{"data":{"id":15364,"title":"Monthly Studio Report: May 2016","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/15364-Monthly-Studio-Report-May-2016","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/15364","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/15364","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"None","images":[{"id":4969,"name":"TractorBeamRoom.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/x77api59xy7axr\/source\/TractorBeamRoom.jpg","alt":"","size":556708,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T19:15:55+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4969","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4969\/similar"},{"id":4978,"name":"Austin-Header-May.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/jo3pcx3wp1stxr\/source\/Austin-Header-May.png","alt":"","size":8898017,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2016-06-02T19:38:39+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4978","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4978\/similar"},{"id":4980,"name":"Armor_1.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/idwni9tipjdhkr\/source\/Armor_1.jpg","alt":"","size":282580,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T19:56:12+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4980","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4980\/similar"},{"id":4981,"name":"Armor_2.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/crrcwrh1gy322r\/source\/Armor_2.jpg","alt":"","size":236376,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T19:56:12+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4981","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4981\/similar"},{"id":4983,"name":"Control_Panel_UKCOMMReports.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/zbrx5pj5qhehmr\/source\/Control_Panel_UKCOMMReports.jpg","alt":"","size":1167588,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T18:31:26+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4983","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4983\/similar"},{"id":4985,"name":"DE_Header.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/wwolfxjmku69vr\/source\/DE_Header.png","alt":"","size":6240833,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2016-06-02T18:21:29+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4985","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4985\/similar"},{"id":4986,"name":"Weapon_material_library.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/ctnycya4aqthir\/source\/Weapon_material_library.jpg","alt":"Weapon Materials","size":1002592,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T18:21:22+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4986","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4986\/similar"},{"id":4987,"name":"Levksi_Header_BHVR2.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/23tu8opxap1c2r\/source\/Levksi_Header_BHVR2.jpg","alt":"","size":1983772,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T18:15:21+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4987","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4987\/similar"},{"id":4988,"name":"MonthlyReport_Buccaneer.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/7xa86iqvaiyb1r\/source\/MonthlyReport_Buccaneer.jpg","alt":"","size":98035,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T18:42:32+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4988","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4988\/similar"},{"id":4990,"name":"Lando1.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/g5ejty6lvqdh7r\/source\/Lando1.jpg","alt":"","size":116098,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2016-06-02T23:57:32+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4990","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/4990\/similar"}],"images_count":16,"translations":{"en_EN":"Greetings Citizens!\n\nAs most of you know, we\u2019ve been working hard to launch Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 this month. The patch is currently on the PTU undergoing testing from our backers. As they can attest, we\u2019re battling some blockers largely related to networking. We\u2019re making good progress, and will keep you updated\u2026 we\u2019re as eager as anyone to see our backers battling it out aboard Starfarers, shopping for clothes and earning in-game currency. Meanwhile, development goes on for all aspects of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, whether they\u2019re intended for Alpha 2.4 or a future release. Without further ado, here\u2019s May, 2016 straight from the developers that lived it!\n\nWest Coast, Best Coast\n\nHello Citizens of the Stars. Once again it is that time where we share what our developers in the City of Angels have been up to. Needless to say, getting 2.4.0 out the door has completely dominated all of our schedules. Ensuring we release a quality product to you is always our top priority; however, doing so requires quite a large amount of attention to detail when you are attempting to create one of the most technically advanced games ever. So let us recount what each team at the CIG-LA office has been up to during what has been an unusually overcast-weathered month of May.\n\n\nEngineering\nMuch of what is happening in 2.4.0 is based upon what the Engineering team has been laying down tracks for. Shopping, persistence, bug fixes, and so much more. While Mark Abent has been focused on the 2.4 Phys Controller and Seat Integration, he and Paul Reindell have been helping the Engineering team in supporting the Persistence and Shopping features.\n\nAriel Xu has still been poring over his Port Editor and Loadout Editor and has recently implemented simulation parameters into the Loadout Editor. This will allow simulations between similar assets such as collision proxies, ropes, etc. These kinds of internally-built tools help streamline the design and engineering process.\n\nChad Zamzow has started working on Coolers and Heat Sinks, updating the technical design document and has started testing the system in ships along with testing the functionality of how IR and heat signatures can be tuned. While Patrick Mathieu has done a code merge for the Seats and Controller managers, he has also had a hand in several other systems such as the Energy Control Manager (for power plants), Flight Controls, and the game\u2019s event system. Chad McKinney wrote a technical design doc for the engineers on Signal Pipes after he worked on the Entity Health components (essentially the wear & tear functionality of components that are being sync\u2019d with Tech Design). Chad has also been helping the QA team by providing custom builds for QA to test very specific parameters of the game. Flight Engineer John Pritchett has also been hard at work, currently in the UK office working on positional controls for capital-class ships.\n\n\nTech Design\nBeing a Technical Designer is much more than coming up with game design ideas. A Technical Designer has to know how these systems and designs are able to function within the game based on certain parameters such as game engine limitations, resources, etc. With those things in mind, Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome has started testing the Power Plants and Shields 2.0 systems along with designing an overview of how overheating\/heat spiking will affect ship components. On the ship side, Kirk has also been working on the Origin 85x and coordinating efforts with the Engineering team on how heat and wear will function in terms of design.\n\nAlong with ship systems, as many of our astute readers know, the Tech Design team also performs the designing of how ship functionality will operate in-game. Calix Reneau has started working on the F7A Hornet, the Prowler, and space stations while Matt Sherman has been working on the white box for the long-awaited Drake Herald all while getting the Reliant flight-ready.\n\nMatt has also been working on supporting the newly-revealed Buccaneer and has also added some much needed updates to the Carrack design brief. There is a touch of Exploration he has been peering into but let\u2019s wait until next month\u2019s report so we can report on what he has accomplished thus far.\n\nThe LA Tech Design team was also joined by a new member, Stephen Hosmer. So stay tuned for next month\u2019s report to see what our newest Tech Designer will have accomplished by then.\n\n\nArt & Animation\nThe Art team was joined by our new Character Art Director, Josh Herman, who brings quite a bit of experience with him in regards to characters and delivering the highest of quality.\n\nCG Supervisor Forrest Stephan has not only been working on clothing support for the character team for 2.4.0, his efforts also look steps beyond what we are currently delivering and extend out to 2.5.0 and further.\n\nA large number of the artists have been dedicated to building the upcoming Caterpillar. Gurmukh Bhasin and Justin Wentz, our ship Concept Artists, have been doing exterior passes of the Caterpillar. This included adjusting the Command Module, turrets, decals, tractor beam room, engines and cargo, as well as the materials pass. On the interior side, Daniel Kamentsky and \u201cJin\u201d Hyun have been busy with the interior cargo module.\n\nThe other half of the CIG LA Art staff continues to work on character art. Omar Aweidah and Cheyne Hessler\u2019s bespoke character hair is currently in progress and looking fabulous while Jeremiah Lee\u2019s costume concepts have been perfected and approved to move into production.\n\n\nGlobal Technical Content\nAs we have explained in the past, the Global Tech Content team is a difficult one to categorize because it extends into everything we do at CIG at a global level. We had a new Associate Tech Animator join the team and are excited he\u2019s here! Erik Link started this month and will be working with our animation team so stay tuned for next month\u2019s report to see what accomplishments he has contributed to the team. But for now, Erik has been working on cleaning up Mannequin and digging deep into our systems to help increase our deliveries.\n\nLast month we reported Gaige Hallman had been working on the clothing volume system to determine how clipping will work. While a few related bugs have popped up, Gaige was pretty swift at getting them resolved and has been working on asset rigging for the Shubin Miner uniform, while John Riggs has been working on fixing the Vanduul Hand Geo and Skeleton just to name a few.\n\nMatt Intrieri, apart from working on asset validation tool, he has started on the Tech Art white box for the Drake Herald while Patrick Salerno has been working on the Reliant grey box Tech Art. Last but not least, Mark McCall completed working on skinning and implementing the RSI Pilot Flight Suit Jetpack.\n\n\nNarrative\nContinuing from our last update:\n\nSquadron 42, Squadron 42, Squadron 42.\n\nYeah, we were on full-blast for the past month. Both Will and I were over in the UK to help out with the pick-up performance capture shoot. We got to have some familiar faces back to the set as well as some new actors join the show. We were thrilled to have on set to play the role of . It went better than any of us could\u2019ve imagined and was spectacular to watch this character who\u2019s been kicking around for a while, finally be brought to life in such a dynamic way.\n\nOtherwise, on the PU front we\u2019ve been delving into things that shan\u2019t be made public yet, so unfortunately there\u2019s not a lot to tell.\n\nNow, back to the mines of Squadron 42.\n\nUntil\u2014\n\nOh, if you haven\u2019t heard, there has been a revamping of the Ask A Dev forum thread. We\u2019ve just started to dive back in and answer your questions, but if you had a question that was still unanswered from the old Ask A Dev \u2013 Lore thread, feel free to repost it in the new one and we will do our best to get to it, progress permitting.\n\nAs I was saying, until next month.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nThis month the CIG-LA Quality Assurance team was all hands on deck and focused on all the new 2.4 features, including the new PU Clothing, and the shopping system, a vast amount of persistence and performance testing, and help troubleshoot stability issues. Saitek was gracious enough to provide us with a Saitek X-56 Rhino H.O.T.A.S. peripheral so we were able to put the controller through its paces after a very short fight over who got to use it first. However, the most exciting thing this month was the privilege of an early look at preliminary large scale solar systems with procedural planets, going from space, to atmosphere, and eventually landing on the ground. At this point the terrain is visually pretty sparse looking, but this early on, the excitement is about the technology itself. There\u2019s nothing quite like flying through and around canyons in an M50!\n\n\nConclusion\nThere you have it folks; that was the month of May in a nutshell for us at the Los Angeles branch of Cloud Imperium Games. It should go without saying that there is much more going on behind the scenes to make all of these milestones possible and we can\u2019t wait until you see what we unveil next.\n\nGame Dev: Bigger in Texas\n\nWe\u2019ve continued to crank away on 2.4.0 through the month of May. We\u2019ve generated 145 builds from the build system; we deployed 98 internal server builds and published 14 of them to the PTU for external feedback. Everyone in the studio has been working night and day and we\u2019ve been making a lot of great progress to support the many technological and design changes that are part of this version. We\u2019re very excited to see this version continue its march soon to the Live server, and as you can imagine teams are already hard at work on 2.5 and beyond.\n\n\nDevelopment\nThe merry month of May has been a productive one for the Austin Dev Team. We\u2019ve spent most of the month wrapping up our tasks for 2.4.0 and planning ahead for 2.5.0. The Design Team has been polishing features in 2.4.0, specifically Shopping and Port Modification, so that they are in tip-top shape for when 2.4.0 goes Live. Robert Gaither has jumped over from QA to help out with placing all of the item ports in the hangars so that you guys are able to customize the layout of your flair objects and ships. He\u2019s been meticulous in making sure that the item port placement makes sense for each type of flair and linking up the item ports so that placing larger flair and ships cancels out the ability to place smaller flair and ships in the immediate vicinity.\n\nLead Designer Rob Reininger has been polishing and fixing bugs with the Shopping experience, in addition to planning for several features coming down the pipe. We\u2019ve got a final design for \u201cKiosk Purchasing\u201d in front of CR and are awaiting feedback. This feature will allow for purchasing of items that are too large to display in a conventional shop, such as ship components, ship weapons, and the ships themselves! We\u2019re also putting focus on designing additional phases of \u201cTry On\/Inspect Mode\u201d where each type of clothing asset will have a specific camera record that \u201czooms in\u201d to specific parts of the body depending on what you\u2019re trying on. So for example if you\u2019re trying on shoes, the camera will zoom in to the feet. There will also be specific \u201cTry On\u201d animations for the character as well so that the character can check himself out while he is trying on the latest and greatest swanky apparel.\n\nSpeaking of new swanky apparel, both Rob and Robert have been working with the Character Team to create briefs for and schedule in additional assets for future releases. Our goal from this point forward is to have new clothing assets ready for every new release. Sometimes these will just be material\/texture variants of existing assets but sometimes we\u2019ll have brand new assets from all-new clothing lines and manufacturers. Our major focus for 2.5.0 will be to have some more grungy frontier clothing ready for you guys.