{"data":{"id":15155,"title":"Monthly Studio Report: December 2015","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/15155-Monthly-Studio-Report-December-2015","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/15155","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/15155","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly 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Citizens,\n2015 was quite a year for Star Citizen! Since the launch of Alpha 2.0, the team has been glued to their monitors watching backers stream and play and adventure in the first corner of the universe we\u2019re building. There\u2019s plenty of work still to be done, but we\u2019re thrilled to have a version of the game available for play that (we believe) shows the project\u2019s true potential. We hope you\u2019re enjoying 2.0 (or 2.1, if you\u2019re a fan of the PTU!)\u2026 there\u2019s plenty more to see in the coming days! But before we look ahead, we\u2019d like to look back at what everyone accomplished in December. Cloud Imperium Games closed for the holidays, allowing our developers some much needed rest and family time\u2026 but that doesn\u2019t mean we didn\u2019t make a lot of progress. Read on for our December monthly report to find out just what everyone was up to\u2026\n\nHappy New Year everyone! We hope you had a great month because we are really excited by what we got finished before the calendar turned over to 2016. We tackled some huge milestones such as the new ItemSystem, Loadout Editor, Character Clothing and more. Dig in to the information below to read about even more accomplishments from the LA studio.\n\nEngineering\nOn the Engineering side, our primary objective was to provide as much stability to the 2.0 release as possible. As new builds of the PTU were released over the course of December, the stability in each iteration drastically improved. Stability will always be one of our top objectives as providing a reliable and exciting experience is a prime directive.\n\nLead Engineer Paul Reindell and Engineer Mark Abent have been aggressively working on what we\u2019re calling \u201cItemSystem 2.0\u201d. This system will allow greater control over the itemization on the back end. The first iteration has been integrated into our development code and we are starting to see the preliminary benefits of this new system that\u2019s really exciting our developers.\n\nAssociate Engineer Chad Zamzow was responsible for implementing the various disabled states for targets struck by the EMP weapon currently employed on the Avenger Warlock. Further refinements will include flickering lights and possibly arcs of electricity across the control panels of the ship. So keep an eye out for the tiny details this new weapon effect will be adding to the game.\n\nAriel Xu created a new tool we are calling the \u201cLoadout Editor\u201d. This tool is designed to create a visualization of our entities. This will allow the designers to visually edit the loadouts of the Vehicles, Items, and Character rather than manually editing the XML file, which is even better and more intuitive for design and balancing than just having a menu or chart-based editor. Now that the Loadout Editor is completed, Ariel has started working on another tool called the \u201cPort Editor,\u201d a tool which allows designers to dynamically Add\/Delete\/Edit the contents of the port.\n\nFlight engineer John Pritchett has been working on fine-tuning the EVA system to make it much more reliable and canny during flight. But most impressively, John was also the individual who helped create our planetary landing flight mode that viewers saw on our December 2015 livestream.\n\nDesign\nAnother very successful year has come and gone for the LA Tech Design team. Starting with new leadership, Kirk Tome took the reins of the team by accepting the role of Tech Design Lead. We have great expectations to come from this team in 2016 and the team could not be in better hands with this tenured industry veteran at the proverbial helm.\n\nDuring the development of the 2.0 patch, we reached several milestones that will drastically impact future development and provide exciting new content to our backers, players, and fans. We completed the white-box design of two ships; the Xi\u2019an Scout and the MISC Reliant. The Xi\u2019an Scout white box was completed by Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome, while the Reliant white box was completed by our item guru, Matt Sherman. Furthermore, as an added bonus, Calix Reneau also completed the grey box tech design of the MISC Reliant, bringing it that much closer to being hangar-ready.\n\nOf course, balance is always a paramount for gaming and thus Calix and Matt have both spent a tremendous amount of time gathering input from the forums, chat rooms, and emails. The Freelancer is new to our flyable ship lineup, and a first round of weapon and ship health balance was achieved for its gaming debut. Expect more balance passes in the future as the flyable ship lineup fills out and go up against each other! Every release brings new insights and as more gameplay and customizations become possible, your testing data helps us home in on an inherently moving target.\n\nOn the feature development-side, 2.0 saw the release of the EMP system designed to temporarily disable your opponent. Further development and evolution of the EMP system was addressed using feedback from the release, such as improvements on how the system will affect the HUD, and various ship systems. Also, Randy Vazquez has completed a first pass on a gameplay design for the Salvage mechanic.\n\nWhile December was a short month due to the holidays, we have laid the groundwork for a tremendous amount of progress.\nh2. Art\n\nWe rocked it hard on the art side in LA during the month of December in 2015. We\u2019ve been working tenaciously to build closer towards some anxiously anticipated releases, such as clothes shopping in the PU, and Squadron 42.\n\nOn the character side we\u2019ve been working on making \u201cOld Man\u201d Colton as great as he can be. You\u2019ll be seeing him in Squadron 42! We\u2019ve also been feverishly prepping some intimidating marines for some exciting action. We can wait for you to meet them! We also can\u2019t wait for you to dig on the variety of stylish threads that we\u2019ve been preparing for your character with our friends at CGBot, available soon (we hope!) for purchase in a PU near you!\n\nWhile all this amazing character progress has been moving forward, we haven\u2019t been neglecting our ships. We\u2019re very much stoked for when we will be able to roll out the Reliant to the hangar. It\u2019s with special pride that we imagine our supporters easing back into the pilot seat for the first time. (There are two seats, side by side. Can you guess which one it is?) We hope you\u2019re as pumped about the Reliant as we are!\n\nAnd that\u2019s December! We had another great month of finished tasks that is leading to an incredible experience in both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We\u2019re looking forward to your feedback and can\u2019t wait to get more done. We\u2019re inspired by you and work as hard as we can to make our milestones a part of history. See you next month!\n\nHowdy Citizens,\nDecember brought our year to a close in grand fashion! We had a great run of builds, fixes, and PTU testing leading up to the launch of 2.0.0 in December! And right after that we jumped into 2.1.0 testing for a fast follow up on PTU. Many people in the studio worked very hard in December to bring this content to the live server, and we have a lot to share. Thankfully we also got some time to relax and recharge a bit after the Christmas holiday and now the team is back hard at work on making the best damn space sim ever!\n\nPersistent Universe Team\nHowdy folks! Hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. Everyone on the PU team here in Austin got a much needed break, but not before knocking some last minute tasks off our plate and finishing the year strong.\n\nTo start, congratulations are in order to Chris Smith and Josh Coons, who finished up the much-awaited revamp to the Constellation Andromeda. This ship is gorgeous, and we love seeing you guys flying it around now out in the \u2018verse. Chris and Josh have since moved on to the Xi\u2019an Scout, and aim to finish that up later this month.\n\nThe other artists here have been trucking along on building and detailing the Levski landing zone in Nyx, supporting BHVR in providing lighting, VFX, and technical oversight. Mark Skelton continues to provide his fearless leadership and direction in helping to make this environment look as amazing as possible. In the Pupil to Planet video, we showed off a bit of how Delamar might look as you depart the Levski landing zone. Hats off to the team in Frankfurt for getting this tech up and running so quickly, but it does create an interesting challenge for Art. Before now, all we have really had to worry about is how the landing zone looks from the ground at a single time of day. Now we\u2019re having to think about not just what a landing zone looks like from eye-level, but how it looks from orbit! Mark has his work cut out for him making sure that these landing zones look amazing not just from varying heights but varying times of day as well, in varying degrees of light, shadow, and everything in between. Eventually our planets will rotate just like real planets, and with that comes a full day\/night cycle that we have to bear in mind when designing and art directing. It certainly is a challenge but we are looking forward to it.\n\nSpeaking of Pupil to Planet, before the break designer Pete \u201cWeather Wizard\u201c Mackay spent some time using his weather wizardry to nail down elements of cruise speed. While we were doing seamless fly-throughs from orbit down to the landing zone we noticed that the speed at which the ship approached was a bit off. We wanted this approach speed to feel fast but without feeling ludicrous. Pete spent some time making calculations to determine the best approach velocity to get the feel just right. He\u2019s still tweaking the parameters to get it perfect, but should have it nailed down soon.\n\nRecently our Design Team has been focusing on additional landing zones in the PU, specifically focusing on breaking up all of our landing zones into Hero, Small Sandbox, and Space Station categories. Every landing zone is extremely detailed, and with that comes a lot of time and resource required to get them to the level of quality that we\u2019re shooting for. Because of this, we are shifting gears slightly and shuffling our schedule around to get MORE landing zones ready in a shorter amount of time, which means everyone not only has to be efficient, but also be clever at the same time. We\u2019re still focusing on hero locations like Hurston and Crusader, but we\u2019re also prioritizing smaller landing zones like Sherman and Odyssa and space stations like mining outposts and research stations. Each of these locations will have their own points of interest and shops, and this requires a lot of design attention by the likes of Rob Reininger and Evan Manning.\n\nOur Animation Team continues to convert and integrate the raw animation data we captured last year for the PU. The Medical Unit animations are nearly complete, and the Nightclub animations are not far behind. Throughout this process we\u2019ve identified and solved issues with female locomotion and vending machine metrics. Our Ship Animators helped prep the Sabre to be Hangar-Ready and get the Freelancer flying. Our next focus will be R&D on what we\u2019re calling the Personality Overlay System. Lead Animator Bryan Brewer will partner with a programmer to blend animations together depending on an NPC\u2019s personality as set by Design. This system would also allow users to select the idle animation that fits them best from a Character Customization UI to create variety amongst player animation. We\u2019re excited about this system because this will enable us to use the hundreds of animations for PU and Players in a better, more adjustable way.\n\nOn the Networking side, Jason Ely and Tom Sawyer spent much of their time before the break prepping the Party System for 2.0.0. release. There is still lots of work to be done and these improvements will continue to be a focus into the new year, so if you think it\u2019s still a little rough, please hang in there \u2013 we\u2019ll be shoring it up. We know it\u2019s a natural feature desire for multicrew play, and it has to start somewhere! Meanwhile, for those who own a Million Mile High Club, we also spent some time getting access and invites set up for that environment as well. We also made some headway on Persistence with the help of Jeff Zhu. This new year will see renewed focus on this critical feature, with new resources being recruited to help knock this functionality out once and for all. Soon we will see the first iteration of truly persistent data in the hands of the players with the release of Shopping v1.\n\nLive Operations\nQA\nFor the month of December, QA mostly focused on testing SC Alpha 2.0.0 and SC Alpha 2.1.0. After 14 deployments (!) to the Public Test Universe (PTU) in a very short period of time, we were extremely excited to finally release SC Alpha 2.0.0 to the live environment. Our thanks to the PTU testers who provided their enthusiasm, attention to detail, and real-time cooperation with us in order to get 2.0 out of the PTU and live into everyone\u2019s hands!\n\nThat would have been a good place to start a vacation, but we didn\u2019t stop there. We immediately jumped into testing SC Alpha 2.1.0, again with the help of our loyal and valued PTU testers. We had guarded hopes to release 2.1.0 to our live environment before the holiday break, but after 4 deployments to the PTU, we were unfortunately still experiencing some stability issues with the additional content. The decision was made to keep 2.1.0 on the PTU over the holidays but open it up to everyone to check out the new flyable Freelancer.\n\nOver the course of the month we deployed fourteen 2.0.0 builds to the PTU, one deployment of 2.0.0 to live and four 2.1.0 deployments to the PTU. Supporting these deployments was a significant undertaking. For each deployment, the team would test each aspect of the game and raise any potential serious issues to production. The team also would conduct launcher\/patch testing as well as compile patch notes. Following the deployment, the team would monitor the community feedback.\n\nAfter each deployment, Jeffrey Pease would gather stability metrics on server and client crashes and provide a comprehensive report to CIG Leadership. Jeffrey Pease has done an amazing job in his various roles in QA and I am happy to announce he has officially transitioned into a development role as a LiveOps Technician. Congratulations to Bearded-CIG!\n\nThere have also been other movements within our ranks. Tyler Witkin, who you may know as Zyloh-CIG, has been promoted to the level of Senior QA. Tyler will be taking a more active leadership role on the team in his new position. In addition to his normal QA duties, Tyler has also been doing a great job keeping the community in the loop with regular updates on Discord and various social media outlets. Tyler has also obtained additional screenshots and videos requested by Marketing that were used in various updates on the RSI website.\n\nIn testing 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 the team has been working very closely with engineers Clive Johnson, George Kidd, Paul Reindell and other developers on extensive performance testing including AI spawning, Server bottle-necking, and server or client crashes. Melissa Estrada has continued with Automation development as well as working closely with engineer Francesco Roccucci on in depth testing of AI behavior.\nTodd Raffray and Robert Gaither have ensured that contacts, the party system, Million Mile High Club and ArcCorp continued to be properly tested. Andrew Rexroth continued to test all FPS functionality sending a report each day highlighting any new or particularly serious issues.\n\nOur Information Specialist Marissa Meissner has been ensuring that for each deployment, all fixes are verified and included in the patch notes. Marissa has been working very closely with Will Leverett in Game Support on messaging and accuracy of promotional mail outs and PTU invites as well as helping to update several FAQ\u2019s to assist Customer Service. Marissa is also working with our Marketing Manager Vincent Gallopain to ensure marketing materials are accurate. Marissa has also been updating our internal knowledge base with a new workflow for reporting performance issues as well as routine updates of deprecated components and production ownership of certain ship manufacturers.\n\nIn addition to testing, QA has also taken on the task of providing feedback to CIG Leadership on various aspects of the game. Andrew Hesse has provided very detailed reports on ship behavior which have been very useful to our designers in their attempts to balance ship flight and combat.\n\nDuring January QA will be continuing to test 2.1.0 for its inevitable deployment to the live environment and promptly begin testing 2.2.0. It is turning out to already be a very active new year. See you in the verse!\n\nGame Support\nOur (amazing) December was all about 2.0 and 2.1!\n\nIt\u2019d be easy to overlook how well 2.0 went through the dev pipeline to Live, because from a process perspective it went so smoothly! Normally, such a major release takes several months to get from initial build to Live, but we did it all within a handful of weeks, in large part due to Game Support (and other teams) working alongside the community who did excellent work in helping us identify major bugs and game imbalances, which we triaged through Issue Council and got into the dev pipeline quickly. It was truly a quantum leap in terms of turnaround time and update speed, and this demonstrates the value of all the time that DevOps and Production spent last year re-engineering the development, build, and patching pipelines. Sometimes, to an outsider those long periods spent building development infrastructure may make it feel like progress on the game is slow, but once the benefits start to kick in, it really pays off, and we think the rapid patch cycle that brought 2.0 to you in December proves it!\n\nOn the topic of PTU, we understand that there was confusion on how PTU testers were selected for closed testing campaigns. Creating any level of confusion or frustration is obviously not our goal, and we FULLY realize how much players want in on early rounds of testing. That said, the PTU is not about privilege or early access \u2013 the mission of the PTU is to iron out a release to a quality sufficient for deployment to live, the faster the better. Ideally, a PTU tester is not someone who wants to be \u201cfirst in line\u201d for new content, but a true and dedicated backer who is willing to put in effort alongside QA, Game Support, and the various Operations teams to get that new content out to the rest of the community and reduce the amount of time it\u2019s necessarily held back for troubleshooting.\n\nSo, while we\u2019d like to stress that it\u2019s not \u201cearly access to content\u201d but rather instead actual testing, and this motivation continues to drive our ongoing revamps and reevaluations of the PTU access selection process. Issue Council Participation\n\nPTU Participation\n\nWe\u2019ve graded players based on these two criteria, and should we have the need for a closed testing period, we\u2019ll be inviting our players who have helped out the most in these areas on a scaled basis. Some PTU releases are open to everyone, but during the very early phases of a major release \u2013 particularly if it\u2019s technically tricky \u2013 , we\u2019ll consider restricting access until a more reasonable level of stability can be achieved. (Remember that in testing, different problems and bugs can have different root causes, and sometimes smaller, focused testing is what\u2019s needed and sometimes a larger pool of testers for stress testing is needed. Access headcounts can vary from one release candidate to the next depending on what kind of testing is most useful)\n\nWe\u2019re excited about the cool things to come in January, and we\u2019re excited to work with you to get it done. \uf04a\n\nIT\/Operations\nHappy New Year from the IT Team at CIG! The month of December brought us many new challenges and even more successes. Much of what the IT department focuses on at the end of the year is boring software licensing renewals, software and user account audits, and internal system maintenance. This December the team has also been heavily involved in publishing support and for the 2.0 & 2.1 publishes. A portion of the team supported the project by providing network and storage optimizations to further improve the build system performance in order to help deliver more builds per day for internal testing. Moving the builds between studios also falls on IT so these services were pushed to the limits allowing us to find even more areas we could tune for performance. The QA teams pull a lot of builds throughout the day, so many that they can actually begin to stress the network in certain areas so new optimizations were added where needed to help QA get builds down to machines as fast as possible. Finally, the IT Team got to provide additional support for LiveOps publishes by prioritizing their traffic over all other outbound traffic because with the amount of publishes we did, every minute counts.\n\nLive Ops\nDecember may have been the most productive month ever for the LiveOps team. With back to back publishes happening nearly every day of the month, it became necessary to dramatically reduce the publish windows. This is the time it takes to deploy the servers, supporting systems, prepare and distribute all patches out to the edge networks. Reducing this time provides faster access to new versions by the backers but just as importantly, allows us to get feedback to the dev team more quickly. At the rate builds were coming out it became clear that we needed to create duplicate environments in order to pre-stage a publish without having to take down the currently running service for 4-6 hours.