzeit in der Polierphase befinden. Dies ist die Zeit, in der man beginnt zu sehen, dass Teile des Projekts wirklich zusammenkommen, man sieht ein Spiel statt einer Sammlung von Bits. Spannende Zeiten!\n\nAudio\nIm vergangenen April waren wir f\u00fcr CIG Audio vor allem damit besch\u00e4ftigt, unsere Arbeit fortzusetzen und nach Wwise zu wechseln. Wir graben jetzt wirklich ein; Verm\u00f6genswerte sind \u00fcberall vorhanden, Banken wurden gegr\u00fcndet, Gesch\u00e4ftshierarchien usw. werden aufgebaut, und es gibt uns jetzt die M\u00f6glichkeit, die Dinge zu \u00fcberarbeiten und zu verbessern, w\u00e4hrend wir die Dinge so gut wie m\u00f6glich mit Cryengine verbinden. Es ist ein gro\u00dfer Schub, denn Cryengine hat erst vor kurzem begonnen, Wwise zu unterst\u00fctzen, und es wird noch viel f\u00fcr uns zu tun geben, wenn wir in diesem Jahr vorankommen. Wir freuen uns sehr darauf, mit ihm zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen, aber wir haben Pl\u00e4ne, die \u00fcber die mit Wwise verbundenen Standardwerkzeuge hinausgehen, wie z.B. automatisierte Foley und Schritte, die systematisch gesteuert werden. Es ist m\u00f6glich, so viel Zeit damit zu verbringen, \u00fcber diese zu arbeiten, es ist ein absoluter Kinderspiel, zu versuchen, die Auto-Route mit ihnen zu gehen.\n\nWir haben von Nugen Audio einige gro\u00dfartige neue Tools erhalten, von denen eines der Schl\u00fcssel dazu sein wird, einen guten, gleichm\u00e4\u00dfigen Lautst\u00e4rke-Normalisierungsgrad aufrechtzuerhalten, insbesondere f\u00fcr den Dialog, der sehr n\u00fctzlich ist.\n\nWie bereits im letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnt, haben wir zwei neue Sound-Designer begr\u00fc\u00dft: Darren Lambourne und Matteo Cerquone. Darren hat sich uns von der Ninja Theory angeschlossen, wo er an einigen erstaunlich klingenden Titeln arbeitete. Matteo ist als Junior beigetreten, nachdem er die Reihen der Vancouver Film School durchlaufen hat, die sich als ausgezeichnete Game-Sounddesigner erwiesen haben.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich haben wir einen Dialogspezialisten, Bob Rissolo, begr\u00fc\u00dft. Bob ist mit einem Live-Action-Shooting direkt ins kalte Wasser gegangen, um gro\u00dfartige Dialogleistungen aufzuzeichnen und sicherzustellen, dass wir dort die Qualit\u00e4t beibehalten, die wir brauchen. Er wird aus den USA zu uns nach Foundry 42 ziehen, was eine echte Ver\u00e4nderung f\u00fcr ihn sein wird und hoffentlich eine, die sich als fruchtbar erweist.\n\nLuke und Pedro waren diesen Monat wirklich hart bei der Arbeit am Tutorial, von dem wir hoffen, dass es dir klanglich gef\u00e4llt, es ist in vielerlei Hinsicht sehr stimmungsvoll!\n\nPhil hat sich immer wieder mit dem Sozialmodul besch\u00e4ftigt, zusammen mit Tom, der auch bei S42 gute Vorarbeit geleistet hat.\n\nStefan hat die Arbeit mit den FPS weiter vorangetrieben - unsere Foley-Session in Pinewood war gro\u00dfartig, was uns einen ausgezeichneten Startpunkt f\u00fcr die verschiedenen R\u00fcstungsarten verschaffte. Wir werden es aber immer noch verbessern, indem wir auch unsere eigenen Foley-Assets aufnehmen. Ich kann nicht aufh\u00f6ren, zu optimieren! Er setzt die Arbeit an den Waffen fort, die ein ausgekl\u00fcgeltes System f\u00fcr sich allein ist, den Kopf \u00fcber das HDR-System zu bekommen, ist ein schwieriger erster Job, aber er schafft es definitiv. Wir haben noch mehr Umweltaspekte des Waffen-Audios aufzunehmen, aber es wird viele Audiodaten geben, die den Waffen in diesem Spiel gewidmet sind, das ist sicher.\n\nDanke f\u00fcrs Zuh\u00f6ren!\n\nKunst\nWow - April flog gerade vorbei, wir dr\u00fcckten einen weiteren Geburtstag rein und schafften es, alle Teller f\u00fcr Sq42 am Laufen zu halten :) Gute Fortschritte werden bei der Vanduul-Flotte, den Schiffen und der Formensprache, der Patinierung, dem Turmdesign und der st\u00e4ndig wachsenden Pandoras-Box erzielt. Wir haben auch viel Zeit und M\u00fche mit den f\u00fcr die Kampagne ben\u00f6tigten FPS-Waffen verbracht, dazu geh\u00f6ren Anbauger\u00e4te (Scopes, Griffe, Schienensysteme) und auch Granaten, w\u00e4hrend wir auch planen, die vorhandenen Waffen PBR korrekt zu machen. Wir haben auch mit einem neuen britischen Konzeptunternehmen zusammengearbeitet, um die wachsende Anzahl von Aufgaben zu l\u00f6sen, die durch die Cap-Schiffe und das Leveldesign entstehen.\n\nUmgebungen\nWir haben uns auf unsere Vertikale Slice-Sektion f\u00fcr Sq42 konzentriert - das bedeutet, dass wir einen Abschnitt eines Levels nehmen und ihn bis zur endg\u00fcltigen Kunstqualit\u00e4t bringen. Wir haben eine ausgefallene neue Technologie aus der Rendering-Abteilung, die es uns erm\u00f6glicht, unsere modularen Ebenen viel kosteng\u00fcnstiger zu bauen. Wir beginnen auch, einige echte Fortschritte zu machen, wie die Requisiten sowohl in Sq42 als auch in der PU gemacht werden, sie werden im Grunde genommen unserem gleichen Master-Materialsystem folgen, das die gleiche begonnene Texturressource wie unsere Umgebung verwendet, was bedeutet, dass wir unsere Level auf einen viel h\u00f6heren Standard bringen k\u00f6nnen. Und schlie\u00dflich haben wir dem neuen Tutorial-Bereich in Dying Star den letzten Schliff gegeben - wir hoffen, es gef\u00e4llt dir. Ian hat auch die Rolle des Global Environment Lead \u00fcbernommen und setzt die vielen Lektionen, die wir gelernt haben, in unseren Partnerstudios um, die geholfen haben, das zu machen, was Sie heute sehen.\n\nSchiffsteam\nIn diesem Monat ist das Schiff der Foundry 42 bei der Vorbereitung vieler Assets f\u00fcr das Cinematic Shooting in London hart am Werk. Dies ist ein fortlaufender Prozess, der sicherstellt, dass Cinematic Directors und Chris Roberts alles haben, was sie brauchen, um alle Kinofilme f\u00fcr Squadron 42 zu drehen.\n\nDas Schiffsteam in Manchester arbeitet mit voller Kraft an mehreren Capships, und wir machen einen wirklich guten Prozess. Unser Ziel ist es, diese riesigen Schiffe zu einer lebendigen und atmenden Welt f\u00fcr den Spieler zu machen. Die Idris und Speer und Bengalen gehen alle in die Endproduktion, um die F42-Standards zu erf\u00fcllen! Ein riesiges Unterfangen. Auch die Starfarer-Produktion macht gute Fortschritte, Matt arbeitet systematisch das ganze Schiff durch ,ein gro\u00dfes Projekt, sein zweites Projekt nach dem Gladiator. Wir arbeiten auch an einem Xi'an Frachtschiff, einem Schiff, das in SQ42 ben\u00f6tigt wird.\n\nCharaktere\nWir haben uns stark auf das Mocap\/Pcap Shooting konzentriert, das Kamerarig ist jetzt in London bei Andy und wird auf Herz und Nieren gepr\u00fcft, um die Schauspieler bei ihrer Ankunft f\u00fcr das Shooting zu erfassen - ich kann es kaum erwarten, eine digitale Version von (redigiert) zu sehen. Alles in allem spannende Dinge!\n\nHey zusammen!\n\nZun\u00e4chst m\u00f6chten wir sagen, dass es fantastisch ist, Ihnen jeden Monat \u00fcber unsere Fortschritte beim BDSSEtm berichten zu k\u00f6nnen. In unserem Buch ist die M\u00f6glichkeit, direkt mit der Community zu interagieren, der wichtigste Vorteil einer offenen Entwicklung.\n\nHier ist, was das BHVR-Team im April geleistet hat. Einige von euch haben uns nach der Loooong-Version gefragt, also hier ist es:\n\nAuf dem Weg zum ersten Release des Sozialmoduls konzentrieren wir uns haupts\u00e4chlich, aber nicht nur darauf, das Einkaufserlebnis zu unterst\u00fctzen und zu verbessern. Die Standorte auf den Planeten werden reich an Abenteuern, Begegnungen und Interaktionen sein, aber bevor wir Ihnen die ausgefalleneren Spielszenarien und -mechanismen vorstellen, konzentrieren wir uns auf das Wesentliche, also beginnen wir mit diesen:\n\nWenn Sie Ihren Hangar endlich zu Fu\u00df verlassen und sich auf den Weg zum Planeten machen, m\u00f6chten wir, dass Sie eine gute Zeit haben, die verschiedenen Gesch\u00e4fte und M\u00e4rkte zu besuchen. Nimm dir einen Moment Zeit, um dich mit diesen Namen vertraut zu machen, wenn du es nicht schon getan hast: Astro-Armada ist ein erstklassiger Schiffsh\u00e4ndler, Casaba-Outlet ist ein Franchiseunternehmen f\u00fcr Kleidung und Bekleidung, Cubby-blast ist ein Gesch\u00e4ft, das einzigartig f\u00fcr ArcCorp-Area18 ist, das alle Ihre pers\u00f6nlichen Waffenbed\u00fcrfnisse befriedigt, Dumper's Depot ist eine Schrottwerkstatt, in der Sie Schiffsteile finden (vorerst in perfektem Zustand), und last but not least bietet die medizinische Einheit medizinische Dienstleistungen f\u00fcr den besonderen Moment, in dem Sie ins Gesicht geschossen werden.\n\nDas Einkaufserlebnis ist auf verschiedenen Ebenen angesiedelt: Auf der Designseite stellen unsere Leveldesigner die physischen und logischen Komponenten zusammen, die in den Levels ben\u00f6tigt werden: Regale, Regale, Regale, Regalartikel, die Gesch\u00e4fte selbst, etc., und unterst\u00fctzen unsere K\u00fcnstler, die die Visuals dieser Orte wundersch\u00f6n und wiederverwendbar machen. Gamedesigner synchronisieren die Arbeit aller Beteiligten, um den Konzepten gerecht zu werden, und entwickeln realistische L\u00f6sungen f\u00fcr epische Probleme, die offensichtlich auf dem Weg dorthin sind (wie.... alle f\u00fcnf Minuten).\n\nUnser UI-Team war schon immer auf der ganzen Linie! Sie haben diesen Monat einige coole Logos f\u00fcr \"Interdimension Software\", \"Electronic Access\" sowie eine \"Star Marine\"-Logoanimation und Decals f\u00fcr die Nyx-Planetenseite erstellt. Das mobiGlas und seine Augmented Reality (AR), die Haupttore zur Einkaufsoberfl\u00e4che, werden um verschiedene visuelle Komponenten und weitere Features wie \u00fcberarbeitete Benachrichtigungen f\u00fcr Lobby, Shop und Hangars erweitert. Wir sind noch nicht in der Lage, den vollen Funktionsumfang zu haben, aber es ist sehr aufregend, es Ihnen in seinem aktuellen Zustand zu geben. Wir freuen uns auf Ihr Feedback zur Benutzerfreundlichkeit und Visualisierung.\n\nAll dies ist f\u00fcr uns \u00e4u\u00dferst spannend, da wir lange Zeit (Jahrhunderte in der Raumschifffahrt) \u00fcber diese Entw\u00fcrfe geschrieben, diskutiert und wiederholt haben und wir endlich sehen, wie alles zusammenkommt. Beachten Sie, dass diese erste Version noch lange nicht das endg\u00fcltige Einkaufserlebnis ist, das wir anstreben. Es ist das, was wir \"Phase eins\" nennen, wie in \"Phaser auf eins setzen\".\n\nIn weiteren Nachrichten sind weitere Standorte am Planetenrand noch in der Entwicklung. Mariana, Odyssa, Crusader und Hurston Designs sind von 2D-Layouts auf die Whitebox-B\u00fchne \u00fcbergegangen. Wenn Sie sich erinnern, haben wir in fr\u00fcheren Berichten erkl\u00e4rt, dass wir dank der Tag-, Raum- und Tier-Systeme immer schneller in der Entwicklung von Planetenseiten vorankommen w\u00fcrden. Die vier genannten Planeten passen in den gleichen architektonischen Stil wie ArcCorp und sind somit hervorragende Kandidaten, um zu beweisen, dass wir sie effizient bauen k\u00f6nnen. So weit, so gut! Sie k\u00f6nnen mehr Informationen und Konzepte \u00fcber diese Planeten finden; sie sind auf dieser Website verf\u00fcgbar.\n\nWie bereits erw\u00e4hnt, hat unsere kleine Armee von K\u00fcnstlern viel Zeit damit verbracht, die verschiedenen Einkaufsorte zu \"erfinden\", aber auch an einem v\u00f6llig neuen modularen Set zu arbeiten, das in zuk\u00fcnftigen Planetenstandorten eingesetzt werden soll. F\u00fcr dieses neue Set haben wir eine bessere Pipeline integriert, die unsere Arbeit effizienter und mit besseren visuellen Ergebnissen macht. Wir k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten, Ihnen diese Ergebnisse zu zeigen!\n\nDu hast wahrscheinlich schon Modelle des holotable Revamps gesehen. Auch auf dieser Seite setzen wir die Bem\u00fchungen fort. Die Visuals sind noch in der Definition, w\u00e4hrend unsere Ingenieure leichte Optimierungen und Korrekturen vornehmen. Um seine Funktionalit\u00e4t f\u00fcr die bald erscheinenden Modi zu erhalten, k\u00f6nnen wir noch nicht in den kompletten Umbau eintauchen. Du wirst verstehen, dass wir es erst brechen m\u00fcssen, bevor wir es besser machen. Nat\u00fcrlich wollen wir nicht, dass du mit einem kaputten Holotable endest. Vorl\u00e4ufig werden Sie Optimierungen sehen, wie z.B. bessere visuelle Hinweise f\u00fcr die REC-Ausr\u00fcstung im Vergleich zu eigenen Ger\u00e4ten.