\n\nDesigner Pete Mackay has been iterating on the ship pricing formula he\u2019s been working on. He\u2019s also been designated as the Design Owner for Game Analytics going forward as well. Pete has been talking back and forth with the Gameplay Engineering Team, the Server Engineering Team, the DevOps Team, and the Platform Team to nail down the best approach for capturing and displaying game analytics from various aspects of Star Citizen. We want to know how you guys are playing so we can focus on the things you like the most and get you more of what you love, and tracking game analytics is the best way to do that.\n\nThe Backend Services Team has been furiously smashing bugs with the Persistence Backend all month in an effort to get it ready for release. This is the most massive change to our core technology we\u2019ve had since the debut of the Large World tech, and with that comes a lot of hiccups that need ironing out. The team has been doing a great job though and we\u2019re in the final stages of polish on this before release. We\u2019re now looking ahead to 2.5.0 and beyond. Our near-term taskload includes Persistent UEC, which will allow us to actually use UEC as part of Persistence instead of just our test currency Alpha UEC. Ian Guthrie at Wyrmbyte has also helped us create an Analytics Service for Gameplay Engineers to hook into to provide the data that Pete Mackay needs as mentioned above. As always, we\u2019ll be knocking out bugs with Persistence as we see them as well.\n\nThe Art and Animation Teams are trucking along with their longer-term tasks. The Ship Team is still up to their eyeballs in the work for the Hornet F7A and the Herald. Jay Brushwood has been on the set of the mocap shoot at Imaginarium the past couple weeks capturing new enter\/exit animations for all the ships, which we\u2019ll start getting in pretty soon so you guys can get in and out of your ships more quickly! Daniel Craig has wrapped up his work on the updated 300i enter\/exit animations and will be moving on to the Avenger next. Our PU Team has been supporting S42 with implementing background animations. They\u2019ve specifically been working on animations for the Mess Hall scenes and interacting with Ship Terminals. They also helped us out in a pinch by getting in some new \u201cWeapon Inspect\u201d animations that you can see in action while inspecting the weapons in the shops. Oh, and that death animation that happens for when a player enters an airlock without his spacesuit on? You can thank Vanessa Landeros for that!\n\nEmre Switzer has been doing a lighting revamp for several areas of the game. He\u2019s already tackled ArcCorp and will be moving on to Crusader next. He\u2019ll also be touching up some of the ships as well, like the Reliant.\n\nLastly, we wanted to reach out and give a hearty thanks to Mark Skelton for all of his effort and devotion to this project and especially this studio. Mark has moved on to a new project and new chapter, but we wish him all the best in his future endeavors and can\u2019t express enough how sorely he\u2019ll be missed. Thanks Mark!\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nApril\u2019s 2.4.0 testing continued well into May with the build making its way to the PTU. As of this writing, QA has deployed 14 builds to the PTU since the initial release to the Evocati testers.\n\nWith the assistance of the testers on the PTU, we\u2019ve been able to reliably reproduce a number of various issues which resulted in Code 7 disconnects. This has greatly assisted us with identifying the various causes of these disconnections, which has allowed the Network Engineers to address them as we identify them. As a result, a significant number of these specific disconnects have been corrected since the start of the PTU. We\u2019ve also seen a number of server\/client crashes fixed, as well as improvements to the Port Modification system, and a large number of fixes related to shopping. Not to mention, enough improvements in item persistence to allow us to begin persisting the database across multiple builds.\n\nInternally, we\u2019ve been gathering lots of server\/client performance data for the Engineering team to analyze to see if there\u2019s any improvements that can be made in the short term to help with performance while we wait on the larger improvements coming later.\n\nWe\u2019d also like to welcome Tori Turner to the QA Team, who has been assisting our Squadron 42 testing team.\n\nThat about wraps up this month, aside from continuing 2.4.0 and Squadron 42 testing there\u2019s nothing much new to report\u2026 well, aside from preliminary testing for Procedural Planets, as well as the first forays into the Solar System map\u2026\n\n\nGame Support\nMay was another busy but solid month for the Game Support Team.\n\nAs everyone knows, 2.4.0 has been not just our focus, but the entire company\u2019s focus. Chris Danks and Will Leverett spent the first part of the month with Evocati Test Flight, helping get bugs into Issue Council and then into our dev pipeline. As 2.4.0 managed to get into a state where we needed more people, we opened up to our PTU 1st Wave testers, and then Subscribers.\n\nTo build any community, you have to dedicate time and energy, and we\u2019re very proud of the fact that CIG has allowed Game Support to do just that with both Evocati and PTU testers. We\u2019ve put a lot of effort into making this successful, and we could not be more pleased with how awesome our volunteer testers have been. It\u2019s really through their passion for this project that we have had such fantastic results which have helped us tremendously in our efforts to complete 2.4.0.\n\nAs a reminder, for those wanting to participate in Evocati or PTU, it\u2019s possible through being an active member of the Issue Council. We\u2019ll be adding to both Evocati and PTU ranks later this summer, so jump on in at https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/community\/issue-council!\n\nWe were also thrilled that our friends at Turbulent visited us for a week in Austin. We got to spend a healthy amount of time on a variety of topics, not the least of which is Issue Council improvements. We\u2019ve identified a handful of requests that we\u2019re going to start developing on, some of which came from the community, some internally. We\u2019ll be very excited to get those out!\n\nWe\u2019re also growing in Austin, Texas! We\u2019ve been interviewing candidates for a Game Support role to help with various tasks such as account security, technical support, and our publishing process, and we\u2019ll be excited to have another hand to improve the level of service we can provide.\n\n\nIT\/Operations\nMore progress was seen on the patch reduction size project in the month of April. As previously mentioned, this is a big overhaul so it\u2019s definitely going to be summer before we get to the point where we can roll this out to everyone but we\u2019re hoping to start seeing real world use of the new system soon for internal testing. This month has been all about carefully incorporating the changes which support the new patching system into our build pipeline without affecting regularly scheduled deployments. This is no small task but we are making progress on schedule as we had hoped.\n\nAs we work through the build pipeline we have found that it may be possible to obtain some further optimizations in the build process. Much in the way we are breaking out data in to its smallest parts which will allow us to deliver more granular changes within our patches under the new system, we\u2019re now identifying ways we should be able to increase granularity in our build process. If this works, we may be able to compile portions of the build down to certain individual changes further reducing dependencies on other aspects of the larger build. In other words, by reducing dependencies we might be able to kick certain types of build changes out in seconds where normally we would have to wait minutes or sometimes hours for that type of fix.\n\nWe certainly have more discovery and testing to perform but hopefully we will have much more to report in this are as our work on our huge patch project progresses.\n\n\nLiveOps\/DevOps\nThis month we have been super busy keeping up with the dev teams work on persistence. We\u2019ve delivered 18 publishes to PTU along with countless deployments for QA and individual use dev testing. Literally, countless deployments because at some point we lost track during the late nights. Our primary build system cranked out 145 builds generating a total of 18,350 gigs of data. Alternate build systems aren\u2019t tracked but are doing almost as much work considering that we\u2019re now requiring code pre-builds prior to code being checked in for the testing and production builds.\n\nApril has also been a month of spring cleaning for us. We\u2019ve reworked a number of internal tools and docs and we\u2019ve completed our planning for our new publish orchestration system. The goal of this project is to make our publishes more automated and configurable. Currently we have a decent system which is fairly dependable but the addition of persistence has shown us that we must be able to make a myriad of configuration changes quickly and easily rather than manually. Our new system will enable all of this for us and be much more extendable meaning we can handle changes much better than we can today. While this may not show up as a neat flashy thing that people see in the game, we\u2019re really happy we get to do this work because it makes the job of publishing Star Citizen so much better in the long run.\n\nForging Ahead\n\nGreetings Citizens,\n\nAnother productive month in Manchester! Chris spent some time with the team this month working on Squadron 42, and we\u2019re very excited to be getting closer to sharing more information on that part of the project. Here\u2019s a report from each department about what we did this month:\n\n\nConcept Art\nAhhh the month of May, everything is blossoming and so is the teams work \u2013 we are really getting into a groove here and the concept team are pumping out a lot of super high quality work. We\u2019ve done a large amount of work for future ships this month, these aren\u2019t needed for Sq42 but are needed for the persistent universe and to keep on expanding the roles in the games, we have 4 unannounced ships\/vehicles in concept right now and they are almost all complete, it\u2019s hard to choose which will be my favourite, they are all really exciting in their own way!\n\nWe\u2019ve also continued to work heavily on ship items, mainly power plants, coolers and shield generators \u2013 look out for the Gorgon Industries \u2013 it\u2019s got some serious bite :D Weapons are continuing both on FPS and ships, working out upgrade paths for all the different sizes of ship guns and how to be efficient with our designs but also give the fans what they\u2019d like. Props and prop dressing has continued, the list of required props is getting longer by the day so we will take on additional resources to fill that gap so that Sq42 can look its best. That\u2019s all for now folks!\n\n\nEnvironment Art\nThe last few remaining art bugs for 2.4 have been ironed out, hopefully you guys will be playing it before too long as we\u2019re looking forward to seeing what you guys think of the new features. As always the team is hard at work on Sq42 development, not too much information can be told but we are ending the Greyboxing phase for the Shubin interior levels, finishing out Final Art on some other undisclosed locations. We are still pushing forward on Final Art for our VS level, everything from lighting, materials, atmospherics, props, terrain, rocks, and buildings are being worked on. That\u2019s all for this month folks, enjoy 2.4!\n\n\nProps\nThis month has been a heads down and getting things done month. After wrapping up 2.4 requests and bugs the team have been focusing on either ship items (formally components) or props to add narrative to Squadron 42. Because of the way we approach the props anything we create can be used anywhere in the game, even if we theme particular props to tell a story in one area we can then override the material and reuse the asset in another area, this means we get a bit more reuse for our time investment and it reduces art fatigue.\n\nBen Curtis has been spending a lot of time on documentation this month, now we have the new shader tech mentioned last month it\u2019s time to get thorough documentation together and update some of the old ones. We have a few new starters over the next month so it\u2019s important to have everything easy to find and refer back to, as we get more resources in the future this becomes more and more important.\n\nLooking forward the whole team will be focusing on the ship items for a couple of sprints to make sure there is plenty of content when the feature goes live. It is going to be a busy month but we can\u2019t wait to get all the content out to the players so you can start really customising the performance of your ships and making them your own.\n\n\nSpaceships\nWork continues on our \u2018big guns,\u2019 the Idris, Javelin and Bengal. As we reported last month, interior work on the Idris has largely wrapped up and we\u2019ve moved to building some story-specific Squadron 42 variations\u2026 but we can\u2019t talk about those just yet! The Javelin and Bengal exteriors are ongoing, with the latter\u2019s team benefiting greatly from the work done on the former.\n\nTowards the smaller end of the spectrum, work is ongoing on the F7A Hornet, which will be the hero ship for Squadron 42. We\u2019re going for updates to the Hornet that make it clear this is a different, military-specific version, and so far the results are great! We\u2019ll share more of that as Squadron 42 gets closer. We also completed work on \u2018pods\u2019 for the Argo transport which will let you use it for a number of different utility functions.\n\nOn the concept side, we are finishing up work on one of the ships you\u2019ve been waiting for: the Drake Dragonfly \u201cspace motorcycle.\u201d We think we\u2019ve come up with a plan for a very cool, very SMALL ship that\u2019s going to work very well alongside some upcoming game systems. More on that soon! We also pitched several designs for Aegis\u2019 next ship. Can\u2019t reveal more yet, but it\u2019s a tough one!\n\n\nGraphics\nThis month the graphics team have finished off a number of features and fixes which we hope will be in the backers\u2019 hands very soon.\n\nThe first of these is a major upgrade to the particle lighting system. Previously the particles were lit by a different system to the rest of the game, and while this was cheaper it had many visual problems such as lack of shadows and incorrect brightness or colour for some light types. We\u2019ve now changed it so that it uses the new tiled-lighting system and so matches the rest of the lighting much better, but we\u2019ve also added fully volumetric shadowing. This means we get accurate shafts of light passing through particles which looks very impressive in our tests and we can\u2019t wait to see what the artists can do with this.\n\nThe tiled lighting system in general has also had a major upgrade, partly to allow the particle lighting, but primarily to achieve greater performance on modern GPUs. This has been deactivated in recent public builds but we expect it to be enabled in the next major release. While looking at the lighting we\u2019ve also started to improve the quality of rectangular area lights. Real-time renderers need to make many compromises to achieve any form of area lighting in real time, but we\u2019re hoping to improve the results of these because sci-fi environments so often use rectangular lights.