\n\nAhmed became the real rock star this month when he built out all the duplicate environments and modified the publishing process. Based on his work, we were able to reduce the publish window completely by simply flipping load balancers from one environment to another. Additionally Ahmed added a number of additional servers in order to accommodate additional logging which was ultimately instrumental to the massive stability improvements we saw in December. Ahmed also had a great time with the publishes during the month as well. We saw chat rooms light up every time he came on line because those backers helping us on the PTU became used to seeing him show up every time we completed another publish.\n\nThe LiveOps team also delivered major improvements to internal development, testing, and reporting tools. The build system experienced several improvements to reduce build times including one fix that allowed us to make use of even more processing power than before. The tools used to collect source code for compiling have been undergoing improvements as well with early reports of hours of reduction times under worst case scenarios.\n\nWrapping up 2015 with such a fantastic month makes looking forward to 2016 that much more exciting.\n\nGreetings Citizens,\nDecember may have been a short month, but it wasn\u2019t quiet! We had a lot to do at Foundry 42 UK, with team members from every discipline contributing to the project. Let\u2019s find out what they were up to!\n\nVFX\nIn December, the VFX team, Mike, Adam, Caleb, and Sean, focused on a flight-ready effects pass for the MISC Freelancer and AEGS Vanguard. A flight-ready pass includes both interior and exterior damage states (including a \u201cdeathmask\u201d) thrusters, and weapons\/counter measures.\n\nWe also continued to polish ambient environment effects for the Alpha 2.0 Crusader map. Mostly this was polish\/optimization to tie in with some lighting tweaks. However, we also added new airlock depressurization effects, so there is a clear visual difference between pressurization and depressurization.\n\nFinally, we focused on a \u201cpost-2.0 release\u201d data clean-up. For the most part this meant removing and re-organizing our particle libraries and texture folders. Not the sexiest task in the world \u2013 quite laborious in fact \u2013 but necessary nonetheless as it will help us to hit the ground running in 2016!\n\nProps\nAs 2015 came to an end the props team, Ben, Dan and our friends at Behaviour Interactive, put the finishing touches on the Casaba shop interior. The store is now complete in terms of prop work and we are just waiting on the stock to come in from our clothing manufacturers! It was an interesting environment to dress, taking on the role of shop fitters and adhering to a brand guidelines to really sell that retail experience.\n\nThe gold standard components are 95% there. They just need a final pass on the materials and then our first two will be ready. Work has also begun on the next set this week so we should have four by the end of the month. We are working closely with the tech designers and they are in the process of defining the sub-component list which is the final part of the puzzle from our point of view.\n\nThe rest of the team are now focusing on our core low-tech prop set in preparation for all the new environments coming in 2016.\n\nI have been concentrating on getting a solid backlog \/ tracking of everything we currently have in game, the sheer number of assets is getting impressive and I needed a fast way of being able to track exactly where each asset is up to and also be able to quickly filter and search the assets so that when new requests come in we can prioritize them against what we have already in game. Once complete we should be in a really good place to start pumping out everything we need to bring the environments to life. This is really important from a game performance perspective, because the sheer number of assets, models, animations, and geometry in the game means that if you don\u2019t do this intelligently, bad things can happen to your load times and FPS. It may not sound like exciting work, but when you want to maintain the pace of your gaming experience, it\u2019s as critical as a lot of other things!\n\nFinally we have a new hire here in the UK studio, the props team here is now up to three! We are still looking and have some strong candidates so hopefully will bolster our numbers again soon!\n\nShips\nThe ship art team led by Nathan were fighting hard in December to get you some new shiny ships to play with over the festive break, so we hope it was worth it!\n\nNeil, Peter, Robin, Jose, and Jan managed to get the new and revised Freelancer exterior and interior art flight ready our 2.1 PTU release, and Paul and Ian also supported Nathan in completing the final art for the Sabre and the Vanguard (including damage states for the latter).\n\nMany of you will be pleased to know that the Starfarer exterior and interior are well underway with Matt, Colin, Joe, Phil and Jay making good progress so we\u2019ll be looking forward to releasing that to you later this year and also looking forward to releasing many more cool and wonderful Star Citizen spaceships in 2016.\n\nConcepts\nPaul and the concept team has been hard at work, the Javelin has had a bit of a nip-and-tuck with some remodeling to bring it into line with the Aegis brand.\n\nSarah has been valiantly battling her way through the many props needed, working on both high tech and low tech prop design styles, and on solidifying the design language should we need to outsource some of the work later on.\n\nJort has been working his Christmas magic on various space station interiors, dressing passes and additional concept work to help define what we need to make these areas come alive.\n\nStu has worked up additional pods for the ARGO RUV which we need for SQ42 and Gary finished up the Xian Scout and has really gone to town helping define further interiors for the Shubin Mining Facility.\n\nCharacters\nOur two man team has been getting to grips with the new and improved pipeline where work has been done on Squadron 42 character Randall Graves by Jon (which you may have seen in the Livestream), both high and low poly models, along with some work to the Female officers uniform. As a good test for Michal our junior character artist, we set him the task of sculpting a stone statue needed for one of our future levels, and I must say the results were great!\n\nIn-Game Animation\nUisdean Ross and the UK animation team are continuing our push on the FPS AI and player mechanics. Player cover animation implementation is on-going by Colin and Dan and being refined and reviewed, this is an ongoing process working closely with the programming team.\n\nThe AI cover behaviors are currently going through a first pass by Spencer, and we are providing a base set for the AI programming team which will then be iterated on. Improvements are also being made to the no weapon (unarmed) locomotion set, as well as stops and starts.\n\nDesign\nThe Christmas break over and we are back in action for 2016. We have so much to do this year in the UK we need to make every day count!\n\nThe UI Director Zane and Lead Systems designer Karl are working on a simplified HUD UI to level out the learning curve when it comes to interacting with your ships systems. All the advanced bells and whistles will still be there for the more hard core players. They are also working with the engineering UI team to implement a functional EVA HUD for players to get all the information they need while experiencing zero-g movement.\n\nThe Live team of Luke, Danny and Matt are listening to your feedback and fixing up issues with the current Live build to make it more stable and fun. They are also looking at further iterations to some of the more basic design implementations that need further work, such as EMP. Syncing up with the ship release schedule in becoming a strong focus for this team going forward to make sure we cover the design functionality that is required for the various ships, such as cargo movers.\n\nThe Tech Design team led by John has scaled up over the last few months ands is now big enough to really get moving on the new ships as the Art team hands them over to us. We have also been looking into ways of addressing ship balance in a less reactive, more forward-looking way that is looking promising over the next month or so.\n\nMike and the Squadron 42 designers are transitioning the levels into the large world system rather than lots of separate CryFiles. We still need to get better at excluding SQ42 files from the current build process as you guys seem to find anything that leaks through and they sometimes appear as spoilers! This will be getting a more robust system in the future and will have the side effect of getting some of these intermediate patch sizes more under control.\n\nAll in all, we are geared up for a very busy year on Star Citizen here in the UK and with your continued solid support we know we can make this something very special! Thanks again.\n\nGraphics\nOver the last month the graphics director Ali and his team have made various performance improvements to the game.\n\nThe lighting shaders have had significant work and are now faster than the base CryEngine shaders despite having more features thanks to Ben. Geoff put in some hard work so that we can now cull rooms that you can\u2019t see on ships and space stations much more accurately thanks to improvements to the culling system. The LOD system has been overhauled by Muhammed which should result in us rendering fewer polygons in the distance where you can\u2019t really see them, and we\u2019ve also made some significant improvements to the performance of our internal tools when generating LODs which could take several minutes on our largest levels and now takes just a few seconds. Okka and the rest of the team also spent a large amount of December bug fixing for the PTU and Live Releases.\n\nOur focus now is on planning our work for 2016, and focusing on the features that Squadron 42 requires. The first features we\u2019re working on will be improved HDR effects such as bloom, lens flares and eye adaption to give a better impression of the stark lighting you get in space and sci-fi scenes in general. We\u2019ll be revamping some shaders such as the glass shader so we can improve the quality of the cockpits and helmets as well as increase their performance. We\u2019ll also be getting back onto our volumetric gas cloud work which had been paused during the work on 2.0 but is crucial for both Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe.\n\nEnvironments\nIan and the environment team hope you\u2019re all enjoying playing Crusader, our team is having a great time watching you play!\n\nJake and part of the team has been doing final bug fixes and lighting improvements for the 2.1 release of Crusader, so it should look and perform better than in 2.0. Eddie and rest of the team has been focusing down on one of our Squadron 42 levels, not too much we can reveal at this stage but it will be our test bed for creating sandbox locations with terrain and multiple landing points.\n\nEngineering\nFor obvious reasons this has been a shorter month for us here in the UK and people have been taking some well-deserved time off. That\u2019s not to say we\u2019ve been taking it easy whilst we\u2019ve been in though!\n\nThe highlight for Derek and the engineering team in December was getting Alpha 2.0 finally out to everybody after a huge effort from anybody concerned. We\u2019re really proud of what we\u2019ve managed to achieve, especially as it has gone down so well with the community. We keep an eye on all the forums and Twitch streams and people do seem to be having a blast which makes all the hard work feel worthwhile. But of course as soon as one milestone has been hit we\u2019re onto the next. We\u2019re now in the final stages of getting Alpha 2.1 hitting the streets so we\u2019re in the general stabilization phase, with many engineers including Rob, Clive, George, and Craig getting those horrid random crash bugs which have crept in fixed and some performance optimizations.\n\nMore general ongoing work. One of the big things Jens and the FPS code team have helping working on is the new physicalized EVA which is a big departure from the current implementation. Rather than \u201cfaking\u201d the fidelity of the player movement as we have been doing currently we\u2019re going down the route of using a proper physical simulation, in much the same way as we do with the ships. As part of that the character is also put into a ragdoll state which gives the whole movement a much more fluid and natural feel to it. The effects of this should include a slight opposite impulse to you to help make it feel like you\u2019re firing a real weapon.\n\nIt does bring up a whole host of new problems to solve, many of which are nasty edge cases. For example, as you EVA around and then hit a gravity area you need to come out of rag doll and transition into the normal locomotion again with it feeling natural and fluid. Also when you\u2019re in EVA you generally can\u2019t see where your legs are and it\u2019s really easy to clip a piece of geometry with them, which will send you into a nasty spin, which gets really annoying really quickly. We\u2019ve got a number of ideas from getting your character to automatically tuck in their legs, to have an IFCS to counter any unwanted spin. There\u2019s going to be a new EVA HUD mode as well to give you some more feedback. When you\u2019re in the middle of space away from any nearby geometry you have very little point of reference to give an indication of what speed and direction you\u2019re moving in, which isn\u2019t much fun.\nBut mainly we\u2019ve been working on our eating, drinking and chilling. :)\n\nQA\nAfter November\u2019s hopeful anticipation of 2.0.0 going LIVE to all backers, Andy and the QA team were very proud (and a little relieved!) that it finally launched this month. We\u2019ve been working on it internally for a while!\n\nHopefully you\u2019re all appreciating the hard work we put in to get it ready for release \u2013 there was a great feeling of satisfaction felt in the department, and like I mentioned last time, we\u2019re really getting to grips with the nature of the testing for Star Citizen\u2019s future development.\n\nSome of the UK QA team have had a busier end to the month of December than others\u2026 ahem! While some were off enjoying the festive season (me, Andy), the rest of our dedicated team were on hand to make sure that the first 2.1.0 patch made it live to PTU on Christmas Eve. \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d, is probably what they were thinking at the time!\n\nWhile some might have considered a lack of a full LIVE release of 2.1.0 disappointing, there were a few good reasons why this release was unfortunately not possible. Without going into too much detail, the performance and stability of the build had regressed, meaning we were not comfortable with a release for you guys. This is not unusual any time you add new content or new gameplay, and particularly not when one of the additions is a completely new class of flyable ship. Post-Christmas, this is going to form the majority of our testing in the department \u2013 helping to reproduce all the issues and ensure the quality of the experience is back where we want it to be.\n\n2.1.0 has meant that the lucky PTU players were able to experience and help test the Freelancer for the first time \u2013 a ship that has prompted plenty of \u201cStarbug roleplay\u201d within the QA team. Hopefully before too long everyone will be able to play the \u201cRimmer role\u201d once 2.1.0 goes LIVE\u2026\n\nIn other news, the UK QA Secret Santa was a great success \u2013 highlights include: Pokemon trainer badges, a genuinely horrifying 1980\u2019s E.T., a Transformers lunchbox with flask and a Corinthian Kevin Keegan figurine.\n\nAudio\nFor Lee Banyard and CIG Audio, December was mostly taken up with ensuring things were as solid as they could be with sound for SC Alpha 2.0. With a game such as ours, testing every possible thing where audio is concerned can be difficult, so we spent a lot of time trying to cover all the bases, going through PTU feedback and issues that came up via QA as well as stuff we found ourselves.\n\nWhat was everyone up to? Luke, Darren and Stefan were immersed in supporting ships such as the Freelancer and Vanguard. Matteo and Stefan (again, he gets around!) looking more at EVA and FPS elements, while Ross was running the rule over the environments in 2.0 again and again to ensure that all worked as it should, testing out the music logic system, planning battle-chatter system and just general testing. Phil continued with UI audio and with PU environments, especially the Million Mile High Club. Bob was engaged in hammering out anything to do with dialogue, and the larger dialogue system, and last (but not least) Jason continued his stellar work in supporting everyone from a technical standpoint and ensuring the audio build system continued to do its thing.\n\nWe continued to plan the orchestral sessions which should be happening in the next month or so, which should align nicely with the progress Ross and Sam Hall are making with the dynamic music system assuming all goes ahead as planned.\n\nAnd Lee tried to help everyone with everything as much as he could!\n\nAlso the team received CIG Audio winter hats as seasonal gifts. I think photos were posted to the Ask A Developer audio thread in case you\u2019re interested. Hope you all had a great winter break!\n\nHallo aus Frankfurt (Hello from Frankfurt),\nChristmas has come and gone, we\u2019re into a new year, and the team is now back from their well-deserved holiday break.\n\nThis month we\u2019ll have 4 new people joining the Frankfurt team, bringing us up to 34 strong.\n\nI hope everyone had a good holiday, read below on some of the stuff we did before the break.\n\nPupil to Planet \u2013 Procedural Tech\nThis past month we showed off the procedural tech we\u2019ve been working on, both in the video Pupil to Planet, and with Chris and Sean playing it live on the livestream.\n\nMarco, Carsten, and Pascal spent a good amount of time working on the tech and environment art, and Hannes came in with final touches and camera work. We had support from others both in and out of the DE office, such as Sean Tracy, Chris Bolte, etc. The character used is a story character from SQ42 called Joachim Steiger. Music was done by our Pedro Camacho and turned out fantastic. Thanks to everyone that pitched in, seeing and navigating around this 1000km diameter planetoid live in-game was and is an absolutely surreal and a mind blowing experience.\n\nThe base planet tech of the procedural work was started a few months earlier, in September. Besides the planet tech, there are several different systems helping to make this possible, including the Large World (systems were converted to use 64 bit positioning to allow large seamless worlds), inverted depth buffer and camera relative rendering (which renders everything relative to the camera to minimize loss of precision), and the Zone system (which was worked on mainly by Chris Bolte).\n\nSome generated planet terrain parts are still too big to fit into 32 bit float vertex buffer chunks for the GPU, so they are computed locally and displaced on the appropriate location on the planet, which, when combined with the aforementioned systems, avoid any jittering or loss of precision.\n\nKeeping the entire planet in memory won\u2019t be possible, so the planet surface is allocated a fixed memory budget and procedurally generated on-demand at different level of details as the engine camera moves around the planet.\n\nThen procedural texturing and colors are applied to the surface in realtime depending on terrain shape and other information.\n\nthe atmospherics are based on a physically accurate model of light transport taking multiple scattering into account, this allows to render atmospherics correctly and automatically from any viewpoint from outer space to ground level.\n\nWe already have some improvements in the works, and we will be updating as the new year goes on. The current plan, as shown in the prototype, is to experience the entire Star Citizen game world in first person, including from walking into your ship, flying and seamlessly landing from space to a docking station on a planet, walking around in first person, entering buildings and doing things at the higher visual fidelity we have shown. Our next steps besides improving the planet generation and visuals would be to integrate the procedural tech into the multiplayer environment so it could be experienced in the PTU.\n\nEngine\nOn top of the above work wrapped around the procedural tech, the engine team gave support to various areas of the current PTU release. We\u2019re also making further progress on the public crash handler to gather relevant data on why clients crash which should help speed up stabilizing future PTU and public releases.\n\nWe\u2019re pushing towards enabling asserts in profile builds to further help catch runtime errors early. As part of this, the internal crash handler and callstack collector service of CE has been totally overhauled.\n\nCinematics\nWe\u2019re currently completing our full breakdown of every scene in SQ42\u2019s script and all material that was shot in regards to scene types.\n\nSQ42 features every type of cinematic you could think of. Ranging from relatively straight forward 3rd person cinematics with filmic cameras without player presence, to 1st person player perspective cinematics with look control and then crossing over into more gameplay oriented conversational scenes with AI characters and full player control. Transitions from cinematics into AI characters most of the time needs to be fluid and conversational scenes often can be interrupted by the player so this requires lots of planning and case handling on animation and AI tech side. The amount of material is massive so getting it all sorted and categorized correctly is essential for production.