\n\nEtwas im Zusammenhang mit dem Holotable, aber auch mit Auswirkungen auf verschiedene Systeme im Laufe des Spiels, haben wir einige Fortschritte beim Holoobjekt-Refaktor gemacht, um die Nutzung von Entit\u00e4ten zu reduzieren. Kurz gesagt, bedeutet dies eine bessere Leistung, die sich direkt auf mehr Spieler in Multiplayer-Instanzen auswirkt!\n\nUnsere Ingenieure sind auch flei\u00dfig dabei, den FPS-Zugang, die Anpassung des Ladevorgangs in der Lobby und die Implementierung der mehrk\u00f6pfigen Lobby zu unterst\u00fctzen. Dar\u00fcber hinaus wurde die Chat-Funktion aktualisiert, um grundlegende Funktionen und private Gespr\u00e4che zu unterst\u00fctzen. Diese sind f\u00fcr dich noch nicht zug\u00e4nglich, aber sie werden sich als n\u00fctzlich erweisen, wenn wir endlich die Multiplayer-Hangars einf\u00fchren, an denen unsere Jungs aktiv arbeiten.\n\nWir hatten auch ein sehr fruchtbares ganzt\u00e4giges Treffen mit Turbulent, bei dem unsere beiden Teams ihre Kr\u00e4fte f\u00fcr skyLine, die Starmap, b\u00fcndelten. Wir k\u00f6nnen noch nicht viel \u00fcber dieses Feature sagen, au\u00dfer dass es super fantastisch sein wird, versprochen! Wir k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten, es zu benutzen!\n\nWie immer haben wir einige coole Flair Objects f\u00fcr die Abonnenten und f\u00fcr vergangene Stretchziele vorbereitet. Ich hoffe, dir hat unser kleiner Aprilscherz gefallen; wir haben geh\u00f6rt, dass er das Spiel FPS tats\u00e4chlich viel besser gemacht hat;). Das Khartu-Al Takuetsu Raumschiffmodell wurde \u00fcbergeben, und wir m\u00f6chten der Gemeinschaft daf\u00fcr danken, dass sie uns berichtet und uns geholfen hat, einen heimt\u00fcckischen Fehler zu finden, der es daran hinderte, in Hangars zu erscheinen. (Erz\u00e4hl es niemandem, aber wir arbeiten an einem besonderen Extra f\u00fcr die 23 Millionen Stretch-Ziel Belohnung....die auch ein Khartu-Al war).\n\nDas Flair des n\u00e4chsten Monats ist der erste einer neuen Serie. Die Puglisi-Kollektionsartikel sind besonders sch\u00f6ne St\u00fccke. Sie haben eine starke Grafik und eine gro\u00dfartige Fiktion um sich herum (danke an Haddock daf\u00fcr!).\n\nOkay, uns geht der Kaffee aus und wir haben sehr wenig \"Space Ink \"tm, also bis zum n\u00e4chsten Mal, viel Spa\u00df mit dem Vers!\n\nAhoy Star B\u00fcrger! Es war ein weiterer arbeitsreicher Monat f\u00fcr das FPS-Team. In den letzten Wochen haben wir uns darauf konzentriert, das Gef\u00fchl von Bewegung und Gesch\u00fctzspiel zu bekommen, das sich wirklich eingew\u00e4hlt hat, zusammen mit der Implementierung von Null-Gang-Bewegung und Interaktionen. Lesen Sie unten f\u00fcr die Details.....\n\nIngenieurwesen\nDas Engineering-Team verbrachte viel Zeit und M\u00fche damit, sicherzustellen, dass alle Variablen und Parameter, die die Designer anforderten, ihnen zum Optimieren zur Verf\u00fcgung standen. Dazu geh\u00f6ren nicht nur die Spielergeschwindigkeit und der Waffenschaden, sondern auch Dinge wie die Atemdauer basierend auf der Ausdauer des Sprints und der Art und Weise, wie sich das auf das Ziel jeder der Waffen auswirkt. Sie k\u00f6nnen nun optimieren, wie lange ein Atemzug dauert, die Pause am oberen und unteren Ende eines Atemzuges, wie weit das das Ziel des Spielers abwirft, etc.... Dies erm\u00f6glicht es den Designern, alles fein abzustimmen, damit alle Waffen in jeder Situation genau so f\u00fchlen, wie sie es wollen. Dar\u00fcber hinaus wurde das Stock CryEngine Hinweis-System neu geschrieben. Das Hinweis-System ist das, was verwendet wurde, um R\u00fccksto\u00df und Ungenauigkeit beim kontinuierlichen Abfeuern einer Waffe zu gew\u00e4hrleisten. Der allgemeine Konsens war, dass das Lagersystem nicht gen\u00fcgend Kontrolle bot, also schrieb einer unserer Ingenieure es von Grund auf neu, um Tonnen von Kontrolle dar\u00fcber zu geben, in welche Richtung die Waffe zur\u00fcckschl\u00e4gt und was die Grenzen f\u00fcr die Auf- und Abbewegung sind. Auch dies ist etwas, das den Konstrukteuren ein viel feineres Ma\u00df an Kontrolle bei der Abstimmung der sich vorw\u00e4rts bewegenden Waffen geben wird.\n\nEine weitere gro\u00dfe Aufgabe ist die Netzwerkoptimierung. Es wurde eine ganze Menge Datenverkehr vom Client an den Server und umgekehrt weitergeleitet, der einfach nicht da sein musste.... also haben einige der Jungs hier den gesamten Netzwerkverkehr profiliert und das, was nicht notwendig ist, entfernt und das, was vorhanden ist, so umstrukturiert, dass es in Bezug auf die Datengr\u00f6\u00dfe viel effizienter ist. Es ist in den letzten Wochen viel, viel besser geworden und es gibt noch mehr, die optimiert werden k\u00f6nnen. Am Ende bedeutet das weniger Verz\u00f6gerung und ein viel reibungsloseres Erlebnis f\u00fcr Sie als B\u00fcrger! Wir wissen, dass Sie verstehen, wie wichtig es ist, so wenig Netzwerkl\u00fccke wie m\u00f6glich zu haben, besonders wenn Sie einen Shooter spielen!\n\nKunst\nDas Kunstteam hat sich darauf konzentriert, ALLE aktuellen Waffen im Spiel zu polieren, vor allem, um sicherzustellen, dass die Materialien den Standards von Star Citizen entsprechen (und Sie wissen, wie hoch diese Stange ist!). Auch auf der Ebene der Raumstation Gold Horizon wurde ein kompletter Beleuchtungspass erstellt. Das Level der Astro-Arena, das Sie auf der PAX East gesehen haben, wurde auf der Kunstseite komplett \u00fcberarbeitet, um ihm mehr Tiefe zu verleihen und insgesamt etwas mehr Kontrast zu verleihen. Die polnischen Arbeiten an der VFX f\u00fcr alle Waffen sind im Gange. Wir wollen auch sicherstellen, dass die Waffeneffekte in FPS mit denen auf Schiffen \u00fcbereinstimmen. \u00c4hnliche Technologien sollten \u00e4hnliche Effekte haben, auch wenn der Umfang reduziert wurde. Schlie\u00dflich begannen die Arbeiten daran, alle Gold Horizon-Sets zu \u00fcbernehmen und sie an das Standard-Tier-Set-System anzupassen, so dass sie an allen persistenten Universumsstandorten verwendet werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDesign\nDas Designteam konzentrierte sich in den letzten Wochen haupts\u00e4chlich darauf, das Gef\u00fchl von Bewegung und Waffenspiel zu verbessern. Nun, da sie alle notwendigen Parameter haben, die sie ben\u00f6tigen, sind sie ihnen ausgesetzt, sie haben die Atmung gew\u00e4hlt, zielen auf Sehensw\u00fcrdigkeiten und R\u00fcckschl\u00e4ge. Auch an einer neuen Karte und einem neuen Spielmodus wurde gearbeitet. Der neue Modus wird sich auf ein asymmetrisches Gameplay konzentrieren, von dem wir alle sehr begeistert sind! Alle Modi, an denen f\u00fcr das FPS-Modul gearbeitet wird, sind dazu da, aktuelle Szenarien zu simulieren, die Spieler im persistenten Universum antreffen k\u00f6nnten. Dinge wie das leise Eindringen in einen festgehaltenen Ort, m\u00f6glicherweise das Stehlen von Ladung oder einfach nur der Schutz. Mit dem offenen Charakter des Spiels und den vielen M\u00f6glichkeiten, die der Spieler in Star Citizen hat, ist es schwer, sich jeden m\u00f6glichen Fall vorzustellen, aber wir denken, dass wir eine solide Handvoll Situationen haben, in die Sie geraten k\u00f6nnten.\n\nAnimation\nDas Animationsteam war damit besch\u00e4ftigt, neue Assets f\u00fcr Sata Ball zu erstellen. Es gibt einige einzigartige Animationen in diesem Modus f\u00fcr die Interaktion mit dem Ball, die haupts\u00e4chlich mit dem Passieren und Schie\u00dfen des Balls in der Arena zu tun haben. In K\u00fcrze werden auch die neuen Mocap-Daten eingepflegt, ab diesem Zeitpunkt werden die Animatoren beginnen, all diese neuen Animationen anzuschlie\u00dfen. Das gr\u00f6\u00dfte St\u00fcck Arbeit hier werden die Bewegungs\u00fcberg\u00e4nge und Jukes sein. Diese Animationen machen die Charaktere lehnend in und aus Sprint-, Lauf- und Gehzust\u00e4nden und geben den Animationen insgesamt ein gutes Gef\u00fchl von Gewicht. Das letzte Bit, das hier zu erw\u00e4hnen ist, ist das Nachbessern der Animationen, die im Spiel vorhanden sind, um zu zielen, zu schie\u00dfen, nachzuladen und Waffen zu tauschen. Nachdem die Designer mit dem Timing und dem Gef\u00fchl f\u00fcr all diese Elemente zufrieden sind, liegt es an der Animation, alles wieder zu synchronisieren.\n\nWir wissen, dass ihr alle wirklich begeistert seid von der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung der FPS, und wir auch! Wir wollen nur sicherstellen, dass du etwas ganz Besonderes bekommst, wenn es f\u00e4llt! Also bitte haben Sie Nachsicht mit uns, es kommt sehr bald und wir denken, dass es sich lohnt zu warten!\n\nHier ist, was wir f\u00fcr den Monat April hier in Montreal gemacht haben.\n\nDer neue Stil von RSI\nZun\u00e4chst einmal hat RSI jetzt eine neue Homepage. In den letzten Wochen lag unser Hauptaugenmerk darauf, dieses neue Design zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen, mit dem Ziel, mehr Inhalte auf einen Blick zu liefern, in einem besser lesbaren Layout mit minimalem ungenutztem Platz. Wir haben auch viel Zeit damit verbracht, dieses neue Design zu optimieren, damit es auf einer gr\u00f6\u00dferen Anzahl von Ger\u00e4ten und Browsern besser verarbeitet werden kann, angefangen bei der deutlichen Reduzierung der Gesamtgr\u00f6\u00dfe der Homepage, einschlie\u00dflich der Videos.\n\nNeue Seiten, wie die neue Dev Tracker-Seite, werden konsequent auf diesem neuen Layout basieren, und wir werden auch den Rest der bestehenden Website kontinuierlich auf dieses Format umstellen, wenn wir Funktionalit\u00e4ten hinzuf\u00fcgen, wie auf der neuen Press-Seite.\n\nDer Community Hub\nDer n\u00e4chste gro\u00dfe Punkt, an dem wir gearbeitet haben, ist der lang angek\u00fcndigte Community Hub. W\u00e4hrend wir mit der Entwicklung fortfahren, sind hier einige der wichtigsten Merkmale. Dieser neue Bereich befindet sich direkt an der Wurzel des Community-Bereichs und wurde entwickelt, um fast ausschlie\u00dflich Fan-Inhalte zu empfangen und zu pr\u00e4sentieren: \"Citizen Spotlight\" erm\u00f6glicht es allen Fans, ihre eigenen Kreationen \u00fcber Star Citizen hochzuladen und anzuzeigen (einschlie\u00dflich, aber nicht beschr\u00e4nkt auf Screenshots, Play-Sessions, Rigs, Cosplay, Musik, Models...), w\u00e4hrend \"Deep Space Radar\" alle externen Inhalte zusammenfasst, die Fans au\u00dferhalb von Roberts Space Industries \u00fcber Star Citizen erfahren k\u00f6nnen. Unter anderem wird der Hub auch mit registrierten Star Citizen Streamern und Fan-Podcasts ausgestattet sein.\n\nDieser neue Abschnitt impliziert eine umfangreiche neue Architektur, um mit so vielen Inhalten umgehen zu k\u00f6nnen, und wir haben das visuelle und technische Design im Laufe des letzten Monats fertiggestellt. Seitdem haben wir mit der Implementierung der Datenmodelle und der statischen visuellen Integration begonnen und gehen nun zur Datenverarbeitung \u00fcber.\n\nWir wollen wirklich eine Seite, die die Community mit ihren eigenen Inhalten \"besitzen\" kann.\n\nNeues Werkzeug in Arbeit\nEs entsteht ein neues Projekt in der Gr\u00f6\u00dfe des Community Hubs, das wir intern den Issue Council genannt haben. Die Grundlinie ist, dass es einen wachsenden Bedarf an einem zentralen Bug-Report-System f\u00fcr Star Citizen gibt: eine M\u00f6glichkeit f\u00fcr die Community, eine Datenbank mit Bugs und Problemen in allen Aspekten des Spiels (und der Website) aufzubauen, die von der gesamten Community reguliert und dann an die Entwicklungsteams rationalisiert wird. Mit diesem System k\u00f6nnen die Spieler Probleme melden, sie von anderen Spielern best\u00e4tigen (oder anfechten lassen) und dem eventuellen Fix im Spiel folgen. Dieses neue Modul ist seit einiger Zeit im Konzept, und wir haben mit der Implementierung begonnen.\n\nStarmap\nDie Starmap-Arbeiten werden fortgesetzt. Viel Fortschritt wurde am Backend gemacht, um sicherzustellen, dass die Architektur der Universums-Updates f\u00fcr die vielen verschiedenen Komponenten funktioniert, die sie ben\u00f6tigen, wobei die Web-Starmap nur eine davon ist. Der gr\u00f6\u00dfte Teil der schweren Front-End-Arbeiten in diesem Monat konzentrierte sich auf die Entwicklung der Asset-Pipeline, um interessante Assets in unseren (pun) \"Astrometrics Room\" zu bringen. Generische Formen und Ikonographie sind wichtig f\u00fcr diese Art von App, aber tats\u00e4chlich gut aussehende Modelle und\/oder Texturen und Animationen werden wichtig sein, um das SC-Universum richtig darzustellen. Diese Pipeline ist spezifisch f\u00fcr WebGL, da wir nun offiziell den Unity-Prototypen, den wir bereits im Dezember\/Januar vorgestellt haben, entfernt haben.