\n\nOur work on the various high-dynamic-ranges features continues with the completion of the light-linking feature to allow realistic levels of brightness and glow from our lights. Next we\u2019ll be focussing on the exposure control system to make it better approximate the complexities of the human eye and brain\u2019s amazing ability to adapt to environments which high contrast or very low light levels.\n\nSome other more minor changes include: uncapping the GPU texture budget so that GPUs with more memory can benefit from higher texture resolutions and less likelihood of seeing any \u2018popping\u2019 from the texture streaming, completion of our internal render-profiler, continuation of our major UI refactor mentioned last month, and various bug fixes with culling.\n\n\nEngineering\nFor the engineering team, much of this month has involved 2.4.0 and helping get it into a state where we can finally release it to live. Bone has been finishing off the port modification system, allowing to customise your hangar and change your ship loadout from inside the game, and it is now complete and is in the final stages of bug fixing and polish. Similarly the shopping is all in and working and again we\u2019re just fixing up any bugs and polish that comes along.\n\nOur network team have been up busy fixing up the disconnection issues we\u2019ve been finding on the PTU build. Unfortunately these have been pretty gnarly and hard to track down and fix, they\u2019ve been coming from the changes required for persistence not playing well with the current networking system. One change required of persistence is being able to reuse entity ids, which the engine was never really designed to do, and as a result we\u2019re having to deal with the consequences of that. Long term George is working on a new message queue system which should be able to deal with all these problems a lot better.\n\nIn-between the bug fixing and polish Craig has spent some more time on the carrier takeoff and landing, Steve has been making more progress on the Object Container system and also our entity component system, which breaks down an entity\u2019s update into smaller individual blocks which can easily be reused. It will help clean up a lot of the codebase as well as helping on the performance side. Sadly for the UK office he\u2019s now leaving us and moving to our sunny LA office, our loss and their gain.\n\nGordon\u2019s been doing more polish work on the cover, as well as the vaulting and mantling. Romulo has been doing the player refactor and moving armour over to the new Item 2.0, as well as some weapon polish. Jens has been working on player moving and the head stabilisation.\n\nAudio\nThis month, will try to keep this a bit snappier just because there\u2019s a lot to cover. Apologies for flitting between bullet points and paragraphs!\n\nDarren Lambourne has been busy with:\n\nSetting up new variable boost layer for thrusters on many ships\n\n2nd Pass on BEHR Laser Cannon S5\n\nReworking and fixing anim sounds across several ships, including Connie pilot\/co-pilot seats. General stock-take of missing audio\n\nBeginning setup of the AEGS Idris audio scheme\n\nGeneral bugfixing across several ships\n\nLuke Hatton has been working on:\n\nThe cockpit interactive user-interface sound, adding sounds for the power distribution triangle and shield distribution\n\nThe Aurora series now have their own pass-by whoosh sounds and should be more easily distinguished when flying past you\n\nOn the FPS side, sounds for hitting targets with projectile weapons have gone in, along with kill confirmation sounds for both friendly and enemy characters\n\nStefan Rutherford performed something akin to open-heart bypass surgery on the Wwise project side of things \u2013 he generally maintains this, ably assisted by Jason Cobb. We\u2019ve put a lot of thought recently into how the game will be mixed (both for S42 and the Live release) and as part of ensuring things work and scale this needed doing. On top of this, he produced new FPS weapon sounds and editing up the recent weapon recording session material.\n\nBoth Phil Smallwood and Bob Rissolo were on-set at Imaginarium to continue with recording duties for our monumental Squadron 42 cinematics. Our lovely new dialogue rig, the D1000 got its first major run out, which Phil\u2019s been debugging a little, smoothing any rough edges. Both returned to master and edit the resultant dialogue.\n\nMatteo Cerquone has mostly worked on Squadron 42 ambiences, with Ross; assisted with checking fidelity of sounds affected by a wholesale conversion settings change in Wwise (part of a general optimisation pass), and cleaning up old Foley events in the character tool.\n\nRoss Tregenza did:\n\nA lot more work on the Music Logic system \u2013 it now has huge web of fully functional states combined with a growing web of momentary stings, and all new music in place, it\u2019s also beginning to expand beyond space-flight music into FPS & EVA\n\nSquadron 42 level ambient sounds \u2013 the levels are advancing well with Ross and Matteo starting to add a load of ambient audio to the spaces, lots of levels really starting to come alive there.\n\nBattle-chatter \u2013 working with the AI guys to start getting the battle-chatter dialogue systems up and running properly\n\nSimon Price has continued laying down pieces of the dialogue pipeline, improving the scalability of it over the last month. Most recently he\u2019s been working on migrating dialogue data over to use external sources. Perhaps that doesn\u2019t seem hugely exciting but it\u2019s part of the overall ethos of keeping things sensible and not overloading the Wwise project with duplicated structure.\n\nSam Hall has been working on a system for dynamically loading audio assets, to ensure we only have loaded in memory what\u2019s absolutely necessary. Different kinds of sounds have different requirements as to how resident they tend to need to be; some kinds (such as ambient sounds that aren\u2019t required to synchronize too much) can stream in, and any kind of latency isn\u2019t perceptible or appreciable. Others, such as gunshots that the player triggers, need to be ready to go instantly. So after sorting through what needs to be resident and what doesn\u2019t, it\u2019s been a question of ensuring the system can bring in audio assets to memory as soon as they\u2019re needed in each case. For a game such as ours it\u2019s important we only have loaded, what\u2019s important to the player; loading everything won\u2019t be an option while scaling up of the universe continues apace.\n\nSam\u2019s also been adding more music logic events and parameter tweaks to improve the dynamic music experience. And of course has been fixing audio bugs as they\u2019ve arisen.\n\nGraham Phillipson\u2019s been busy on the in-game VOIP tech, we\u2019ve actually had something that we could demo internally as a result of this which went down well \u2013 of course, we\u2019re really keen on getting this out to the community. Adding to the ability for the community to, well, commune, I think it\u2019s going to be a huge benefit for everyone and it\u2019s been great to hear it in action. Standard audio bug fixing duties and audio system back-end stuff too, much as usual. Graham added the ability to assign parameters to Audio Trigger Spots which gave all the sound designers much cheer. Though this seems a small thing in the grand scheme, it ensures we\u2019re not just creating new objects in Wwise for subtle contextual changes to audio in the game; it allows us to add change at the point where the change is required rather than, again, duplicating contexts at source as well as at the destination.\n\nEwan Brown is a new Senior Audio Programmer and has been settling in, getting to know the code-base and how things fit together, providing tool support to the likes of Mannequin. There\u2019s a lot to pick up on and he\u2019s going to be assisting Sam and Ross with their musical endeavours too.\n\nJason Cobb has been busy with the following:\n\nDeveloped audio build validation scripts\n\nBug fix various voice leaks, documented two test cases for fixes needed for Flowgraph audio triggers to play correctly with zones\n\nBug fix support for hard-coded mat_water material fx\n\nStarted development game audio inventory script\n\nVarious wwise project upkeep, optimizations, support for Stephan\u2019s environment re-org effort\n\nArea-based mix state markup for multicrew ships. 90% complete\n\nInvestigated situation for markup of single-seater ship interiors.\n\nAnd that\u2019s all for the moment, please do ask more questions on the forums and we will try to get the whole audio team answering where applicable. Thanks for listening!\n\nVFX\nIt\u2019s been a busy month for the VFX team (I know, I know, we say that every month!). Lots of fine-tuning and bug-fixing has gone in for the imminent 2.4 release \u2013 specifically fixing up a couple of particle effects causing memory leaks (easy to fix, not always so easy to find the culprit though!) and a further optimization pass on the new plasma shotgun.\n\nAway from the live release, we have really started to get our teeth into Squadron 42 effects to a more polished level of quality. Obviously we can\u2019t give away too many spoilers, but it\u2019s really exciting to be working on such a diverse range of environments and set pieces. From billowing dust and water sprays, and obviously a lot of explosions, we\u2019ve got it all going on. It\u2019s really starting to come together.\n\nOn the weapons side of things, we have begun a clean-up of our impact effects libraries. Specifically here, we are creating surface-specific impact effects so if you fire your ballistic machine gun down at the dusty ground, you will get a kick-up of dust as opposed to a huge blast of sparks. Nothing ground-breaking here but necessary nonetheless and will go a long way towards enhancing the player experience.\n\nWe also began to flesh out VFX-related plans for the incredible procedural planet tech. We have some simple but effective ideas as to how we can place effects on a planetary scale (hint: we won\u2019t be manually placing them) It\u2019s really important that we are smart about this, so we can save time in the long run whilst allowing us to maintain the same quality and scale of effects across a planet. Looking good so far!\n\nFinally \u2013 and this may be mentioned in the graphics team write-up \u2013 some exciting news about particle lighting. We are close to moving over to the new tiled lighting system for particles. This will allow much more accurate shadow-receiving \u2013 large spinning fan casting long dark shadows in a steamy corridor? Check!\n\nChanging the Worlds\n\nThe weathers not sure what it wants to do out here in Frankfurt, sunny and hot, overcast and raining, last month had a fair share of it all. The office grew by 2 people in May, Janine helping out with production and David joining the weapons art team. We\u2019re just about at capacity in the office so we officially started an expansion. When we moved into the office space last July the owners of the building put the adjoining space on hold for us for a full year, one of the perks they offer to new tenants. At that time we didn\u2019t know if we would have any need for it, but thought it was a nice gesture.\n\nThe team has also been doing some excellent work not detailed below on the procedural system\u2026 they would rather let you see it in action than spoil all the details now, so stay tuned on that front!\n\nThis month we also kicked things into gear with Gamescom, it only makes sense for Frankfurt to help out as much as we can since we live here. Not too much can be said at this point, but we\u2019ll definitely be there in August.\n\n\nCinematics\nThis month we had our 2nd performance capture shoot for SQ42 at Imaginarium Studios in Ealing London that complemented and completed scenes in the earlier chapters.\n\nLast summer was our main shoot that gave us approx. 75% of all needed material for SQ42\u2019s story. With this new shoot complete and another final shoot upcoming in July we will have collected every bit of performance! Highlight of this shoot were scenes with the Idris\u2019 quartermaster handing out big guns as well as an in-universe spectrum show with a furious and most importantly hilarious host!\n\nFor the shoot the Cinematic team built some of the needed environments to be used for live-mocap and coordinated efforts to get all needed level segments, characters sorted in time for live-mocap to be effective. (Live-mocap is a process where we can see the motion data live in our engine on actual in-game characters inside the actual scenes\/levels)\n\nMichael, our Lead Cinematic Designer, has finished a first pass on an important, longer cinematic piece that happens in the middle of the story campaign.\n\nThe Cinematic animators have been providing support to the Gameplay team in the UK while they wait for data to get back from the shoot. They\u2019re also finishing up sorting the quad cam video data from last year\u2019s p-cap shoot. When that\u2019s done the animators on the Cinematic team will review the p-cap shots with the quad cam data and make sure that the animations are playing out as they are intended.\n\n\nAI\nSubsumption editor has been updated to version 0.901 and we started to implement some more functionalities exposed now in the tools for the designers. First of all we created some new Subsumption tasks to allow designers to use the following functionalities:\n\n1. Querying the Tactical Point System\n2. Move to a specific cover location\n3. Shoot from the cover the NPC is in to his attention target\n\nWe exposed a way for designers to suggest the next activity or subactivity for a given NPC. We also completed the first pass to support Action Areas. As we explained in the monthly report from April, those are the elements in the world that allow designers to mark areas with specific information: a multicrew space ship, for example, might have an engine room, a hangar, a control room and so on. Action Areas allow the NPCs to reason about the environment to fulfil their tasks. Those game elements are also used to notify the NPC when another NPC is entering\/exiting the area or to re-route specific events that are intended for the characters present in the area. We also implemented the basic code to handle Subsumption events, designers can create those specifying different properties (for example if the event is something the NPCs should see to perceive it, if they should hear it, if there is a max range in which the event can be received, and so on) and Subsumption keeps track of all this data.\n\nWe also completed the first pass on using the Usables\/Interactors as navigation links. This unification step was required since Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are not only using the classic navigation links to allow characters to jump, vault, and so on. We also have links to connect the navigation through the usage of items (for example passing from room 1 and room 2 may require the AI to open a door) and these items can also be used by the players, making everything even more complicated. Using the Interactors makes sure that an NPC that opens a door doesn\u2019t require any different code to synchronize the action with other players or other AI characters, making all the code flow much more consistent.\n\nRegarding behaviors, we are currently embedding specific \u201cmental states\u201d to allow the normal NPCs behaviors to cope better with cinematic scenes and in-ship state (piloting a ship, controlling a turret, and so on)\n\nRegarding the ships behavior we are almost done with the first pass to improve the behaviors of the ship assigned to restrict their movement into specific areas. We currently have missions where spaceships need to guard specific environmental elements or where ships cannot leave specific boundaries to avoid being destroyed.