\n\nWe are also working on a scene with Admiral Bishop going planetside to view battle damage and a first scene with Captain Maclaren but both are in their early stages of implementation.\n\nFor cinematic environment work, we finished up geometry for the Retribution skydock, started working on the Corvo ruins scene, and started with some terrain RnD of the big background mountains and crater.\n\nDesign\nOur system designers are busy coming up with consistent designs for cargo and looting so we can have a clear path of where we need to take these systems and at the same time come up with a tier zero implementation for the baby PU so the players can loot items, move them around and sell them in various stations. The goal here is to implement an initial light version of the system that we can build upon in the future without having to redo it from scratch when the full system will be ready to deploy. These systems should help stimulate different types of gameplay in the baby PU, from cargo transport to market research and even piracy or escorting other players.\n\nBoth system and level designers here are now working together with programmers in creating a mission generation system that is modular and that can offer great variation of gameplay. We\u2019re still in the early stages for this system but we\u2019re hoping we can get some early version of it in the baby PU as soon as possible. This system should be able to take data from the universe simulator and generate missions based on that data so let\u2019s say if a system is under heavy pirate threat then we can generate more missions to fight pirates, and even tailor those procedural missions to that specific pirate faction.\n\nLevel designers have been pushing through with their Power Management System prototype that they started last month and hopefully we\u2019ll get to play it soon and see how it fits in our current plans for the stations & ships. Also a lot of research & prototyping time was put into various models of asteroid bases and facilities trying to get away from the conventional \u201cplanet-like\u201d looking base and exploring all the possibilities that life on a low\/no gravity asteroid can offer.\n\nTechArt\nTechArt in Frankfurt is continuing to work with the other studios Tech Artists on our bigger DCC pipeline, this month we finalized our puppet from animation perspective.\n\nWe\u2019re currently working on finalizing in-game internal rig setups. Further supporting various department RNDs and bug fixing is daily routines for us.\n\nQA\nAside from the usual bug-hunting, I worked mostly on Automated Testing solutions for Star Citizen, developing automated test levels with timed demos with the help of Francesco Di Mizio in the hopes that automating a simple test-run of a level could lead to further automation down the line. Right now a simple test level involving spawning in a location, equipping a loadout and running through the map shooting at AI can test everything from level loading and chainloading to AI-Hit Reactions, bullet physics and particles, character physics & ragdoll, falling damage and a whole host of other functions vital to the core gameplay of S42 and the Persistent Universe. Additional test map demos can now be made and implemented using the same framework that will allow developers to see which changelists cause any problems for any area of the game on a daily basis as changes go in.\n\nWeapons\nThe weapon art team has finished the Apocalypse Arms Revenant Ballistic Gatling. As already mentioned in the previous monthly studio report, this is the first weapon to use our new Multi-Layer shader and we are quite happy with the results!\n\nWhile working with the new shader and being in direct communication with the graphics programmer wizards in the UK we have learned a lot and identified some issues as well as given feedback to further improve the shader in the future.\n\nEnvironment Art\nLast month the Frankfurt environment art team was working on the Shubin space station, a high tech mining facility whose role is to \u201ccrack\u201d asteroids in order to mine the valuable minerals that they contain. Shubin will be featured heavily in the Squadron 42 campaign and will differ from the other stations in its design, being a very high tech facility. The station is going to be one of the biggest so far, giving the player the freedom to fly around the huge superstructure and, of course, land and explore the interior on foot. From an artist\u2019s point of view, Shubin has been a huge challenge but at the same time a very rewarding one, giving us the freedom to explore new designs and really try to develop something that we think will provide a real sense of awe when players initially experience it in game.\n\nGreetings Citizens,\nAnother month of hard work here in Montreal. Here\u2019s what the team have been working on.\n\nDesign\nThe Behaviour design team wrapped up the year with a few things. First, Lead Technical Designer Francois Boucher continued to set up shops and shopping items for the upcoming Casaba Outlet and current stores as well. In parallel, we are working on a streamlined shopping interface that hopefully everyone will like.\n\nLevel Designer Jesse Kalb added a bunch of new flair objects to the game as we wanted to get some kind of cushion leading into the new year. We also worked hard solidifying 2.0 and subsequently 2.1 before leaving for the holiday.\n\nFinally, we cooked 3.5 pounds of Canadian bacon for the Star Citizen Behaviour team to celebrate the end of the year. Yummy!\n\nArt\nThis month, the Environment team continued to work on Levski. Mainly optimizing complex geometry like rock walls and tunnels. Also, we began dressing the interiors, trying to give to each a theme. This will help navigation but also to make it visually interesting when exploring the map. A couple of minor bugs were fixed on ArcCorp and Hangars.\n\nFor the Prop team, the next flairs were completed and we are planning the next ones for 2016.\n\nThe background and static props where completed for the clothing store. We are now moving on props for industrial\/mining planets.\n\nOn the Concept Art team , we worked on paint-overs for Levski`s interior shops. You can admire the amazing work done by our concept artists Seungjin Woo on Cordry`s armor shop.\n\nEngineering\nComing to you shortly in version 2.1.0 are a few cool new features. Customizing your ships with the HoloTable will be a little easier. You\u2019re probably used to seeing only your loose ship parts that can be equipped, and you still will by default. However, with a new UI widget you\u2019ll now be able to filter items to see what\u2019s available and what isn\u2019t. For example you\u2019ll now be able to see items on other ships, so you can equip them directly without having to load and strip that other ship first. You can also your whole inventory for a given part category, which could help you plan the loadouts of your personal fleet at a glance. All of this will come with color highlighting and some clearer labeling of the various parts and their stats. For those of you who play well with others, we hope you enjoy the new updates to the party management and contact list UI systems. We\u2019ve also worked hard to improve stability of options, customizations and emotes so you can continue to have fun mingling with others planet-side (or crashing your buggies into each other, whatever floats your boat).\n\nFor subsequent updates, we\u2019re working to provide you with a full AR shopping experience, where you can purchase gear for your character in-game and preview the various modifications on your avatar. We\u2019re continuing to work on optimizing ship customizations, allowing you to make temporary modifications in Crusader from a HoloTable, load them into a dock and take flight without returning to your hangar. Any of you who are upgrading your computers this winter may appreciate our modifications to the graphics menu options. Quality settings will apply immediately, allowing you to see their effects without having to leave the menu. You\u2019ll also have a timed screen resolution confirmation dialog, which will help if you try configurations that don\u2019t quite agree with your graphics card or monitor\/TV setup. If a resolution doesn\u2019t work for you (no, not the New Year\u2019s kind. unfortunately), it will revert back in 15 seconds. More party and Crusader ship features will continue to be improved as well. Hopefully you\u2019ll have your hands on all of these pretty soon!\n\nOn our side, we\u2019re continuing to update our dev tools to help bring you more content and exciting new features in the near future.\n\nGreetings from frosty Montreal! Here\u2019s what we\u2019ve been up to in the last month, in-between snowfalls :\n\nPledge Buy Back\nIn December, we launched a new feature called Pledge Buy Back. Most of you knew it by another, more obscure name, \u201cunmelt\u201d. It allows anyone to undo a mistake they made, like exchanging a limited availability pledge they had for store credit. Anyone will be able to undo such mistakes and do themselves what used to take hours of Customer Service exchanges. This feature is now accessible via My Hangar. Note: there will be a handful of pledges which are and will stay ineligible for Pledge Buy Back : some limited offers, offers linked to third party companies, pledge packages including physical merchandise\u2026 The system still allows buying back 99.9% of all pledges ever available, and to date close to 5,000 pledges have been bought back, making it one of our most popular features already!\n\nOrganization Invitations\nLast month, we completed development on the new Organization invitation email template, so that it would reflect your Org\u2019s identity better and make it less ambiguously linked to RSI Itself. The new layout is currently being tested on different email programs and devices, and once it has passed QA, we\u2019ll go live. Coming soon!\n\nOf course, we haven\u2019t forgotten other Org improvements either! While there\u2019s nothing to report in those regards this month, rest assured that we haven\u2019t forsaken you, and that more robust updates to the Organization are still waiting in the wings for gameplay elements that will support them.\n\nSubscription campaign\nWe are currently in the Design phase for the new Subscribers section of the website. In addition to the look-and-feel of the new landing page, we are creating a new logo and many other assets which will then be used to promote subscriptions to the general public.\n\nShip Happens\nDecember was a busy month for ship sales, with the Holiday livestream as well as the end of year free for all sale to close out 2015. The livestream saw the release of the Reliant variants, including a researcher, a reporter and a skirmisher model, each with their own unique loadout and expertise. In 2.0 the new Constellation Andromeda model became available in hangar and crusader. This version also included the Vanguard Warden as hangar ready. As 2015 came to an end, there was also one last free-for-all sale for the year giving everyone a chance to get their favorite ship during the holidays, and serve as what we\u2019ve been calling a grace period before the new Euro rate came into place.\n\nWishing you all a happy new year!","de_DE":"neue Schiffe, da das Art-Team sie uns \u00fcbergibt. Wir haben auch nach M\u00f6glichkeiten gesucht, die Schiffsbilanz weniger reaktiv und zukunftsorientiert anzugehen, was f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chsten Monate oder so vielversprechend ist.\n\nMike und die Squadron 42-Designer stellen die Levels auf das gro\u00dfe Weltsystem um und nicht auf viele separate CryFiles. Wir m\u00fcssen noch besser darin werden, SQ42-Dateien aus dem aktuellen Build-Prozess auszuschlie\u00dfen, da ihr Jungs alles zu finden scheint, was durchsickert und sie manchmal als Spoiler erscheinen! Dies wird in Zukunft zu einem robusteren System f\u00fchren und den Nebeneffekt haben, dass einige dieser Zwischenst\u00fcckgr\u00f6\u00dfen besser unter Kontrolle gebracht werden.\n\nAlles in allem sind wir auf ein sehr arbeitsreiches Jahr mit Star Citizen hier in Gro\u00dfbritannien vorbereitet und mit Ihrer anhaltenden soliden Unterst\u00fctzung wissen wir, dass wir dies zu etwas ganz Besonderem machen k\u00f6nnen! Nochmals vielen Dank.\n\nGrafiken\nIn den letzten Monaten haben der Grafikdirektor Ali und sein Team verschiedene Leistungssteigerungen am Spiel vorgenommen.\n\nDie Lichtschatten haben viel Arbeit geleistet und sind jetzt schneller als die Basis-Schatten der CryEngine, obwohl sie dank Ben mehr Funktionen bieten. Geoff hat hart gearbeitet, damit wir jetzt R\u00e4ume, die man auf Schiffen und Raumstationen nicht sehen kann, dank Verbesserungen am Keulsystem viel genauer keulen k\u00f6nnen. Das LOD-System wurde von Muhammed \u00fcberarbeitet, was dazu f\u00fchren sollte, dass wir weniger Polygone in der Ferne rendern, wo man sie nicht wirklich sehen kann, und wir haben auch die Leistung unserer internen Tools bei der Generierung von LODs deutlich verbessert, was auf unseren gr\u00f6\u00dften Ebenen mehrere Minuten dauern k\u00f6nnte und nun nur noch wenige Sekunden dauert. Okka und der Rest des Teams verbrachten auch eine gro\u00dfe Menge an Dezember-Fehlerbehebung f\u00fcr die PTU- und Live-Versionen.\n\nUnser Fokus liegt nun auf der Planung unserer Arbeit f\u00fcr 2016 und auf den Funktionen, die die Staffel 42 ben\u00f6tigt. Die ersten Features, an denen wir arbeiten, werden verbesserte HDR-Effekte wie Bloom, Linsenfackeln und Augenanpassung sein, um einen besseren Eindruck von der starken Beleuchtung im Weltraum und Sci-Fi-Szenen im Allgemeinen zu vermitteln. Wir werden einige Shader wie den Glas-Shader \u00fcberarbeiten, damit wir die Qualit\u00e4t der Cockpits und Helme verbessern und ihre Leistung steigern k\u00f6nnen. Wir werden auch wieder auf unsere volumetrische Gaswolkenarbeit zur\u00fcckkommen, die w\u00e4hrend der Arbeiten an 2.0 unterbrochen wurde, aber sowohl f\u00fcr die Staffel 42 als auch f\u00fcr das Persistente Universum entscheidend ist.\n\nUmgebungen\nIan und das Umweltteam hoffen, dass ihr alle Spa\u00df daran habt, Crusader zu spielen, unser Team hat eine tolle Zeit, euch beim Spielen zuzusehen!\n\nJake und ein Teil des Teams haben letzte Bugfixes und Lighting-Verbesserungen f\u00fcr die 2.1-Version von Crusader vorgenommen, also sollte es besser aussehen und funktionieren als in 2.0. Eddie und der Rest des Teams haben sich auf eines unserer Staffel 42 Levels konzentriert, nicht allzu viel, was wir in dieser Phase verraten k\u00f6nnen, aber es wird unser Teststand f\u00fcr die Erstellung von Sandbox-Standorten mit Gel\u00e4nde und mehreren Landepunkten sein.\n\nIngenieurwesen\nAus offensichtlichen Gr\u00fcnden war dies f\u00fcr uns hier im Vereinigten K\u00f6nigreich ein k\u00fcrzerer Monat, und die Menschen haben sich eine wohlverdiente Auszeit genommen. Das soll nicht hei\u00dfen, dass wir es uns gem\u00fctlich gemacht haben, w\u00e4hrend wir drin waren!\n\nDas Highlight f\u00fcr Derek und das Engineering-Team im Dezember war, Alpha 2.0 nach einer gro\u00dfen Anstrengung von allen Beteiligten endlich an alle weiterzugeben. Wir sind wirklich stolz auf das, was wir erreicht haben, zumal es bei der Community so gut angekommen ist. Wir behalten ein Auge auf alle Foren und Twitch-Streams und die Leute scheinen einen Riesenspa\u00df zu haben, der die ganze harte Arbeit lohnenswert macht. Aber nat\u00fcrlich, sobald ein Meilenstein erreicht ist, sind wir auf dem richtigen Weg. Wir befinden uns nun in der Endphase, in der Alpha 2.1 auf die Stra\u00dfe kommt, also befinden wir uns in der allgemeinen Stabilisierungsphase, in der viele Ingenieure wie Rob, Clive, George und Craig diese schrecklichen zuf\u00e4lligen Crash-Bugs, die sich eingeschlichen haben, und einige Leistungsoptimierungen erhalten haben.\n\nAllgemeinere laufende Arbeiten. Eines der gro\u00dfen Dinge, an denen Jens und das FPS-Code-Team bei der Arbeit mitgewirkt haben, ist das neue physisierte EVA, das eine gro\u00dfe Abweichung von der aktuellen Implementierung darstellt. Anstatt die Treue der Spielerbewegung zu \"f\u00e4lschen\", wie wir es derzeit tun, gehen wir den Weg der Verwendung einer geeigneten physikalischen Simulation, \u00e4hnlich wie bei den Schiffen. Dabei wird der Charakter auch in einen Ragdoll-Zustand versetzt, der der gesamten Bewegung ein viel flie\u00dfenderes und nat\u00fcrlicheres Gef\u00fchl verleiht. Die Auswirkungen davon sollten einen leichten gegenteiligen Impuls zu dir beinhalten, um dir zu helfen, das Gef\u00fchl zu vermitteln, dass du eine echte Waffe abfeuerst.\n\nEs bringt eine ganze Reihe neuer Probleme mit sich, die es zu l\u00f6sen gilt, von denen viele b\u00f6se Kantenf\u00e4lle sind. Z.B. als Sie EVA herum und dann einen Schwerkraftbereich schlagen, m\u00fcssen Sie aus Lumpenpuppe herauskommen und in die normale Bewegung wieder mit ihr \u00fcbergehen, die sich nat\u00fcrlich und fl\u00fcssig anf\u00fchlt. Auch wenn du in EVA bist, kannst du im Allgemeinen nicht sehen, wo deine Beine sind, und es ist wirklich einfach, ein St\u00fcck Geometrie mit ihnen zu schneiden, was dich in einen b\u00f6sen Spin versetzt, der wirklich sehr schnell nervig wird. Wir haben eine Reihe von Ideen, wie Sie Ihren Charakter dazu bringen k\u00f6nnen, sich automatisch in die Beine zu stecken, ein IFCS zu haben, um unerw\u00fcnschten Drehungen entgegenzuwirken. Es wird auch einen neuen EVA-HUD-Modus geben, um Ihnen mehr Feedback zu geben. Wenn du dich mitten im Weltraum befindest, weg von einer nahegelegenen Geometrie, hast du nur einen sehr kleinen Bezugspunkt, um einen Hinweis darauf zu geben, in welcher Geschwindigkeit und Richtung du dich bewegst, was nicht viel Spa\u00df macht.\nAber vor allem haben wir an unserem Essen, Trinken und K\u00fchlen gearbeitet. :)\n\nQA\nNach der hoffnungsvollen Erwartung vom November, dass 2.0.0 LIVE an alle Geldgeber geht, waren Andy und das QA-Team sehr stolz (und ein wenig erleichtert!), dass es diesen Monat endlich gestartet ist. Wir haben intern eine Weile daran gearbeitet!\n\nHoffentlich sch\u00e4tzt ihr alle die harte Arbeit, die wir geleistet haben, um sie f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung vorzubereiten - es gab ein gro\u00dfes Gef\u00fchl der Zufriedenheit in der Abteilung, und wie ich letztes Mal erw\u00e4hnt habe, kommen wir wirklich mit der Art der Tests f\u00fcr die zuk\u00fcnftige Entwicklung von Star Citizen zurecht.\n\nW\u00e4hrend einige von ihnen die Weihnachtszeit genossen (ich, Andy), war der Rest unseres engagierten Teams vor Ort, um sicherzustellen, dass der erste 2.1.0-Patch am Heiligabend live in PTU \u00fcbertragen wurde. \"Frohe Weihnachten\", das ist wahrscheinlich das, was sie damals dachten!\n\nW\u00e4hrend einige das Fehlen einer vollst\u00e4ndigen LIVE-Version von 2.1.0 als entt\u00e4uschend empfunden haben, gab es einige gute Gr\u00fcnde, warum diese Version leider nicht m\u00f6glich war. Ohne ins Detail zu gehen, war die Leistung und Stabilit\u00e4t des Builds zur\u00fcckgegangen, was bedeutet, dass wir mit einer Ver\u00f6ffentlichung f\u00fcr euch Jungs nicht zufrieden waren. Dies ist nicht ungew\u00f6hnlich, wenn Sie neue Inhalte oder neues Gameplay hinzuf\u00fcgen, und vor allem nicht, wenn eine der Erg\u00e4nzungen eine v\u00f6llig neue Klasse von fliegbaren Schiffen ist. Nach Weihnachten wird dies den gr\u00f6\u00dften Teil unserer Tests in der Abteilung ausmachen - und dazu beitragen, alle Themen zu reproduzieren und sicherzustellen, dass die Qualit\u00e4t der Erfahrung wieder dort ist, wo wir sie haben wollen.\n\n2.1.0 hat dazu gef\u00fchrt, dass die gl\u00fccklichen PTU-Spieler den Freelancer zum ersten Mal erleben und mittesten konnten - ein Schiff, das im QA-Team viele \"Starbug-Rollenspiele\" ausgel\u00f6st hat. Hoffentlich kann in K\u00fcrze jeder die \"Rimmer-Rolle\" spielen, wenn 2.1.0 LIVE geht.....\n\nIn anderen Nachrichten war der britische QA Secret Santa ein gro\u00dfer Erfolg - Highlights sind unter anderem: Pokemon Trainerabzeichen, ein wirklich schreckliches E.T. aus den 80er Jahren, eine Transformers Lunchbox mit Flasche und einer korinthischen Kevin Keegan-Figur.\n\nAudio\nF\u00fcr Lee Banyard und CIG Audio wurde der Dezember vor allem damit in Anspruch genommen, sicherzustellen, dass die Dinge so solide sind, wie sie es mit dem Sound f\u00fcr SC Alpha 2.0 sein k\u00f6nnten. Mit einem Spiel wie dem unseren kann es schwierig sein, alles M\u00f6gliche zu testen, was das Audio betrifft, also haben wir viel Zeit damit verbracht, alle Grundlagen abzudecken, PTU-Feedback und Probleme, die \u00fcber die Qualit\u00e4tssicherung aufgetreten sind, sowie Dinge, die wir selbst gefunden haben.\n\nWas hatten alle vor? Luke, Darren und Stefan waren in unterst\u00fctzende Schiffe wie die Freelancer und Vanguard getaucht. Matteo und Stefan (wieder kommt er herum!) schauen sich mehr EVA- und FPS-Elemente an, w\u00e4hrend Ross in 2.0 immer wieder die Regel \u00fcber die Umgebungen f\u00fchrte, um sicherzustellen, dass alles so funktionierte, wie es sollte, das Musiklogiksystem ausprobierte, das Kampf-Chatter-System plante und nur allgemeine Tests durchf\u00fchrte. Phil arbeitete weiter mit UI-Audio und mit PU-Umgebungen, insbesondere dem Million Mile High Club. Bob war damit besch\u00e4ftigt, alles auszuarbeiten, was mit dem Dialog und dem gr\u00f6\u00dferen Dialogsystem zu tun hatte, und last (aber nicht zuletzt) setzte Jason seine hervorragende Arbeit fort, indem er alle aus technischer Sicht unterst\u00fctzte und sicherstellte, dass das Audio-Build-System weiterhin seine Sache machte.\n\nWir haben die Orchester-Sessions, die in den n\u00e4chsten Monaten stattfinden sollen, weiter geplant, die sich gut an die Fortschritte von Ross und Sam Hall mit dem dynamischen Musiksystem anpassen sollten, vorausgesetzt, alles l\u00e4uft wie geplant.\n\nUnd Lee versuchte, jedem mit allem zu helfen, so gut er konnte!\n\nAuch das Team erhielt CIG Audio Winterh\u00fcte als Saisongeschenk. Ich denke, dass Fotos im Ask A Developer Audio-Thread gepostet wurden, falls du interessiert bist. Ich hoffe, ihr alle hattet eine tolle Winterpause!\n\nHallo aus Frankfurt (Hallo aus Frankfurt),\nWeihnachten ist gekommen und vergangen, wir stehen vor einem neuen Jahr, und das Team ist nun aus der wohlverdienten Ferienpause zur\u00fcckgekehrt.