\n\nDiese Bildsprache muss auch mit dem Spiel \u00fcbereinstimmen, und so viele Design-Meetings mit allen beteiligten Teams waren notwendig. Es ist noch viel Arbeit \u00fcbrig!\n\nInhalte und Updates\nIm April kam es zu einem eigenen Konzeptverkauf, und die Hull Series ist derzeit auf unserer brandneuen Homepage stark vertreten. Damit kam die \u00dcberarbeitung des Frachtsystems, die k\u00fcrzlich in den Ship Stats zum Ausdruck kam, und oben auf diesem Update haben wir auch eine gemeinsame Aufgabe mit den Spieleautoren gestartet, einige der veraltetsten Schiffe im Katalog zu aktualisieren. Der erste in der Liste ist der Aurora LX, der endlich seine Sch\u00f6nheitsrender im Laden bekommen hat.\n\nAbmeldung von Ranglisten\nDie aktivsten Spieler werden auch feststellen, dass es nun m\u00f6glich ist, sich direkt auf Ihrer Einstellungsseite aus den Arena Commander Ranglisten auszutragen. Wenn Sie sich abmelden, werden wir weiterhin Ihre Spieldaten erhalten und Ihre pers\u00f6nlichen Daten, Statistiken und Leistungen berechnen, aber sie bleiben f\u00fcr jeden unsichtbar, bis Sie sich daf\u00fcr entscheiden, sich wieder einzuloggen. W\u00e4hrend du unsichtbar bist, gibst du effektiv auch deinen potentiellen \u00f6ffentlichen Rang \"auf\".\n\nCCU-System\nWie Sie wissen, ist das aktuelle CCU-System mit so vielen Schiffen, die jetzt flugf\u00e4hig sind, \u00fcberwachsen. Design und grundlegende Implementierungsarbeiten wurden diesen Monat durchgef\u00fchrt, um Ihnen einen alternativen Weg zur CCU zu erm\u00f6glichen. M\u00f6glicherweise sollte es gr\u00f6\u00dfere Fortschritte bei diesem Teilsystem geben. Da mehr Schiffe fliegbar werden, wird dieses System ben\u00f6tigt, damit Sie Ihre bestehenden Alpha\/LTI-Versprechen richtig upgraden k\u00f6nnen, ohne diese wertvollen Gegenst\u00e4nde zu opfern.\n\nFragen Sie einen Web-Entwickler\nSchlie\u00dflich haben wir auch unsere Forumpr\u00e4senz in diesem Monat auf dem Ask a Dev - Website Thread verst\u00e4rkt. Wenn du also Fragen zu uns, unserem Prozess oder bevorstehenden Features hast, frag nach dem Kerl mit dem 1-UP-Pilz!\n\nDies war ein weiterer schwerer Monat der Planung der Roadmap f\u00fcr die Funktionen von Star Citizen. Wir haben viel mit den Teams in Frankfurt, Manchester und Austin zusammengearbeitet, um weiterhin gemeinsame KI-Anforderungen in verschiedenen Star Citizen-Modulen zu identifizieren und herauszufinden, wie Doppelarbeit am besten minimiert werden kann und wie alle wichtigen KI-Funktionen bei Bedarf implementiert werden k\u00f6nnen. Das ist schon schwierig genug, wenn man nur ein normales Spiel macht, aber mit dem ehrgeizigen Umfang von Star Citizen, mehreren Modulen und einem konstanten Strom von Releases wird es zu etwas, das st\u00e4ndig bearbeitet und optimiert werden muss.\n\nDesign\nDie wichtigste Designarbeit, die wir in diesem Monat geleistet haben, war die Verbesserung des Kythera-KI-Systems, um es mehr Multithreading zu erm\u00f6glichen. Bestimmte Aspekte von Kythera werden bereits auf separaten Threads ausgef\u00fchrt, wie z.B. das Erzeugen von Navigationsnetzen, aber viele Aspekte wie Verhaltensverarbeitung und Wahrnehmung werden immer noch auf einem einzigen Thread ausgef\u00fchrt. F\u00fcr die meisten Spiele mit einer kleinen Anzahl aktiver KI ist das wirklich kein Problem, aber wie wir alle wissen, wirft Star Citizen den Normalfall aus dem Fenster! Um Hunderte oder Tausende von AIs effizient aktualisieren zu k\u00f6nnen, ist es wichtig, so viel Verarbeitungsaufwand wie m\u00f6glich in kleine, unabh\u00e4ngige Jobs aufteilen und \u00fcber mehrere Threads laufen zu k\u00f6nnen.\n\nUnsere Arbeit im letzten Monat am Jobsystem hat uns geholfen, uns so einzurichten, dass wir bei Bedarf kleine Aufgaben erstellen k\u00f6nnen, aber das Herausfinden, wie man Dinge wie Verhaltensverarbeitung sicher und effizient aufl\u00f6st, ist der schwierige Teil. Es geht darum, ein Framework zu schaffen, das bestimmen kann, welche Codebits von anderen Codebits abh\u00e4ngig sind und daher nach ihnen laufen m\u00fcssen und welche unabh\u00e4ngig voneinander ausgef\u00fchrt werden k\u00f6nnen. Sie m\u00fcssen dann in der Lage sein, all dies effizient zu planen. Oh, und es ist auch praktisch, das Framework so einzurichten, dass es f\u00fcr Programmierer schwer ist, damit versehentlich Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten zu erstellen, die nicht vorhanden sein sollten, und die gesamte Planung durcheinander zu bringen!\n\nIngenieurwesen\nWir haben in diesem Monat eine nette Funktionsverbesserung an unserem Kythera Inspector Debugging-Tool vorgenommen, n\u00e4mlich die Hinzuf\u00fcgung einer Verhaltensbaum-Visualisierung f\u00fcr Aufnahmen. Wie bereits erw\u00e4hnt, erlaubt Inspector Designern, alles aufzuzeichnen, was die KI tut, w\u00e4hrend sie das Spiel spielen, und es dann wiederzugeben, um genau zu sehen, was die KI zu irgendeinem Zeitpunkt gemacht hat. Dies ist ein unsch\u00e4tzbares Werkzeug, um Fehler aufzusp\u00fcren.\n\nEine Sache, die jedoch fehlte, war die M\u00f6glichkeit, ihr Verhalten richtig zu visualisieren. Dies war etwas, das Sie in Echtzeit \u00fcber einige On-Screen-Debugging-Funktionen tun konnten, aber es war nicht benutzerfreundlich aus dem Inspektor heraus zug\u00e4nglich. Wenn wir nun Aufnahmen wiedergeben, k\u00f6nnen wir uns einen guten \u00dcberblick \u00fcber den Verhaltensbaum verschaffen, den jede KI gerade ausf\u00fchrt, und in welchem Zustand sie sich befindet. Wir haben noch nicht die M\u00f6glichkeit, dies zu sehen, w\u00e4hrend das Spiel l\u00e4uft, nur auf Aufnahmen, aber das ist etwas, das wir bald hinzuf\u00fcgen werden.\n\nEin weiteres interessantes Feature, an dem wir gearbeitet haben, ist eine gro\u00dfe Verbesserung unseres Spline-F\u00fcgecodes. Wir haben bereits erw\u00e4hnt, wie wir es Designern erlauben, verschiedene Splines zu erstellen, um Angriffspfade zu definieren, oder ausgefallene Man\u00f6ver, um Schiffe durch enge Hindernisse zu bringen, die sie sonst umgehen k\u00f6nnten, aber ein Problem, das wir bei dieser Funktion gefunden haben, ist, dass es schwierig sein kann, das Schiff auf eine reibungslose und realistische Weise zum Start der Spline zu bringen.\n\nOft wollen wir, dass das Schiff eine bestimmte Ausrichtung und Geschwindigkeit hat, wenn es den Anfang der Spline erreicht, aber wir m\u00fcssen das Schiff von dort bringen, egal wie seine aktuelle Ausrichtung und Geschwindigkeit ist, in einer Weise, die innerhalb der Man\u00f6vrierf\u00e4higkeiten dieses Schiffes liegt, und ohne es zu zwingen, mehr als unbedingt notwendig zu verlangsamen.\n\nUnsere bestehende L\u00f6sung hat die meiste Zeit einen vern\u00fcnftigen Job gemacht, aber manchmal zu schlechten Ergebnissen gef\u00fchrt, also haben wir uns entschieden, herauszufinden, wie man es richtig macht. Dies ist eigentlich ein viel kniffligeres Problem, als du vielleicht denkst. Knifflig genug, dass unser ans\u00e4ssiger Astrophysiker Ben Lowing einen zweiten Astrophysiker hinzugezogen hat, und die beiden haben eine detaillierte L\u00f6sung f\u00fcr das Problem erarbeitet. Es ist nun weitgehend implementiert, obwohl sich herausgestellt hat, dass es einige zus\u00e4tzliche Feinheiten des Problems gibt, die wir im n\u00e4chsten Monat weiter angehen werden.\n\nSeid gegr\u00fc\u00dft, B\u00fcrger! Community Manager Jared \"Disco Lando\" Huckaby hier im fantastischen S\u00fcdkalifornien, wo die Sonne immer scheint und die Steuern immer schw\u00e4cher werden. Ja, ich bin's. Ich kann es selbst kaum glauben. Lasst uns direkt reingehen, oder?\n\nUnsere Community Content Managerin Jenny Varner zog um und kam aus ihrer Heimat Texas zu uns. W\u00e4hrend sie darum k\u00e4mpft, sich an unsere lokalen Gepflogenheiten anzupassen und weiterhin darauf besteht, dass Fr\u00fchst\u00fcckstacos Burritos \u00fcberlegen sind, findet sie hier bei Cloud Imperium Games ihren Platz in der Familie. Neben der Verwaltung aller unserer sozialen Inhalte ist sie auch mit der Produktion von Videosegmenten f\u00fcr Around the Vers besch\u00e4ftigt, betreibt unseren w\u00f6chentlichen Livestream Reverse the Vers und legt den Grundstein f\u00fcr unsere erweiterte Unterst\u00fctzung von Community Content Creators.\n\nF\u00fcr mich selbst bin ich diesen Monat nach Jahren im YouTube-Exil ins Team gekommen. Als Community Manager werde ich mich darauf konzentrieren, die Verbindungen zwischen euch B\u00fcrgern und unserem Entwicklungsteam in den Foren zu verbessern. Obwohl wir einen beispiellosen Zugang zwischen den Fans und unserem Team haben, wenn wir vier w\u00f6chentliche Videosendungen, w\u00f6chentliche Kommunikationsverbindungen und die Vielfalt der zus\u00e4tzlichen Beitr\u00e4ge ber\u00fccksichtigen, k\u00f6nnen wir immer danach streben, es besser zu machen, und das ist unser Ziel. Dar\u00fcber hinaus habe ich Around the Vers in den letzten zwei Monaten bearbeitet und versucht, ein wenig von der Pers\u00f6nlichkeit unseres Teams in den Vordergrund zu r\u00fccken. Wir sind nicht die Standard-Videospielunternehmen, und wir sind nicht daran interessiert, die Standard-Videospielunternehmen-Community-Inhalte herauszubringen.\n\nDas f\u00fchrt uns zu unserem gr\u00f6\u00dften Meilenstein als Community-Team in diesem Monat, Around the Vers #42. Ich muss dir nicht sagen, welche Bedeutung diese Zahl f\u00fcr alle hat. in diesem Team. Jede Woche tun wir unser Bestes, um Ihnen die Informationen, die wir zur Verf\u00fcgung haben, zur Verf\u00fcgung zu stellen und sie so gut wie m\u00f6glich zu pr\u00e4sentieren. Wie bei allem anderen, was wir tun, werden wir auch weiterhin unser Bestes tun, um unsere Bem\u00fchungen jede Woche zu verbessern, und mit diesem Meilenstein habe ich mit Hilfe von Ryan Archer und Star Citizen Angry Peas einen speziellen Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy thematischen Intro zur Show erstellt. Danke Peas.\n\nUnd wie immer ist all dies ohne mich, unsere Abonnenten, m\u00f6glich, deren Beitr\u00e4ge diese Produktionen erm\u00f6glichen. Ich wei\u00df, dass wir das jeden Monat sagen, aber das ist das erste Mal, dass ich es sagen kann, und ich habe diesen Monat aus erster Hand gesehen, wie viel Engagement und harte Arbeit die Leute in diesem Team in den Dienst der Gemeinschaft gestellt haben. Es ist unsere gemeinsame Hoffnung, dass die j\u00fcngsten Erg\u00e4nzungen des Teams in Kombination mit den etablierten Stammkunden, die schon so lange hier sind, es uns erm\u00f6glichen werden, mehr von Ihnen zu erreichen, und zwar effektiver als je zuvor.\n\nBen sagt mir, dass ich jetzt aufh\u00f6ren muss zu reden. Ich werde so lange tippen, wie er es zugelassen hat.","zh_CN":"Greetings Citizens,\nWelcome to the April 2015 Monthly Report! It was a busy month for the Star Citizen team, with the worldwide teams going full speed ahead on updates to Arena Commander, Star Marine, Squadron 42, the persistent universe and more. As we speak, Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.2 is available on the PTU. Thanks to the community, we\u2019ve identified a number of bugs that the team is hard at work squashing today\u2026 expect an update on that next week. This is also your last weekend to pledge for a Hull series ship during the concept sale; check it out! We\u2019ll also be putting out a more comprehensive update on Star Marine early next week, letting you know exactly what we\u2019ve been working on these past few weeks. Until then, enjoy finding out what we\u2019ve been up to in April!\n\nGreetings Citizens,\n\nApril is over; man, that was fast! We\u2019re trying things a little differently with this month\u2019s report: instead of a single voice, we\u2019ve given each team member the opportunity to contribute directly. And below this report, we\u2019ve added a little background about what one of our artists does. You\u2019ll have to let us know what you think in the comments but we believe it creates a much more dynamic update! Without further ado, let\u2019s go to the department updates written by those who make up the departments.