\n\nCurrently boundaries where always considered as a soft restriction on the ships behavior, but we are now expanding the ships behavior to correctly handle a strong spacial restriction.\n\nThis month we also spent time on improving stability and performances of the live game, so that all of you guys can continue to enjoy each release of Star Citizen.\n\n\nWeapons\nThis month the weapon art team finished two new ship weapons and did extensive work on the weapon material library. On top of that we are currently modelling a new ballistic submachine gun and doing the final touches on the Scourge Railgun detailing and texturing. The Railgun is meant to be a visual target for all the new weapons to come, so we\u2019ve taken some extra time to take it to a gold standard level of quality.\n\nWe\u2019ve also been joined by a new starter, David, bringing the weapon art team size up to 4 people now.\n\n\nDesign\nLevel Designers have been working on finalizing the layout for the Outlaw Base, it\u2019s had a first art pass and will come back to them for a mark-up phase before release. This base is also scheduled for a tiered release so there will be a lot of back and forth between art and level designers as areas get released an new ones get added. The guys are also working hard on the Truck Stop base which is a nice place for pilots to stop to refuel, grab a bite to eat, get some supplies before they head out on big journeys. Another area in which level designers are working in is adding landing sites on procedurally generated planets.\n\nThe system designers have finalized the Power Distribution system which once implemented should power all our ships from single seaters to capitals and even stations. This system will allow players to configure how power travels within their ships, which components get power, how much do they get and where do they draw it from. At the same time it should allow more nefarious players to sabotage said system. At the same time the Looting, Inner Though and the Usable\/Interactor systems are also fully designed now and are heading into production. A lot of work went into ensuring that all our usable props and animation metrics for them are properly standardized so we don\u2019t have to do the work twice and everything will fit together once it\u2019s in game.\n\nOn the AI side we are designing a system that can generate archetypes and loadouts quick enough to fill an entire galaxy without us having to manually build each individual NPC. Basically by defining rulesets and tag sets the system will be able to create said archetypes matching their gear to where they came from, what their job is, what the dress code is in the area they are in, what rank they are etc. Besides that, there is also a lot of work going on in designing the tools we will need for the brains and logic of our new Subsumption based AI.\n\nBoth system and level designers have been planning out the work for the next year and the upcoming releases to make sure we have a more realistic picture of what can be done with the allotted time.\n\n\nEngineering\nRenderer refactoring: On the Renderer side, we did some housecleaning and optimizations. Based on the refactorings from last month to increase the object count, we started to simplify the data upload to the GPU. Previously the CryeEngine system is based on reflection, so that the code could find out what data was needed on the GPU and only upload this data. While this sounds like a solid idea, finding out what was needed was more expensive than a straight data upload. So we began to remove those reflection code paths in the time critical areas. This also improved the readability of the code, as we can now see what the code does and not the logic to find out what to do. Related to this change, we also ensured to only upload the same data once to GPU. Previously it uploaded a data buffer for each object, and then uploaded the same data again if the code decided to use instancing. This is now fixed.\n\nData Patcher: On the Data Patcher (the tool which will be responsible to create the data for the engine to use when we switch to incremental patching), we made a little progress by better defining how to store the data. Not much reportable progress here as much work is about infrastructure discussions.\n\nOptimizations: To further optimize the streaming code, we added timeslicing support to it again. This way the cost to update the distance to objects not visible to the player is done less frequent.\n\nTag System comes into the ZoneSystem: Initial support was written to support storing tags inside the ZoneSystem. A Tag is a small string which we use to give context information to an entity object. For example if we want to know if something is a chair, we can tag it as a chair. This way the AI system can ask all objects and find out if they are chairs. We already have such systems inside the engine but those are lacking spatial information, so they can only answer: is this object a chair, but not \u201cfind me all chairs around me\u201d. This lead to some in-efficient solutions as the code had to brute force get many objects and check their type. To overcome this limitation we are moving the support for tags into the ZoneSystem, our spatial position system. This required some changes and new systems:\n\nStoring and comparing a string is not very efficient on a computer (but very convenient for a human, thus we need it), so we implemented a Trie to allow us to very an efficient way to map unique strings to a fixed integer range. (We wanted to get an integer range instead of a hash as a range allows us some better broad phase checks and more efficient data storage)\n\nSince not all data types which we stored inside the ZoneSystem require tags, we made the whole zone system more flexible to allow the client code to specify the properties to store per object type. This also reduced our memory usage in crusader by 50MB.\n\nWe implemented a specialized allocator for the tags so they can be efficiently culled by the low level zone system, which is implemented in SIMD, so the tags must follow a certain size and alignment.\n\nAnd as a last thing, we implemented code to allow filtering tags by a DNF (Disjunctive normal form), which is a fixed format and can be used for efficient checking of arbitrary boolean expressions.\n\nRuntime Skel-Extensions: The character customization system in Star Citizen is internally using an engine feature called \u201cskinned attachments\u201d. With skinned attachments it is possible to replace every deformable item on a character (i.e. cloth, shoes, spaces suits, helmets, etc) and even entire body parts such as faces, hands, or upper and lower body parts. Each skin-attachment has its own set of joints that are automatically animated and deformed by the base skeleton. It is also possible to use skinned attachments that have more joints and different joints then the base skeleton and it is possible to merge all types of skeletons together, even skeletons from totally different characters. That means you can have a minimalistic base skeleton which can be extended by an arbitrarily complex skinning skeleton. In the original CryEngine this was an offline- or loading-time feature, because the entire process was pretty CPU intensive. For Star Citizen we turned this into a runtime-feature that allows us to extend a base-skeleton anytime while the game is running, no matter if the character is alive and playing animations or in a driven- or floppy-ragdoll state. This means that you don\u2019t have to know in advance the type of joints you might need in the base skeleton nor do you have to carry extra joints around just in case you might need them. Instead the system allows you to add new joints at will and whenever they are required.\n\nFull-Body Experience: we also invested a lot of time to improve the full-body experience in first person. Our main goal was to make the head-bobbing customizable. In Star Citizen the head-bobbing is a natural side-effect of the mocap data, because third- and first-person are using the same animation. To make the controls as smooth and precise as possible, we implemented a new IK-solution to eliminate all unwanted effects from the 3rd person body animations on the first person view and weapon handling.\n\n\nTech Art\nFrankfurt TechArt is always busy with RND and actively supporting any discipline who needs help. This month we were helping with Eye stabilization for FPS , which will stabilize camera movement while playing in FPS, the results so far have been really good. We\u2019re also supporting feature or RND for the itemport IK system for game, it\u2019s moving positively as well.\n\nOn our DCC[Maya] pipeline front it is becoming much more stable but still needs a bit more support as we keep updating or expending it. We were also fixing bugs and supporting weapon Assets on all fronts like rigs, updating rendermesh, entity setup, Mannequin setup etc.\n\nOverall TechArt is participating for new features as well as keep supporting daily operations.\n\n\nVFX\nThe past month the Frankfurt VFX team has been working on Squadron 42 single player missions. This covers almost all aspects of VFX such as ambient\/environment effects, scripted action effects and even some cinematic effects. This also requires a fair deal of collaboration with the individual level designers and artists. Once they are done designing and building a section of the level with props, VFX can then move in and decorate it with the appropriate effects. Everything from fire and explosions to blood and water.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nThis month in QA we\u2019ve been working closely with our in-house Engineering team to test progress on the procedural planets, as seen in the Pupil to Planet trailer. With such a large scale planet you can imagine the number of issues we encountered throughout our testing. Including, but not limited to the buggy insisting on driving on its z-axis, defying all laws of gravity!! We also spent some time checking all characters currently in Star Citizen and Squadron 42 for issues that might be blocking our cinematic developers. As a result, we were able to identify multiple Squadron 42 characters that had definitely seen better days. Sean Tracy, Ali Brown, and Okka Kyaw jumped on board to assist and we were able to resolve the issues quickly, so that our cinematic developers will be able to continue to create amazing cinematic sequences for Star Citizen. Lastly, we spent the remainder of the month assisting Chris Raine and Chris Bolte with gathering profiling and concurrency data for the PTU servers. The community was a great help and rallied together to load as many players onto the PTU servers as possible so that we could collect data with a hi-load server in order to contribute to resolving the framerate drops the public has been experiencing in Crusader. May has by far been our busiest month in QA, but we would not have expected any less as our universe grows larger each day.\n\nWe Aim to Misbehaviour\n\nFrom supporting Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 to working on some exciting content you\u2019ll be seeing in the coming patches, we had a busy month at BHVR! Here\u2019s the skinny\u2026\n\n\nEngineering\nFor the engineering team, this month went by very quickly. A lot of effort was put on getting 2.4 out of the door, working hard on the leftover nitty gritty details.\n\nWe mainly polished and debugged features like the shopping system and cry astro.\n\nThe good news is that with release 2.4, we are establishing the foundation for really fun features that will be implemented for the next releases.\n\n\nDesign\nWith no surprise, this month was almost all about shopping in both Port Olisar and Area18, getting features ready for 2.4.0 live release. This means, sorting out the last remaining bugs and working on improvements like for example; adding NPC shopkeepers or fixing some load out issues.\n\nLevel Designer Jesse Kalb, helped out re-design and implement the new port modification system for the flair items in the hangars. The game has many flair objects, so we had to work with Turbulent on getting things working right with the new design. Hopefully, players will enjoy placing the flair items and customizing their display cases.\n\nOn a different topic, Technical Lead Level Designer Fran\u00e7ois Boucher, led the way for the creation of the CryEngine level structure and its components for the next map we are currently working on, the Pirate Base. With the whitebox map, hot out of the oven, from our friends in Frankfurt, we prepared the map so both Design and Art teams could work on their respective sections. This means, setting up landing pads, airlocks, doors, elevators, player spawning and finding a sweet spot for this base in the Stanton System.\n\nFrancois is also busy setting up the ship components shop that is going to open soon on Port Olisar.\n\nFinally, the design team also started working on the shop designs, layouts and whiteboxes that we are going to find on the Pirate base. The mood is going to be different on the Pirate base and so will the shops. More to come, looking forward to further share with you guys!\n\n\nArt\nIt was a very exciting month for the BHVR Art Team, because we began production on new maps.\n\nOne of them is a new pirate space station, which we mostly concentrated our efforts on the global aspects of the map like: composition, orientation, basic dressing and evaluating the new extra modules that will be required for this map.\n\nNext month, we will move to final dressing pass, color balance, decal placement and polishing.\n\nThe second map, is a new ship parts shop that will be available on a future release. This shop has great character, so we have spent a good chunk of time working on the dressing and first pass lighting.\n\nNext month, we are moving on debugging and polishing.\n\nFor the props team, we continued supporting the new shopping system. Mainly working on item racks and shelves.\n\nWe have also completed several new props that the environment team is extremely happy to be able to use now.\n\nFinally, let\u2019s not forget the improvements and debugging work that was done for the upcoming 2.4 release.\n\nThe Turbulent Power!\n\nGreetings from sunny Montreal where Star Citizen\u2019s web team have been hard at work on everything from Buccaneer surveys to changing how you log in to the game! Here are some specifics on the projects we were working on this past month.\n\n\nMulti-Factor Authentication (MFA)\nFor those that aren\u2019t familiar, Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA, is the type of security many people use with modern MMOs and web accounts, where you need to use a special key code or something texted to your cell phone to access an account. It keeps your data more secure by making it much harder for anyone to break in and assume your identity. We\u2019ve had MFA in the works for quite a while, as we know you want to keep your ships and characters safe! We\u2019re in the home stretch now, as we are close to completing the development of it for the RSI website. Once the QA phase starts, we will be working with CIG to test it and then roll out to the community. At the same time, we are continuing to work on MFA support for the game launcher itself, which will be especially important as we move more aspects of Star Citizen from the web to the game world itself.\n\n\nCommunication Platform\nYou may know this better as \u2018Organizations 2.0,\u2019 which we pitched earlier in Star Citizen\u2019s development. Instead of going with a simple update to the current Org system, we\u2019ve opted to develop a purpose-built communications platform that can be adapted for many aspects of the game. Development continues on the new platform, which includes completely new chat and forum systems for the first iteration. We have set up a server for internal testing, but we\u2019re still a few months away from a beta launch. When the time comes, the Evocati group will get the first access to kick the tires!