\n\nDiesen Monat werden wir 4 neue Mitarbeiter in das Frankfurter Team aufnehmen, was uns auf 34 Mitarbeiter bringt.\n\nIch hoffe, jeder hatte einen sch\u00f6nen Urlaub, lesen Sie unten auf einigen der Dinge, die wir vor der Pause gemacht haben.\n\nSch\u00fcler zum Planeten - Verfahrenstechnik\nIm vergangenen Monat haben wir die prozedurale Technologie, an der wir gearbeitet haben, sowohl im Video Pupil to Planet als auch mit Chris und Sean gezeigt, die sie live auf dem Livestream spielen.\n\nMarco, Carsten und Pascal verbrachten viel Zeit damit, an der Technik- und Umweltkunst zu arbeiten, und Hannes kam mit dem letzten Schliff und der Kameraarbeit herein. Wir hatten Unterst\u00fctzung von anderen, sowohl im DE-B\u00fcro als auch au\u00dferhalb, wie Sean Tracy, Chris Bolte, etc. Der verwendete Charakter ist ein Geschichtencharakter aus SQ42 namens Joachim Steiger. Die Musik wurde von unserem Pedro Camacho gemacht und ist fantastisch geworden. Vielen Dank an alle, die sich um dieses Planetoiden-Live-In-Game mit einem Durchmesser von 1000 Kilometern gek\u00fcmmert, gesehen und navigiert haben, war und ist eine absolut surreale und atemberaubende Erfahrung.\n\nDie Basis-Planetentechnologie der Verfahrensarbeiten wurde einige Monate zuvor, im September, gestartet. Neben der Planetentechnologie gibt es mehrere verschiedene Systeme, die dazu beitragen, dies zu erm\u00f6glichen, darunter die Gro\u00dfe Welt (die Systeme wurden in eine 64-Bit-Positionierung umgewandelt, um gro\u00dfe nahtlose Welten zu erm\u00f6glichen), ein invertierter Tiefenpuffer und ein relatives Kamerarendering (das alles in Bezug auf die Kamera rendert, um den Verlust an Pr\u00e4zision zu minimieren) und das Zonensystem (an dem haupts\u00e4chlich Chris Bolte gearbeitet hat).\n\nEinige generierte Planeten-Terrain-Teile sind immer noch zu gro\u00df, um in 32-Bit-Float-Vertex-Pufferchunks f\u00fcr den Grafikprozessor zu passen, so dass sie lokal berechnet und an die entsprechende Stelle auf dem Planeten verschoben werden, was in Kombination mit den oben genannten Systemen jegliches Zittern und Genauigkeitsverlust verhindert.\n\nEs ist nicht m\u00f6glich, den gesamten Planeten im Ged\u00e4chtnis zu behalten, so dass der Planetenoberfl\u00e4che ein festes Speicherbudget zugewiesen wird und sie bei Bedarf auf verschiedenen Detailebenen prozedural generiert wird, w\u00e4hrend sich die Motorkamera um den Planeten bewegt.\n\nAnschlie\u00dfend werden prozedurale Texturen und Farben in Echtzeit auf die Oberfl\u00e4che aufgebracht, abh\u00e4ngig von der Gel\u00e4ndeform und anderen Informationen.\n\nDie Atmosph\u00e4ren basieren auf einem physikalisch genauen Modell des Lichttransports unter Ber\u00fccksichtigung der Mehrfachstreuung, das es erm\u00f6glicht, die Atmosph\u00e4ren korrekt und automatisch aus jedem Blickwinkel vom Weltraum bis zum Boden darzustellen.\n\nWir haben bereits einige Verbesserungen in den Arbeiten, und wir werden sie im Laufe des neuen Jahres aktualisieren. Der aktuelle Plan, wie im Prototyp gezeigt, ist es, die gesamte Star Citizen-Spielwelt in der ersten Person zu erleben, einschlie\u00dflich vom Betreten Ihres Schiffes, Fliegen und nahtloser Landung vom Weltraum zu einer Dockingstation auf einem Planeten, dem Gehen in der ersten Person, dem Betreten von Geb\u00e4uden und dem Tun von Dingen mit der h\u00f6heren visuellen Treue, die wir gezeigt haben. Unsere n\u00e4chsten Schritte neben der Verbesserung der Planetengeneration und der Visualisierung w\u00e4ren die Integration der Verfahrenstechnik in die Multiplayer-Umgebung, damit sie in der PTU erlebt werden kann.\n\nMotor\nZus\u00e4tzlich zu den oben genannten Arbeiten rund um die Verfahrenstechnik unterst\u00fctzte das Motorenteam verschiedene Bereiche der aktuellen PTU-Version. Wir machen auch weitere Fortschritte beim \u00f6ffentlichen Crash-Handler, um relevante Daten dar\u00fcber zu sammeln, warum Clients abst\u00fcrzen, was dazu beitragen sollte, die Stabilisierung zuk\u00fcnftiger PTU- und \u00f6ffentlicher Releases zu beschleunigen.\n\nWir dr\u00e4ngen darauf, Asserts in Profilerstellungen zu erm\u00f6glichen, um Laufzeitfehler fr\u00fchzeitig zu erkennen. Im Zuge dessen wurde der interne Crash-Handler und Callstack-Collector-Service von CE komplett \u00fcberarbeitet.\n\nKinematiken\nWir sind gerade dabei, unsere vollst\u00e4ndige Aufschl\u00fcsselung jeder Szene im Skript von SQ42 und allem Material, das in Bezug auf die Szenentypen aufgenommen wurde, fertigzustellen.\n\nDas SQ42 bietet jede Art von Kino, die man sich vorstellen kann. Angefangen bei relativ einfachen 3rd-Person-Kinematiken mit Filmkameras ohne Spielerpr\u00e4senz \u00fcber die perspektivische Filmkunst der 1st-Person mit Look Control bis hin zu mehr spielorientierten Gespr\u00e4chsszenen mit KI-Charakteren und voller Spielerkontrolle. \u00dcberg\u00e4nge von der Kinematik zu den KI-Charakteren m\u00fcssen meistens flie\u00dfend sein und Konversationsszenen k\u00f6nnen oft vom Spieler unterbrochen werden, so dass dies viel Planung und Fallbearbeitung auf der Animations- und KI-Technik-Seite erfordert. Die Menge des Materials ist enorm, so dass es f\u00fcr die Produktion unerl\u00e4sslich ist, alles sortiert und richtig kategorisiert zu bekommen.\n\nWir arbeiten auch an einer Szene, in der Admiral Bishop auf den Planeten geht, um Kampfsch\u00e4den zu sehen, und einer ersten Szene mit Captain Maclaren, aber beide befinden sich in der Anfangsphase der Umsetzung.\n\nF\u00fcr die Arbeit an der filmischen Umgebung haben wir die Geometrie f\u00fcr den Skydock Retribution fertig gestellt, mit der Arbeit an der Corvo-Ruinenszene begonnen und mit einem Gel\u00e4nde RnD der gro\u00dfen Hintergrundberge und des Kraters begonnen.\n\nDesign\nUnsere Systemdesigner sind damit besch\u00e4ftigt, konsistente Designs f\u00fcr Ladung und Pl\u00fcnderung zu entwickeln, damit wir einen klaren Weg finden, wohin wir diese Systeme bringen m\u00fcssen, und gleichzeitig eine Implementierung f\u00fcr die Baby-PU entwickeln k\u00f6nnen, damit die Spieler Gegenst\u00e4nde pl\u00fcndern, bewegen und an verschiedenen Stationen verkaufen k\u00f6nnen. Ziel ist es, eine erste Light-Version des Systems zu implementieren, auf der wir in Zukunft aufbauen k\u00f6nnen, ohne es von Grund auf neu machen zu m\u00fcssen, wenn das gesamte System einsatzbereit sein wird. Diese Systeme sollen dazu beitragen, verschiedene Arten von Gameplay im Baby-PU zu stimulieren, vom G\u00fcterverkehr \u00fcber Marktforschung bis hin zu Piraterie oder Eskorte anderer Spieler.\n\nSowohl System- als auch Leveldesigner arbeiten hier nun gemeinsam mit Programmierern an einem modularen Missionsgeneratorsystem, das eine gro\u00dfe Variationsbreite des Gameplays bieten kann. Wir befinden uns noch im Anfangsstadium f\u00fcr dieses System, aber wir hoffen, dass wir so schnell wie m\u00f6glich eine fr\u00fche Version davon in der Baby-PU bekommen k\u00f6nnen. Dieses System sollte in der Lage sein, Daten aus dem Universums-Simulator zu nehmen und Missionen basierend auf diesen Daten zu generieren, also sagen wir mal, wenn ein System einer schweren Piratenbedrohung ausgesetzt ist, dann k\u00f6nnen wir mehr Missionen zur Bek\u00e4mpfung von Piraten generieren und diese verfahrenstechnischen Missionen sogar auf diese spezielle Piratenfraktion zuschneiden.\n\nLeveldesigner haben mit ihrem Prototyp des Power Management Systems, den sie letzten Monat gestartet haben, die Arbeit fortgesetzt, und hoffentlich werden wir es bald spielen k\u00f6nnen und sehen, wie es in unsere aktuellen Pl\u00e4ne f\u00fcr die Stationen und Schiffe passt. Auch wurde viel Forschungs- und Prototypingzeit in verschiedene Modelle von Asteroidenbasen und -einrichtungen investiert, um von der konventionellen \"planetarisch\" aussehenden Basis wegzukommen und alle M\u00f6glichkeiten zu erforschen, die das Leben auf einem Asteroiden mit geringer\/keiner Schwerkraft bieten kann.\n\nTechArt\nTechArt in Frankfurt arbeitet weiterhin mit den anderen Studios Tech Artists an unserer gr\u00f6\u00dferen DCC-Pipeline, diesen Monat haben wir unsere Marionette aus Animationsperspektive fertig gestellt.\n\nWir arbeiten derzeit daran, die internen Rig-Setups im Spiel abzuschlie\u00dfen. Die weitere Unterst\u00fctzung verschiedener RNDs der Abteilung und die Fehlerbehebung sind f\u00fcr uns t\u00e4gliche Routinen.\n\nQA\nNeben der \u00fcblichen Fehlersuche arbeitete ich haupts\u00e4chlich an Automated Testing L\u00f6sungen f\u00fcr Star Citizen und entwickelte mit Hilfe von Francesco Di Mizio automatisierte Teststufen mit zeitgesteuerten Demos in der Hoffnung, dass die Automatisierung eines einfachen Testlaufs einer Stufe zu einer weiteren Automatisierung auf der ganzen Linie f\u00fchren k\u00f6nnte. Im Moment kann eine einfache Teststufe, die das Spawnen an einem Ort, die Ausr\u00fcstung eines Loadouts und das Durchlaufen des Kartenschie\u00dfens an der KI umfasst, alles testen, von der Levelladung und dem Chainloading bis hin zu KI-Hit-Reaktionen, Kugelphysik und Partikeln, Charakterphysik und Ragdoll, Sturzsch\u00e4den und einer ganzen Reihe anderer Funktionen, die f\u00fcr das Kern-Gameplay von S42 und dem persistenten Universum wichtig sind. Zus\u00e4tzliche Testkarten-Demos k\u00f6nnen nun mit dem gleichen Framework erstellt und implementiert werden, das es Entwicklern erm\u00f6glicht zu sehen, welche \u00c4nderungslisten t\u00e4glich f\u00fcr jeden Bereich des Spiels Probleme verursachen, wenn \u00c4nderungen vorgenommen werden.\n\nWaffen\nDas Waffenkunstteam hat das Apocalypse Arms Revenant Ballistic Gatling beendet. Wie bereits im letzten monatlichen Studiobericht erw\u00e4hnt, ist dies die erste Waffe, die unseren neuen Multi-Layer-Shader verwendet und wir sind mit den Ergebnissen sehr zufrieden!\n\nBei der Arbeit mit dem neuen Shader und der direkten Kommunikation mit den Grafikprogrammierern in Gro\u00dfbritannien haben wir viel gelernt und einige Probleme identifiziert sowie Feedback gegeben, um den Shader in Zukunft weiter zu verbessern.\n\nUmwelt Kunst\nIm vergangenen Monat arbeitete das Frankfurter Umweltkunstteam an der Raumstation Shubin, einer High-Tech-Mining-Einrichtung, deren Aufgabe es ist, Asteroiden zu \"knacken\", um die darin enthaltenen wertvollen Mineralien zu gewinnen. Shubin wird in der Squadron 42 Kampagne stark vertreten sein und sich in seinem Design von den anderen Stationen unterscheiden, da es sich um eine sehr High-Tech-Einrichtung handelt. Die Station wird eine der bisher gr\u00f6\u00dften sein und dem Spieler die Freiheit geben, um den riesigen \u00dcberbau herumzufliegen und nat\u00fcrlich zu Fu\u00df zu landen und das Innere zu erkunden. Aus der Sicht des K\u00fcnstlers war Shubin eine gro\u00dfe Herausforderung, aber gleichzeitig auch eine sehr lohnende, die uns die Freiheit gibt, neue Designs zu erforschen und wirklich zu versuchen, etwas zu entwickeln, von dem wir glauben, dass es ein echtes Gef\u00fchl der Ehrfurcht vermitteln wird, wenn die Spieler es anfangs im Spiel erleben.\n\nGr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger,\nEin weiterer Monat harter Arbeit hier in Montreal. Hier ist, woran das Team gearbeitet hat.\n\nDesign\nDas Behaviour Design Team beendete das Jahr mit ein paar Dingen. Erstens hat der leitende technische Designer Francois Boucher weiterhin Gesch\u00e4fte und Einkaufsartikel f\u00fcr das kommende Casaba Outlet und die aktuellen Gesch\u00e4fte eingerichtet. Parallel dazu arbeiten wir an einer optimierten Einkaufsschnittstelle, die hoffentlich jedem gef\u00e4llt.\n\nLevel Designer Jesse Kalb hat dem Spiel eine Reihe neuer Flair-Objekte hinzugef\u00fcgt, da wir eine Art Kissen f\u00fcr das neue Jahr haben wollten. Wir haben auch hart daran gearbeitet, 2.0 und anschlie\u00dfend 2.1 zu verfestigen, bevor wir in den Urlaub gingen.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich haben wir 3,5 Pfund kanadischen Speck f\u00fcr das Star Citizen Behaviour Team gekocht, um das Ende des Jahres zu feiern. Lecker!\n\nKunst\nIn diesem Monat hat das Umweltteam die Arbeit an Levski fortgesetzt. Haupts\u00e4chlich Optimierung komplexer Geometrien wie Felsw\u00e4nde und Tunnel. Au\u00dferdem begannen wir, die Innenr\u00e4ume zu kleiden und versuchten, jedem ein Thema zu geben. Dies wird die Navigation erleichtern, aber auch optisch interessant machen, wenn man die Karte erkundet. Einige kleinere Fehler wurden bei ArcCorp und Hangars behoben.\n\nF\u00fcr das Requisitenteam wurden die n\u00e4chsten Flairs fertig gestellt und wir planen die n\u00e4chsten f\u00fcr 2016.\n\nDer Hintergrund und die statischen Requisiten wurden f\u00fcr das Bekleidungsgesch\u00e4ft fertiggestellt. Wir bewegen uns jetzt auf Requisiten f\u00fcr Planeten in der Industrie und im Bergbau.\n\nIm Team Concept Art haben wir an der Lackierung von Levskis Innenausstattungen gearbeitet. Sie k\u00f6nnen die erstaunliche Arbeit unserer Konzeptk\u00fcnstler Seungjin Woo in Cordry`s R\u00fcstungsladen bewundern.\n\nIngenieurwesen\nIn K\u00fcrze werden Ihnen in der Version 2.1.0 einige coole neue Features vorgestellt. Das Anpassen Ihrer Schiffe mit dem HoloTable wird etwas einfacher sein. Du bist es wahrscheinlich gewohnt, nur deine losen Schiffsteile zu sehen, die ausgestattet werden k\u00f6nnen, und das wirst du immer noch standardm\u00e4\u00dfig. Mit einem neuen UI-Widget k\u00f6nnen Sie nun jedoch Elemente filtern, um zu sehen, was verf\u00fcgbar ist und was nicht. Zum Beispiel kannst du jetzt Gegenst\u00e4nde auf anderen Schiffen sehen, so dass du sie direkt ausr\u00fcsten kannst, ohne das andere Schiff zuerst laden und ausziehen zu m\u00fcssen. Sie k\u00f6nnen auch Ihren gesamten Bestand f\u00fcr eine bestimmte Teilekategorie erfassen, was Ihnen helfen k\u00f6nnte, die Auslastung Ihrer pers\u00f6nlichen Flotte auf einen Blick zu planen. All dies wird mit farblichen Hervorhebungen und einer klareren Beschriftung der verschiedenen Teile und deren Statistiken einhergehen. F\u00fcr diejenigen unter Ihnen, die gut mit anderen spielen, w\u00fcnschen wir Ihnen viel Spa\u00df mit den neuen Updates f\u00fcr die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4chen der Gruppenverwaltung und Kontaktliste. Wir haben auch hart daran gearbeitet, die Stabilit\u00e4t von Optionen, Anpassungen und Emotes zu verbessern, damit Sie weiterhin Spa\u00df daran haben k\u00f6nnen, sich mit anderen auf der Planetenseite zu vermischen (oder Ihre Buggys ineinander zu prallen, was auch immer Ihr Boot bewegt).\n\nF\u00fcr sp\u00e4tere Updates arbeiten wir daran, Ihnen ein komplettes AR-Shopping-Erlebnis zu bieten, bei dem Sie Ausr\u00fcstung f\u00fcr Ihren Charakter im Spiel kaufen und sich die verschiedenen \u00c4nderungen an Ihrem Avatar ansehen k\u00f6nnen. Wir arbeiten weiter an der Optimierung von Schiffsanpassungen, damit Sie tempor\u00e4re \u00c4nderungen in Crusader von einem HoloTable aus vornehmen k\u00f6nnen, diese in ein Dock laden und fliegen k\u00f6nnen, ohne zu Ihrem Hangar zur\u00fcckzukehren. Jeder von euch, der in diesem Winter seine Computer aufr\u00fcstet, wird unsere \u00c4nderungen an den Grafikmen\u00fcoptionen zu sch\u00e4tzen wissen. Die Qualit\u00e4tseinstellungen gelten sofort, so dass Sie deren Auswirkungen sehen k\u00f6nnen, ohne das Men\u00fc verlassen zu m\u00fcssen. Sie werden auch ein Best\u00e4tigungsdialogfeld f\u00fcr die zeitgesteuerte Bildschirmaufl\u00f6sung haben, das Ihnen helfen wird, wenn Sie Konfigurationen ausprobieren, die nicht ganz mit Ihrer Grafikkarte oder Ihrem Monitor\/TV-Setup \u00fcbereinstimmen. Wenn eine L\u00f6sung f\u00fcr Sie nicht funktioniert (nein, leider nicht die Neujahrsart.), kehrt sie in 15 Sekunden zur\u00fcck. Weitere Funktionen f\u00fcr Gruppen- und Kreuzfahrtschiffe werden ebenfalls weiter verbessert. Hoffentlich wirst du bald alle diese Dinge in die Finger bekommen!\n\nAuf unserer Seite aktualisieren wir weiterhin unsere Entwicklungstools, um Ihnen in naher Zukunft mehr Inhalte und aufregende neue Funktionen bieten zu k\u00f6nnen.\n\nGr\u00fc\u00dfe aus dem frostigen Montreal! Hier ist, was wir im letzten Monat gemacht haben, zwischen den Schneef\u00e4llen :\n\nPfandr\u00fcckkauf\nIm Dezember haben wir eine neue Funktion namens Pledge Buy Back eingef\u00fchrt. Die meisten von euch kannten es unter einem anderen, unbekannteren Namen, \"ungeschmolzen\". Es erlaubt jedem, einen Fehler r\u00fcckg\u00e4ngig zu machen, den er gemacht hat, wie z.B. ein begrenztes Verf\u00fcgbarkeitszusage, das er hatte, gegen Shop-Guthaben einzutauschen. Jeder wird in der Lage sein, solche Fehler r\u00fcckg\u00e4ngig zu machen und selbst zu tun, was fr\u00fcher Stunden des Austauschs im Kundenservice gekostet hat. Diese Funktion ist nun \u00fcber Mein Hangar zug\u00e4nglich. Hinweis: Es wird eine Handvoll Pfandrechte geben, die f\u00fcr den Pfandr\u00fcckkauf nicht in Frage kommen: einige begrenzte Angebote, mit Drittunternehmen verbundene Angebote, Pfandpakete einschlie\u00dflich physischer Waren.... Das System erlaubt es immer noch, 99,9% aller jemals verf\u00fcgbaren Pfandrechte zur\u00fcckzukaufen, und bis heute wurden fast 5.000 Pfandrechte zur\u00fcckgekauft, was es bereits zu einem unserer beliebtesten Merkmale macht!\n\nUnternehmenseinladungen\nLetzten Monat haben wir die Entwicklung der neuen E-Mail-Vorlage f\u00fcr die Einladung zur Organisation abgeschlossen, so dass sie die Identit\u00e4t Ihrer Org besser widerspiegelt und sie weniger mehrdeutig mit RSI selbst verkn\u00fcpft macht. Das neue Layout wird derzeit auf verschiedenen E-Mail-Programmen und -Ger\u00e4ten getestet, und sobald es die QS bestanden hat, werden wir live gehen. Kommt bald!\n\nNat\u00fcrlich haben wir auch andere Org-Verbesserungen nicht vergessen! Auch wenn es in dieser Hinsicht in diesem Monat nichts zu berichten gibt, seien Sie versichert, dass wir Sie nicht verlassen haben und dass robustere Updates der Organisation immer noch auf Gameplay-Elemente warten, die sie unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nAbonnementkampagne\nWir befinden uns derzeit in der Designphase f\u00fcr den neuen Abonnentenbereich der Website. Zus\u00e4tzlich zum Look-and-Feel der neuen Landing Page kreieren wir ein neues Logo und viele andere Elemente, die dann zur F\u00f6rderung von Abonnements in der \u00d6ffentlichkeit verwendet werden.\n\nSchiff passiert\nDer Dezember war ein arbeitsreicher Monat f\u00fcr den Schiffsverkauf, mit dem Holiday Livestream sowie dem Ende des Jahres frei f\u00fcr alle Verk\u00e4ufe bis 2015. Im Livestream wurden die Reliant-Varianten ver\u00f6ffentlicht, darunter ein Forscher, ein Reporter und ein Skirmisher-Modell, die jeweils \u00fcber eine eigene Auslastung und Expertise verf\u00fcgen. In 2.0 wurde das neue Constellation Andromeda Modell in Hangar und Kreuzritter verf\u00fcgbar. Diese Version enthielt auch den Vanguard Warden als Hangar ready. Als 2015 zu Ende ging, gab es auch noch einen letzten Free-for-All-Verkauf f\u00fcr das Jahr, der jedem die M\u00f6glichkeit gab, sein Lieblingsschiff w\u00e4hrend der Feiertage zu bekommen und als das zu dienen, was wir eine Gnadenfrist genannt haben, bevor der neue Eurokurs eingef\u00fchrt wurde.\n\nIch w\u00fcnsche euch allen einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr! Gr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger,\n2015 war ein tolles Jahr f\u00fcr Star Citizen! Seit dem Start von Alpha 2.0 ist das Team auf seinen Monitoren festgeklebt und beobachtet die Backer Streams und Spiele und Abenteuer in der ersten Ecke des Universums, das wir aufbauen. Es gibt noch viel zu tun, aber wir freuen uns, eine Version des Spiels zur Verf\u00fcgung zu haben, die (wie wir glauben) das wahre Potenzial des Projekts zeigt. Wir hoffen, dass Sie 2.0 (oder 2.1, wenn Sie ein Fan der PTU sind!) genie\u00dfen.... es gibt in den n\u00e4chsten Tagen noch viel mehr zu sehen! Aber bevor wir nach vorne schauen, m\u00f6chten wir auf das zur\u00fcckblicken, was alle im Dezember erreicht haben. Cloud Imperium Games wurde f\u00fcr die Feiertage geschlossen, was unseren Entwicklern einige dringend ben\u00f6tigte Ruhe- und Familienzeiten erm\u00f6glicht.... aber das bedeutet nicht, dass wir nicht viele Fortschritte gemacht haben. Lesen Sie weiter f\u00fcr unseren Monatsbericht vom Dezember, um herauszufinden, was alle vorhatten.....\n\nFrohes neues Jahr an alle! Wir hoffen, dass du einen tollen Monat hattest, denn wir sind wirklich begeistert von dem, was wir vor der Umstellung des Kalenders auf 2016 fertig gestellt haben. Wir haben einige gro\u00dfe Meilensteine wie das neue ItemSystem, den Loadout Editor, die Charakterbekleidung und vieles mehr in Angriff genommen. Schauen Sie sich die folgenden Informationen an, um mehr \u00fcber die noch besseren Leistungen des LA-Studios zu erfahren.\n\nIngenieurwesen\nAuf der Engineering-Seite war unser Hauptziel, dem 2.0-Release so viel Stabilit\u00e4t wie m\u00f6glich zu verleihen. Da im Laufe des Dezembers neue Versionen der PTU ver\u00f6ffentlicht wurden, verbesserte sich die Stabilit\u00e4t in jeder Iteration drastisch. Stabilit\u00e4t wird immer eines unserer obersten Ziele sein, denn eine zuverl\u00e4ssige und spannende Erfahrung ist eine der wichtigsten Richtlinien.\n\nLead Engineer Paul Reindell und Engineer Mark Abent haben aggressiv an dem gearbeitet, was wir \"ItemSystem 2.0\" nennen. Dieses System erm\u00f6glicht eine bessere Kontrolle \u00fcber den Einzelnachweis im Backend. Die erste Iteration wurde in unseren Entwicklungscode integriert und wir beginnen, die ersten Vorteile dieses neuen Systems zu erkennen, das unsere Entwickler wirklich begeistert.\n\nDer stellvertretende Ingenieur Chad Zamzow war verantwortlich f\u00fcr die Umsetzung der verschiedenen Behindertenzust\u00e4nde f\u00fcr Ziele, die von der EMP-Waffe getroffen wurden, die derzeit im R\u00e4cher-Zauberer eingesetzt wird. Weitere Verbesserungen werden flackernde Lichter und m\u00f6glicherweise Stromb\u00f6gen \u00fcber die Bedienfelder des Schiffes sein. Achten Sie also auf die kleinen Details, die dieser neue Waffeneffekt dem Spiel hinzuf\u00fcgen wird.