\n\nDesign\nOne of the items we\u2019ve been working on in the Design department is Pirate Swarm is a mode within the map of Broken Moon. It features Pirate pilots using UEE ships that will attack the players. The number of waves has been reduced for play times to be more manageable, waves have been balanced as well to allow players a chance to reach the end. The Swarm modes have been played a bunch over the time since Arena Commander has been released, but we want to give you more than just static waves of the same ones over and over. Moving forward we want to get away from the term of Vanduul or Pirate Swarm and make it just \u2018Swarm\u2019.\n\nWhat does that mean?\n\nWe want to give you options in which you can customize your gameplay.\n\nThat doesn\u2019t tell me anything!\n\nHmm, how would you like to choose what enemies you fight? How would you like to select how many waves you want to go up against? Moving forward we really want to give you those types of options. The ability to make your play experience painfully difficult as a true swarm of enemies zero in on you, or if you just want to jump in and test a new weapon set up, then spawn a single easy wave to check it out. This is a simulation, you should have the ability to set up your training simulation as you please, and we aim to give you that option.\n\nGOST is coming! GOST is a modular system we\u2019re developing that allows us to more directly control the varied methods of interacting with our ships. Previously hard-coded archetypes of accessing, entering, sitting within, and navigating throughout ships will instead be authored by situation-specific logical components, granting us greater freedom than ever before. One example of the advantages of this system is that in the Hornet F7CM, instead of being auto-seated in the pilot\u2019s seat, you\u2019ll be able to deploy the access ladder, then choose to retract it, sit in the pilot\u2019s seat, or sit in the copilot seat. Multi-crewed ships will reap even larger functional benefits, especially while dashing from the radar station to the hangar deck in the heat of battle or while simply taking a leisurely stroll to the lounge. Interact with your ships however you\u2019d like\u2014it\u2019s all possible with GOST.\n\nOverall, April has seen a lot of great progress for our long-term itemization in Star Citizen. With the continued work on all of the ship components, we\u2019ve been working on a full overhaul and standardization of all of our component sizes. Having these in place is going to help with all aspects of ship design and development. From the ground up, we can use these sizes to build out much more detailed component plans for each of our ships, as well as starting to help us plan out just what our increased modularity of ship components will mean when putting together a loadout.\n\nHaving these sizes locked in, we\u2019ve already started planning out some of the possible component swapping that will be available in the future. Some of our current experiments are exploring Power Plants, Shield Generators, and Cooling systems sharing more interchangeable placement. This is still going to take a lot of testing and tuning to make sure these choices feel meaningful enough to make while also keeping the overall power of each ship balanced.\n\nAnother set of components we\u2019ve needed to rethink the sizing on are our Ammo Boxes, Battery Packs, Fuel Tanks, and Ballast systems. With our resized components, these all now share the same size, allowing them to easily be replaced with one another. Running a ballistics-heavy ship? Bring some extra ammo. Need to make a long-range flight next? Swap that ammo out with some spare fuel tanks. While not all of these components are adjustable on a ship currently, they\u2019re going to help play a major part in loadout customization.\n\nThis month we took on tangibility mechanics \u2013 what has affectionately been called \u201cgrabby hands\u201d \u2013 as a vital step towards bringing the cargo system to life. The basic premise is that everything is physical, that human scale objects can be picked up and manipulated, placed and tossed around with a level of fidelity and control that really brings the environment alive. Moving things around is great, and from our early prototypes it feels more natural and responsive than has ever been seen done before, but that\u2019s only the first problem \u2013 doing it with animations that flow naturally while remaining responsive for gameplay and visibly correct in both first and third person is a whole extra level of complexity. It\u2019s all pretty well documented here.\n\nFor all its challenges, this level of detail and interactivity is the path to a universe that feels real, from seeing a stranger flipping a coin to walking into your hangar and truly feeling at home. It extends beyond just the picking up of items, so I\u2019ve also created early examples of direct interaction with buttons, dials, throttles, even computer screens. Being able to sit in your cockpit and manually pick out individual buttons to press, or directly pulling levers and valves to tweak and tune components for repair, or just walking up to a screen and being able to instantly interact intuitively and naturally without switching into a new mode \u2013 these are the things that make the art of Star Citizen tangible.\n\nEngineering\nThis month we implemented a new 3D-to-2D \u201cpoint of view\u201d radar in the style of Wing Commander\u2019s radar. Though range can be harder to discern with this radar it makes it very easy to know where your contacts are around you and which way to turn to get them in view. We started by using Wolfram Mathematica to rapidly prototype the math necessary to map a 3D direction onto the display, creating both an interactive output and a test output using a generated array of test points so we could see any mistakes that needed fixing. Once we were sure the math was correct we brought it all into C++ and hooked it up to the flash through a custom dock item field, then attached the flash to the front HUD of an Avenger to test it. This new radar type will be appearing in certain ships soon.\n\nWhile the AI devs over in the UK have nowadays mostly been working on character-based AI for Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe, we\u2019ve been focused on the maintenance of spaceship-based AI as you see in the Vanduul Swarm game mode. Most recently, we\u2019ve begun prototyping wingmen commands, the ability for the player to assign specific goals such as \u201cattack my target\u201d or \u201cdefend me\u201d to his wingmen instead of just having them engage enemies as they please. This work will also work well towards our ability to create complex combat scenarios and missions in which AI ships will have different objectives to fulfill specific roles in the fleet. In the future, we expect to be working more in supporting Randy Vazquez, an LA technical designer who started working for us in the past couple of months and specifically focuses on AI encounter systems.\n\nContinue bug support on release stream; crashes, mp de-syncs, unexpected behavior, and all around shenanigans. Prep work for radar system 2.0, signature system 2.0, vehicle params, and physical based damage. The improved radar system will be handle designer driven entries, threaded performance improvements, coherent abstraction so player and vehicles can use the same system with adjusted parameters, and more. The improved signature system will extend the designer driven system because calix demands more power, allow signatures to mask other signatures ( sun blocking ir signatures ), introduce the concept of frequency, and expand signature emission profiles. The vehicle params are a important step to reduce load times and allow external system to construct information on how a vehicle could be built without the need of spawning said vehicle. The params will also be used to cache resources. Physical damage will allow our kinetic projectiles damage to be based off kinetic energy and control how vehicles handle damage from physical hits and collisions.\n\nArt\nThroughout April members of the Santa Monica ship team have been coming together to update the Freelancer. This process has been an intricate one as it touches many facets of the games core mechanics including some new up and coming features. Coordination between studios has been crucial to this update. Concept artists in the UK have been hard at work fleshing out the Starfarer\u2019s design and with this has come a particular aesthetic that solidified the MISC look in the Star Citizen universe.\n\nUnity among manufacturers is a must so artists here in Santa Monica are applying those concepts to the Freelancer interior and exterior areas. This update has involved many changes such as proper metrics for character interactions, creating zones for cargo and adding areas for modular components. Maintaining the original experience and purpose of the ship will of course be maintained. As a whole the Freelancer has increases in size but the interior has remained a narrow and functional space as the previous design intended; allowing players to be immersed in the multi crew experience of a personal ship.\n\nThroughout the community there has been a lot of feedback concerning the Freelancer, and we\u2019ve listened! Worries about entering the cargo bay while it is full, accessibility to the back turret and the small mid-section as well some other issues have all been addressed. (No more clipping through bathrooms or popping up and down while trying to get to your bed). When the update is completed we believe the community will be pleasantly surprised.\n\nThings have been busy as usual in the Concept department here in Santa Monica. We did a bit of concept work on the freelancer back turret and body before moving on to help where we could with the art for the Hull concept sale. That ship is looking gorgeous and we are excited for you all to see what we have done.\n\nOmar has been doing some amazing work on the characters. He spent a few weeks in Austin working with the team there and they have all made some really amazing progress. He will be heading to the UK office for a few weeks to continue moving forward with character stuff. We can assure you that the character team is creating some really cool stuff and we know you are all going to be really excited when you see what they have been working on. Hopefully we will get Omar back in the concept department soon to work on ship stuff.\n\nWell that wraps up the Santa Monica portion of this report. Hope you\u2019ve enjoyed your tour through our development efforts for the month voiced by those on the front lines. As always thank you to everyone in the community for their continued support and for making this game possible. It is a real pleasure to be able to work on such an amazing universe with such an amazing community!\n\nCheers,\nCIG Santa Monica Team\n\nHi my name is Daniel Kamentsky and I\u2019m an Associate 3D artist at CIG in Santa Monica. You might know me from my time working on TNGS as a part of time shimapan. My role at CIG has recently shifted away from modeling and more towards surfacing.\n\nAs real time rendering evolves, with new rendering techniques such as PBR (physically based rendering) there is a growing demand for artists that specialize in the creation and application of materials. As one of these artists it\u2019s my job to think about the more micro level of detail while the other ship artist focus on the modeling and large shapes.\n\nSo what does it mean to be a surfacing artist? Well for me it\u2019s about being fascinated with small details and different surface types. Being a surfacing artist requires you to have a deep understanding of the way different materials react to light, how different materials are used in reality, and how to accurately create these materials with in a real time engine.\n\nAnyways as an artist I\u2019m better at showing rather than saying (or writing) so let me walk you through my process in creating a material in this set of images. So for this demo I\u2019m going to create a painted metal material. With physically based rendering you are able to create believable materials with simple solid base colors. So with that in mind the first thing I normally do when making my materials is start by blocking in some solid values.