\n\nGame Launcher\n3, 2, 1\u2026 launch! We have been working with the team at CIG on the new version of the game launcher\/patcher. The new version will support multiple environments (e.g. PTU, live) and multiple games (e.g. Star Citizen, Squadron 42), and will allow for background patching. In the first phase, the user interface will look like the current one, but we will be able to add new functionality and design in subsequent phases that the current patcher wouldn\u2019t be able to handle. This is an exciting step for how the game \u2018works,\u2019 although we know it\u2019s probably not as thrilling to the community as seeing a new ship or planet.\n\n\nSales\nI guess you could say, the Bucc stops here! We assisted CIG in launching the next great pirate fighter, and all our metrics say it\u2019s a hit! To support the Buccaneer, we built a \u2018Drake customer survey\u2019 site that will determine what bonus weapon everyone who purchases the ship will get. We took inspiration from the classic Ultima series for this, trying to come up with Star Citizen\u2019s version of the fortune teller\u2019s quiz used for character generation. After all, immersion isn\u2019t just for the game! This month was also the month where backers could reap the rewards of our one-off operations: we distributed coupons to all those of you who took part in the April Fools \u201cBig Benny\u201d reveal, all the entrants in the Shubin recruitment programs, and also everyone who joined in for the latest Free Fly promo.\n\n\nBehind-the-Scenes\nIn preparation for the release of 2.4.0, we have been working with CIG to test the platform side. For example, if a user makes changes to their inventory on the website, they should be reflected in the game too. There are many different scenarios to test, so it\u2019s been a collaborative effort between us and CIG\u2019s QA team. This is one of those areas backers probably don\u2019t think too much about, but is necessary for the move to a true persistent universe. It\u2019s great seeing your ships in the inventory of the website\u2026 but it\u2019s a lot greater having the game track them, their upgrades, their damage status, their location in the world and so on.\n\nAlso in May, Turbulent sent a small strikeforce to Austin for a series of face-to-face meetings to discuss various issues, such as server infrastructure, analytics, persistence, and the Issue Council. It is possible that some BBQ was consumed after hours, and we\u2019ve had ongoing discussions with CIG about IT infrastructure, and improving performance. As you would expect, this is a complex subject, but we hope to have implemented some new measures by the end of summer.\n\nDon\u2019t Forget a Snappy Title, Jared\n\nThis train is just about to the station. I won\u2019t hold you up with a long, boring intro, suffice to say, I could write a long, boring intro if I wanted to. I could do it, man. But I won\u2019t. Because I know you\u2019re in a hurry. Uh oh, is this becoming a long, boring intro anyway? I\u2019d better move onto the next section before that happens. Quickly. Let\u2019s go\u2026\n\n\nDay-to-Day\nEach day I come to work with some of my favorite people in the world. And Thomas Hennessy. This month was a struggle with Ben and Alexis gone back east for two weeks on Bereavement Leave, but we pulled through with a newfound appreciation for the amount of work the two of them do each and every month. Between Ben and Alexis being gone, and Sandi going to the UK, it was a rare few days this week when the whole team was together, but my main man Tyler Witkin helped out from the Austin office, calling me on Skype each day to keep me company, and help shoulder the load while folks were out.\n\nBasically, this section is just so I can say how much I like the people I work with. I\u2019m in a mood.\n\n\nBroadcasts\nThis month\u2019s 10 for the Developers episodes in lieu of Chris being in the UK covered a wide range of topics and hosts. Sean Tracy, Forrest Stephan, Adam Weiser, Omar Aweidah, Eric Keiron Davis, Gaige Hallman, Mark Abent, Randy Vasquez, Dave Haddock and Ben Lesnick all stepped up to step in for the Chairman this month. We are extremely grateful each and every week for the time and effort our developers put in stepping away from their work to communicate with the community. We quite simply going not do it without them.\n\nAround the Verse continues to diversify it\u2019s offering as we approach the 100th episode on June 30th. We explored the Nexus, Tamsa, and Min systems in Loremaker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy. We interviewed folks like artist Cheyne Hessler and the makers of Voice Attack and HCS Voice Packs. We ventured into the Wonderful World of Star Citizen to highlight the tremendous work fan-organization The Imperial News Network does week in and week out. With Ship Shape, we explored the whitebox design of both the Drake Herald and the Drake Caterpillar. And we sat down with designer Matt Sherman and Concept Artist Jim Martin to for an unprecedented exploration of the Drake Buccaneer concept ship. Things certainly came up Drake in Around the Verse this month.\n\nReverse the Verse, our weekly informal livestream with the fans survived the absence of Ben and Alexis for two weeks (if only barely) and the May Subscribers Edition saw questions posed to our Design and Tech Art members for a full hour.\n\n\nYou Guys\nAs another month of development passes, so does another month of stories, content videos, and community accomplishments. This is a section we wanted to include to highlight all of the content creators, streamers, and more! For short, YOU!\n\nFirst and foremost: PTU Testers. We want to take a moment to express our appreciation for all of our PTU testers who were patient and eager enough to write thousands of bugs and feedback posts over the course of May! As many of you know, this was our first time utilizing the focus-test group titled \u201cEvocati\u201d, and it was a smashing success! We look forward to collaborating together on future patches\/content! Thank you so much!\n\nTwerk17 continued his early morning streams that not only entertained us, but helped us greatly! The Design and QA team in the UK studio have utilized Twerk17\u2019s early morning schedule to watch\/analyze game-play and bugs! Thanks for being awesome Twerk!\n\nWhile not Star Citizen related, a couple of different families acquired miniature co-pilots! Congratulations to STLYoungblood\u2019s family and NighthawkZale\u2019s family for both adding a +1 to the citizen count!\n\nStreamer\/entertainer\/developer Geekdomo underwent a successful surgery, and we are all very happy to hear he is doing well!\n\nWe could easily write enough to make this section alone longer than the entirety of the monthly report. This community has really grown into something meaningful. We are all connected to each other not just as backers of the same game, but as dreamers of the same universe. Some may be pirates, while others militant UEE soldiers, but we share one goal in common: stepping outside the box of conformity and traditional game publication in order to try and bring a living, breathing universe that we have always wanted to play to life. This community has become a safe-haven for us sci-fi geeks and we love it. We want to give a huge thank you to everyone who has shown their support and patience for the team and this project as we continue progress on making the best damn space sim ever! We sincerely could not do it without you!\n\nLooking Ahead\nBuilding Star Citizen is hard work, but it\u2019s the best job in the world. Every day we work is one day closer to our dream: the massive persistent universe of Star Citizen and an unparalleled single player cinematic experience in Squadron 42. We know there will always be setbacks, difficulties, challenges we didn\u2019t predict\u2026 but we\u2019re privileged to fight this battle alongside an incredible development team and an amazing community.\n\nOur next release will be Star Citizen Alpha 2.4, which is being tested as we speak. Alpha 2.4 represents another important step towards our goal, with the introduction of persistence and the first part of the in-game economy. We\u2019re very excited to have players earn credits in the game world instead of buying them through Voyager Direct, which has been a goal for a long time. We\u2019ve already seen what players are doing with the Starfarer, our largest ship launched to date, on the test servers and we can\u2019t wait to see what happens when everybody can start boarding.\n\nWe are also heading into \u2018convention season,\u2019 with appearances planned at Gamescom, DragonCon and our own CitizenCon. We\u2019ll be sharing more details about these events shortly and how you can interact with the team both in person and remote. There\u2019s a lot we want to talk about and then even more we want to get into your hands. We\u2019ll keep smashing bugs, creating worlds and telling stories\u2026 and we\u2019re happy to have you along for the ride!\n\nWe\u2019ll see you in the \u2018Verse.","de_DE":"Gr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger!\n\nWie die meisten von euch wissen, haben wir hart daran gearbeitet, Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 diesen Monat zu starten. Der Patch befindet sich derzeit auf der PTU, die von unseren Geldgebern getestet wird. Wie sie best\u00e4tigen k\u00f6nnen, k\u00e4mpfen wir gegen einige Blocker, die haupts\u00e4chlich mit dem Netzwerk zu tun haben. Wir machen gute Fortschritte und werden Sie auf dem Laufenden halten.... wir sind so begierig wie jeder andere, dass unsere Unterst\u00fctzer an Bord der Starfarers gegeneinander antreten, nach Kleidung suchen und im Spiel Geld verdienen. In der Zwischenzeit wird an allen Aspekten von Star Citizen und Squadron 42 gearbeitet, unabh\u00e4ngig davon, ob sie f\u00fcr Alpha 2.4 oder eine zuk\u00fcnftige Version vorgesehen sind. Ohne weiteres, hier ist Mai 2016, direkt von den Entwicklern, die es gelebt haben!\n\nWestk\u00fcste, Beste K\u00fcste\n\nHallo, B\u00fcrger der Sterne. Wieder einmal ist es an der Zeit, dass wir teilen, was unsere Entwickler in der Stadt der Engel vorhaben. Unn\u00f6tig zu sagen, dass 2.4.0 aus der T\u00fcr zu bekommen, hat nat\u00fcrlich alle unsere Zeitpl\u00e4ne v\u00f6llig dominiert. Es ist immer unsere oberste Priorit\u00e4t, dass wir Ihnen ein Qualit\u00e4tsprodukt zur Verf\u00fcgung stellen; dies erfordert jedoch eine ziemlich gro\u00dfe Aufmerksamkeit f\u00fcr Details, wenn Sie versuchen, eines der technisch fortschrittlichsten Spiele aller Zeiten zu entwickeln. Lassen Sie uns also erz\u00e4hlen, was jedes Team im CIG-LA-B\u00fcro in einem ungew\u00f6hnlich \u00fcbergl\u00fchenden Monat Mai geleistet hat.\n\n\nIngenieurwesen\nVieles von dem, was in 2.4.0 passiert, basiert auf dem, wof\u00fcr das Engineering-Team die Weichen gestellt hat. Einkaufen, Ausdauer, Bugfixes und vieles mehr. W\u00e4hrend sich Mark Abent auf die 2.4 Phys Controller und Seat Integration konzentriert hat, haben er und Paul Reindell das Engineering-Team bei der Unterst\u00fctzung der Persistenz- und Shopping-Funktionen unterst\u00fctzt.\n\nAriel Xu hat immer noch \u00fcber seinen Port Editor und Loadout Editor nachgedacht und k\u00fcrzlich Simulationsparameter in den Loadout Editor implementiert. Dies erm\u00f6glicht Simulationen zwischen \u00e4hnlichen Anlagen wie Kollisionsproxies, Seilen usw. Diese Art von intern entwickelten Tools helfen, den Design- und Engineering-Prozess zu rationalisieren.\n\nChad Zamzow hat mit der Arbeit an K\u00fchlern und K\u00fchlern begonnen, das technische Konstruktionsdokument aktualisiert und mit dem Testen des Systems in Schiffen begonnen, zusammen mit dem Testen der Funktionalit\u00e4t, wie IR- und W\u00e4rmesignaturen abgestimmt werden k\u00f6nnen. W\u00e4hrend Patrick Mathieu einen Code Merge f\u00fcr die Seats und Controller Manager durchgef\u00fchrt hat, war er auch an mehreren anderen Systemen beteiligt, wie dem Energy Control Manager (f\u00fcr Kraftwerke), Flight Controls und dem Event-System des Spiels. Chad McKinney schrieb ein technisches Design-Dokument f\u00fcr die Ingenieure an Signalleitungen, nachdem er an den Entity Health-Komponenten gearbeitet hatte (im Wesentlichen an der Verschlei\u00dffunktionalit\u00e4t von Komponenten, die mit Tech Design synchronisiert werden). Chad hat dem QA-Team auch geholfen, indem er kundenspezifische Builds f\u00fcr QA zur Verf\u00fcgung stellte, um sehr spezifische Parameter des Spiels zu testen. Auch der Flugingenieur John Pritchett hat hart gearbeitet und arbeitet derzeit im britischen B\u00fcro an Positionskontrollen f\u00fcr Schiffe der Hauptklasse.\n\n\nTechnisches Design\nEin technischer Designer zu sein, ist viel mehr als nur Spiele-Design-Ideen zu entwickeln. Ein technischer Designer muss wissen, wie diese Systeme und Designs innerhalb des Spiels funktionieren k\u00f6nnen, basierend auf bestimmten Parametern wie Einschr\u00e4nkungen der Spiele-Engine, Ressourcen, etc. Vor diesem Hintergrund hat der Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome damit begonnen, die Kraftwerke und Schilde 2.0 Systeme zu testen und einen \u00dcberblick dar\u00fcber zu entwerfen, wie sich \u00dcberhitzung\/W\u00e4rmespitzen auf Schiffskomponenten auswirken. Auf der Schiffsseite hat Kirk auch an der Origin 85x gearbeitet und die Bem\u00fchungen mit dem Engineering-Team abgestimmt, wie Hitze und Verschlei\u00df designtechnisch funktionieren werden.\n\nNeben Schiffssystemen, wie viele unserer klugen Leser wissen, \u00fcbernimmt das Tech Design Team auch das Design, wie die Schiffsfunktionalit\u00e4t im Spiel funktioniert. Calix Reneau hat mit der Arbeit an der F7A Hornet, dem Prowler und den Raumstationen begonnen, w\u00e4hrend Matt Sherman an der wei\u00dfen Box f\u00fcr den lang erwarteten Drake Herald gearbeitet hat, w\u00e4hrend er den Reliant flugbereit machte.\n\nMatt hat auch an der Unterst\u00fctzung des neu entdeckten Freibeuters gearbeitet und auch einige dringend ben\u00f6tigte Updates f\u00fcr den Carrack Design Brief hinzugef\u00fcgt. Es gibt einen Hauch von Erforschung, in den er geschaut hat, aber lasst uns bis zum Bericht des n\u00e4chsten Monats warten, damit wir dar\u00fcber berichten k\u00f6nnen, was er bisher erreicht hat.\n\nDas LA Tech Design Team wurde durch ein neues Mitglied, Stephen Hosmer, erg\u00e4nzt. Bleiben Sie also dran f\u00fcr den Bericht des n\u00e4chsten Monats, um zu sehen, was unser neuester Tech Designer bis dahin erreicht haben wird.\n\n\nKunst & Animation\nDas Art-Team wurde durch unseren neuen Character Art Director Josh Herman erg\u00e4nzt, der eine Menge Erfahrung mit ihm in Bezug auf Charaktere und h\u00f6chste Qualit\u00e4t mitbringt.\n\nCG Supervisor Forrest Stephan hat nicht nur an der Bekleidungsunterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr das Charakter-Team f\u00fcr 2.4.0 gearbeitet, seine Bem\u00fchungen gehen auch \u00fcber das hinaus, was wir gerade liefern und erstrecken sich bis 2.5.0 und weiter.\n\nEin gro\u00dfer Teil der K\u00fcnstler hat sich dem Bau der kommenden Caterpillar verschrieben. Gurmukh Bhasin und Justin Wentz, unsere Schiffsk\u00fcnstler, haben Au\u00dfenp\u00e4sse der Caterpillar gemacht. Dazu geh\u00f6rten die Anpassung des Kommandomoduls, der T\u00fcrme, Aufkleber, des Traktorbalkenraums, der Motoren und der Ladung sowie des Materialdurchlaufs. Auf der Innenseite waren Daniel Kamentsky und \"Jin\" Hyun mit dem Innenladungsmodul besch\u00e4ftigt.\n\nDie andere H\u00e4lfte der Mitarbeiter von CIG LA Art arbeitet weiterhin an der Charakterkunst. Omar Aweidah und Cheyne Hesslers ma\u00dfgeschneidertes Charakterhaar ist derzeit in Arbeit und sieht fabelhaft aus, w\u00e4hrend Jeremiah Lees Kost\u00fcmkonzepte perfektioniert und f\u00fcr die Produktion freigegeben wurden.