\n\nAriel Xu hat ein neues Tool entwickelt, das wir den \"Loadout Editor\" nennen. Dieses Tool wurde entwickelt, um eine Visualisierung unserer Einheiten zu erstellen. Dies erm\u00f6glicht es den Designern, die Auslastungen der Fahrzeuge, Elemente und Charaktere visuell zu bearbeiten, anstatt die XML-Datei manuell zu bearbeiten, was f\u00fcr Design und Ausgleich noch besser und intuitiver ist, als nur mit einem Men\u00fc oder einem grafikbasierten Editor. Nachdem der Loadout-Editor abgeschlossen ist, hat Ariel mit der Arbeit an einem anderen Tool namens \"Port Editor\" begonnen, einem Tool, das es Designern erm\u00f6glicht, den Inhalt des Ports dynamisch hinzuzuf\u00fcgen, zu l\u00f6schen oder zu bearbeiten.\n\nFlugingenieur John Pritchett hat an der Feinabstimmung des EVA-Systems gearbeitet, um es im Flug viel zuverl\u00e4ssiger und schlauer zu machen. Aber am eindrucksvollsten war John auch derjenige, der an der Entwicklung unseres planetarischen Landeflugmodus mitgewirkt hat, den die Zuschauer auf unserem Livestream vom Dezember 2015 gesehen haben.\n\nDesign\nEin weiteres sehr erfolgreiches Jahr ist f\u00fcr das LA Tech Design Team gekommen und vergangen. Beginnend mit einer neuen F\u00fchrung \u00fcbernahm Kirk Tome die Leitung des Teams, indem er die Rolle des Tech Design Lead \u00fcbernahm. Wir haben gro\u00dfe Erwartungen, 2016 von diesem Team zu kommen, und das Team k\u00f6nnte bei diesem langj\u00e4hrigen Branchenveteranen an der sprichw\u00f6rtlichen Spitze nicht besser aufgehoben sein.\n\nW\u00e4hrend der Entwicklung des 2.0-Patches haben wir mehrere Meilensteine erreicht, die die zuk\u00fcnftige Entwicklung drastisch beeinflussen und unseren Geldgebern, Spielern und Fans spannende neue Inhalte bieten werden. Wir haben das White-Box-Design von zwei Schiffen abgeschlossen: der Xi'an Scout und der MISC Reliant. Die wei\u00dfe Xi'an Scout Box wurde von Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome komplettiert, w\u00e4hrend die wei\u00dfe Reliant Box von unserem Item-Guru Matt Sherman komplettiert wurde. Dar\u00fcber hinaus hat Calix Reneau als zus\u00e4tzlichen Bonus auch das graue Kastendesign des MISC Reliant vervollst\u00e4ndigt, was ihn der Hangarf\u00e4higkeit noch n\u00e4her bringt.\n\nNat\u00fcrlich ist das Gleichgewicht immer von gr\u00f6\u00dfter Bedeutung f\u00fcr das Spielen und so haben Calix und Matt beide eine enorme Menge Zeit damit verbracht, Input aus den Foren, Chatrooms und E-Mails zu sammeln. Der Freelancer ist neu in unserem fliegbaren Schiffsprogramm, und f\u00fcr sein Gaming-Deb\u00fct wurde eine erste Runde an Waffen und Schiffsgesundheit erreicht. Erwarten Sie mehr Saldendurchg\u00e4nge in der Zukunft, wenn die fliegende Schiffsbesatzung ausf\u00fcllt und gegeneinander antreten wird! Jede Ver\u00f6ffentlichung bringt neue Erkenntnisse und da mehr Gameplay und Anpassungen m\u00f6glich werden, helfen uns Ihre Testdaten, ein sich inh\u00e4rent bewegendes Ziel zu identifizieren.\n\nAuf der Seite der Feature-Entwicklung wurde mit 2.0 das EMP-System ver\u00f6ffentlicht, mit dem der Gegner vor\u00fcbergehend deaktiviert werden kann. Die Weiterentwicklung und Evolution des EMP-Systems wurde mit Hilfe von Feedback aus dem Release behandelt, wie z.B. Verbesserungen, wie sich das System auf das HUD und verschiedene Schiffssysteme auswirken wird. Au\u00dferdem hat Randy Vazquez einen ersten Durchgang \u00fcber ein Gameplay-Design f\u00fcr den Bergungsmechaniker abgeschlossen.\n\nW\u00e4hrend der Dezember aufgrund der Feiertage ein kurzer Monat war, haben wir den Grundstein f\u00fcr enorme Fortschritte gelegt.\nh2. Kunst\n\nWir haben es auf der Kunstseite in LA im Monat Dezember 2015 hart gerockt. Wir haben beharrlich daran gearbeitet, uns einigen mit Spannung erwarteten Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen anzun\u00e4hern, wie z.B. dem Einkauf von Kleidung in der PU und der Squadron 42.\n\nAuf der Charakterseite haben wir daran gearbeitet, \"Old Man\" Colton so gro\u00dfartig wie m\u00f6glich zu machen. Du wirst ihn in Geschwader 42 sehen! Wir haben auch fieberhaft einige einsch\u00fcchternde Marines f\u00fcr eine aufregende Aktion vorbereitet. Wir k\u00f6nnen darauf warten, dass du sie kennenlernst! Wir k\u00f6nnen es auch kaum erwarten, dass du die Vielfalt der stylischen Garne entdeckst, die wir mit unseren Freunden bei CGBot f\u00fcr deinen Charakter vorbereitet haben und die bald (hoffentlich!) in einer PU in deiner N\u00e4he zum Kauf angeboten werden!\n\nW\u00e4hrend all diese erstaunlichen Charakterfortschritte voranschreiten, haben wir unsere Schiffe nicht vernachl\u00e4ssigt. Wir sind sehr gespannt, wann wir den Relianten in den Hangar bringen k\u00f6nnen. Mit besonderem Stolz stellen wir uns vor, dass unsere Unterst\u00fctzer zum ersten Mal wieder auf den Pilotensitz zur\u00fcckkehren. (Es gibt zwei Sitze, Seite an Seite. Kannst du dir vorstellen, welcher es ist?) Wir hoffen, dass du genauso von dem Religi\u00f6sen angetan bist wie wir!\n\nUnd das ist Dezember! Wir hatten einen weiteren gro\u00dfartigen Monat mit abgeschlossenen Aufgaben, der zu einer unglaublichen Erfahrung in Star Citizen und Staffel 42 f\u00fchrt. Wir freuen uns auf Ihr Feedback und k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten, mehr zu tun. Wir lassen uns von Ihnen inspirieren und arbeiten so hart wie m\u00f6glich daran, unsere Meilensteine in die Geschichte einzubeziehen. Bis n\u00e4chsten Monat!\n\nHowdy Citizens,\nDer Dezember beendete unser Jahr in gro\u00dfartiger Weise! Wir hatten einen gro\u00dfartigen Durchlauf von Builds, Fixes und PTU-Tests bis zur Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von 2.0.0 im Dezember! Und gleich danach stiegen wir in den 2.1.0-Test ein, um eine schnelle Nachbereitung der PTU zu erm\u00f6glichen. Viele Leute im Studio haben im Dezember sehr hart gearbeitet, um diese Inhalte auf den Live-Server zu bringen, und wir haben viel zu erz\u00e4hlen. Gl\u00fccklicherweise hatten wir auch etwas Zeit zum Entspannen und Auftanken nach den Weihnachtsferien und jetzt arbeitet das Team wieder hart daran, die beste verdammte Weltraumsimulation aller Zeiten zu machen!\n\nHartn\u00e4ckiges Universumsteam\nHallo Leute! Ich hoffe, alle hatten eine fantastische Weihnachtszeit. Jeder im PU-Team hier in Austin bekam eine dringend ben\u00f6tigte Pause, aber nicht bevor er uns ein paar Last-Minute-Aufgaben abgenommen und das Jahr stark beendet hatte.\n\nZun\u00e4chst einmal sind die Gl\u00fcckw\u00fcnsche an Chris Smith und Josh Coons gerichtet, die die lang erwartete \u00dcberarbeitung der Konstellation Andromeda abgeschlossen haben. Dieses Schiff ist wundersch\u00f6n, und wir lieben es, euch Jungs zu sehen, wie ihr es jetzt drau\u00dfen in der Strophe herumfliegt. Chris und Josh sind inzwischen auf den Xi'an Scout \u00fcbergegangen und wollen das Ende dieses Monats abschlie\u00dfen.\n\nDie anderen K\u00fcnstler hier haben den Bau und die Detaillierung der Levski Landezone in Nyx mitgenommen und BHVR bei der Beleuchtung, dem VFX und der technischen Aufsicht unterst\u00fctzt. Mark Skelton gibt weiterhin seine furchtlose F\u00fchrung und Richtung vor, um dazu beizutragen, dass diese Umgebung so fantastisch wie m\u00f6glich aussieht. Im Video von Pupil to Planet haben wir ein wenig gezeigt, wie Delamar aussehen k\u00f6nnte, wenn Sie die Levski Landezone verlassen. Hut ab vor dem Team in Frankfurt, das diese Technologie so schnell in Betrieb genommen hat, aber es stellt eine interessante Herausforderung f\u00fcr Art. Bisher mussten wir uns nur darum k\u00fcmmern, wie die Landezone vom Boden aus zu einer Tageszeit aussieht. Jetzt m\u00fcssen wir nicht nur dar\u00fcber nachdenken, wie eine Landezone aus Augenh\u00f6he aussieht, sondern auch, wie sie aus dem Orbit aussieht! Mark hat es sich zur Aufgabe gemacht, daf\u00fcr zu sorgen, dass diese Landezonen nicht nur aus unterschiedlichen H\u00f6hen, sondern auch zu unterschiedlichen Tageszeiten, in unterschiedlichen Lichtverh\u00e4ltnissen, Schatten und allem, was dazwischen liegt, erstaunlich aussehen. Irgendwann werden sich unsere Planeten wie echte Planeten drehen, und damit kommt ein ganzer Tag\/Nacht-Zyklus, den wir bei der Gestaltung und Kunstleitung ber\u00fccksichtigen m\u00fcssen. Es ist sicherlich eine Herausforderung, aber wir freuen uns darauf.\n\nApropos Sch\u00fcler zum Planeten, vor der Pause verbrachte der Designer Pete \"Weather Wizard\" Mackay einige Zeit damit, mit seiner Wetterzauberei Elemente der Reisegeschwindigkeit festzuhalten. W\u00e4hrend wir nahtlose Durchfl\u00fcge vom Orbit hinunter zur Landezone machten, stellten wir fest, dass die Geschwindigkeit, mit der sich das Schiff n\u00e4herte, etwas daneben lag. Wir wollten, dass sich diese Ann\u00e4herungsgeschwindigkeit schnell anf\u00fchlt, aber ohne sich l\u00e4cherlich zu f\u00fchlen. Pete verbrachte einige Zeit damit, Berechnungen durchzuf\u00fchren, um die beste Ann\u00e4herungsgeschwindigkeit zu bestimmen, um das richtige Gef\u00fchl zu bekommen. Er optimiert immer noch die Parameter, um es perfekt zu machen, aber er sollte es bald festhalten.\n\nVor kurzem hat sich unser Designteam auf zus\u00e4tzliche Landezonen in der PU konzentriert, insbesondere auf die Aufteilung aller unserer Landezonen in die Kategorien Held, kleine Sandkiste und Raumstation. Jede Landezone ist extrem detailliert, und damit verbunden ist viel Zeit und Ressourcenaufwand, um sie auf das Qualit\u00e4tsniveau zu bringen, das wir anstreben. Aus diesem Grund schalten wir leicht und verschieben unseren Zeitplan, um MEHR Landepl\u00e4tze in k\u00fcrzerer Zeit fertig zu stellen, was bedeutet, dass jeder nicht nur effizient, sondern auch clever sein muss. Wir konzentrieren uns immer noch auf Heldenstandorte wie Hurston und Crusader, aber wir priorisieren auch kleinere Landezonen wie Sherman und Odyssa und Raumstationen wie Minenau\u00dfenposten und Forschungsstationen. Jeder dieser Orte wird seine eigenen Sehensw\u00fcrdigkeiten und Gesch\u00e4fte haben, und das erfordert viel gestalterische Aufmerksamkeit von Rob Reininger und Evan Manning.\n\nUnser Animationsteam konvertiert und integriert weiterhin die Rohdaten der Animation, die wir im vergangenen Jahr f\u00fcr die PU erfasst haben. Die Animationen der medizinischen Einheit sind fast vollst\u00e4ndig, und die Animationen des Nachtclubs sind nicht weit entfernt. W\u00e4hrend dieses Prozesses haben wir Probleme mit weiblichen Fortbewegungs- und Automatenmetriken identifiziert und gel\u00f6st. Unsere Schiffsanimateure halfen dabei, den S\u00e4bel so vorzubereiten, dass er f\u00fcr den Hangar bereit ist und den Freelancer zum Fliegen bringt. Unser n\u00e4chster Schwerpunkt wird die Forschung und Entwicklung auf dem so genannten Personality Overlay System sein. Lead-Animator Bryan Brewer wird mit einem Programmierer zusammenarbeiten, um Animationen je nach der Pers\u00f6nlichkeit eines NSCs, wie sie vom Design festgelegt wurde, miteinander zu kombinieren. Dieses System w\u00fcrde es den Benutzern auch erm\u00f6glichen, die Leerlaufanimation auszuw\u00e4hlen, die am besten zu ihnen passt, und zwar aus einer Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che zur Charakteranpassung, um eine Vielfalt an Spieleranimationen zu schaffen. Wir sind begeistert von diesem System, denn so k\u00f6nnen wir die Hunderte von Animationen f\u00fcr PU und Player besser und flexibler nutzen.\n\nAuf der Networking-Seite verbrachten Jason Ely und Tom Sawyer einen Gro\u00dfteil ihrer Zeit vor der Pause damit, das Party System auf die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von 2.0.0.0 vorzubereiten. Es gibt noch viel zu tun und diese Verbesserungen werden auch im neuen Jahr im Mittelpunkt stehen. Wenn Sie also der Meinung sind, dass es noch ein wenig rau ist, halten Sie bitte durch - wir werden es unterst\u00fctzen. Wir wissen, dass es ein nat\u00fcrlicher Wunsch nach Multicrew-Spiel ist, und es muss irgendwo beginnen! In der Zwischenzeit haben wir f\u00fcr diejenigen, die einen Million Mile High Club besitzen, auch einige Zeit damit verbracht, Zugang zu erhalten und laden ein, sich ebenfalls auf diese Umgebung einzustellen. Wir haben auch mit Hilfe von Jeff Zhu einige Fortschritte bei der Persistenz gemacht. In diesem neuen Jahr wird der Fokus wieder auf dieses wichtige Feature gerichtet, und es werden neue Ressourcen eingestellt, um diese Funktionalit\u00e4t ein f\u00fcr alle Mal auszuschalten. Bald werden wir die erste Iteration von wirklich persistenten Daten in den H\u00e4nden der Spieler mit der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Shopping v1 sehen.\n\nLive-Betrieb\nQA\nF\u00fcr den Monat Dezember konzentrierte sich die QS haupts\u00e4chlich auf das Testen von SC Alpha 2.0.0.0 und SC Alpha 2.1.0. Nach 14 Implementierungen (!) im Public Test Universe (PTU) in sehr kurzer Zeit waren wir sehr erfreut, SC Alpha 2.0.0.0 endlich in die Live-Umgebung zu bringen. Unser Dank gilt den PTU-Testern, die mit Begeisterung, Liebe zum Detail und in Echtzeit mit uns zusammenarbeiten, um 2.0 aus der PTU herauszuholen und in die H\u00e4nde aller zu gelangen!\n\nDas w\u00e4re ein guter Ort gewesen, um einen Urlaub zu beginnen, aber wir haben dort nicht aufgeh\u00f6rt. Wir haben sofort mit dem Testen von SC Alpha 2.1.0 begonnen, wiederum mit Hilfe unserer treuen und gesch\u00e4tzten PTU-Tester. Wir hatten die Hoffnung gehabt, 2.1.0 vor der Urlaubszeit in unserer Live-Umgebung zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen, aber nach 4 Eins\u00e4tzen in der PTU hatten wir leider immer noch einige Stabilit\u00e4tsprobleme mit den zus\u00e4tzlichen Inhalten. Die Entscheidung wurde getroffen, 2.1.0 \u00fcber die Feiertage auf der PTU zu behalten, aber es steht jedem offen, den neuen fliegbaren Freelancer zu testen.\n\nIm Laufe des Monats haben wir vierzehn 2.0.0.0-Builds f\u00fcr die PTU bereitgestellt, eine Bereitstellung von 2.0.0 to live und vier 2.1.0.0-Builds f\u00fcr die PTU. Die Unterst\u00fctzung dieser Implementierungen war ein bedeutendes Unterfangen. F\u00fcr jeden Einsatz w\u00fcrde das Team jeden Aspekt des Spiels testen und m\u00f6gliche schwerwiegende Probleme in der Produktion ansprechen. Das Team w\u00fcrde auch Starter-\/Patch-Tests durchf\u00fchren und Patch-Notizen erstellen. Nach dem Einsatz \u00fcberwacht das Team das Feedback der Community.\n\nNach jedem Einsatz sammelte Jeffrey Pease Stabilit\u00e4tskennzahlen f\u00fcr Server- und Clientabst\u00fcrze und stellte einen umfassenden Bericht f\u00fcr die CIG-Leitung bereit. Jeffrey Pease hat in seinen verschiedenen Rollen in der Qualit\u00e4tssicherung eine erstaunliche Arbeit geleistet, und ich freue mich, Ihnen mitteilen zu k\u00f6nnen, dass er offiziell in eine Entwicklungsrolle als LiveOps-Techniker \u00fcbergegangen ist. Herzlichen Gl\u00fcckwunsch an Bearded-CIG!\n\nEs gab auch andere Bewegungen in unseren Reihen. Tyler Witkin, den Sie vielleicht als Zyloh-CIG kennen, wurde auf die Stufe Senior QA bef\u00f6rdert. Tyler wird in seiner neuen Position eine aktivere F\u00fchrungsrolle im Team \u00fcbernehmen. Zus\u00e4tzlich zu seinen normalen QS-Aufgaben hat Tyler auch gute Arbeit geleistet, um die Community auf dem Laufenden zu halten, mit regelm\u00e4\u00dfigen Updates \u00fcber Discord und verschiedene Social Media Angebote. Tyler hat auch zus\u00e4tzliche vom Marketing angeforderte Screenshots und Videos erhalten, die bei verschiedenen Updates auf der RSI-Website verwendet wurden.\n\nBeim Testen von 2.0.0 und 2.1.0 arbeitete das Team sehr eng mit den Ingenieuren Clive Johnson, George Kidd, Paul Reindell und anderen Entwicklern zusammen, um umfangreiche Leistungstests durchzuf\u00fchren, einschlie\u00dflich KI-Spawning, Server-Bottle-Necking und Server- oder Client-Crash. Melissa Estrada hat die Entwicklung der Automatisierung fortgesetzt und eng mit dem Ingenieur Francesco Roccucci zusammengearbeitet, um das KI-Verhalten eingehend zu testen.\nTodd Raffray und Robert Gaither haben daf\u00fcr gesorgt, dass Kontakte, das Partysystem, der Million Mile High Club und ArcCorp weiterhin angemessen getestet wurden. Andrew Rexroth testete weiterhin die gesamte FPS-Funktionalit\u00e4t und schickte jeden Tag einen Bericht, der auf neue oder besonders schwerwiegende Probleme hinwies.\n\nUnsere Informationsspezialistin Marissa Meissner hat daf\u00fcr gesorgt, dass bei jedem Einsatz alle Fehlerbehebungen \u00fcberpr\u00fcft und in die Patch-Notizen aufgenommen werden. Marissa hat sehr eng mit Will Leverett im Game Support zusammengearbeitet, um Messaging und Genauigkeit von Werbe-E-Mails und PTU-Einladungen zu verbessern und mehrere FAQs zu aktualisieren, um den Kundenservice zu unterst\u00fctzen. Marissa arbeitet auch mit unserem Marketing Manager Vincent Gallopain zusammen, um sicherzustellen, dass die Marketingmaterialien korrekt sind. Marissa hat auch unsere interne Wissensdatenbank mit einem neuen Workflow zur Meldung von Leistungsproblemen sowie routinem\u00e4\u00dfigen Updates von veralteten Komponenten und Produktionseigentum bestimmter Schiffshersteller aktualisiert.\n\nZus\u00e4tzlich zum Testen hat die QA auch die Aufgabe \u00fcbernommen, der CIG-F\u00fchrung Feedback zu verschiedenen Aspekten des Spiels zu geben. Andrew Hesse hat sehr detaillierte Berichte \u00fcber das Schiffsverhalten erstellt, die unseren Designern bei ihren Versuchen, Schiffsflug und -kampf in Einklang zu bringen, sehr n\u00fctzlich waren.\n\nIm Januar wird QA weiterhin 2.1.0 auf seine unvermeidliche Bereitstellung in der Live-Umgebung testen und zeitnah mit dem Testen von 2.2.0 beginnen und sich bereits als sehr aktives neues Jahr erweisen. Wir sehen uns im Vers!\n\nSpielunterst\u00fctzung\nUnser (erstaunlicher) Dezember war alles \u00fcber 2.0 und 2.1!\n\nEs w\u00e4re leicht zu \u00fcbersehen, wie gut 2.0 durch die Dev-Pipeline zu Live gegangen ist, denn aus Prozesssicht lief es so reibungslos! Normalerweise dauert es mehrere Monate, bis eine solche Hauptversion vom ersten Build zu Live gelangt, aber wir haben alles innerhalb weniger Wochen geschafft, zum gr\u00f6\u00dften Teil dank des Game Supports (und anderer Teams), der mit der Community zusammenarbeitete und uns ausgezeichnete Arbeit geleistet hat, um uns zu helfen, gr\u00f6\u00dfere Fehler und Spielungleichgewichte zu identifizieren, die wir durch den Issue Council getestet und schnell in die Dev-Pipeline aufgenommen haben. Es war wirklich ein Quantensprung in Bezug auf die Bearbeitungszeit und die Aktualisierungsgeschwindigkeit, was den Wert der gesamten Zeit zeigt, die DevOps und Produktion im vergangenen Jahr damit verbracht haben, die Entwicklungs-, Bau- und Patch-Pipelines neu zu gestalten. Manchmal, f\u00fcr einen Au\u00dfenstehenden, mag es das Gef\u00fchl geben, dass der Fortschritt im Spiel langsam ist, aber sobald die Vorteile einsetzen, zahlt es sich wirklich aus, und wir denken, dass der schnelle Patch-Zyklus, der Ihnen im Dezember 2.0 brachte, es beweist!\n\nZum Thema PTU: Wir verstehen, dass es Verwirrung dar\u00fcber gab, wie PTU-Tester f\u00fcr geschlossene Testkampagnen ausgew\u00e4hlt wurden. Es ist offensichtlich nicht unser Ziel, ein gewisses Ma\u00df an Verwirrung oder Frustration zu erzeugen, und wir erkennen VOLL und ganz, wie viel Spieler in den ersten Testrunden dabei sein wollen. Allerdings geht es bei der PTU nicht um Privilegien oder fr\u00fchen Zugriff - die Mission der PTU besteht darin, eine Freigabe auf eine Qualit\u00e4t zu bringen, die ausreicht, damit der Einsatz leben kann, je schneller, desto besser. Im Idealfall ist ein PTU-Tester nicht jemand, der \"First in Line\" f\u00fcr neue Inhalte sein will, sondern ein echter und engagierter Geldgeber, der bereit ist, sich neben QA, Game Support und den verschiedenen Operations-Teams daf\u00fcr einzusetzen, diese neuen Inhalte an den Rest der Community weiterzugeben und die Zeit, die er f\u00fcr die Fehlersuche ben\u00f6tigt, zu verk\u00fcrzen.\n\nObwohl wir betonen m\u00f6chten, dass es sich nicht um einen \"fr\u00fchen Zugriff auf Inhalte\", sondern um ein tats\u00e4chliches Testen handelt, treibt diese Motivation unsere laufenden \u00dcberarbeitungen und Neubewertungen des PTU-Zugriffsauswahlverfahrens weiter voran.\n\n\nHerausgabe der Ratsbeteiligung PTU-Beteiligung PTU-Beteiligung\nWir haben die Spieler nach diesen beiden Kriterien bewertet, und sollten wir die Notwendigkeit einer geschlossenen Testphase haben, werden wir unsere Spieler einladen, die in diesen Bereichen am meisten geholfen haben. Einige PTU-Releases sind f\u00fcr jedermann zug\u00e4nglich, aber in den sehr fr\u00fchen Phasen eines Major-Release - insbesondere wenn es technisch schwierig ist - werden wir dar\u00fcber nachdenken, den Zugriff einzuschr\u00e4nken, bis ein angemesseneres Ma\u00df an Stabilit\u00e4t erreicht werden kann. (Denken Sie daran, dass beim Testen verschiedene Probleme und Fehler unterschiedliche Ursachen haben k\u00f6nnen, und manchmal sind kleinere, fokussierte Tests das, was ben\u00f6tigt wird, und manchmal ist ein gr\u00f6\u00dferer Pool von Testern f\u00fcr Stresstests erforderlich. Die Zugriffszahlen k\u00f6nnen von Release Kandidat zu Release Kandidat variieren, je nachdem, welche Art von Test am n\u00fctzlichsten ist.\n\nWir freuen uns \u00fcber die coolen Dinge, die im Januar auf uns zukommen werden, und wir freuen uns darauf, mit Ihnen zusammenzuarbeiten, um es zu schaffen.\n\nIT\/Betrieb\nFrohes neues Jahr vom IT-Team der CIG! Der Monat Dezember brachte uns viele neue Herausforderungen und noch mehr Erfolge. Vieles, worauf sich die IT-Abteilung am Ende des Jahres konzentriert, ist die langweilige Verl\u00e4ngerung von Softwarelizenzen, Software- und Benutzerkontenaudits sowie die interne Systemwartung. Im Dezember dieses Jahres war das Team auch stark an der Unterst\u00fctzung bei der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung und bei den Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen 2.0 & 2.1 beteiligt. Ein Teil des Teams unterst\u00fctzte das Projekt durch Netzwerk- und Speicheroptimierungen, um die Leistung des Build-Systems weiter zu verbessern und so mehr Builds pro Tag f\u00fcr interne Tests zu liefern. Der Umzug der Builds zwischen den Studios f\u00e4llt auch auf die IT, so dass diese Dienste an ihre Grenzen gesto\u00dfen wurden, so dass wir noch mehr Bereiche finden konnten, in denen wir uns auf die Leistung einstellen konnten. Die QA-Teams ziehen den ganzen Tag \u00fcber viele Builds, so viele, dass sie tats\u00e4chlich anfangen k\u00f6nnen, das Netzwerk in bestimmten Bereichen zu belasten, so dass neue Optimierungen hinzugef\u00fcgt wurden, wo n\u00f6tig, um die QA dabei zu unterst\u00fctzen, Builds so schnell wie m\u00f6glich auf Maschinen herunterzuladen. Schlie\u00dflich konnte das IT-Team zus\u00e4tzliche Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr LiveOps-Publikationen bieten, indem es den Datenverkehr \u00fcber den gesamten anderen ausgehenden Datenverkehr priorisierte, denn bei der Anzahl der Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen z\u00e4hlt jede Minute.