\n\nHi everyone!\n\nApril showers have blessed Central Texas this month and we\u2019ve been hard at work on many fronts. We\u2019ve seen record concurrency numbers with the 1.1.1 game update, and experienced multiplayer connectivity issues as a result. We mobilized all resources to focus on this issue, and you\u2019ll see more detail on these activities from several teams in the detailed reports. We\u2019ve got a lot to share, so please check out some detailed info from the teams in the Austin studio!\n\nPersistent Universe Team\nArt\nThe month of April saw many developments within the Art Department of CIG Austin. We hosted an Environment Mini-Summit where our friends from Foundry 42, BHVR, and Illfonic came to visit to discuss long term planning for Star Citizen Environments. There are a lot of cross-studio dependencies that require face-to-face time to discuss in more depth, and it is very valuable to interact with people in person that we work with on a daily basis across the world. All in all the Summit was a success, and our Global Environment Leads Ian Leyland and Cort Soest have helped establish a firm foundation upon which to build the best environments possible. Our focus specifically for the PU this year will be fleshing out the \u201cFirst 5\u201d planetary landing zones, wrapping up our first batch of shops that will be found on those landing zones, and R&D on creating modular space stations that will serve a variety of functions in the PU.\n\nOur character team has been solely focused on supporting the FPS character revisions this month. There was a lot of work to do to help bring these characters up to speed with the rest of the amazing work Illfonic has been doing to make Star Marine look the best it can. We\u2019ve added armor plating to help beef up the Medium Marine a bit more, tweaked materials and colors to help both the Marines and Outlaws look like they belong to the same unit, and Josh Coons even jumped over from the Ship Team for a while to help bring the Outlaw helmets up to the next level. These characters are looking fantastic, and we\u2019re really excited for you guys to get to run around with them very SOON!\n\nOther things the Art Team has been up to this month include concept work for Hangar weapon racks and Holo-Kiosks for the Astro Armada shop, concept work on shielding and radiators for space stations, explorations into Blue Collar clothing sets, flickering job board VFX for the TDD shop, and texturing work for the mobiGlas asset.\n\nOur Animation Team has been supporting various aspects of the project, including prone weapon sets for FPS, and Grabby Hands animations for testing out picking up and putting down objects. Lead Animator Bryan Brewer has been testing and debugging the brand new skeleton we are going to be moving our characters over to in order to improve various aspects of the character\u2019s proportions and range of motion. Our entire animation team is now transitioning over to helping retarget our whole library of animations (over 2,000!) to this new skeleton.\n\nDesign\nThere were many discussions and meetings that took place this month amongst our designers in order to break down what we are calling the \u201cGame Loop\u201d for our upcoming Social Module release. Where does a player start when he\/she logs in? What do they experience as they participate in various activities around a landing zone? What happens when they interact with REDACTED??? All very important questions that ultimately helped shape the design for Shopping, Storage, NPC setup, and more. We\u2019ll continue to break these down even further as we progress into next month.\n\nPete Mackay has been adding extensive developments to his newly dubbed \u201cShip Cruncher\u201d tool (formerly Thruster Calculator). It\u2019s a pretty robust tool that allows designers to balance discrete item parameters, create baseline ship items for each item type, properly size ship gear and visualize granular changes on a macro scale, and collect robust data sets for each ship. The Ship Cruncher also does several different physics calculations to determine how fast a ship can change direction, its top speed, its turn radius, etc. It\u2019s an all-inclusive package that will significantly help with ship balancing in the future.\n\nEvan Manning has been adding data to the Star Map to be used by our friends at Turbulent for the release of the Star Map on the Platform side. There is a lot of information to be documented and Evan has been doing a great job of ensuring every element in each system is in its proper place.\n\nWork continues on fleshing out various occupations within the Persistent Universe. Tony Zurovec continues to whittle away at the details of the Pioneer occupation, and Rob Reininger and Nate Blaisdell have taken cracks at initial passes on the Mercenary\/Escort and Bounty Hunter occupations, respectively. Before long we\u2019ll have more detailed breakdowns of how each of these occupations will work in the PU.\n\nEngineering\nApril was a busy month for our engineering team, as many of them were recruited to support the live patch that went out the first week of the month.\n\nOur Server Team paused their work on the Multiplayer Hangars feature in order to work closely with DevOps and QA to improve and strengthen our Instance Manager, our Matchmaking Service and other services. As a result, we have had a dramatic decrease in reports of issues related to inability to load into multiplayer matches. Congrats to our hardworking team for this splendid accomplishment!\n\nWe have other, longer term systems in the works that continue to progress closer towards completion. These systems are being worked on out of Austin with strong cross-over with Manchester and Denver (by our friends at Wyrmbyte)\u2026such as: Unique Global Entity ID system, Generic Instance Manager, Player Info Server, Presence Server, Universe Simulator, HUB Server, and Player Persistence. Much of this work is slated to have deliverables of first iterations in the month of May\u2026the team is definitely making some solid progress!\n\nThe team has also been working with tools such as RAD Telemetry to help them profile our server metrics, in order to support the ongoing task of optimizing server performance. They have started profiling our live builds and analyzing the results with fine toothed combs to identify areas to focus on to implement improvements.\n\nWork also continues on our various tools systems, including support for such items as the Sandbox Editor, Trackview and our Asset Validation Tool. And development continues to progress quickly on our various AI Editors\u2026such as our Useable Editor and our Character Archetype Editor\u2026which are needed by our design team to help bring our worlds to life.\n\nAnd while juggling all of these tasks the team has also been busy working on such things as finalizing 64-bit networking support for our Large World system, finalizing work on the iPredictor (movement prediction) system, creating a series of prototypes for the Mining Occupation, and helping support other systems that are live or in the works, such as REC and Multi-Seat Ships.\n\nFinally, behind the scenes our team has been hard at work re-optimizing our development stream workflow, which will help us streamline our development to ultimately be more efficient and stable. Everyone is looking forward to this new workflow, which has been rolling out step-by-step over the past several weeks.\n\nWell, that\u2019s it in a nutshell for the month on April, 2015! We\u2019ll be back with more next month!\n\nLive Operations\nQA\nFor the month of April QA has been busy on multiple fronts. With the release of 1.1.1, our concurrency rose to a level we had not seen before. This exposed aspects of our back-end infrastructure that were preventing successful connections to multiplayer matches. QA worked closely with DevOps and our server engineers in a full investigation. After multiple hot-fixes to our servers, the issues were dramatically improved. Subsequently a call was made for everyone to help participate in a scheduled stress test. The turnout was such that we were able to surpass our previous concurrency record and were happy to see our back-end system could handle this increased load.\n\nMelissa Estrada has been assisting our developers in the Frankfurt studio to track down and regress editor issues they\u2019ve encountered when doing comparison testing of our version of the editor to pure CryEngine SDK. Melissa also headed up an initiative to log all errors found in the game logs which will be a huge help in ensuring we have a cleaner game for the release of Star Marine. The team assisted our Global Environmental Tech Lead Cort Soest to filter unused maps in the editor to reduce internal build space by more than 100GB helping to enhance work efficiency.\n\nOur checklists have been updated to include more Star Marine and Squadron 42 features as well as deeper checks to the editor. With help from Jeffrey Pease, efforts have been made to improve the patch notes creation process which help to more easily incorporate multiple members of the QA team that can assist in the event that someone is absent.\n\nMiles Lee has made significant progress in developing test automation. As a result, we are able to automate the capturing of performance data for each of our various builds. He is also working on automating our build sanity checks and assisting DevOps with the development of a headless client system that will enable us to automate stress tests on our back-end infrastructure.\n\nThe team was also continually testing Star Marine. FPS specialists Tyler Witkin and his UK counterpart Glenn Kneal ensured production was notified of all issues found that day and highlighted any severe outstanding issues that were blocking or significantly hindering testing.\n\nOur QA team was also fortunate enough to visit Professor Paul Toprac and his aspiring game developers participating in the Capstone GAMMA program at the University of Texas. We had a lot of fun playtesting and providing feedback on their projects.\n\nNext month we plan to incorporate Social Module in our regular testing. We will be working very closely with Jake Ross to ensure we begin testing each aspect of the Module as soon as it is available.\n\nGame Support\nThe month of April was quite busy for everyone, including Game Support!\n\nWe\u2019re continuing to learn and refine our processes of communicating and working with players, particularly on the Live Service Notification forums and on Reddit. We\u2019ve seen nothing but appreciation from players for these efforts, which means we\u2019re doing something right! Our goal of serving live players with information is carried out by giving you the most accurate and updated information on the health of the service, what kind of game experience you can expect as a player, and what we\u2019re all doing to make it better (especially on patch days!).\n\nBehind the scenes, we\u2019ve made some changes that will ultimately result in you getting a better, faster response. We\u2019re closely working with Customer Service, Community, and DevOps on a daily basis to make sure that you get the right timely support. We\u2019ve got a good plan and we\u2019re excited to start getting to where you would want us to be as a service provider.\n\nOn a more visible level, we\u2019ve also begun the work of running and managing stress tests, and we\u2019ll be involved in many more of these. The rollout of 1.1.1 and increased concurrency resulted in multiplayer instability, and we worked with multiple teams to identify and address the more common issues. To properly test these fixes, we coordinated with the player base in what turned out to be an incredibly successful test which set new concurrency records for Star Citizen. Not only was this helpful, but it was fun!\n\nLastly, we\u2019ve spent some time internally on creating some plans on what we\u2019re going to need to support future modules, namely the upcoming Star Marine module, which for us basically means supporting an entirely new game! We\u2019ll be excited to roll these plans out in the coming weeks and months as we expand our services to better support the growing community and ever-expanding needs of the Star Citizen universe.