\n\n\nGlobale technische Inhalte\nWie wir in der Vergangenheit bereits erl\u00e4utert haben, ist das Global Tech Content Team schwer zu kategorisieren, da es sich auf alles erstreckt, was wir bei CIG auf globaler Ebene tun. Wir hatten einen neuen Associate Tech Animator im Team und freuen uns, dass er hier ist! Erik Link begann diesen Monat und wird mit unserem Animationsteam zusammenarbeiten, also bleiben Sie dran f\u00fcr den Bericht des n\u00e4chsten Monats, um zu sehen, welche Leistungen er f\u00fcr das Team erbracht hat. Aber im Moment arbeitet Erik daran, die Schaufensterpuppe zu reinigen und tief in unsere Systeme einzudringen, um unsere Lieferungen zu erh\u00f6hen.\n\nLetzten Monat berichteten wir, dass Gaige Hallman an dem Bekleidungsvolumen-System gearbeitet hatte, um festzustellen, wie das Clipping funktionieren wird. W\u00e4hrend ein paar verwandte Fehler aufgetaucht sind, war Gaige ziemlich schnell dabei, sie zu beheben und hat an der Anlagenmontage f\u00fcr die Shubin Miner-Uniform gearbeitet, w\u00e4hrend John Riggs an der Reparatur des Vanduul Hand Geo und Skeletons gearbeitet hat, um nur einige zu nennen.\n\nMatt Intrieri hat neben der Arbeit an einem Tool zur Asset-Validierung auch an der Tech Art White Box f\u00fcr den Drake Herald begonnen, w\u00e4hrend Patrick Salerno an der Reliant Grey Box Tech Art gearbeitet hat. Last but not least beendete Mark McCall die Arbeit an der Enth\u00e4utung und Implementierung des RSI Pilot Flight Suit Jetpack.\n\n\nNarrativ\nWeiter mit unserem letzten Update:\n\nGeschwader 42, Geschwader 42, Geschwader 42, Geschwader 42.\n\nJa, wir waren im letzten Monat auf Hochtouren. Sowohl Will als auch ich waren in Gro\u00dfbritannien, um bei der Aufnahme der Aufnahmeleistung zu helfen. Wir m\u00fcssen einige bekannte Gesichter wieder am Set haben, sowie einige neue Schauspieler, die an der Show teilnehmen. Es lief besser, als sich jeder von uns h\u00e4tte vorstellen k\u00f6nnen, und es war spektakul\u00e4r zu sehen, wie diese Figur, die schon seit einiger Zeit herumtr\u00f6delt, endlich auf so dynamische Weise zum Leben erweckt wurde.\n\nAnsonsten haben wir uns an der PU-Front mit Dingen besch\u00e4ftigt, die noch nicht \u00f6ffentlich gemacht werden sollen, also gibt es leider nicht viel zu erz\u00e4hlen.\n\nNun, zur\u00fcck zu den Minen von Geschwader 42.\n\nBis-\n\nOh, wenn du es noch nicht geh\u00f6rt hast, gibt es eine \u00dcberarbeitung des Ask A Dev Forum-Threads. Wir haben gerade erst begonnen, wieder einzusteigen und Ihre Fragen zu beantworten, aber wenn Sie eine Frage hatten, die noch unbeantwortet war vom alten Ask A Dev - Lore Thread, z\u00f6gern Sie nicht, sie in den neuen zu posten und wir werden unser Bestes tun, um an sie heranzukommen, wenn es der Fortschritt zul\u00e4sst.\n\nWie ich schon sagte, bis n\u00e4chsten Monat.\n\n\nQualit\u00e4tssicherung\nIn diesem Monat war das CIG-LA-Qualit\u00e4tssicherungsteam an Deck und konzentrierte sich auf alle neuen 2.4-Funktionen, einschlie\u00dflich der neuen PU-Kleidung und des Einkaufssystems, eine gro\u00dfe Anzahl von Ausdauer- und Leistungstests und Hilfe bei der Behebung von Stabilit\u00e4tsproblemen. Saitek war so freundlich, uns ein Saitek X-56 Rhino H.O.T.A.S. Peripherieger\u00e4t zur Verf\u00fcgung zu stellen, so dass wir den Controller nach einem sehr kurzen Streit dar\u00fcber, wer ihn zuerst benutzt hat, auf Herz und Nieren pr\u00fcfen konnten. Das Spannendste in diesem Monat war jedoch das Privileg eines fr\u00fchen Blicks auf vorl\u00e4ufige gro\u00dffl\u00e4chige Sonnensysteme mit verfahrenstechnischen Planeten, die vom Weltraum in die Atmosph\u00e4re wandern und schlie\u00dflich auf dem Boden landen. An diesem Punkt sieht das Gel\u00e4nde optisch ziemlich karg aus, aber so fr\u00fch geht es um die Technologie selbst. Es gibt nichts Sch\u00f6neres, als mit einem M50 durch und durch Canyons zu fliegen!\n\n\nFazit\nDa haben wir es Leute; das war der Monat Mai, kurz gesagt f\u00fcr uns in der Niederlassung von Cloud Imperium Games in Los Angeles. Es sollte selbstverst\u00e4ndlich sein, dass hinter den Kulissen noch viel mehr passiert, um all diese Meilensteine zu erm\u00f6glichen, und wir k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten, bis Sie sehen, was wir als n\u00e4chstes enth\u00fcllen.\n\nGame Dev: Gr\u00f6\u00dfer in Texas\n\nWir haben die Version 2.4.0 bis zum Monat Mai weiter ausgebaut. Wir haben 145 Builds aus dem Build-System generiert; wir haben 98 interne Server-Builds bereitgestellt und 14 davon an die PTU f\u00fcr externes Feedback ver\u00f6ffentlicht. Jeder im Studio hat Tag und Nacht gearbeitet und wir haben viele gro\u00dfe Fortschritte gemacht, um die vielen technologischen und gestalterischen \u00c4nderungen, die Teil dieser Version sind, zu unterst\u00fctzen. Wir freuen uns sehr, dass diese Version bald ihren Weg zum Live-Server fortsetzen wird, und wie Sie sich vorstellen k\u00f6nnen, arbeiten die Teams bereits hart an 2.5 und dar\u00fcber hinaus.\n\n\nEntwicklung\nDer Wonnemonat Mai war ein produktiver Monat f\u00fcr das Austin Dev Team. Wir haben den gr\u00f6\u00dften Teil des Monats damit verbracht, unsere Aufgaben f\u00fcr 2.4.0 abzuschlie\u00dfen und f\u00fcr 2.5.0 im Voraus zu planen. Das Designteam hat in 2.4.0 die Funktionen, insbesondere Shopping und Port\u00e4nderung, so optimiert, dass sie f\u00fcr den Zeitpunkt des Produktivstarts von 2.4.0 in Top-Form sind. Robert Gaither ist von der QA her\u00fcbergesprungen, um bei der Platzierung aller Item-Ports in den Hangars zu helfen, so dass ihr Jungs in der Lage seid, das Layout eurer Flair-Objekte und Schiffe anzupassen. Er hat sorgf\u00e4ltig darauf geachtet, dass die Platzierung der Item-Ports f\u00fcr jede Art von Flair sinnvoll ist und die Item-Ports so miteinander verkn\u00fcpft, dass die Platzierung von gr\u00f6\u00dferem Flair und Schiffen die M\u00f6glichkeit, kleinere Flairs und Schiffe in der unmittelbaren Umgebung zu platzieren, zunichte macht.\n\nLead Designer Rob Reininger hat Fehler mit dem Shopping-Erlebnis poliert und behoben, zus\u00e4tzlich zur Planung mehrerer Features, die in das Rohr kommen. Wir haben ein fertiges Design f\u00fcr \"Kiosk Purchasing\" vor CR und warten auf Feedback. Diese Funktion erm\u00f6glicht den Kauf von Gegenst\u00e4nden, die zu gro\u00df sind, um sie in einem herk\u00f6mmlichen Gesch\u00e4ft auszustellen, wie z.B. Schiffskomponenten, Schiffswaffen und die Schiffe selbst! Wir konzentrieren uns auch auf die Entwicklung weiterer Phasen des \"Try On\/Inspect Mode\", in denen jede Art von Kleidungsst\u00fcck eine spezifische Kameraaufzeichnung hat, die je nachdem, was Sie ausprobieren, an bestimmte K\u00f6rperteile heranzoomt. Wenn Sie also zum Beispiel Schuhe anprobieren, zoomt die Kamera bis zu den F\u00fc\u00dfen heran. Es wird auch spezifische \"Try On\"-Animationen f\u00fcr den Charakter geben, so dass der Charakter sich selbst ausprobieren kann, w\u00e4hrend er die neueste und beste schicke Kleidung anprobiert.\n\nApropos neue schicke Kleidung, sowohl Rob als auch Robert haben mit dem Charakter-Team zusammengearbeitet, um Slips f\u00fcr zus\u00e4tzliche Assets zu erstellen und f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Versionen zu planen. Unser Ziel ist es, von nun an neue Kleidungsst\u00fccke f\u00fcr jede neue Version bereitzuhalten. Manchmal werden dies nur Material- und Texturvarianten bestehender Assets sein, aber manchmal werden wir brandneue Assets von v\u00f6llig neuen Bekleidungslinien und Herstellern haben. Unser Hauptaugenmerk f\u00fcr 2.5.0 wird darauf liegen, etwas mehr schmutzige Grenzkleidung f\u00fcr euch bereitzuhalten.\n\nDer Designer Pete Mackay hat die Schiffspreisformel, an der er gearbeitet hat, wiederholt. Er wurde auch in Zukunft zum Design Owner f\u00fcr Game Analytics ernannt. Pete sprach hin und her mit dem Gameplay Engineering Team, dem Server Engineering Team, dem DevOps Team und dem Platform Team, um den besten Ansatz f\u00fcr die Erfassung und Anzeige von Spielanalysen aus verschiedenen Aspekten von Star Citizen zu finden. Wir wollen wissen, wie ihr spielt, damit wir uns auf die Dinge konzentrieren k\u00f6nnen, die euch am besten gefallen und euch mehr von dem geben, was ihr liebt, und die Verfolgung der Spielanalyse ist der beste Weg, das zu tun.\n\nDas Backend Services Team hat den ganzen Monat lang w\u00fctend Fehler mit dem Persistence Backend zerschlagen, um es f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung bereit zu machen. Dies ist die massivste Ver\u00e4nderung unserer Kerntechnologie seit dem Deb\u00fct der Large World-Technologie, und damit verbunden sind viele Probleme, die es zu l\u00f6sen gilt. Das Team hat jedoch einen gro\u00dfartigen Job gemacht und wir befinden uns in der Endphase der Fertigstellung vor der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung. Wir schauen nun auf 2.5.0 und dar\u00fcber hinaus. Unsere kurzfristige Aufgabe beinhaltet Persistent UEC, was es uns erm\u00f6glichen wird, UEC tats\u00e4chlich als Teil von Persistenz zu verwenden, anstatt nur unsere Testw\u00e4hrung Alpha UEC. Ian Guthrie von Wyrmbyte hat uns auch geholfen, einen Analysedienst f\u00fcr Gameplay-Ingenieure zu entwickeln, in den wir uns einklinken k\u00f6nnen, um die Daten bereitzustellen, die Pete Mackay wie oben erw\u00e4hnt ben\u00f6tigt. Wie immer werden wir mit Beharrlichkeit Fehler ausschalten, wie wir sie auch sehen.\n\nDie Kunst- und Animationsteams fahren mit ihren l\u00e4ngerfristigen Aufgaben per LKW. Das Ship Team ist immer noch bis zum \u00c4u\u00dfersten in der Arbeit f\u00fcr die Hornet F7A und den Herald. Jay Brushwood war in den letzten Wochen am Set des Mocap-Shootings bei Imaginarium und hat neue Enter\/Exit-Animationen f\u00fcr alle Schiffe aufgenommen, die wir ziemlich bald einf\u00fchren werden, damit ihr schneller ein- und aussteigen k\u00f6nnt! Daniel Craig hat seine Arbeit an den aktualisierten 300i Enter\/Exit-Animationen abgeschlossen und wird als n\u00e4chstes zum Avenger \u00fcbergehen. Unser PU-Team hat S42 bei der Implementierung von Hintergrundanimationen unterst\u00fctzt. Sie haben speziell an Animationen f\u00fcr die Szenen der Messehalle gearbeitet und interagieren mit Schiffsterminals. Sie halfen uns auch im Notfall, indem sie einige neue \"Weapon Inspect\"-Animationen einf\u00fchrten, die Sie bei der Inspektion der Waffen in den Gesch\u00e4ften in Aktion sehen k\u00f6nnen. Oh, und diese Todesanimation, die passiert, wenn ein Spieler eine Luftschleuse betritt, ohne seinen Raumanzug an? Daf\u00fcr kannst du Vanessa Landeros danken!\n\nEmre Switzer hat die Beleuchtung f\u00fcr mehrere Bereiche des Spiels \u00fcberarbeitet. Er hat sich bereits mit ArcCorp auseinandergesetzt und wird als n\u00e4chstes zu Crusader \u00fcbergehen. Er wird auch einige der Schiffe nachbessern, wie die Reliantin.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich wollten wir Mark Skelton f\u00fcr all seine Bem\u00fchungen und seine Hingabe an dieses Projekt und insbesondere an dieses Studio herzlich danken. Mark ist zu einem neuen Projekt und einem neuen Kapitel \u00fcbergegangen, aber wir w\u00fcnschen ihm alles Gute f\u00fcr seine zuk\u00fcnftigen Bem\u00fchungen und k\u00f6nnen nicht genug ausdr\u00fccken, wie sehr er vermisst wird. Danke Mark!\n\n\nQualit\u00e4tssicherung\nDie 2.4.0-Tests vom April setzten sich bis weit in den Mai hinein fort, wobei der Build seinen Weg zur PTU fand. Bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt hat QA 14 Builds f\u00fcr die PTU seit der ersten Freigabe durch die Evocati-Tester bereitgestellt.\n\nMit Hilfe der Tester auf der PTU konnten wir eine Reihe von verschiedenen Problemen, die zu einer Unterbrechung der Code 7-Verbindung f\u00fchrten, zuverl\u00e4ssig reproduzieren. Dies hat uns sehr geholfen, die verschiedenen Ursachen f\u00fcr diese Unterbrechungen zu identifizieren, was es den Netzwerkingenieuren erm\u00f6glicht hat, sie zu behandeln, w\u00e4hrend wir sie identifizieren. Infolgedessen wurde eine betr\u00e4chtliche Anzahl dieser spezifischen Trennungen seit dem Start der PTU korrigiert. Wir haben auch eine Reihe von Server\/Client-Abst\u00fcrzen behoben gesehen, ebenso wie Verbesserungen am Port Modification System und eine gro\u00dfe Anzahl von Korrekturen im Zusammenhang mit dem Einkaufen. Ganz zu schweigen von den ausreichenden Verbesserungen bei der Objektpersistenz, die es uns erm\u00f6glichen, die Datenbank \u00fcber mehrere Builds hinweg zu persistieren.\n\nIntern haben wir viele Server\/Client-Leistungsdaten gesammelt, die das Engineering-Team analysieren kann, um zu sehen, ob es kurzfristig Verbesserungen gibt, die bei der Leistung helfen k\u00f6nnen, w\u00e4hrend wir auf die sp\u00e4ter anstehenden gr\u00f6\u00dferen Verbesserungen warten.\n\nWir m\u00f6chten auch Tori Turner im QA-Team begr\u00fc\u00dfen, der unser Squadron 42 Testteam unterst\u00fctzt hat.\n\nDas schlie\u00dft diesen Monat ab, abgesehen von der Fortsetzung der Tests von 2.4.0 und Staffel 42 gibt es nicht viel Neues zu berichten.... nun, abgesehen von den Vorversuchen f\u00fcr Verfahrensplaneten sowie den ersten Ausfl\u00fcgen in die Karte des Sonnensystems.....\n\n\nSpielunterst\u00fctzung\nDer Mai war ein weiterer arbeitsreicher, aber solider Monat f\u00fcr das Game Support Team.\n\nWie jeder wei\u00df, war 2.4.0 nicht nur unser Fokus, sondern der Fokus des gesamten Unternehmens. Chris Danks und Will Leverett verbrachten die erste H\u00e4lfte des Monats mit Evocati Test Flight und halfen, Bugs in den Issue Council und dann in unsere Dev-Pipeline zu bekommen. Als es 2.4.0 gelang, in einen Zustand zu gelangen, in dem wir mehr Leute brauchten, \u00f6ffneten wir uns f\u00fcr unsere PTU 1st Wave-Tester und dann f\u00fcr die Abonnenten.\n\nUm eine Community aufzubauen, muss man Zeit und Energie investieren, und wir sind sehr stolz darauf, dass CIG dem Game Support erlaubt hat, genau das mit Evocati und PTU-Testern zu tun. Wir haben uns sehr viel M\u00fche gegeben, um dies erfolgreich zu machen, und wir k\u00f6nnten nicht zufriedener sein mit dem, wie gro\u00dfartig unsere freiwilligen Tester waren. Es ist wirklich ihre Leidenschaft f\u00fcr dieses Projekt, dass wir so fantastische Ergebnisse erzielt haben, die uns bei unseren Bem\u00fchungen, 2.4.0 abzuschlie\u00dfen, enorm geholfen haben.\n\nZur Erinnerung: F\u00fcr diejenigen, die an Evocati oder PTU teilnehmen m\u00f6chten, ist es m\u00f6glich, ein aktives Mitglied des Issue Council zu sein. Wir werden im Laufe dieses Sommers sowohl die Evocati- als auch die PTU-Reihen erweitern, also steigen Sie unter https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/community\/issue-council ein!\n\nWir waren auch begeistert, dass unsere Freunde von Turbulent uns f\u00fcr eine Woche in Austin besucht haben. Wir haben viel Zeit mit einer Vielzahl von Themen verbracht, nicht zuletzt mit den Verbesserungen des Issue Council. Wir haben eine Handvoll Anfragen identifiziert, mit deren Entwicklung wir beginnen werden, von denen einige aus der Community und andere intern stammen. Wir werden sehr gespannt sein, die zu entfernen!\n\nWir wachsen auch in Austin, Texas! Wir haben Kandidaten f\u00fcr eine Game Support Rolle interviewt, um bei verschiedenen Aufgaben wie Account-Sicherheit, technischer Support und unserem Publishing-Prozess zu helfen, und wir werden begeistert sein, eine weitere Hand zu haben, um das Niveau des Service, den wir anbieten k\u00f6nnen, zu verbessern.\n\n\nIT\/Betrieb\nWeitere Fortschritte wurden beim Projekt zur Reduzierung der Pflastergr\u00f6\u00dfe im April erzielt. Wie bereits erw\u00e4hnt, ist dies eine gro\u00dfe \u00dcberholung, so dass es definitiv Sommer sein wird, bevor wir zu dem Punkt kommen, an dem wir dies auf alle ausweiten k\u00f6nnen, aber wir hoffen, dass wir bald anfangen werden, die reale Nutzung des neuen Systems f\u00fcr interne Tests zu sehen. In diesem Monat ging es darum, die \u00c4nderungen, die das neue Patchesystem unterst\u00fctzen, sorgf\u00e4ltig in unsere Build-Pipeline aufzunehmen, ohne die regelm\u00e4\u00dfig geplanten Implementierungen zu beeintr\u00e4chtigen. Das ist keine leichte Aufgabe, aber wir kommen planm\u00e4\u00dfig voran, wie wir es uns erhofft hatten.