\n\nLive-Ops\nDer Dezember war vielleicht der produktivste Monat aller Zeiten f\u00fcr das LiveOps-Team. Da die Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen fast jeden Tag im Monat stattfinden, wurde es notwendig, die Ver\u00f6ffentlichungsfenster drastisch zu reduzieren. Dies ist die Zeit, die ben\u00f6tigt wird, um die Server, unterst\u00fctzenden Systeme bereitzustellen, alle Patches vorzubereiten und an die Edge-Netzwerke zu verteilen. Die Verk\u00fcrzung dieser Zeit erm\u00f6glicht einen schnelleren Zugriff auf neue Versionen durch die Backer, aber ebenso wichtig ist, dass wir schneller Feedback an das Entwicklungsteam erhalten. Bei der Entwicklung der Builds wurde deutlich, dass wir doppelte Umgebungen erstellen mussten, um eine Ver\u00f6ffentlichung vorzubereiten, ohne den aktuell laufenden Dienst f\u00fcr 4-6 Stunden herunterfahren zu m\u00fcssen.\n\nAhmed wurde diesen Monat zum echten Rockstar, als er alle Duplikat-Umgebungen ausbaute und den Publishing-Prozess modifizierte. Basierend auf seiner Arbeit konnten wir das Ver\u00f6ffentlichungsfenster komplett reduzieren, indem wir Lastausgleiche einfach von einer Umgebung in eine andere umwandelten. Zus\u00e4tzlich f\u00fcgte Ahmed eine Reihe zus\u00e4tzlicher Server hinzu, um zus\u00e4tzliches Logging zu erm\u00f6glichen, was letztendlich entscheidend f\u00fcr die massiven Stabilit\u00e4tsverbesserungen im Dezember war. Ahmed hatte auch eine tolle Zeit mit den Publishern w\u00e4hrend des Monats. Wir sahen, wie Chatrooms jedes Mal aufleuchteten, wenn er online kam, weil die Geldgeber, die uns bei der PTU halfen, sich daran gew\u00f6hnt haben, ihn jedes Mal auftauchen zu sehen, wenn wir eine weitere Ver\u00f6ffentlichung abgeschlossen haben.\n\nDas LiveOps-Team hat auch die internen Entwicklungs-, Test- und Berichtstools erheblich verbessert. Das Build-System wurde mehrfach verbessert, um die Buildzeiten zu verk\u00fcrzen, darunter ein Fix, der es uns erm\u00f6glichte, noch mehr Rechenleistung als bisher zu nutzen. Die Werkzeuge zur Sammlung von Quellcode f\u00fcr die Kompilierung wurden ebenfalls verbessert, ebenso wie fr\u00fchzeitige Berichte \u00fcber stundenlange Reduzierungszeiten unter Worst-Case-Szenarien.\n\nDer Abschluss des Jahres 2015 mit einem so fantastischen Monat macht die Freude auf 2016 umso spannender.\n\nGr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger,\nDer Dezember war vielleicht ein kurzer Monat, aber es war nicht ruhig! Wir hatten bei Foundry 42 UK viel zu tun, wobei Teammitglieder aus allen Disziplinen an dem Projekt beteiligt waren. Lasst uns herausfinden, was sie vorhatten!\n\nVFX\nIm Dezember konzentrierte sich das VFX-Team Mike, Adam, Caleb und Sean auf einen flugbereiten Effektpass f\u00fcr den MISC Freelancer und AEGS Vanguard. Ein flugfertiger Pass beinhaltet sowohl innere als auch \u00e4u\u00dfere Schadenszust\u00e4nde (einschlie\u00dflich einer \"Totenmaske\"), Triebwerke und Waffen\/Gegenma\u00dfnahmen.\n\nWir haben auch die Umgebungseffekte f\u00fcr die Alpha 2.0 Crusader-Karte weiter verbessert. Meistens war dies Politur\/Optimierung, um an einige Beleuchtungsoptimierungen anzukn\u00fcpfen. Wir haben jedoch auch neue Luftschleusenentl\u00fcftungseffekte hinzugef\u00fcgt, so dass es einen deutlichen visuellen Unterschied zwischen Druckbeaufschlagung und Druckentlastung gibt.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich konzentrierten wir uns auf eine \"Post-2.0 Release\" Datenbereinigung. Dies bedeutete zum gr\u00f6\u00dften Teil das Entfernen und Reorganisieren unserer Partikelbibliotheken und Texturordner. Nicht die reizvollste Aufgabe der Welt - eigentlich ziemlich m\u00fchsam -, aber dennoch notwendig, denn sie wird uns helfen, 2016 den Boden unter den F\u00fc\u00dfen zu erreichen!\n\nRequisiten\nAls 2015 zu Ende ging, gaben das Requisitenteam, Ben, Dan und unsere Freunde von Behaviour Interactive, den letzten Schliff f\u00fcr die Inneneinrichtung der Casaba-L\u00e4den. Der Laden ist nun komplett in Sachen Requisitenarbeit und wir warten nur noch darauf, dass der Vorrat von unseren Bekleidungsherstellern kommt! Es war ein interessantes Umfeld zum Anziehen, die Rolle des Ladenbauers zu \u00fcbernehmen und sich an eine Markenrichtlinie zu halten, um dieses Erlebnis im Einzelhandel wirklich zu verkaufen.\n\nDie Goldstandard-Komponenten liegen dort bei 95%. Sie brauchen nur einen letzten Durchgang \u00fcber die Materialien und dann sind unsere ersten beiden bereit. Die Arbeiten am n\u00e4chsten Satz haben in dieser Woche ebenfalls begonnen, so dass wir bis Ende des Monats vier haben sollten. Wir arbeiten eng mit den Technikern zusammen und sie sind dabei, die Liste der Unterkomponenten zu definieren, die aus unserer Sicht den letzten Teil des Puzzles bildet.\n\nDer Rest des Teams konzentriert sich nun auf unsere Low-Tech-Kernst\u00fctze, die zur Vorbereitung auf alle neuen Umgebungen im Jahr 2016 entwickelt wurde.\n\nIch habe mich darauf konzentriert, einen soliden Backlog \/ Tracking von allem, was wir derzeit im Spiel haben, zu bekommen, die schiere Anzahl der Assets wird beeindruckend und ich brauchte einen schnellen Weg, um genau verfolgen zu k\u00f6nnen, wohin jedes Asset f\u00fchrt, und auch in der Lage zu sein, die Assets schnell zu filtern und zu suchen, so dass wir, wenn neue Anfragen hereinkommen, sie gegen\u00fcber dem, was wir bereits im Spiel haben, priorisieren k\u00f6nnen. Nach der Fertigstellung sollten wir an einem wirklich guten Ort sein, um alles herauszupumpen, was wir brauchen, um die Umgebung zum Leben zu erwecken. Dies ist aus Sicht der Spieleleistung wirklich wichtig, denn die schiere Anzahl von Assets, Modellen, Animationen und Geometrien im Spiel bedeutet, dass, wenn Sie dies nicht intelligent tun, schlechte Dinge mit Ihren Ladezeiten und FPS passieren k\u00f6nnen. Es mag nicht nach aufregender Arbeit klingen, aber wenn Sie das Tempo Ihres Spielerlebnisses beibehalten wollen, ist es genauso wichtig wie viele andere Dinge!\n\nEndlich haben wir hier im britischen Studio einen neuen Mitarbeiter, das Requisiteteam hier ist jetzt bis zu drei! Wir sind noch auf der Suche und haben einige starke Kandidaten, also werden wir hoffentlich bald wieder unsere Zahlen erh\u00f6hen!\n\nSchiffe\nDas Schiffskunstteam unter der Leitung von Nathan k\u00e4mpfte im Dezember hart, um dir w\u00e4hrend der festlichen Pause neue gl\u00e4nzende Schiffe zum Spielen zu besorgen, also hoffen wir, dass es sich gelohnt hat!\n\nNeil, Peter, Robin, Jose und Jan haben es geschafft, den neuen und \u00fcberarbeiteten Freelancer Kunstflug im Au\u00dfen- und Innenbereich f\u00fcr unsere 2.1 PTU-Version vorzubereiten, und Paul und Ian haben Nathan auch bei der Fertigstellung der endg\u00fcltigen Kunst f\u00fcr den S\u00e4bel und die Avantgarde (einschlie\u00dflich Schadenszust\u00e4nde f\u00fcr letztere) unterst\u00fctzt.\n\nViele von euch werden sich freuen zu erfahren, dass das Exterieur und Interieur von Starfarer gut im Gange ist, wobei Matt, Colin, Joe, Phil und Jay gute Fortschritte machen, so dass wir uns darauf freuen werden, das sp\u00e4ter in diesem Jahr an euch zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen und uns auch darauf freuen, im Jahr 2016 viele weitere coole und wunderbare Star Citizen Raumschiffe zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen.\n\nKonzepte\nPaul und das Konzeptteam waren flei\u00dfig bei der Arbeit, der Javelin hatte ein wenig Nip-and-Tuck mit einigen Umbauten, um ihn mit der Marke Aegis in Einklang zu bringen.\n\nSarah hat sich tapfer durch die vielen ben\u00f6tigten Requisiten gek\u00e4mpft und sowohl an High-Tech- als auch an Low-Tech-Requisiten-Designstilen gearbeitet und an der Verfestigung der Designsprache gearbeitet, sollten wir sp\u00e4ter einen Teil der Arbeit auslagern m\u00fcssen.\n\nJort hat seine Weihnachtsmagie an verschiedenen Innenr\u00e4umen der Raumstation, Dressing-P\u00e4ssen und zus\u00e4tzlichen Konzeptarbeiten gearbeitet, um zu definieren, was wir brauchen, um diese Bereiche lebendig zu machen.\n\nStu hat zus\u00e4tzliche H\u00fclsen f\u00fcr den ARGO RUV ausgearbeitet, die wir f\u00fcr SQ42 ben\u00f6tigen, und Gary hat den Xian Scout fertig gestellt und ist wirklich in die Stadt gegangen, um weitere Innenr\u00e4ume f\u00fcr die Shubin Mining Facility zu definieren.\n\nCharaktere\nUnser Zwei-Mann-Team hat sich mit der neuen und verbesserten Pipeline besch\u00e4ftigt, in der die Arbeit an den Randall Graves von Jon (die Sie vielleicht im Livestream gesehen haben), sowohl High-Poly-Modelle als auch Low-Poly-Modelle, sowie einige Arbeiten an der Uniform der weiblichen Offiziere, durchgef\u00fchrt wurde. Als guten Test f\u00fcr Michal, unseren Junior-Charakterk\u00fcnstler, haben wir ihm die Aufgabe gestellt, eine Steinstatue zu formen, die f\u00fcr eine unserer zuk\u00fcnftigen Ebenen ben\u00f6tigt wird, und ich muss sagen, die Ergebnisse waren gro\u00dfartig!\n\nIn-Game-Animation\nUisdean Ross und das britische Animationsteam setzen unsere Bem\u00fchungen um die FPS-KI und die Spielmechanik fort. Die Implementierung der Player-Cover-Animation wird von Colin und Dan fortgef\u00fchrt und wird verfeinert und \u00fcberpr\u00fcft. Dies ist ein laufender Prozess, der eng mit dem Programmierungsteam zusammenarbeitet.\n\nDas Verhalten der KI-Abdeckung durchl\u00e4uft derzeit einen ersten Durchlauf von Spencer, und wir stellen ein Basisset f\u00fcr das KI-Programmierteam zur Verf\u00fcgung, das dann weiter bearbeitet wird. Auch das Bewegungs-Set ohne Waffe (unbewaffnet) sowie die Stopps und Starts werden verbessert.\n\nDesign\nDie Weihnachtspause ist vorbei und wir sind f\u00fcr 2016 wieder in Aktion. Wir haben in diesem Jahr in Gro\u00dfbritannien so viel zu tun, dass jeder Tag z\u00e4hlt!\n\nDer UI-Direktor Zane und der Lead Systems Designer Karl arbeiten an einem vereinfachten HUD UI, um die Lernkurve bei der Interaktion mit Ihren Schiffssystemen auszugleichen. Alle fortgeschrittenen Glocken und Pfeifen werden auch weiterhin f\u00fcr die Hardcore-Spieler da sein. Sie arbeiten auch mit dem Engineering UI-Team zusammen, um ein funktionales EVA-HUD zu implementieren, mit dem die Spieler alle Informationen erhalten, die sie ben\u00f6tigen, w\u00e4hrend sie eine Zero-G-Bewegung erleben.\n\nDas Live-Team von Luke, Danny und Matt h\u00f6rt sich Ihr Feedback an und l\u00f6st Probleme mit dem aktuellen Live-Build, um es stabiler und lustiger zu machen. Sie pr\u00fcfen auch weitere Iterationen zu einigen der grundlegenderen Designimplementierungen, die weitere Arbeiten erfordern, wie beispielsweise EMP. Die Synchronisation mit dem Zeitplan f\u00fcr die Schiffsfreigabe wird zu einem Schwerpunkt dieses Teams, um sicherzustellen, dass wir die Designfunktionalit\u00e4t abdecken, die f\u00fcr die verschiedenen Schiffe, wie z.B. Frachtmaschinen, erforderlich ist.\n\nDas Tech Design Team unter der Leitung von John hat sich in den letzten Monaten vergr\u00f6\u00dfert und ist nun gro\u00df genug, um sich wirklich auf den Weg zu machen.","zh_CN":"Greetings Citizens,\n2015 was quite a year for Star Citizen! Since the launch of Alpha 2.0, the team has been glued to their monitors watching backers stream and play and adventure in the first corner of the universe we\u2019re building. There\u2019s plenty of work still to be done, but we\u2019re thrilled to have a version of the game available for play that (we believe) shows the project\u2019s true potential. We hope you\u2019re enjoying 2.0 (or 2.1, if you\u2019re a fan of the PTU!)\u2026 there\u2019s plenty more to see in the coming days! But before we look ahead, we\u2019d like to look back at what everyone accomplished in December. Cloud Imperium Games closed for the holidays, allowing our developers some much needed rest and family time\u2026 but that doesn\u2019t mean we didn\u2019t make a lot of progress. Read on for our December monthly report to find out just what everyone was up to\u2026\n\nHappy New Year everyone! We hope you had a great month because we are really excited by what we got finished before the calendar turned over to 2016. We tackled some huge milestones such as the new ItemSystem, Loadout Editor, Character Clothing and more. Dig in to the information below to read about even more accomplishments from the LA studio.\n\nEngineering\nOn the Engineering side, our primary objective was to provide as much stability to the 2.0 release as possible. As new builds of the PTU were released over the course of December, the stability in each iteration drastically improved. Stability will always be one of our top objectives as providing a reliable and exciting experience is a prime directive.\n\nLead Engineer Paul Reindell and Engineer Mark Abent have been aggressively working on what we\u2019re calling \u201cItemSystem 2.0\u201d. This system will allow greater control over the itemization on the back end. The first iteration has been integrated into our development code and we are starting to see the preliminary benefits of this new system that\u2019s really exciting our developers.\n\nAssociate Engineer Chad Zamzow was responsible for implementing the various disabled states for targets struck by the EMP weapon currently employed on the Avenger Warlock. Further refinements will include flickering lights and possibly arcs of electricity across the control panels of the ship. So keep an eye out for the tiny details this new weapon effect will be adding to the game.\n\nAriel Xu created a new tool we are calling the \u201cLoadout Editor\u201d. This tool is designed to create a visualization of our entities. This will allow the designers to visually edit the loadouts of the Vehicles, Items, and Character rather than manually editing the XML file, which is even better and more intuitive for design and balancing than just having a menu or chart-based editor. Now that the Loadout Editor is completed, Ariel has started working on another tool called the \u201cPort Editor,\u201d a tool which allows designers to dynamically Add\/Delete\/Edit the contents of the port.\n\nFlight engineer John Pritchett has been working on fine-tuning the EVA system to make it much more reliable and canny during flight. But most impressively, John was also the individual who helped create our planetary landing flight mode that viewers saw on our December 2015 livestream.\n\nDesign\nAnother very successful year has come and gone for the LA Tech Design team. Starting with new leadership, Kirk Tome took the reins of the team by accepting the role of Tech Design Lead. We have great expectations to come from this team in 2016 and the team could not be in better hands with this tenured industry veteran at the proverbial helm.\n\nDuring the development of the 2.0 patch, we reached several milestones that will drastically impact future development and provide exciting new content to our backers, players, and fans. We completed the white-box design of two ships; the Xi\u2019an Scout and the MISC Reliant. The Xi\u2019an Scout white box was completed by Tech Design Lead Kirk Tome, while the Reliant white box was completed by our item guru, Matt Sherman. Furthermore, as an added bonus, Calix Reneau also completed the grey box tech design of the MISC Reliant, bringing it that much closer to being hangar-ready.\n\nOf course, balance is always a paramount for gaming and thus Calix and Matt have both spent a tremendous amount of time gathering input from the forums, chat rooms, and emails. The Freelancer is new to our flyable ship lineup, and a first round of weapon and ship health balance was achieved for its gaming debut. Expect more balance passes in the future as the flyable ship lineup fills out and go up against each other! Every release brings new insights and as more gameplay and customizations become possible, your testing data helps us home in on an inherently moving target.\n\nOn the feature development-side, 2.0 saw the release of the EMP system designed to temporarily disable your opponent. Further development and evolution of the EMP system was addressed using feedback from the release, such as improvements on how the system will affect the HUD, and various ship systems. Also, Randy Vazquez has completed a first pass on a gameplay design for the Salvage mechanic.\n\nWhile December was a short month due to the holidays, we have laid the groundwork for a tremendous amount of progress.\nh2. Art\n\nWe rocked it hard on the art side in LA during the month of December in 2015. We\u2019ve been working tenaciously to build closer towards some anxiously anticipated releases, such as clothes shopping in the PU, and Squadron 42.\n\nOn the character side we\u2019ve been working on making \u201cOld Man\u201d Colton as great as he can be. You\u2019ll be seeing him in Squadron 42! We\u2019ve also been feverishly prepping some intimidating marines for some exciting action. We can wait for you to meet them! We also can\u2019t wait for you to dig on the variety of stylish threads that we\u2019ve been preparing for your character with our friends at CGBot, available soon (we hope!) for purchase in a PU near you!\n\nWhile all this amazing character progress has been moving forward, we haven\u2019t been neglecting our ships. We\u2019re very much stoked for when we will be able to roll out the Reliant to the hangar. It\u2019s with special pride that we imagine our supporters easing back into the pilot seat for the first time. (There are two seats, side by side. Can you guess which one it is?) We hope you\u2019re as pumped about the Reliant as we are!\n\nAnd that\u2019s December! We had another great month of finished tasks that is leading to an incredible experience in both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We\u2019re looking forward to your feedback and can\u2019t wait to get more done. We\u2019re inspired by you and work as hard as we can to make our milestones a part of history. See you next month!\n\nHowdy Citizens,\nDecember brought our year to a close in grand fashion! We had a great run of builds, fixes, and PTU testing leading up to the launch of 2.0.0 in December! And right after that we jumped into 2.1.0 testing for a fast follow up on PTU. Many people in the studio worked very hard in December to bring this content to the live server, and we have a lot to share. Thankfully we also got some time to relax and recharge a bit after the Christmas holiday and now the team is back hard at work on making the best damn space sim ever!\n\nPersistent Universe Team\nHowdy folks! Hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. Everyone on the PU team here in Austin got a much needed break, but not before knocking some last minute tasks off our plate and finishing the year strong.\n\nTo start, congratulations are in order to Chris Smith and Josh Coons, who finished up the much-awaited revamp to the Constellation Andromeda. This ship is gorgeous, and we love seeing you guys flying it around now out in the \u2018verse. Chris and Josh have since moved on to the Xi\u2019an Scout, and aim to finish that up later this month.\n\nThe other artists here have been trucking along on building and detailing the Levski landing zone in Nyx, supporting BHVR in providing lighting, VFX, and technical oversight. Mark Skelton continues to provide his fearless leadership and direction in helping to make this environment look as amazing as possible. In the Pupil to Planet video, we showed off a bit of how Delamar might look as you depart the Levski landing zone. Hats off to the team in Frankfurt for getting this tech up and running so quickly, but it does create an interesting challenge for Art. Before now, all we have really had to worry about is how the landing zone looks from the ground at a single time of day. Now we\u2019re having to think about not just what a landing zone looks like from eye-level, but how it looks from orbit! Mark has his work cut out for him making sure that these landing zones look amazing not just from varying heights but varying times of day as well, in varying degrees of light, shadow, and everything in between. Eventually our planets will rotate just like real planets, and with that comes a full day\/night cycle that we have to bear in mind when designing and art directing. It certainly is a challenge but we are looking forward to it.\n\nSpeaking of Pupil to Planet, before the break designer Pete \u201cWeather Wizard\u201c Mackay spent some time using his weather wizardry to nail down elements of cruise speed. While we were doing seamless fly-throughs from orbit down to the landing zone we noticed that the speed at which the ship approached was a bit off. We wanted this approach speed to feel fast but without feeling ludicrous. Pete spent some time making calculations to determine the best approach velocity to get the feel just right. He\u2019s still tweaking the parameters to get it perfect, but should have it nailed down soon.\n\nRecently our Design Team has been focusing on additional landing zones in the PU, specifically focusing on breaking up all of our landing zones into Hero, Small Sandbox, and Space Station categories. Every landing zone is extremely detailed, and with that comes a lot of time and resource required to get them to the level of quality that we\u2019re shooting for. Because of this, we are shifting gears slightly and shuffling our schedule around to get MORE landing zones ready in a shorter amount of time, which means everyone not only has to be efficient, but also be clever at the same time. We\u2019re still focusing on hero locations like Hurston and Crusader, but we\u2019re also prioritizing smaller landing zones like Sherman and Odyssa and space stations like mining outposts and research stations. Each of these locations will have their own points of interest and shops, and this requires a lot of design attention by the likes of Rob Reininger and Evan Manning.