\n\nIT\/Operations\nThe IT team has been hard at work improving internal systems, planning for future systems, growing storage, and fine tuning service performance. The term explosive growth is often used when talking about storage and in our case, we\u2019re no different. As our dev teams continue to produce content and collaborate, we need to make the results of their work available to all teams within the company. As storage needs grow in LA for example, we must grow storage in all other studio locations to match so that data can be replicated locally to each team.\n\nGrowth of storage space is not the only aspect we\u2019ve been focused on this month. Storage performance can also become an issue when lots of people need access to the same things at the same time. We\u2019ve already surpassed the capability of standard replication methods and found it necessary to build our own in order to keep up with demand. I\u2019m proud to say that the IT team has come up with some very creative and innovative strategies to make better use of existing systems and believe me, we push hardware to the limits here at Cloud Imperium Games.\n\nFor example, one of our replication systems pushes about 900 mb\/s for about 12 hours each day pushing content to 5 replication targets simultaneously. It is important for this data to get to each studio as quickly as possible so the performance demand on the servers is pretty high. To solve this problem we\u2019ve built a custom flash storage system in in order to provide the IOPS we need for this process. Each upgrade seems to expose new areas we can improve on. In this example we got our replication going so fast that it began to bog down servers on the receiving end so we\u2019ve been upgrading those servers where necessary as well.\n\nWhile the IT team has been continuing to provide support to individual developers around the world it seems like storage and replication tuning have been our main focus this month. Next month we\u2019re looking forward to building even better systems to help the dev teams crank out content even faster.\n\nDev Ops\nApril was a month of firefighting and stability improvements! We launched patch 1.1.1 and worked to fix stability issues with our Instance Manager, Party, and Matchmaking services. After two weeks of deploying hotfixes from our Server Engineering team, stability increased. Due to some of the stability issues we have had over the last few patch releases, CIG has decided to change our approach to Operational Deployments. What this means to the players is that they should not expect Friday patch releases, or releases late at night. Instead we will be aiming for a more tempered roll out of patches and hotfixes to our live environment, taking full advantage of our PTU environment for config and game testing. We hope this will lead to more stable releases for our players.\n\nThe DevOps team has also been hard at work building the base infrastructure for the live environment, PTU, and internal test environments. Work on the new launcher and patcher continues, and we am sure you all will be as excited to use it as we are. We will be demo\u2019ing it very soon with an upcoming PTU test and getting feedback and usability testing on it. Work on our automated dynamic infrastructure scaling system continues, around 40% of this system is already deployed live, and we expect the rest to begin operating over the next month. Internally, we continue to re-build our build server, change how we merge code and data between working branches, build better crash reporting, and work on automated testing.\n\nThere is still a lot of work to do to rework our internal data pipeline to get it to the point that both CIG developers and players do not have to patch and move around massive amounts of data each time there are minor changes. The DevOps team is working on a large roadmap to fix this with help from our engineering and tech art teams in Austin and Germany while being supported by our IT staff on the hardware build out. A full completion of this plan will take many months to roll out, but should drastically reduce the time it takes for a game build to be generated, the time for developers to test their changes, the size of patches, and the amount of data developers need to grab each morning. More on this plan in the months to come.\n\nAnimation\nThe UK animation team has expanded in to a group of five ready to tackle and implement the ongoing Imaginarium shoot as it comes in. As well as being on hand for any block out animations needed here at Foundry 42 we\u2019ve been doing some of the back end work to get the databases and tracking in place that are necessary to keep on top of a project as large and ambitious as Squadron 42.\n\nEngineering\nThere are a couple of big ticket items coming to their first major milestones for the end of April. Firstly you will hopefully have your first taste of the new tutorial mode in Arena Commander. This has proved to be much more of an undertaking than originally planned, mainly because of just how deep our control systems go and then the complexity of trying to show the player how everything works. Sometimes when you are so close to a project you don\u2019t always appreciate the bigger picture and realise just quite how much we\u2019ve accomplished. We know most people internally who have played through the tutorial (including some of the QA team) have learnt something new about the game!\n\nSecondly we\u2019ve been doing a lot of work in the last few months converting all the game\u2019s \u201centity Ids\u201d from a 32 bit number to a 64 bit number. The entity Id is a unique identifier for each \u201cthing\u201d in the game, which can be stored and referenced very quickly, and for a computer is much more natural way of accessing items than something more human readable like a name string for example. For a normal single player game, and standalone multiplayer games, 32 bits is plenty (it gives you about 4 billion possibilities) but for an MMO game it proves to be woefully inadequate. The plan is that everything in the universe will have its own unique Id or a \u201cglobal entity Id\u201d as we\u2019re now calling it, so every item in every database and on every server can be accessed via its own identifier. So as you traverse your way across the universe in your ship, with your particular loadout, with your cargo stored, and a couple of hitchhikers, and are hopping from one system to the next, it makes it much more straightforward technically to transfer all of that information from the server your currently on and onto the next, seamlessly. The fundamental change is actually a fairly simple one, the knock-ons where the code was assuming all these Ids would be 32 bits required a huge amount of fixing and is what takes the majority of the time. This process looks like it is now coming to an end much to the relief of the engineer in charge.\n\nGoing into May our gameplay engineers are really focusing in on our charge for the S42 vertical slice, many mechanics of which are now in the polish stage. This is the time where you start to see parts of the project really come together, you see a game instead of a collection of bits. Exciting times!\n\nAudio\nThis past April for CIG Audio was mainly us keeping busy continuing our work in moving to Wwise. We\u2019re really digging in now; assets are all across, banks created, bussing hierarchy etc. is built, and it\u2019s giving us an opportunity now to refactor and improve while tying things together with Cryengine as much as we can. It\u2019s a big push as Cryengine has only relatively recently begun supporting Wwise and there\u2019ll still be a lot for us to do ourselves on that side, as we progress this year. We\u2019re very much looking forward to releasing with it, but we\u2019ve got plans beyond the standard tools associated with Wwise, for example automated Foley and footsteps that are driven systematically. It\u2019s possible to spend so much time labouring over these, it\u2019s a complete no-brainer to attempt to go the auto route with them.\n\nWe obtained some great new tools from Nugen Audio, one of which is going to be key in maintaining a good consistent loudness normalisation level for dialogue particularly, hugely useful.\n\nAs we mentioned last month, we\u2019ve welcomed two new Sound Designers: Darren Lambourne, and Matteo Cerquone. Darren\u2019s joined us from Ninja Theory where he worked on some amazing sounding titles. Matteo has joined as a junior, having come through the ranks at Vancouver Film School who turn out same excellent game sound designers.\n\nFinally, we\u2019ve welcomed a Dialogue Specialist, Bob Rissolo. Bob is straight into the deep end with a live-action shoot, helping to record great dialogue performances and ensuring we maintain the quality we need there. He\u2019ll be moving from the US to join us at Foundry 42 which will be a real change for him and hopefully one that proves fruitful.\n\nLuke and Pedro have been really hard at work on the Tutorial this month, which we hope you\u2019ll enjoy from a sonic aspect, it\u2019s highly evocative stuff in many ways!\n\nPhil has kept on plugging away at the social module, along with Tom who\u2019s been putting in great groundwork on S42 too.\n\nStefan has kept pushing on with FPS work \u2013 our Foley session at Pinewood was great, gave us an excellent kicking-off point for the different armour types. We\u2019re still going to keep improving it through recording our own Foley assets as well, however. Can\u2019t stop tweaking! He\u2019s continuing the work on the guns which is a sophisticated system in its own right, getting one\u2019s head around the HDR system is a tough first job but he\u2019s definitely getting there. We still have more environmental aspects of the weapons audio to record though, there\u2019s going to be a lot of audio data devoted to weapons in this game, that\u2019s for sure.\n\nThanks for listening!\n\nArt\nWow \u2013 April just flew by, we squeezed another birthday in while managing to keep all the plates spinning for Sq42 :) Good progress is being made on the Vanduul fleet, ships and shape language, patina paintovers, turret design, its an ever growing pandoras box of tasks. We\u2019ve also spent a lot of time and effort on the FPS weapons needed for the campaign, this includes attachments (scopes, grips, rail systems) and also grenades, while also planning on making the existing weapons PBR correct. We\u2019ve also started working with an new UK based concept company to help us solve the growing amount of tasks generated by the Cap ships and level design.\n\nEnvironments\nWe\u2019ve been focusing on our Vertical Slice section for Sq42 \u2013 this means we take a section of a level and take it up to final art quality. We\u2019ve got some fancy new tech fresh from the rendering department which will enable us to build our modular levels much more cheaply. We\u2019re also starting to make some real progress on how props are going to be done in both Sq42 & the PU, they will basically follow our same master material system which will utilise the same started texture resource as our environments, this will mean that we can dress our levels to a much higher standard. And lastly we\u2019ve been putting the final touches and fixes to the new Tutorial section in Dying Star \u2013 we hope you like it. Ian has also taken on the role as Global environment lead and is pushing through the many lessons we\u2019ve learnt to our partner studios who have been helping make what you see today.\n\nShip Team\nThis month, the Foundry 42 ship is hard at work preparing a lot of assets for the Cinematic shoot in London. This is an ongoing process, making sure Cinematic Directors and Chris Roberts have everything that they need to shoot all the cinematics for Squadron 42.\n\nThe ship team in Manchester is working on multiple capships full force, and we are making really good process. Our goal is to make these massive ships a living and breathing world for the player to explore. The Idris and Javelin and Bengal are all going into final production, to meet the F42 standards! A huge undertaking. The Starfarer production is also making good headway, Matt is systematically working through the whole ship ,a big project, his second project after the Gladiator. We are also working on a Xi\u2019an Cargo ship, a ship that is needed in SQ42.