\n\nW\u00e4hrend wir durch die Build-Pipeline arbeiten, haben wir festgestellt, dass es m\u00f6glich sein k\u00f6nnte, weitere Optimierungen im Build-Prozess zu erreichen. So wie wir Daten in kleinste Teile ausbrechen, die es uns erm\u00f6glichen, detailliertere \u00c4nderungen innerhalb unserer Patches unter dem neuen System bereitzustellen, identifizieren wir nun Wege, wie wir die Granularit\u00e4t in unserem Build-Prozess erh\u00f6hen k\u00f6nnen. Wenn dies funktioniert, k\u00f6nnen wir m\u00f6glicherweise Teile des Builds bis auf bestimmte individuelle \u00c4nderungen zusammenstellen, was die Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten von anderen Aspekten des gr\u00f6\u00dferen Builds weiter reduziert. Mit anderen Worten, durch die Reduzierung von Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten k\u00f6nnten wir in der Lage sein, bestimmte Arten von Build-\u00c4nderungen in Sekundenschnelle auszuschalten, wo wir normalerweise Minuten oder manchmal Stunden auf diese Art von Korrektur warten m\u00fcssten.\n\nWir haben sicherlich mehr Entdeckungen und Tests durchzuf\u00fchren, aber hoffentlich werden wir viel mehr zu berichten haben, wenn unsere Arbeit an unserem riesigen Patch-Projekt voranschreitet.\n\n\nLiveOps\/DevOps\/DevOps\nDiesen Monat waren wir super besch\u00e4ftigt, um mit den Arbeiten der Entwicklungsteams an der Ausdauer Schritt zu halten. Wir haben 18 Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen an PTU geliefert, zusammen mit unz\u00e4hligen Implementierungen f\u00fcr QA- und Individualanwendungstests. Buchst\u00e4blich unz\u00e4hlige Eins\u00e4tze, denn irgendwann haben wir in den sp\u00e4ten N\u00e4chten den \u00dcberblick verloren. Unser prim\u00e4res Build-System umfasste 145 Builds, die insgesamt 18.350 Gigabyte an Daten erzeugten. Alternative Build-Systeme werden nicht verfolgt, leisten aber fast ebenso viel Arbeit, wenn man bedenkt, dass wir jetzt Code Pre-Builds ben\u00f6tigen, bevor Code f\u00fcr die Test- und Produktionsbuilds eingecheckt wird.\n\nDer April war f\u00fcr uns auch ein Monat des Fr\u00fchjahrsputzes. Wir haben eine Reihe von internen Tools und Dokumenten \u00fcberarbeitet und unsere Planung f\u00fcr unser neues Publikations-Orchestrierungssystem abgeschlossen. Ziel dieses Projekts ist es, unsere Publikationen automatisierter und konfigurierbarer zu gestalten. Derzeit haben wir ein anst\u00e4ndiges System, das ziemlich zuverl\u00e4ssig ist, aber die zus\u00e4tzliche Ausdauer hat uns gezeigt, dass wir in der Lage sein m\u00fcssen, eine Vielzahl von Konfigurations\u00e4nderungen schnell und einfach und nicht manuell vorzunehmen. Unser neues System wird all dies f\u00fcr uns erm\u00f6glichen und viel erweiterbarer sein, was bedeutet, dass wir mit Ver\u00e4nderungen viel besser umgehen k\u00f6nnen als heute. W\u00e4hrend dies vielleicht nicht als eine ordentliche auff\u00e4llige Sache erscheint, die die Leute im Spiel sehen, sind wir wirklich gl\u00fccklich, dass wir diese Arbeit machen k\u00f6nnen, weil es die Arbeit der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Star Citizen auf lange Sicht so viel besser macht.\n\nSchmieden vorw\u00e4rts\n\nGr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger,\n\nEin weiterer produktiver Monat in Manchester! Chris hat diesen Monat einige Zeit mit dem Team an der Staffel 42 gearbeitet, und wir freuen uns sehr, dem Austausch weiterer Informationen \u00fcber diesen Teil des Projekts n\u00e4her zu kommen. Hier ist ein Bericht von jeder Abteilung \u00fcber das, was wir diesen Monat gemacht haben:\n\n\nKonzeptkunst\nAhhhh der Monat Mai, alles bl\u00fcht und so auch die Arbeit des Teams - wir kommen hier wirklich in Schwung und das Konzeptteam gibt eine Menge superhochwertige Arbeit ab. Wir haben diesen Monat viel Arbeit f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Schiffe geleistet, diese werden nicht f\u00fcr Sq42 ben\u00f6tigt, sondern f\u00fcr das hartn\u00e4ckige Universum und um die Rollen in den Spielen weiter auszubauen, wir haben 4 unangek\u00fcndigte Schiffe\/Fahrzeuge im Konzept und sie sind fast alle fertig, es ist schwer zu entscheiden, welches mein Favorit sein wird, sie sind alle auf ihre Weise wirklich spannend!\n\nWir haben auch weiterhin intensiv an Schiffsartikeln gearbeitet, haupts\u00e4chlich an Kraftwerken, K\u00fchlern und Schildgeneratoren - achten Sie auf die Gorgon Industries - es hat einige ernsthafte Bisse bekommen :D Waffen werden sowohl auf FPS als auch auf Schiffen eingesetzt, indem wir Upgrade-Pfade f\u00fcr alle verschiedenen Gr\u00f6\u00dfen von Schiffswaffen ausgearbeitet haben und wie man mit unseren Designs effizient sein kann, aber auch den Fans geben, was sie wollen. Requisiten und Requisitenverband hat sich fortgesetzt, die Liste der ben\u00f6tigten Requisiten wird von Tag zu Tag l\u00e4nger, so dass wir zus\u00e4tzliche Ressourcen auf uns nehmen werden, um diese L\u00fccke zu schlie\u00dfen, damit Sq42 optimal aussehen kann. Das ist alles f\u00fcr den Moment, Leute!\n\n\nUmwelt Kunst\nDie letzten verbliebenen Art Bugs f\u00fcr 2.4 wurden bereinigt, hoffentlich werdet ihr es bald spielen, solange wir uns darauf freuen zu sehen, was ihr von den neuen Features haltet. Wie immer arbeitet das Team hart an der Entwicklung von Sq42, nicht allzu viele Informationen k\u00f6nnen erz\u00e4hlt werden, aber wir beenden die Greyboxing-Phase f\u00fcr die Shubin-Innenr\u00e4ume und beenden die Final Art an einigen anderen, nicht offenbarten Orten. Wir treiben die Final Art f\u00fcr unser VS-Niveau weiter voran, alles von Beleuchtung, Materialien, Atmosph\u00e4ren, Requisiten, Gel\u00e4nde, Felsen und Geb\u00e4uden wird bearbeitet. Das ist alles f\u00fcr diesen Monat Leute, genie\u00dft 2.4!\n\n\nRequisiten\nDieser Monat war ein Kopf kleiner und die Dinge wurden im Monat erledigt. Nach dem Verpacken von 2.4 Anfragen und Bugs konzentrierte sich das Team entweder auf Schiffsgegenst\u00e4nde (formale Komponenten) oder Requisiten, um der Staffel 42 eine Geschichte hinzuzuf\u00fcgen. Aufgrund der Art und Weise, wie wir uns den Requisiten n\u00e4hern, kann alles, was wir erstellen, \u00fcberall im Spiel verwendet werden, selbst wenn wir bestimmte Requisiten so gestalten, dass sie eine Geschichte in einem Bereich erz\u00e4hlen, k\u00f6nnen wir das Material \u00fcberschreiben und den Gegenstand in einem anderen Bereich wiederverwenden, was bedeutet, dass wir ein wenig mehr Wiederverwendung f\u00fcr unsere Zeitinvestition erhalten und es reduziert die Kunstm\u00fcdigkeit.\n\nBen Curtis hat diesen Monat viel Zeit mit der Dokumentation verbracht, jetzt haben wir die neue Shader-Technologie, die letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnt wurde. Es ist Zeit, die gr\u00fcndliche Dokumentation zusammenzustellen und einige der alten zu aktualisieren. Wir haben im Laufe des n\u00e4chsten Monats ein paar neue Starter, also ist es wichtig, alles leicht zu finden und auf alles zur\u00fcckzugreifen, da wir in Zukunft mehr Ressourcen bekommen, wird dies immer wichtiger.\n\nIn Zukunft wird sich das gesamte Team f\u00fcr ein paar Sprints auf die Schiffsartikel konzentrieren, um sicherzustellen, dass es viele Inhalte gibt, wenn das Feature live geht. Es wird ein arbeitsreicher Monat werden, aber wir k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten, den Spielern den gesamten Inhalt zur Verf\u00fcgung zu stellen, so dass Sie wirklich anfangen k\u00f6nnen, die Leistung Ihrer Schiffe anzupassen und sie zu Ihren eigenen zu machen.\n\n\nRaumschiffe\nDie Arbeit an unseren \"gro\u00dfen Kanonen\", den Idris, Speer und Bengalen, geht weiter. Wie wir letzten Monat berichtet haben, sind die Innenausbauarbeiten am Idris weitgehend abgeschlossen und wir sind dazu \u00fcbergegangen, einige geschossgebundene Staffel 42-Varianten zu bauen.... aber dar\u00fcber k\u00f6nnen wir noch nicht sprechen! Die Au\u00dfenseiten des Speerwurfes und der Bengalen sind im Gange, wobei das Team des letzteren stark von der Arbeit an der ersteren profitiert.\n\nGegen Ende des Spektrums wird an der F7A Hornet gearbeitet, die das Heldenschiff f\u00fcr Staffel 42 sein wird. Wir werden Updates f\u00fcr die Hornet einf\u00fchren, die deutlich machen, dass es sich um eine andere, milit\u00e4rspezifische Version handelt, und bisher sind die Ergebnisse gro\u00dfartig! Wir werden mehr davon teilen, wenn Geschwader 42 n\u00e4her kommt. Wir haben auch die Arbeit an \"Pods\" f\u00fcr den Argo-Transport abgeschlossen, so dass Sie ihn f\u00fcr eine Reihe verschiedener Utility-Funktionen nutzen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nAuf der Konzeptseite beenden wir die Arbeit an einem der Schiffe, auf die Sie gewartet haben: der Drake Dragonfly \"Space Motorcycle\". Wir denken, dass wir uns einen Plan f\u00fcr ein sehr cooles, sehr kleines Schiff ausgedacht haben, das sehr gut mit einigen zuk\u00fcnftigen Spielsystemen funktionieren wird. Mehr dazu in K\u00fcrze! Wir haben auch mehrere Entw\u00fcrfe f\u00fcr Aegis' n\u00e4chstes Schiff entworfen. Ich kann noch nicht mehr verraten, aber es ist eine harte Sache!\n\n\nGrafiken\nIn diesem Monat hat das Grafik-Team eine Reihe von Features und Korrekturen abgeschlossen, von denen wir hoffen, dass sie bald in den H\u00e4nden der Geldgeber sein werden.\n\nDie erste davon ist ein wichtiges Upgrade der Partikelbeleuchtungsanlage. Fr\u00fcher wurden die Partikel von einem anderen System als der Rest des Spiels beleuchtet, und obwohl dies billiger war, hatte es viele visuelle Probleme wie Schattenmangel und falsche Helligkeit oder Farbe f\u00fcr einige Lichtarten. Wir haben es jetzt so ge\u00e4ndert, dass es das neue Kachel-Lichtsystem verwendet und somit viel besser zum Rest der Beleuchtung passt, aber wir haben auch eine voll volumetrische Abschattung hinzugef\u00fcgt. Das bedeutet, dass wir pr\u00e4zise Lichtwellen durch Partikel hindurchbekommen, was in unseren Tests sehr beeindruckend aussieht, und wir k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten zu sehen, was die K\u00fcnstler damit machen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDas geflieste Beleuchtungssystem im Allgemeinen wurde ebenfalls grundlegend verbessert, zum Teil, um die Partikelbeleuchtung zu erm\u00f6glichen, aber vor allem, um eine h\u00f6here Leistung auf modernen GPUs zu erreichen. Dies wurde in den letzten \u00f6ffentlichen Builds deaktiviert, aber wir erwarten, dass es in der n\u00e4chsten Hauptversion aktiviert wird. W\u00e4hrend wir uns die Beleuchtung ansehen, haben wir auch begonnen, die Qualit\u00e4t von rechteckigen Fl\u00e4chenleuchten zu verbessern. Echtzeit-Renderer m\u00fcssen viele Kompromisse eingehen, um jede Form von Fl\u00e4chenbeleuchtung in Echtzeit zu erreichen, aber wir hoffen, die Ergebnisse zu verbessern, da Sci-Fi-Umgebungen so oft rechteckige Lichter verwenden.\n\nUnsere Arbeit an den verschiedenen Merkmalen der Hochdynamikbereiche wird mit der Fertigstellung der Lichtvernetzung fortgesetzt, um realistische Helligkeits- und Gl\u00fchwerte unserer Leuchten zu erm\u00f6glichen. Als n\u00e4chstes werden wir uns auf das Belichtungssteuerungssystem konzentrieren, um es besser an die Komplexit\u00e4t des menschlichen Auges und die erstaunliche F\u00e4higkeit des Gehirns anzupassen, sich an Umgebungen mit hohem Kontrast oder sehr niedrigen Lichtwerten anzupassen.\n\nEinige weitere kleinere \u00c4nderungen sind: das Entkappen des GPU-Textur-Budgets, so dass GPUs mit mehr Speicher von h\u00f6heren Texturaufl\u00f6sungen profitieren k\u00f6nnen und weniger Wahrscheinlichkeit haben, dass sie vom Textur-Streaming poppen\" sehen, die Fertigstellung unseres internen Render-Profilers, die Fortsetzung unseres im letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnten gro\u00dfen UI-Refactors und verschiedene Bugfixes beim Culling.\n\n\nIngenieurwesen\nF\u00fcr das Ingenieurteam war ein Gro\u00dfteil dieses Monats mit 2.4.0 verbunden und hat geholfen, es in einen Zustand zu bringen, in dem wir es endlich zum Leben freigeben k\u00f6nnen. Bone hat das Hafenmodifikationssystem fertiggestellt, mit dem Sie Ihren Hangar individuell gestalten und Ihre Schiffsladung vom Inneren des Spiels aus \u00e4ndern k\u00f6nnen, und es ist nun komplett und befindet sich in der Endphase der Fehlerbehebung und -bereinigung. \u00c4hnlich ist das Einkaufen alles in und funktioniert und wieder reparieren wir nur alle Fehler und polieren, die auftauchen.\n\nUnser Netzwerkteam war damit besch\u00e4ftigt, die Trennungsprobleme zu beheben, die wir beim PTU-Build gefunden haben. Leider waren diese ziemlich knorrig und schwer aufzusp\u00fcren und zu reparieren, sie stammen von den \u00c4nderungen, die f\u00fcr die Persistenz erforderlich sind, die mit dem aktuellen Netzwerksystem nicht gut funktionieren. Eine \u00c4nderung, die von der Persistenz verlangt wird, ist die M\u00f6glichkeit, Entity-IDs wiederzuverwenden, wof\u00fcr die Engine nie wirklich konzipiert wurde, und als Folge davon m\u00fcssen wir uns mit den Folgen auseinandersetzen. Langfristig arbeitet George an einem neuen Nachrichtenwarteschlangensystem, das in der Lage sein sollte, all diese Probleme viel besser zu bew\u00e4ltigen.\n\nZwischen der Fehlerbehebung und dem Polieren hat Craig etwas mehr Zeit mit dem Start und der Landung der Tr\u00e4ger verbracht, Steve hat weitere Fortschritte im Object Container System und auch in unserem Entity Component System gemacht, das das Update einer Entit\u00e4t in kleinere einzelne Bl\u00f6cke unterteilt, die leicht wiederverwendet werden k\u00f6nnen. Es wird helfen, einen Gro\u00dfteil der Codebasis zu bereinigen und auch auf der Performance-Seite zu helfen. Traurig f\u00fcr das britische B\u00fcro verl\u00e4sst er uns jetzt und zieht in unser sonniges B\u00fcro in LA, unseren Verlust und ihren Gewinn.\n\nGordon hat mehr Polierarbeiten an der Abdeckung, sowie am Gew\u00f6lbe und an der Verkleidung durchgef\u00fchrt. Romulo hat den Spieler-Refaktor gemacht und die R\u00fcstung auf den neuen Gegenstand 2.0 umgestellt, ebenso wie einige Waffenpolituren. Jens hat an der Spielerbewegung und der Kopfstabilisierung gearbeitet.\n\nAudio\nDiesen Monat wird ich versuchen, dies etwas z\u00fcgiger zu halten, nur weil es viel zu bedenken gibt. Entschuldigen Sie, dass ich zwischendurch geflogen bin. ein Aufz\u00e4hlungszeichen und Abs\u00e4tze!\n\nDarren Lambourne war besch\u00e4ftigt mit:\n\nAufbau einer neuen variablen Verst\u00e4rkungsschicht f\u00fcr Triebwerke auf vielen Schiffen 2nd Pass on BEHR Laser Cannon S5 \u00dcberarbeitung und Fixierung von Animations-Sounds auf mehreren Schiffen, einschlie\u00dflich Connie-Pilot\/Copilotensitzen. Allgemeine Bestandsaufnahme der fehlenden Audiodaten Beginn der Einrichtung des AEGS Idris-Audioschemas Allgemeine Fehlerbehebung f\u00fcr mehrere Schiffe, an denen Luke Hatton gearbeitet hat:\n\nDer interaktive Benutzeroberfl\u00e4chen-Sound des Cockpits, der Kl\u00e4nge f\u00fcr das Energieverteilungsdreieck und die Schildverteilung hinzuf\u00fcgt Die Aurora-Serie hat jetzt ihre eigenen Pass-by-Whosh-Kl\u00e4nge und sollte leichter unterschieden werden, wenn sie an Ihnen vorbeifliegt Auf der FPS-Seite sind Kl\u00e4nge f\u00fcr das Schlagen von Zielen mit Projektilwaffen eingeflossen, zusammen mit Kill-Best\u00e4tigungskl\u00e4ngen f\u00fcr freundliche und feindliche Charaktere Stefan Rutherford hat etwas \u00c4hnliches wie eine Open-Heart-Bypass-Operation auf der Wwise Projektseite der Dinge durchgef\u00fchrt - er h\u00e4lt dies im Allgemeinen aufrecht, geschickt unterst\u00fctzt durch Jason Cobb. Wir haben in letzter Zeit viel dar\u00fcber nachgedacht, wie das Spiel gemischt wird (sowohl f\u00fcr S42 als auch f\u00fcr die Live-Version) und als Teil der Sicherstellung, dass die Dinge funktionieren und die Skalierung dies erfordert. Dar\u00fcber hinaus produzierte er neue FPS-Waffensounds und bearbeitete das aktuelle Waffenaufzeichnungsmaterial.\n\nSowohl Phil Smallwood als auch Bob Rissolo waren bei Imaginarium am Set, um die Aufnahmen f\u00fcr unsere monumentalen Staffel 42-Kinematiken fortzusetzen. Unser sch\u00f6nes neues Dialog-Rig, das D1000, bekam seinen ersten gro\u00dfen Auslauf, den Phil ein wenig debuggt und alle Ecken und Kanten gl\u00e4ttet. Beide kehrten zum Master zur\u00fcck und editierten den resultierenden Dialog.