\n\nOur Animation Team continues to convert and integrate the raw animation data we captured last year for the PU. The Medical Unit animations are nearly complete, and the Nightclub animations are not far behind. Throughout this process we\u2019ve identified and solved issues with female locomotion and vending machine metrics. Our Ship Animators helped prep the Sabre to be Hangar-Ready and get the Freelancer flying. Our next focus will be R&D on what we\u2019re calling the Personality Overlay System. Lead Animator Bryan Brewer will partner with a programmer to blend animations together depending on an NPC\u2019s personality as set by Design. This system would also allow users to select the idle animation that fits them best from a Character Customization UI to create variety amongst player animation. We\u2019re excited about this system because this will enable us to use the hundreds of animations for PU and Players in a better, more adjustable way.\n\nOn the Networking side, Jason Ely and Tom Sawyer spent much of their time before the break prepping the Party System for 2.0.0. release. There is still lots of work to be done and these improvements will continue to be a focus into the new year, so if you think it\u2019s still a little rough, please hang in there \u2013 we\u2019ll be shoring it up. We know it\u2019s a natural feature desire for multicrew play, and it has to start somewhere! Meanwhile, for those who own a Million Mile High Club, we also spent some time getting access and invites set up for that environment as well. We also made some headway on Persistence with the help of Jeff Zhu. This new year will see renewed focus on this critical feature, with new resources being recruited to help knock this functionality out once and for all. Soon we will see the first iteration of truly persistent data in the hands of the players with the release of Shopping v1.\n\nLive Operations\nQA\nFor the month of December, QA mostly focused on testing SC Alpha 2.0.0 and SC Alpha 2.1.0. After 14 deployments (!) to the Public Test Universe (PTU) in a very short period of time, we were extremely excited to finally release SC Alpha 2.0.0 to the live environment. Our thanks to the PTU testers who provided their enthusiasm, attention to detail, and real-time cooperation with us in order to get 2.0 out of the PTU and live into everyone\u2019s hands!\n\nThat would have been a good place to start a vacation, but we didn\u2019t stop there. We immediately jumped into testing SC Alpha 2.1.0, again with the help of our loyal and valued PTU testers. We had guarded hopes to release 2.1.0 to our live environment before the holiday break, but after 4 deployments to the PTU, we were unfortunately still experiencing some stability issues with the additional content. The decision was made to keep 2.1.0 on the PTU over the holidays but open it up to everyone to check out the new flyable Freelancer.\n\nOver the course of the month we deployed fourteen 2.0.0 builds to the PTU, one deployment of 2.0.0 to live and four 2.1.0 deployments to the PTU. Supporting these deployments was a significant undertaking. For each deployment, the team would test each aspect of the game and raise any potential serious issues to production. The team also would conduct launcher\/patch testing as well as compile patch notes. Following the deployment, the team would monitor the community feedback.\n\nAfter each deployment, Jeffrey Pease would gather stability metrics on server and client crashes and provide a comprehensive report to CIG Leadership. Jeffrey Pease has done an amazing job in his various roles in QA and I am happy to announce he has officially transitioned into a development role as a LiveOps Technician. Congratulations to Bearded-CIG!\n\nThere have also been other movements within our ranks. Tyler Witkin, who you may know as Zyloh-CIG, has been promoted to the level of Senior QA. Tyler will be taking a more active leadership role on the team in his new position. In addition to his normal QA duties, Tyler has also been doing a great job keeping the community in the loop with regular updates on Discord and various social media outlets. Tyler has also obtained additional screenshots and videos requested by Marketing that were used in various updates on the RSI website.\n\nIn testing 2.0.0 and 2.1.0 the team has been working very closely with engineers Clive Johnson, George Kidd, Paul Reindell and other developers on extensive performance testing including AI spawning, Server bottle-necking, and server or client crashes. Melissa Estrada has continued with Automation development as well as working closely with engineer Francesco Roccucci on in depth testing of AI behavior.\nTodd Raffray and Robert Gaither have ensured that contacts, the party system, Million Mile High Club and ArcCorp continued to be properly tested. Andrew Rexroth continued to test all FPS functionality sending a report each day highlighting any new or particularly serious issues.\n\nOur Information Specialist Marissa Meissner has been ensuring that for each deployment, all fixes are verified and included in the patch notes. Marissa has been working very closely with Will Leverett in Game Support on messaging and accuracy of promotional mail outs and PTU invites as well as helping to update several FAQ\u2019s to assist Customer Service. Marissa is also working with our Marketing Manager Vincent Gallopain to ensure marketing materials are accurate. Marissa has also been updating our internal knowledge base with a new workflow for reporting performance issues as well as routine updates of deprecated components and production ownership of certain ship manufacturers.\n\nIn addition to testing, QA has also taken on the task of providing feedback to CIG Leadership on various aspects of the game. Andrew Hesse has provided very detailed reports on ship behavior which have been very useful to our designers in their attempts to balance ship flight and combat.\n\nDuring January QA will be continuing to test 2.1.0 for its inevitable deployment to the live environment and promptly begin testing 2.2.0. It is turning out to already be a very active new year. See you in the verse!\n\nGame Support\nOur (amazing) December was all about 2.0 and 2.1!\n\nIt\u2019d be easy to overlook how well 2.0 went through the dev pipeline to Live, because from a process perspective it went so smoothly! Normally, such a major release takes several months to get from initial build to Live, but we did it all within a handful of weeks, in large part due to Game Support (and other teams) working alongside the community who did excellent work in helping us identify major bugs and game imbalances, which we triaged through Issue Council and got into the dev pipeline quickly. It was truly a quantum leap in terms of turnaround time and update speed, and this demonstrates the value of all the time that DevOps and Production spent last year re-engineering the development, build, and patching pipelines. Sometimes, to an outsider those long periods spent building development infrastructure may make it feel like progress on the game is slow, but once the benefits start to kick in, it really pays off, and we think the rapid patch cycle that brought 2.0 to you in December proves it!\n\nOn the topic of PTU, we understand that there was confusion on how PTU testers were selected for closed testing campaigns. Creating any level of confusion or frustration is obviously not our goal, and we FULLY realize how much players want in on early rounds of testing. That said, the PTU is not about privilege or early access \u2013 the mission of the PTU is to iron out a release to a quality sufficient for deployment to live, the faster the better. Ideally, a PTU tester is not someone who wants to be \u201cfirst in line\u201d for new content, but a true and dedicated backer who is willing to put in effort alongside QA, Game Support, and the various Operations teams to get that new content out to the rest of the community and reduce the amount of time it\u2019s necessarily held back for troubleshooting.\n\nSo, while we\u2019d like to stress that it\u2019s not \u201cearly access to content\u201d but rather instead actual testing, and this motivation continues to drive our ongoing revamps and reevaluations of the PTU access selection process. Issue Council Participation\n\nPTU Participation\n\nWe\u2019ve graded players based on these two criteria, and should we have the need for a closed testing period, we\u2019ll be inviting our players who have helped out the most in these areas on a scaled basis. Some PTU releases are open to everyone, but during the very early phases of a major release \u2013 particularly if it\u2019s technically tricky \u2013 , we\u2019ll consider restricting access until a more reasonable level of stability can be achieved. (Remember that in testing, different problems and bugs can have different root causes, and sometimes smaller, focused testing is what\u2019s needed and sometimes a larger pool of testers for stress testing is needed. Access headcounts can vary from one release candidate to the next depending on what kind of testing is most useful)\n\nWe\u2019re excited about the cool things to come in January, and we\u2019re excited to work with you to get it done. \uf04a\n\nIT\/Operations\nHappy New Year from the IT Team at CIG! The month of December brought us many new challenges and even more successes. Much of what the IT department focuses on at the end of the year is boring software licensing renewals, software and user account audits, and internal system maintenance. This December the team has also been heavily involved in publishing support and for the 2.0 & 2.1 publishes. A portion of the team supported the project by providing network and storage optimizations to further improve the build system performance in order to help deliver more builds per day for internal testing. Moving the builds between studios also falls on IT so these services were pushed to the limits allowing us to find even more areas we could tune for performance. The QA teams pull a lot of builds throughout the day, so many that they can actually begin to stress the network in certain areas so new optimizations were added where needed to help QA get builds down to machines as fast as possible. Finally, the IT Team got to provide additional support for LiveOps publishes by prioritizing their traffic over all other outbound traffic because with the amount of publishes we did, every minute counts.\n\nLive Ops\nDecember may have been the most productive month ever for the LiveOps team. With back to back publishes happening nearly every day of the month, it became necessary to dramatically reduce the publish windows. This is the time it takes to deploy the servers, supporting systems, prepare and distribute all patches out to the edge networks. Reducing this time provides faster access to new versions by the backers but just as importantly, allows us to get feedback to the dev team more quickly. At the rate builds were coming out it became clear that we needed to create duplicate environments in order to pre-stage a publish without having to take down the currently running service for 4-6 hours.\n\nAhmed became the real rock star this month when he built out all the duplicate environments and modified the publishing process. Based on his work, we were able to reduce the publish window completely by simply flipping load balancers from one environment to another. Additionally Ahmed added a number of additional servers in order to accommodate additional logging which was ultimately instrumental to the massive stability improvements we saw in December. Ahmed also had a great time with the publishes during the month as well. We saw chat rooms light up every time he came on line because those backers helping us on the PTU became used to seeing him show up every time we completed another publish.\n\nThe LiveOps team also delivered major improvements to internal development, testing, and reporting tools. The build system experienced several improvements to reduce build times including one fix that allowed us to make use of even more processing power than before. The tools used to collect source code for compiling have been undergoing improvements as well with early reports of hours of reduction times under worst case scenarios.\n\nWrapping up 2015 with such a fantastic month makes looking forward to 2016 that much more exciting.\n\nGreetings Citizens,\nDecember may have been a short month, but it wasn\u2019t quiet! We had a lot to do at Foundry 42 UK, with team members from every discipline contributing to the project. Let\u2019s find out what they were up to!\n\nVFX\nIn December, the VFX team, Mike, Adam, Caleb, and Sean, focused on a flight-ready effects pass for the MISC Freelancer and AEGS Vanguard. A flight-ready pass includes both interior and exterior damage states (including a \u201cdeathmask\u201d) thrusters, and weapons\/counter measures.\n\nWe also continued to polish ambient environment effects for the Alpha 2.0 Crusader map. Mostly this was polish\/optimization to tie in with some lighting tweaks. However, we also added new airlock depressurization effects, so there is a clear visual difference between pressurization and depressurization.\n\nFinally, we focused on a \u201cpost-2.0 release\u201d data clean-up. For the most part this meant removing and re-organizing our particle libraries and texture folders. Not the sexiest task in the world \u2013 quite laborious in fact \u2013 but necessary nonetheless as it will help us to hit the ground running in 2016!\n\nProps\nAs 2015 came to an end the props team, Ben, Dan and our friends at Behaviour Interactive, put the finishing touches on the Casaba shop interior. The store is now complete in terms of prop work and we are just waiting on the stock to come in from our clothing manufacturers! It was an interesting environment to dress, taking on the role of shop fitters and adhering to a brand guidelines to really sell that retail experience.\n\nThe gold standard components are 95% there. They just need a final pass on the materials and then our first two will be ready. Work has also begun on the next set this week so we should have four by the end of the month. We are working closely with the tech designers and they are in the process of defining the sub-component list which is the final part of the puzzle from our point of view.\n\nThe rest of the team are now focusing on our core low-tech prop set in preparation for all the new environments coming in 2016.\n\nI have been concentrating on getting a solid backlog \/ tracking of everything we currently have in game, the sheer number of assets is getting impressive and I needed a fast way of being able to track exactly where each asset is up to and also be able to quickly filter and search the assets so that when new requests come in we can prioritize them against what we have already in game. Once complete we should be in a really good place to start pumping out everything we need to bring the environments to life. This is really important from a game performance perspective, because the sheer number of assets, models, animations, and geometry in the game means that if you don\u2019t do this intelligently, bad things can happen to your load times and FPS. It may not sound like exciting work, but when you want to maintain the pace of your gaming experience, it\u2019s as critical as a lot of other things!\n\nFinally we have a new hire here in the UK studio, the props team here is now up to three! We are still looking and have some strong candidates so hopefully will bolster our numbers again soon!\n\nShips\nThe ship art team led by Nathan were fighting hard in December to get you some new shiny ships to play with over the festive break, so we hope it was worth it!\n\nNeil, Peter, Robin, Jose, and Jan managed to get the new and revised Freelancer exterior and interior art flight ready our 2.1 PTU release, and Paul and Ian also supported Nathan in completing the final art for the Sabre and the Vanguard (including damage states for the latter).\n\nMany of you will be pleased to know that the Starfarer exterior and interior are well underway with Matt, Colin, Joe, Phil and Jay making good progress so we\u2019ll be looking forward to releasing that to you later this year and also looking forward to releasing many more cool and wonderful Star Citizen spaceships in 2016.\n\nConcepts\nPaul and the concept team has been hard at work, the Javelin has had a bit of a nip-and-tuck with some remodeling to bring it into line with the Aegis brand.\n\nSarah has been valiantly battling her way through the many props needed, working on both high tech and low tech prop design styles, and on solidifying the design language should we need to outsource some of the work later on.\n\nJort has been working his Christmas magic on various space station interiors, dressing passes and additional concept work to help define what we need to make these areas come alive.\n\nStu has worked up additional pods for the ARGO RUV which we need for SQ42 and Gary finished up the Xian Scout and has really gone to town helping define further interiors for the Shubin Mining Facility.\n\nCharacters\nOur two man team has been getting to grips with the new and improved pipeline where work has been done on Squadron 42 character Randall Graves by Jon (which you may have seen in the Livestream), both high and low poly models, along with some work to the Female officers uniform. As a good test for Michal our junior character artist, we set him the task of sculpting a stone statue needed for one of our future levels, and I must say the results were great!\n\nIn-Game Animation\nUisdean Ross and the UK animation team are continuing our push on the FPS AI and player mechanics. Player cover animation implementation is on-going by Colin and Dan and being refined and reviewed, this is an ongoing process working closely with the programming team.\n\nThe AI cover behaviors are currently going through a first pass by Spencer, and we are providing a base set for the AI programming team which will then be iterated on. Improvements are also being made to the no weapon (unarmed) locomotion set, as well as stops and starts.\n\nDesign\nThe Christmas break over and we are back in action for 2016. We have so much to do this year in the UK we need to make every day count!\n\nThe UI Director Zane and Lead Systems designer Karl are working on a simplified HUD UI to level out the learning curve when it comes to interacting with your ships systems. All the advanced bells and whistles will still be there for the more hard core players. They are also working with the engineering UI team to implement a functional EVA HUD for players to get all the information they need while experiencing zero-g movement.\n\nThe Live team of Luke, Danny and Matt are listening to your feedback and fixing up issues with the current Live build to make it more stable and fun. They are also looking at further iterations to some of the more basic design implementations that need further work, such as EMP. Syncing up with the ship release schedule in becoming a strong focus for this team going forward to make sure we cover the design functionality that is required for the various ships, such as cargo movers.\n\nThe Tech Design team led by John has scaled up over the last few months ands is now big enough to really get moving on the new ships as the Art team hands them over to us. We have also been looking into ways of addressing ship balance in a less reactive, more forward-looking way that is looking promising over the next month or so.\n\nMike and the Squadron 42 designers are transitioning the levels into the large world system rather than lots of separate CryFiles. We still need to get better at excluding SQ42 files from the current build process as you guys seem to find anything that leaks through and they sometimes appear as spoilers! This will be getting a more robust system in the future and will have the side effect of getting some of these intermediate patch sizes more under control.\n\nAll in all, we are geared up for a very busy year on Star Citizen here in the UK and with your continued solid support we know we can make this something very special! Thanks again.\n\nGraphics\nOver the last month the graphics director Ali and his team have made various performance improvements to the game.\n\nThe lighting shaders have had significant work and are now faster than the base CryEngine shaders despite having more features thanks to Ben. Geoff put in some hard work so that we can now cull rooms that you can\u2019t see on ships and space stations much more accurately thanks to improvements to the culling system. The LOD system has been overhauled by Muhammed which should result in us rendering fewer polygons in the distance where you can\u2019t really see them, and we\u2019ve also made some significant improvements to the performance of our internal tools when generating LODs which could take several minutes on our largest levels and now takes just a few seconds. Okka and the rest of the team also spent a large amount of December bug fixing for the PTU and Live Releases.\n\nOur focus now is on planning our work for 2016, and focusing on the features that Squadron 42 requires. The first features we\u2019re working on will be improved HDR effects such as bloom, lens flares and eye adaption to give a better impression of the stark lighting you get in space and sci-fi scenes in general. We\u2019ll be revamping some shaders such as the glass shader so we can improve the quality of the cockpits and helmets as well as increase their performance. We\u2019ll also be getting back onto our volumetric gas cloud work which had been paused during the work on 2.0 but is crucial for both Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe.\n\nEnvironments\nIan and the environment team hope you\u2019re all enjoying playing Crusader, our team is having a great time watching you play!\n\nJake and part of the team has been doing final bug fixes and lighting improvements for the 2.1 release of Crusader, so it should look and perform better than in 2.0. Eddie and rest of the team has been focusing down on one of our Squadron 42 levels, not too much we can reveal at this stage but it will be our test bed for creating sandbox locations with terrain and multiple landing points.\n\nEngineering\nFor obvious reasons this has been a shorter month for us here in the UK and people have been taking some well-deserved time off. That\u2019s not to say we\u2019ve been taking it easy whilst we\u2019ve been in though!