\n\nCharacters\nWe\u2019ve been concentrating heavily on the mocap\/Pcap shoot, the camera rig is now in London with Andy and is being put through its paces capturing the actors as they arrive for the shoot \u2013 cant wait to see a digital version of (redacted). All in all exciting stuff!\n\nHey all!\n\nFirst off, we\u2019d like to say that it\u2019s fantastic to be able to report to you our progress on the BDSSEtm every month. In our book, being able to interact directly with the community is the number one perk of open development.\n\nHere\u2019s what the BHVR team has been up to in April. Some of you asked us for the loooong version, so here it is:\n\nPushing towards the social module\u2019s first release, we\u2019re focused mainly, but not solely, on supporting and polishing the shopping experience. Planetside locations are going to be rich in adventure, encounters and interactions, but before we get to present to you the fancier game scenarios and mechanics, we are focused on the essentials, so let\u2019s start with those:\n\nWhen you\u2019ll finally get to exit your hangar on foot and make your way up to planetside, we want you to have a good time visiting the various shops and markets available. Take a moment to familiarise yourself with these names if you haven\u2019t already: Astro-Armada is a high-class ship dealer, Casaba-Outlet is a clothing and apparel franchise, Cubby-blast is a shop unique to ArcCorp-Area18 which will answer all of your personal weaponry needs, Dumper\u2019s Depot is a scrap metal shop where you\u2019ll find ship parts (in perfect condition for now), and last but not least the medical-unit offers medical services for that special moment when you get shotgunned in the face.\n\nThe shopping experience effort is on various fronts: On the design side, our level designers are putting together the physical and logical components needed in the levels: racks, shelves, items on shelves, the shops themselves, etc., as well as supporting our artists who are making these locations\u2019 visuals gorgeous and reusable. Game Designers are synchronizing everyone\u2019s work to fit the concepts and coming up with realistic solutions to epic problems that obviously come along the way (like \u2026 every five minutes).\n\nOur UI team has been all over the place! They created some cool logos this month for \u201cInterdimension Software\u201c, \u201cElectronic Access\u201d as well as a \u201cStar Marine\u201d logo animation, along with decals for the Nyx planetside location. The mobiGlas and its Augmented Reality (AR), which are the main gateways into the shopping interface, are being enhanced with various visual components and other features such as reworked notifications for lobby, shops and hangars. We are not able to have the full polished set of features just yet, but giving it to you in its current state is very exciting. We\u2019re looking forward to reading your feedback on its usability and visuals.\n\nAll of this is extremely exciting to us as we\u2019ve written, discussed and iterated on these designs for a long time (centuries in spacecrab-time) and we\u2019re finally seeing it all come together. Note that this first release is far from the final shopping experience we\u2019re striving for. It is what we call \u201cPhase one\u201d as in \u201cSet phasers to one\u201d.\n\nIn other news, other Planetside locations are still being developed. Mariana, Odyssa, Crusader and Hurston Designs have passed from 2D level layouts to the whitebox stage. If you recall, we\u2019ve stated in previous reports that we would get faster and faster in the development of Planetsides thanks to the Tag, Room and Tier systems. The four planets mentioned fit under the same Architectural style as ArcCorp, making them great candidates to prove that we can build them efficiently. So far so good! You can dig up more info and concepts about these Planets; it\u2019s available on this very site.\n\nAs mentioned above, our little army of artists has spent a good amount of time \u2018arting-up\u2019 the various shopping locations, but also working on an all new modular set to be used in future planetside locations. For this new set, we\u2019ve integrated a better pipeline that makes our work more efficient and with better visual results. We can\u2019t wait to show you those results!\n\nYou\u2019ve probably seen mock-ups of the holotable revamp. We are continuing the effort on this side as well. The visuals are still being defined while our engineers are making slight tweaks and fixes. To preserve its functionality for the soon to be released modes, we cannot dive in the full revamp just yet. You\u2019ll understand that before making it better we\u2019ll need to break it. Of course we don\u2019t want you to end up with a broken holotable. For now you\u2019ll see tweaks such as better visual cues for the REC equipment versus owned equipment.\n\nSomewhat related to the holotable, but also affecting various systems throughout the game, we have made some progress on the holo-object refactor to reduce entity usage. In a nutshell, this means better performance which directly translates to more players in multiplayer instances!\n\nOur engineers are also hard at work supporting the FPS access, the loadout customization in the lobby and the multi-crew lobby implementation. On top of that, the chat feature has been updated to support basic features and private conversations. These aren\u2019t accessible to you yet but they\u2019ll come in handy when we finally roll out the multiplayer hangars, which our guys are actively working on.\n\nWe also had a very fruitful day-long meeting with Turbulent where both of our teams joined forces for skyLine, the Starmap. We can\u2019t say much about this feature just yet except that it\u2019ll be super awesome, promise! We can\u2019t wait to use it!\n\nAs usual, we prepared some cool Flair Objects for the subscribers and for past stretch goals. Hope you liked our little April\u2019s Fools prank; we\u2019ve heard that it actually made the game FPS much better ;). The Khartu-Al Takuetsu starship model has been given, and we\u2019d like to thank the community for reporting and helping us find an insidious error that prevented it from appearing in hangars. (Don\u2019t tell anyone, but we\u2019re working on a special extra something for the 23million stretch goal reward\u2026which was also a Khartu-Al).\n\nNext month\u2019s flair will be the first of a new series. The Puglisi collection items are especially nice pieces. They have strong visuals and also have a great fiction around them (thanks to Haddock for that!).\n\nOkay, we\u2019re running out of coffee and are very low on \u201cspace ink\u201dtm, so until next time, have fun in the \u2018verse!\n\nAhoy Star Citizens! It\u2019s been another busy month for the FPS team. Over the past few weeks we\u2019ve been focused on getting the feel of movement and gun-play really dialed in, along with implementing zero g locomotion and interactions. Read below for the details\u2026\n\nEngineering\nThe engineering team spent a lot of time and effort making sure all of the variables and parameters that designers were requesting were available to them for tweaking. This doesn\u2019t just include player speed and weapon damage, but also things like breathe duration based on stamina from sprinting and how that affects aim on each of the weapons. They can now tweak how long a breath is, the pause at the top and bottom of a breath, how far that will throw off the player\u2019s aim, etc\u2026 This allows the designers to fine tune everything to get all the weapons feeling exactly how they want in every situation. In addition, the stock CryEngine hint system was rewritten. The hint system is what was used to provide recoil and inaccuracy when continually firing a weapon. The general consensus was that the stock system didn\u2019t provide enough control, so one of our engineers rewrote it from scratch to give tons of control over which direction the gun will recoil and what the limits are for up and down movement. Again, this is something that will give designers a much finer level of control in tuning the weapons moving forward.\n\nAnother big task that has been going on is network optimization. There was quite a bit of traffic being passed from the client to the server and vice versa that just didn\u2019t need to be there\u2026 so a few of the guys here have been profiling all of the network traffic and stripping out what isn\u2019t necessary and restructuring what is there to be much more efficient in terms of data size. It\u2019s gotten much, much better over the last few weeks and there is still more that can be optimized. In the end, this will mean less lag and a much smoother experience for you Citizens! We know you understand how important it is to have as little network lag as possible, especially when playing a shooter!\n\nArt\nThe art team has been focused on polishing ALL of the current weapons in the game, mostly making sure the materials are all up to Star Citizen standards (and you know how high that bar is!). A full lighting pass was also completed on the Gold Horizon space station level. The Astro Arena level that you saw at PAX East has undergone a complete rework on the art side to give it more depth and bring some more contrast in as a whole. Polish work on the VFX for all of the weapons is ongoing. We also want to make sure that the weapon effects in FPS are lining up with those used in ships. Similar technologies should have similar effects, even if the scale has been reduced. Lastly, work started on taking all of the Gold Horizon set pieces and making them conform to the standard tier set system so they can be used in any persistent universe locations.\n\nDesign\nThe design team was mostly focused on tweaking the feel of movement and gun-play over the last few weeks. Now that they have all of the parameters needed exposed to them, they have been dialing in breathing, aiming down sights and recoil. Work also continued on a new map and game mode. The new mode will focus on some asymmetrical gameplay, which we are all very excited about! All of the modes that are being worked on for the FPS module are there to simulate actual scenarios that players could run into in the persistent universe. Things like infiltrating a held location quietly, possibly stealing cargo, or just running protection. With the open nature of the game and how many options the player will have in Star Citizen it\u2019s hard to imagine every possible case, but we think we have a solid handful of situations that you might run into.\n\nAnimation\nThe animation team has been busy creating new assets for Sata Ball. There are quite a few unique animations to that mode for interacting with the ball, mostly having to do with passing and shooting the ball around the arena. The new mocap data will also be rolling in shortly, at which point the animators will start hooking up all of those new animations. The largest bit of work here is going to be the movement transitions and jukes. These animations make the characters lean into and out of sprinting, running and walking states and gives a good sense of weight to the animations overall. The last bit to mention here is re-tweaking the animations that are present in the game for aiming, shooting, reloading and swapping weapons. After the designers are happy with the timing and feel on all of those elements, it\u2019s up to animation to get everything synced back up again.\n\nWe know you are all really excited for the release of the FPS, and we are too! We just want to make sure that you get something really special when it drops! So please bear with us, it\u2019s coming very soon and we think it will be worth the wait!\n\nHere\u2019s what we\u2019ve been up to for the month of April, up here in Montreal.\n\nRSI\u2019s new style\nFirst off, RSI has a new homepage now. It\u2019s been our main focus for the past weeks to release this new design, aiming to deliver more content at a glance, in a more legible layout with minimal unused space. We also spent a lot of time optimizing this new design so that it would be handled better on a wider range of devices and browsers, starting with significantly reducing the homepage\u2019s total size, including the videos.\n\nNew pages, like the new Dev Tracker page, will consistently be based on this new layout, and we\u2019ll also continually transition the rest of the existing website to use this format when we add functionalities, like in the new Press page.\n\nThe Community Hub\nThe next big item we\u2019ve been working on is the long-announced Community Hub. As we get further along into its development, here are some of its key features. This new section will be located right at the root of the Community section, and is designed to receive and feature almost exclusively fan content : \u201cCitizen Spotlight\u201d will allow all fans to upload and display their own creations about Star Citizen (including but not restricted to screenshots, play sessions, rigs, cosplay, music, models\u2026), while \u201cDeep Space Radar\u201d will aggregate all external contents that fans can find about Star Citizen outside of Roberts Space Industries. Among other things, the Hub will also feature registered Star Citizen streamers and fan podcasts.\n\nThis new section implies a sizeable new architecture to be able to handle that much content, and we have been finalizing its visual and technical design throughout this last month. We have since started implementing the data models and static visual integration, and are moving on to data handling.\n\nWe really want a page the community can \u201cown\u201d with it\u2019s own content.\n\nNew tool in the works\nA new project is coming up, in size on par with the Community Hub, that we\u2019ve been internally calling the Issue Council. Its baseline is that there is a growing need for a centralized Bug Report system for Star Citizen : a way for the community to build up a database of bugs and issues in all aspects of the game (and the website), regulated by the entire community, and then streamlined to the development teams. With this system, players will be able to report issues, have them confirmed (or contested) by other players, and follow the eventual fix in the game. This new module has been in concept for a while now, and we have started implementation.\n\nStarmap\nStarmap work continues. Much progress done on the back end to ensure that the architecture of the universe updates will work for the many different components that will need them, the web Starmap being only one of those. Most of the heavy front end work this month was focused on developing the asset pipeline to bring interesting assets to our (pun) \u201cAstrometrics room\u201d. Having generic shapes and iconography is important for this type of app but having actual good looking models and\/or texture and animation will be important to properly represent the SC Universe. This pipeline is specific to WebGL as we have now officially moved off the Unity prototype we demo\u2019ed back in December\/January.\n\nThis visual language must also be common with the game and so many design meetings with all of the teams involved were needed. There is still alot of work left!\n\nContent and updates\nApril came with its own concept sale, and the Hull Series is currently heavily featured on our brand new homepage. With it, came the rework of the Cargo system which got recently reflected into the Ship Stats, and of top of that update we have also started a conjoint task with the game designers to update some of the most outdated ships in the catalog. First in the list is the Aurora LX, which finally got its beauty renders in the store.\n\nLeaderboards opt-out\nThe most active players may also notice that it is now possible to opt out of the Arena Commander Leaderboards, directly from your settings page. If you opt-out, we will still keep receiving your game data and calculate your personal; statistics and performance, but they will remain invisible to anyone until you choose to opt back-in again. While invisible, you effectively also \u201crelinquish\u201d your potential public rank.\n\nCCU system\nAs you know the current CCU system has been outgrown with so many ships now flyable. Design and basic implementation work has been done this month to bring you an alternate way to CCU. May should have more substantial progress on this subsystem. With more ships becoming flyable, this system will be required so that you can properly upgrade your existing Alpha\/LTI pledges without sacrificing those precious items.\n\nAsk a Web Dev\nFinally we have also stepped up our forum presence this month on the Ask a Dev \u2013 Website thread. So if you have questions about us, our process, or upcoming features, ask away and look for the guy with the 1-UP mushroom!\n\nThis was another heavy month of planning out the roadmap of features for Star Citizen. We worked a lot with the Frankfurt, Manchester, and Austin teams in particular to continue identifying common AI needs across different Star Citizen modules and working out how to best minimize duplication of effort and getting all the crucial AI features in place as they\u2019re needed. This is tricky enough when you\u2019re just making a regular game, but with the ambitious scope of Star Citizen, multiple modules and a constant stream of releases, it becomes something that needs to be constantly worked on and tweaked.\n\nDesign\nThe main design work we did this month was on improving the Kythera AI system to be more multithreaded. Certain aspects of Kythera are already run on separate threads, such as generating navigation meshes, but a lot of aspects such as behavior processing and perception are still run on a single thread. For most games with a small number of active AI this really isn\u2019t a problem, but as we all know, Star Citizen throws normal out the window! To be able to efficiently update hundreds or thousands of AIs, it becomes critical to be able to break up as much processing work as possible into small, independent jobs and run them across multiple threads.\n\nOur work last month on the job system helped set us up to be able to create small tasks as needed, but the figuring out how to safely and efficiently break up things like behavior processing is the hard part. It involves creating a framework that can determine which bits of code are dependent on other bits of code and therefore need to run after them, and which can be run independently. You then need to be able to efficiently schedule all of these. Oh, and it\u2019s also handy to have your framework setup in such a way that it\u2019s hard for programmers using it to accidentally create dependencies that shouldn\u2019t be there and mess all of the scheduling up!\n\nEngineering\nWe made a nice feature improvement to our Kythera Inspector debugging tool this month, which is the addition of behavior tree visualization for recordings. As we\u2019ve mentioned previously, Inspector allows designers to record everything that AI does while they\u2019re playing the game, and then replay it to see exactly what the AI was doing at any point. This is an invaluable tool for tracking down bugs.\n\nOne thing that was missing, though, was being able to properly visualize their behaviors. This was something you could do in real time via some on screen debugging, but it wasn\u2019t accessible in a user friendly way from inside the inspector. Now, when we play back recordings we can get a nice view of the behavior tree that any AI is currently running, and what state it\u2019s in. We don\u2019t yet have the ability to see this while the game is running, just on recordings, but that\u2019s something we\u2019ll be adding soon.\n\nAnother interesting feature we\u2019ve been working on is a big improvement to our spline joining code. We\u2019ve mentioned previously how we allow designers to create various splines to define attack paths or fancy maneuvers to take ships through tight obstacles that they might otherwise avoid, but one issue we\u2019ve found with this feature is that it can be tricky to get the ship to the start of the spline in a smooth and realistic way.\n\nOften we want the ship to have a specific orientation and velocity when it hits the start of the spline, but we need to get the ship there from whatever its current orientation and velocity are, in a way that is within that ship\u2019s maneuvering capabilities, and without forcing it to slow down any more than absolutely necessary.\n\nOur existing solution did a reasonable job most of the time, but would sometimes give bad results, so we decided to figure out how to do it right. This is actually a much trickier problem than you might think. Tricky enough, in fact, that our resident astrophysicist Ben Lowing called in a second astrophysicist, and the two of them worked out a detailed solution to the problem. It\u2019s now been mostly implemented, though there have turned out to be some extra subtleties to the problem that we will continue to address next month.\n\nGreetings, Citizens! Community Manager Jared \u201cDisco Lando\u201d Huckaby here in fantastic Southern California, where the sun always shines and the taxes always debilitate. Yeah, it\u2019s me. I can barely believe it myself. Let\u2019s jump right in, shall we?\n\nOur Community Content Manager Jenny Varner relocated and joined us from her native land of Texas. While she\u2019s struggling to adapt to our local customs, and continues to insist that breakfast tacos are superior to burritos, she\u2019s finding her place amongst the family here at Cloud Imperium Games. In addition to managing all our social content, she\u2019s also hard at work producing video segments for Around the Verse, running our weekly livestream Reverse the Verse, and laying the groundwork of our extended support for community content creators.\n\nFor myself, I joined the team this month after years in YouTube exile. As Community Manager, my focus will be in improving the connections between you Citizens and our development team on the forums. While we have an unparalleled level of access between the fans and our team when we account for four weekly video broadcasts, weekly comm-links, and the variety of additional posts, we can always strive to do better, and that\u2019s our goal. In addition to that, I\u2019ve been editing Around the Verse for the last two months, trying to bring a little of our team\u2019s personality to the forefront. We\u2019re not the standard video game company, and we\u2019re not interested in putting out the standard video game company community content.\n\nThat leads us to our biggest milestone as a Community Team this month, Around the Verse #42. I don\u2019t have to tell you the significance of that number to everyone on this team. Each week we do our best to bring you the information we have available to share, and to present it in the best fashion we can. As with everything else we do, we\u2019ll continue to do our best to improve our efforts each and every week, and with this milestone, I created a special Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy themed intro to the show with the help of Ryan Archer, and Star Citizen Angry Peas. Thanks Peas.\n\nAnd as always, none of this is possible without me our subscribers, who\u2019s contributions make these productions possible. I know we say that every month, but this is the first time I get to say it, and I\u2019ve seen firsthand this month the level of dedication and hard work the folks on this team put into serving the community. It\u2019s our collective hope, that the recent additions to the team combined with the established regulars who\u2019ve been here for so long will allow us to reach more of you, and more effectively, than ever before.\n\nBen is telling me that I have to stop talking, now. I\u2019m going to keep typing for as long as he let"},"links_count":1,"comment_count":91,"created_at":"2015-05-02T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"11 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-08 03:11:56","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":14689,"next_id":14691}}