\n\nThe highlight for Derek and the engineering team in December was getting Alpha 2.0 finally out to everybody after a huge effort from anybody concerned. We\u2019re really proud of what we\u2019ve managed to achieve, especially as it has gone down so well with the community. We keep an eye on all the forums and Twitch streams and people do seem to be having a blast which makes all the hard work feel worthwhile. But of course as soon as one milestone has been hit we\u2019re onto the next. We\u2019re now in the final stages of getting Alpha 2.1 hitting the streets so we\u2019re in the general stabilization phase, with many engineers including Rob, Clive, George, and Craig getting those horrid random crash bugs which have crept in fixed and some performance optimizations.\n\nMore general ongoing work. One of the big things Jens and the FPS code team have helping working on is the new physicalized EVA which is a big departure from the current implementation. Rather than \u201cfaking\u201d the fidelity of the player movement as we have been doing currently we\u2019re going down the route of using a proper physical simulation, in much the same way as we do with the ships. As part of that the character is also put into a ragdoll state which gives the whole movement a much more fluid and natural feel to it. The effects of this should include a slight opposite impulse to you to help make it feel like you\u2019re firing a real weapon.\n\nIt does bring up a whole host of new problems to solve, many of which are nasty edge cases. For example, as you EVA around and then hit a gravity area you need to come out of rag doll and transition into the normal locomotion again with it feeling natural and fluid. Also when you\u2019re in EVA you generally can\u2019t see where your legs are and it\u2019s really easy to clip a piece of geometry with them, which will send you into a nasty spin, which gets really annoying really quickly. We\u2019ve got a number of ideas from getting your character to automatically tuck in their legs, to have an IFCS to counter any unwanted spin. There\u2019s going to be a new EVA HUD mode as well to give you some more feedback. When you\u2019re in the middle of space away from any nearby geometry you have very little point of reference to give an indication of what speed and direction you\u2019re moving in, which isn\u2019t much fun.\nBut mainly we\u2019ve been working on our eating, drinking and chilling. :)\n\nQA\nAfter November\u2019s hopeful anticipation of 2.0.0 going LIVE to all backers, Andy and the QA team were very proud (and a little relieved!) that it finally launched this month. We\u2019ve been working on it internally for a while!\n\nHopefully you\u2019re all appreciating the hard work we put in to get it ready for release \u2013 there was a great feeling of satisfaction felt in the department, and like I mentioned last time, we\u2019re really getting to grips with the nature of the testing for Star Citizen\u2019s future development.\n\nSome of the UK QA team have had a busier end to the month of December than others\u2026 ahem! While some were off enjoying the festive season (me, Andy), the rest of our dedicated team were on hand to make sure that the first 2.1.0 patch made it live to PTU on Christmas Eve. \u201cMerry Christmas\u201d, is probably what they were thinking at the time!\n\nWhile some might have considered a lack of a full LIVE release of 2.1.0 disappointing, there were a few good reasons why this release was unfortunately not possible. Without going into too much detail, the performance and stability of the build had regressed, meaning we were not comfortable with a release for you guys. This is not unusual any time you add new content or new gameplay, and particularly not when one of the additions is a completely new class of flyable ship. Post-Christmas, this is going to form the majority of our testing in the department \u2013 helping to reproduce all the issues and ensure the quality of the experience is back where we want it to be.\n\n2.1.0 has meant that the lucky PTU players were able to experience and help test the Freelancer for the first time \u2013 a ship that has prompted plenty of \u201cStarbug roleplay\u201d within the QA team. Hopefully before too long everyone will be able to play the \u201cRimmer role\u201d once 2.1.0 goes LIVE\u2026\n\nIn other news, the UK QA Secret Santa was a great success \u2013 highlights include: Pokemon trainer badges, a genuinely horrifying 1980\u2019s E.T., a Transformers lunchbox with flask and a Corinthian Kevin Keegan figurine.\n\nAudio\nFor Lee Banyard and CIG Audio, December was mostly taken up with ensuring things were as solid as they could be with sound for SC Alpha 2.0. With a game such as ours, testing every possible thing where audio is concerned can be difficult, so we spent a lot of time trying to cover all the bases, going through PTU feedback and issues that came up via QA as well as stuff we found ourselves.\n\nWhat was everyone up to? Luke, Darren and Stefan were immersed in supporting ships such as the Freelancer and Vanguard. Matteo and Stefan (again, he gets around!) looking more at EVA and FPS elements, while Ross was running the rule over the environments in 2.0 again and again to ensure that all worked as it should, testing out the music logic system, planning battle-chatter system and just general testing. Phil continued with UI audio and with PU environments, especially the Million Mile High Club. Bob was engaged in hammering out anything to do with dialogue, and the larger dialogue system, and last (but not least) Jason continued his stellar work in supporting everyone from a technical standpoint and ensuring the audio build system continued to do its thing.\n\nWe continued to plan the orchestral sessions which should be happening in the next month or so, which should align nicely with the progress Ross and Sam Hall are making with the dynamic music system assuming all goes ahead as planned.\n\nAnd Lee tried to help everyone with everything as much as he could!\n\nAlso the team received CIG Audio winter hats as seasonal gifts. I think photos were posted to the Ask A Developer audio thread in case you\u2019re interested. Hope you all had a great winter break!\n\nHallo aus Frankfurt (Hello from Frankfurt),\nChristmas has come and gone, we\u2019re into a new year, and the team is now back from their well-deserved holiday break.\n\nThis month we\u2019ll have 4 new people joining the Frankfurt team, bringing us up to 34 strong.\n\nI hope everyone had a good holiday, read below on some of the stuff we did before the break.\n\nPupil to Planet \u2013 Procedural Tech\nThis past month we showed off the procedural tech we\u2019ve been working on, both in the video Pupil to Planet, and with Chris and Sean playing it live on the livestream.\n\nMarco, Carsten, and Pascal spent a good amount of time working on the tech and environment art, and Hannes came in with final touches and camera work. We had support from others both in and out of the DE office, such as Sean Tracy, Chris Bolte, etc. The character used is a story character from SQ42 called Joachim Steiger. Music was done by our Pedro Camacho and turned out fantastic. Thanks to everyone that pitched in, seeing and navigating around this 1000km diameter planetoid live in-game was and is an absolutely surreal and a mind blowing experience.\n\nThe base planet tech of the procedural work was started a few months earlier, in September. Besides the planet tech, there are several different systems helping to make this possible, including the Large World (systems were converted to use 64 bit positioning to allow large seamless worlds), inverted depth buffer and camera relative rendering (which renders everything relative to the camera to minimize loss of precision), and the Zone system (which was worked on mainly by Chris Bolte).\n\nSome generated planet terrain parts are still too big to fit into 32 bit float vertex buffer chunks for the GPU, so they are computed locally and displaced on the appropriate location on the planet, which, when combined with the aforementioned systems, avoid any jittering or loss of precision.\n\nKeeping the entire planet in memory won\u2019t be possible, so the planet surface is allocated a fixed memory budget and procedurally generated on-demand at different level of details as the engine camera moves around the planet.\n\nThen procedural texturing and colors are applied to the surface in realtime depending on terrain shape and other information.\n\nthe atmospherics are based on a physically accurate model of light transport taking multiple scattering into account, this allows to render atmospherics correctly and automatically from any viewpoint from outer space to ground level.\n\nWe already have some improvements in the works, and we will be updating as the new year goes on. The current plan, as shown in the prototype, is to experience the entire Star Citizen game world in first person, including from walking into your ship, flying and seamlessly landing from space to a docking station on a planet, walking around in first person, entering buildings and doing things at the higher visual fidelity we have shown. Our next steps besides improving the planet generation and visuals would be to integrate the procedural tech into the multiplayer environment so it could be experienced in the PTU.\n\nEngine\nOn top of the above work wrapped around the procedural tech, the engine team gave support to various areas of the current PTU release. We\u2019re also making further progress on the public crash handler to gather relevant data on why clients crash which should help speed up stabilizing future PTU and public releases.\n\nWe\u2019re pushing towards enabling asserts in profile builds to further help catch runtime errors early. As part of this, the internal crash handler and callstack collector service of CE has been totally overhauled.\n\nCinematics\nWe\u2019re currently completing our full breakdown of every scene in SQ42\u2019s script and all material that was shot in regards to scene types.\n\nSQ42 features every type of cinematic you could think of. Ranging from relatively straight forward 3rd person cinematics with filmic cameras without player presence, to 1st person player perspective cinematics with look control and then crossing over into more gameplay oriented conversational scenes with AI characters and full player control. Transitions from cinematics into AI characters most of the time needs to be fluid and conversational scenes often can be interrupted by the player so this requires lots of planning and case handling on animation and AI tech side. The amount of material is massive so getting it all sorted and categorized correctly is essential for production.\n\nWe are also working on a scene with Admiral Bishop going planetside to view battle damage and a first scene with Captain Maclaren but both are in their early stages of implementation.\n\nFor cinematic environment work, we finished up geometry for the Retribution skydock, started working on the Corvo ruins scene, and started with some terrain RnD of the big background mountains and crater.\n\nDesign\nOur system designers are busy coming up with consistent designs for cargo and looting so we can have a clear path of where we need to take these systems and at the same time come up with a tier zero implementation for the baby PU so the players can loot items, move them around and sell them in various stations. The goal here is to implement an initial light version of the system that we can build upon in the future without having to redo it from scratch when the full system will be ready to deploy. These systems should help stimulate different types of gameplay in the baby PU, from cargo transport to market research and even piracy or escorting other players.\n\nBoth system and level designers here are now working together with programmers in creating a mission generation system that is modular and that can offer great variation of gameplay. We\u2019re still in the early stages for this system but we\u2019re hoping we can get some early version of it in the baby PU as soon as possible. This system should be able to take data from the universe simulator and generate missions based on that data so let\u2019s say if a system is under heavy pirate threat then we can generate more missions to fight pirates, and even tailor those procedural missions to that specific pirate faction.\n\nLevel designers have been pushing through with their Power Management System prototype that they started last month and hopefully we\u2019ll get to play it soon and see how it fits in our current plans for the stations & ships. Also a lot of research & prototyping time was put into various models of asteroid bases and facilities trying to get away from the conventional \u201cplanet-like\u201d looking base and exploring all the possibilities that life on a low\/no gravity asteroid can offer.\n\nTechArt\nTechArt in Frankfurt is continuing to work with the other studios Tech Artists on our bigger DCC pipeline, this month we finalized our puppet from animation perspective.\n\nWe\u2019re currently working on finalizing in-game internal rig setups. Further supporting various department RNDs and bug fixing is daily routines for us.\n\nQA\nAside from the usual bug-hunting, I worked mostly on Automated Testing solutions for Star Citizen, developing automated test levels with timed demos with the help of Francesco Di Mizio in the hopes that automating a simple test-run of a level could lead to further automation down the line. Right now a simple test level involving spawning in a location, equipping a loadout and running through the map shooting at AI can test everything from level loading and chainloading to AI-Hit Reactions, bullet physics and particles, character physics & ragdoll, falling damage and a whole host of other functions vital to the core gameplay of S42 and the Persistent Universe. Additional test map demos can now be made and implemented using the same framework that will allow developers to see which changelists cause any problems for any area of the game on a daily basis as changes go in.\n\nWeapons\nThe weapon art team has finished the Apocalypse Arms Revenant Ballistic Gatling. As already mentioned in the previous monthly studio report, this is the first weapon to use our new Multi-Layer shader and we are quite happy with the results!\n\nWhile working with the new shader and being in direct communication with the graphics programmer wizards in the UK we have learned a lot and identified some issues as well as given feedback to further improve the shader in the future.\n\nEnvironment Art\nLast month the Frankfurt environment art team was working on the Shubin space station, a high tech mining facility whose role is to \u201ccrack\u201d asteroids in order to mine the valuable minerals that they contain. Shubin will be featured heavily in the Squadron 42 campaign and will differ from the other stations in its design, being a very high tech facility. The station is going to be one of the biggest so far, giving the player the freedom to fly around the huge superstructure and, of course, land and explore the interior on foot. From an artist\u2019s point of view, Shubin has been a huge challenge but at the same time a very rewarding one, giving us the freedom to explore new designs and really try to develop something that we think will provide a real sense of awe when players initially experience it in game.\n\nGreetings Citizens,\nAnother month of hard work here in Montreal. Here\u2019s what the team have been working on.\n\nDesign\nThe Behaviour design team wrapped up the year with a few things. First, Lead Technical Designer Francois Boucher continued to set up shops and shopping items for the upcoming Casaba Outlet and current stores as well. In parallel, we are working on a streamlined shopping interface that hopefully everyone will like.\n\nLevel Designer Jesse Kalb added a bunch of new flair objects to the game as we wanted to get some kind of cushion leading into the new year. We also worked hard solidifying 2.0 and subsequently 2.1 before leaving for the holiday.\n\nFinally, we cooked 3.5 pounds of Canadian bacon for the Star Citizen Behaviour team to celebrate the end of the year. Yummy!\n\nArt\nThis month, the Environment team continued to work on Levski. Mainly optimizing complex geometry like rock walls and tunnels. Also, we began dressing the interiors, trying to give to each a theme. This will help navigation but also to make it visually interesting when exploring the map. A couple of minor bugs were fixed on ArcCorp and Hangars.\n\nFor the Prop team, the next flairs were completed and we are planning the next ones for 2016.\n\nThe background and static props where completed for the clothing store. We are now moving on props for industrial\/mining planets.\n\nOn the Concept Art team , we worked on paint-overs for Levski`s interior shops. You can admire the amazing work done by our concept artists Seungjin Woo on Cordry`s armor shop.\n\nEngineering\nComing to you shortly in version 2.1.0 are a few cool new features. Customizing your ships with the HoloTable will be a little easier. You\u2019re probably used to seeing only your loose ship parts that can be equipped, and you still will by default. However, with a new UI widget you\u2019ll now be able to filter items to see what\u2019s available and what isn\u2019t. For example you\u2019ll now be able to see items on other ships, so you can equip them directly without having to load and strip that other ship first. You can also your whole inventory for a given part category, which could help you plan the loadouts of your personal fleet at a glance. All of this will come with color highlighting and some clearer labeling of the various parts and their stats. For those of you who play well with others, we hope you enjoy the new updates to the party management and contact list UI systems. We\u2019ve also worked hard to improve stability of options, customizations and emotes so you can continue to have fun mingling with others planet-side (or crashing your buggies into each other, whatever floats your boat).\n\nFor subsequent updates, we\u2019re working to provide you with a full AR shopping experience, where you can purchase gear for your character in-game and preview the various modifications on your avatar. We\u2019re continuing to work on optimizing ship customizations, allowing you to make temporary modifications in Crusader from a HoloTable, load them into a dock and take flight without returning to your hangar. Any of you who are upgrading your computers this winter may appreciate our modifications to the graphics menu options. Quality settings will apply immediately, allowing you to see their effects without having to leave the menu. You\u2019ll also have a timed screen resolution confirmation dialog, which will help if you try configurations that don\u2019t quite agree with your graphics card or monitor\/TV setup. If a resolution doesn\u2019t work for you (no, not the New Year\u2019s kind. unfortunately), it will revert back in 15 seconds. More party and Crusader ship features will continue to be improved as well. Hopefully you\u2019ll have your hands on all of these pretty soon!\n\nOn our side, we\u2019re continuing to update our dev tools to help bring you more content and exciting new features in the near future.\n\nGreetings from frosty Montreal! Here\u2019s what we\u2019ve been up to in the last month, in-between snowfalls :\n\nPledge Buy Back\nIn December, we launched a new feature called Pledge Buy Back. Most of you knew it by another, more obscure name, \u201cunmelt\u201d. It allows anyone to undo a mistake they made, like exchanging a limited availability pledge they had for store credit. Anyone will be able to undo such mistakes and do themselves what used to take hours of Customer Service exchanges. This feature is now accessible via My Hangar. Note: there will be a handful of pledges which are and will stay ineligible for Pledge Buy Back : some limited offers, offers linked to third party companies, pledge packages including physical merchandise\u2026 The system still allows buying back 99.9% of all pledges ever available, and to date close to 5,000 pledges have been bought back, making it one of our most popular features already!\n\nOrganization Invitations\nLast month, we completed development on the new Organization invitation email template, so that it would reflect your Org\u2019s identity better and make it less ambiguously linked to RSI Itself. The new layout is currently being tested on different email programs and devices, and once it has passed QA, we\u2019ll go live. Coming soon!\n\nOf course, we haven\u2019t forgotten other Org improvements either! While there\u2019s nothing to report in those regards this month, rest assured that we haven\u2019t forsaken you, and that more robust updates to the Organization are still waiting in the wings for gameplay elements that will support them.\n\nSubscription campaign\nWe are currently in the Design phase for the new Subscribers section of the website. In addition to the look-and-feel of the new landing page, we are creating a new logo and many other assets which will then be used to promote subscriptions to the general public.\n\nShip Happens\nDecember was a busy month for ship sales, with the Holiday livestream as well as the end of year free for all sale to close out 2015. The livestream saw the release of the Reliant variants, including a researcher, a reporter and a skirmisher model, each with their own unique loadout and expertise. In 2.0 the new Constellation Andromeda model became available in hangar and crusader. This version also included the Vanguard Warden as hangar ready. As 2015 came to an end, there was also one last free-for-all sale for the year giving everyone a chance to get their favorite ship during the holidays, and serve as what we\u2019ve been calling a grace period before the new Euro rate came into place.\n\nWishing you all a happy new year!"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":105,"created_at":"2016-01-13T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"10 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-08 05:27:04","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":15154,"next_id":15156}}