\n\nMatteo Cerquone hat haupts\u00e4chlich an Squadron 42 Ambiences gearbeitet, mit Ross; er hat bei der \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung der Klangtreue von Sounds geholfen, die von einer \u00c4nderung der Gro\u00dfhandelseinstellungen in Wwise (Teil eines allgemeinen Optimierungspasses) betroffen sind, und hat alte Foley-Ereignisse im Charaktertool bereinigt.\n\nDas war Ross Tregenza:\n\nViel mehr Arbeit am Music Logic System - es hat jetzt ein riesiges Netz von voll funktionsf\u00e4higen Zust\u00e4nden, kombiniert mit einem wachsenden Netz von momentanen Stichen, und alle neue Musik an Ort und Stelle, es beginnt auch, sich \u00fcber die Raumfahrtmusik hinaus auf FPS & EVA Squadron 42 Level Ambient Sounds auszudehnen - die Level kommen gut voran, Ross und Matteo beginnen, eine Menge Ambient Audio in die R\u00e4ume zu bringen, viele Level beginnen dort wirklich zu leben. Battle-Chatter - Zusammenarbeit mit den KI-Jungs, um die Kampf-Chatter-Dialogsysteme richtig zum Laufen zu bringen Simon Price hat weiterhin Teile der Dialogpipeline festgelegt und die Skalierbarkeit im Laufe des letzten Monats verbessert. Zuletzt arbeitete er an der Migration von Dialogdaten zur Nutzung externer Quellen. Vielleicht erscheint das nicht sehr aufregend, aber es ist Teil des Gesamtethos, die Dinge vern\u00fcnftig zu halten und das Wwise Projekt nicht mit doppelter Struktur zu \u00fcberladen.\n\nSam Hall hat an einem System zum dynamischen Laden von Audioinhalten gearbeitet, um sicherzustellen, dass wir nur das in den Speicher geladen haben, was absolut notwendig ist. Verschiedene Arten von Kl\u00e4ngen haben unterschiedliche Anforderungen an den Bewohner, der sie tendenziell sein m\u00fcssen; einige Arten (z.B. Umgebungsger\u00e4usche, die nicht zu sehr synchronisiert werden m\u00fcssen) k\u00f6nnen einstr\u00f6men, und jede Art von Latenz ist nicht wahrnehmbar oder sp\u00fcrbar. Andere, wie z.B. Sch\u00fcsse, die der Spieler ausl\u00f6st, m\u00fcssen sofort einsatzbereit sein. Nachdem also sortiert wurde, was residiert werden muss und was nicht, galt es sicherzustellen, dass das System Audiodateien in den Speicher aufnehmen kann, sobald sie in jedem Fall ben\u00f6tigt werden. F\u00fcr ein Spiel wie das unsere ist es wichtig, dass wir nur geladen haben, was f\u00fcr den Spieler wichtig ist; das Laden von allem wird nicht m\u00f6glich sein, w\u00e4hrend die Skalierung des Universums schnell voranschreitet.\n\nSams hat auch mehr musiklogische Ereignisse und Parameteranpassungen hinzugef\u00fcgt, um das dynamische Musikerlebnis zu verbessern. Und nat\u00fcrlich wurden Audio-Fehler behoben, sobald sie aufgetreten sind.\n\nGraham Phillipson war mit der In-Game-VOIP-Technologie besch\u00e4ftigt, wir hatten tats\u00e4chlich etwas, das wir intern demonstrieren konnten, was gut ankam - nat\u00fcrlich sind wir sehr daran interessiert, es in die Community zu bringen. Ich denke, es wird ein gro\u00dfer Vorteil f\u00fcr alle sein, und es war gro\u00dfartig, es in Aktion zu h\u00f6ren. Standard-Audio-Fehlerbehebung Aufgaben und Audio-System Back-End-Zeug zu, viel wie \u00fcblich. Graham f\u00fcgte die M\u00f6glichkeit hinzu, den Audio Trigger Spots Parameter zuzuweisen, was allen Sound-Designern viel Freude bereitete. Obwohl dies im Gro\u00dfen und Ganzen eine Kleinigkeit zu sein scheint, stellt es sicher, dass wir nicht nur neue Objekte in Wise erstellen, um subtile kontextuelle \u00c4nderungen am Audio im Spiel vorzunehmen; es erlaubt uns, \u00c4nderungen an der Stelle vorzunehmen, an der die \u00c4nderung erforderlich ist, anstatt erneut Kontexte sowohl an der Quelle als auch am Zielort zu duplizieren.\n\nEwan Brown ist ein neuer Senior Audio Programmer und hat sich eingelebt, um die Codebasis kennenzulernen und wie die Dinge zusammenpassen, indem er Tools wie Mannequin unterst\u00fctzt. Es gibt viel zu entdecken und er wird Sam und Ross auch bei ihren musikalischen Bem\u00fchungen unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nJason Cobb war mit den folgenden Themen besch\u00e4ftigt:\n\nEntwickelte Audio-Build-Validierungsskripte Bug beheben verschiedene Sprachlecks, dokumentierten zwei Testf\u00e4lle f\u00fcr Korrekturen, die f\u00fcr das korrekte Abspielen von Flowgraph-Audio-Triggern mit Zonen ben\u00f6tigt wurden Bugfix-Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr fest programmiertes mat_water material fx Gestartetes Entwicklungsspiel-Audio-Inventarisierungsskript Verschiedene wwise Projektpflege, Optimierungen, Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Stephans Umweltreorganisationsaufwand Area-based Mix State Markup f\u00fcr Mehrschraubenschiffe. 90% vollst\u00e4ndig Untersuchte Situation f\u00fcr die Aufpreisbildung von einsitzigen Schiffsinnenr\u00e4umen. Und das ist alles f\u00fcr den Moment, bitte stellen Sie weitere Fragen in den Foren und wir werden versuchen, das gesamte Audio-Team dazu zu bringen, gegebenenfalls zu antworten. Danke f\u00fcrs Zuh\u00f6ren!\n\nVFX\nEs war ein arbeitsreicher Monat f\u00fcr das VFX-Team (ich wei\u00df, ich wei\u00df, wir sagen das jeden Monat!). F\u00fcr die bevorstehende Version 2.4 wurden viele Feinabstimmungen und Fehlerbehebungen vorgenommen - insbesondere die Behebung einiger Partikeleffekte, die Ged\u00e4chtnisprobleme verursachen (einfach zu beheben, aber nicht immer so einfach, den T\u00e4ter zu finden!) und eine weitere Optimierung der neuen Plasma-Schrotflinte.\n\nAbseits der Live-Ver\u00f6ffentlichung haben wir wirklich damit begonnen, unsere Z\u00e4hne in Squadron 42 Effekte auf ein besseres Qualit\u00e4tsniveau zu bringen. Nat\u00fcrlich k\u00f6nnen wir nicht zu viele Spoiler verschenken, aber es ist wirklich aufregend, an so unterschiedlichen Umgebungen und Kulissen zu arbeiten. Von wogenden Staub- und Wassersprays und nat\u00fcrlich vielen Explosionen haben wir alles im Griff. Es f\u00e4ngt wirklich an, zusammenzukommen.\n\nWas die Waffen betrifft, so haben wir mit der S\u00e4uberung unserer Bibliotheken f\u00fcr Impact-Effekte begonnen. Konkret erzeugen wir hier oberfl\u00e4chenspezifische Aufpralleffekte, so dass Sie, wenn Sie Ihr ballistisches Maschinengewehr auf den staubigen Boden abfeuern, einen Staubauftrieb erhalten und nicht einen riesigen Funkenschlag. Nichts bahnbrechendes hier, aber dennoch notwendig und wird einen gro\u00dfen Beitrag zur Verbesserung der Spielerfahrung leisten.\n\nWir begannen auch, VFX-bezogene Pl\u00e4ne f\u00fcr den unglaublichen prozeduralen Planeten Tech zu entwickeln. Wir haben einige einfache, aber effektive Ideen, wie wir Effekte auf planetarer Ebene platzieren k\u00f6nnen (Hinweis: Wir werden sie nicht manuell platzieren). Es ist wirklich wichtig, dass wir diesbez\u00fcglich klug sind, damit wir langfristig Zeit sparen k\u00f6nnen, w\u00e4hrend wir gleichzeitig die gleiche Qualit\u00e4t und Gr\u00f6\u00dfe der Effekte auf einem Planeten beibehalten k\u00f6nnen. Sieht bisher gut aus!\n\nAbschlie\u00dfend - und das kann man im Schreiben des Grafikteams erw\u00e4hnen - einige spannende Neuigkeiten zum Thema Partikelbeleuchtung. Wir stehen kurz davor, auf das neue geflieste Beleuchtungssystem f\u00fcr Partikel umzusteigen. Dies erm\u00f6glicht eine viel genauere Schattenaufnahme - ein gro\u00dfer Spinnf\u00e4cher, der lange dunkle Schatten in einem dampfenden Korridor wirft? \u00dcberpr\u00fcfen!\n\nDie Welten ver\u00e4ndern\n\nDas Wetter ist sich nicht sicher, was es hier in Frankfurt tun will, sonnig und hei\u00df, bedeckt und regnerisch, der letzte Monat hatte einen guten Teil davon. Das B\u00fcro wuchs im Mai um 2 Personen, Janine half bei der Produktion und David trat dem Waffenkunstteam bei. Wir sind fast ausgelastet im B\u00fcro, also haben wir offiziell mit einer Erweiterung begonnen. Als wir im Juli letzten Jahres in die B\u00fcror\u00e4ume eingezogen sind, haben die Eigent\u00fcmer des Geb\u00e4udes die angrenzenden Fl\u00e4chen f\u00fcr uns f\u00fcr ein ganzes Jahr auf Eis gelegt, einer der Vorteile, die sie neuen Mietern bieten. Damals wussten wir nicht, ob wir es brauchen w\u00fcrden, aber wir dachten, es sei eine nette Geste.\n\nDas Team hat auch einige ausgezeichnete Arbeit geleistet, die im Folgenden nicht n\u00e4her beschrieben wird.... sie w\u00fcrden es Ihnen lieber in Aktion sehen lassen, als jetzt alle Details zu verderben, also bleiben Sie an dieser Front dran!\n\nDiesen Monat haben wir auch mit der Gamescom die Dinge in Gang gesetzt, es macht nur Sinn, dass Frankfurt so viel wie m\u00f6glich hilft, da wir hier leben. An dieser Stelle kann man nicht allzu viel sagen, aber wir werden definitiv im August dort sein.\n\n\nKinematiken\nDiesen Monat hatten wir unser zweites Performance Capture Shooting f\u00fcr SQ42 in den Imaginarium Studios in Ealing London, das die Szenen der fr\u00fcheren Kapitel erg\u00e4nzte und erg\u00e4nzte.\n\nLetzter Sommer war unser Hauptshooting, das uns ca. 75% des ben\u00f6tigten Materials f\u00fcr die Story von SQ42 bescherte. Mit diesem neuen Shooting komplett und einem weiteren Final Shooting im Juli werden wir jedes bisschen Leistung gesammelt haben! H\u00f6hepunkt dieses Shootings waren Szenen mit dem Quartiermeister des Idris, der gro\u00dfe Waffen austeilte, sowie eine In-Universum-Spektrum-Show mit einem w\u00fctenden und vor allem urkomischen Gastgeber!\n\nF\u00fcr den Dreh baute das Cinematic-Team einige der ben\u00f6tigten Umgebungen f\u00fcr Live-Mocap und koordinierte die Bem\u00fchungen, alle ben\u00f6tigten Levelsegmente zu erhalten, Charaktere rechtzeitig sortiert, damit Live-Mocap effektiv ist. (Live-mocap ist ein Prozess, bei dem wir die Bewegungsdaten live in unserer Engine auf tats\u00e4chlichen Charakteren im Spiel innerhalb der aktuellen Szenen\/Level sehen k\u00f6nnen).\n\nMichael, unser Lead Cinematic Designer, hat einen ersten Durchgang \u00fcber ein wichtiges, l\u00e4ngeres filmisches St\u00fcck abgeschlossen, das mitten in der Story-Kampagne spielt.\n\nDie Cinematic-Animatoren unterst\u00fctzen das Gameplay-Team in Gro\u00dfbritannien, w\u00e4hrend sie darauf warten, dass die Daten vom Dreh zur\u00fcckkommen. Sie sind auch dabei, die Quad Cam-Videodaten vom letztj\u00e4hrigen p-cap Shooting zu sortieren. Wenn das erledigt ist, werden die Animatoren des Cinematic-Teams die p-cap-Aufnahmen mit den Quad-Cam-Daten \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen und sicherstellen, dass die Animationen wie vorgesehen ablaufen.\n\n\nKI\nDer Subsumption Editor wurde auf Version 0.901 aktualisiert und wir haben damit begonnen, einige weitere Funktionalit\u00e4ten zu implementieren, die jetzt in den Tools f\u00fcr die Designer sichtbar sind. Zuerst haben wir einige neue Subsumption-Aufgaben erstellt, damit Designer die folgenden Funktionalit\u00e4ten nutzen k\u00f6nnen:\n\n1. Abfrage des taktischen Punktesystems\n2. Zu einer bestimmten Deckungsposition bewegen\n3. Schie\u00dfen Sie von der Abdeckung, in der sich der NSC befindet, auf sein Aufmerksamkeitsziel.\n\nWir haben eine M\u00f6glichkeit f\u00fcr Designer entwickelt, die n\u00e4chste Aktivit\u00e4t oder Subaktivit\u00e4t f\u00fcr einen bestimmten NSC vorzuschlagen. Wir haben auch den ersten Durchgang zur Unterst\u00fctzung von Aktionsbereichen abgeschlossen. Wie wir im Monatsbericht vom April erkl\u00e4rt haben, sind das die Elemente auf der Welt, die es Designern erm\u00f6glichen, Bereiche mit spezifischen Informationen zu markieren: Ein mehrk\u00f6pfiges Raumschiff zum Beispiel k\u00f6nnte einen Maschinenraum, einen Hangar, einen Kontrollraum und so weiter haben. Aktionsbereiche erm\u00f6glichen es den NSCs, \u00fcber die Umwelt nachzudenken, um ihre Aufgaben zu erf\u00fcllen. Diese Spielelemente werden auch verwendet, um den NSC zu benachrichtigen, wenn ein anderer NSC das Gebiet betritt oder verl\u00e4sst, oder um bestimmte Ereignisse umzuleiten, die f\u00fcr die im Gebiet anwesenden Charaktere bestimmt sind. Wir haben auch den Basiscode implementiert, um Subsumption-Ereignisse zu verarbeiten, Designer k\u00f6nnen diese mit unterschiedlichen Eigenschaften erstellen (z.B. wenn das Ereignis etwas ist, das die NSCs sehen sollten, um es wahrzunehmen, wenn sie es h\u00f6ren sollten, wenn es einen maximalen Bereich gibt, in dem das Ereignis empfangen werden kann, und so weiter) und Subsumption verfolgt all diese Daten.\n\nWir haben auch die erste Weitergabe mit den Usables\/Interactors als Navigationslinks abgeschlossen. Dieser Vereinheitlichungsschritt war notwendig, da die Staffel 42 und Star Citizen nicht nur die klassischen Navigationslinks verwenden, um den Charakteren das Springen, Springen, Springen und so weiter zu erm\u00f6glichen. Wir haben auch Links, um die Navigation durch die Verwendung von Gegenst\u00e4nden zu verbinden (z.B. wenn man von Raum 1 und Raum 2 kommt, kann die KI eine T\u00fcr \u00f6ffnen), und diese Gegenst\u00e4nde k\u00f6nnen auch von den Spielern verwendet werden, was alles noch komplizierter macht. Die Verwendung der Interactors stellt sicher, dass ein NSC, der eine T\u00fcr \u00f6ffnet, keinen anderen Code ben\u00f6tigt, um die Aktion mit anderen Spielern oder anderen KI-Charakteren zu synchronisieren, wodurch der gesamte Codefluss viel einheitlicher wird.\n\nWas das Verhalten betrifft, so betten wir derzeit spezifische \"mentale Zust\u00e4nde\" ein, damit das Verhalten der normalen NSCs besser mit Filmszenen und dem Zustand im Schiff umgehen kann (Steuern eines Schiffes, Steuern eines Turms usw.).\n\nWas das Verhalten des Schiffes betrifft, so sind wir fast fertig mit dem ersten Durchgang, um das Verhalten des Schiffes zu verbessern, das zugewiesen wurde, um seine Bewegung in bestimmte Bereiche einzuschr\u00e4nken. Wir haben derzeit Missionen, bei denen Raumschiffe bestimmte Umweltelemente sch\u00fctzen m\u00fcssen oder bei denen Schiffe keine spezifischen Grenzen verlassen k\u00f6nnen, um die Zerst\u00f6rung zu vermeiden.\n\nDerzeit wurden Grenzen immer als eine weiche Einschr\u00e4nkung des Schiffsverhaltens betrachtet, aber wir erweitern nun das Schiffsverhalten, um eine starke r\u00e4umliche Einschr\u00e4nkung richtig zu handhaben.\n\nDiesen Monat haben wir auch Zeit damit verbracht, die Stabilit\u00e4t und Leistung des Live-Spiels zu verbessern, so dass ihr alle weiterhin jede Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Star Citizen genie\u00dfen k\u00f6nnt.\n\n\nWaffen\nIn diesem Monat fertigte das Waffenkunstteam zwei neue Schiffswaffen und f\u00fchrte umfangreiche Arbeiten an der Waffenbibliothek durch. Dar\u00fcber hinaus modellieren wir derzeit eine neue ballistische Maschinenpistole und machen den letzten Schliff an der Plagegewehr, die detailliert und strukturiert ist. Die Railgun soll ein visuelles Ziel f\u00fcr alle neuen Waffen sein, die kommen werden, also haben wir uns etwas mehr Zeit genommen, um sie auf ein Goldstandardniveau zu bringen.\n\nZu uns gesellt sich auch ein neuer Starter, David, der die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe des Waffenkunstteams auf jetzt 4 Personen erh\u00f6ht.\n\n\nDesign\nLeveldesigner haben an der Fertigstellung des Layouts f\u00fcr die Outlaw Base gearbeitet, es hatte einen ersten Kunstpass und wird vor der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung zu ihnen f\u00fcr eine Aufschlagphase zur\u00fcckkommen. Diese Basis ist auch f\u00fcr eine mehrstufige Ver\u00f6ffentlichung geplant, so dass es eine Menge hin und her zwischen Kunst- und Leveldesignern geben wird, wenn Bereiche ver\u00f6ffentlicht werden und neue hinzugef\u00fcgt werden. Die Jungs arbeiten auch hart an der Truck Stop Basis, die ein netter Ort f\u00fcr Piloten ist, um anzuhalten, um zu tanken, einen Happen zu essen und Vorr\u00e4te zu besorgen, bevor sie auf gro\u00dfe Reisen gehen. Ein weiterer Bereich, in dem Leveldesigner arbeiten, ist das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von Landepl\u00e4tzen auf verfahrenstechnisch generierten Planeten.\n\nDie Systemdesigner haben das Stromverteilungssystem fertiggestellt, das nach der Implementierung alle unsere Schiffe von Einzelsitzern \u00fcber Hauptst\u00e4dte bis hin zu Stationen versorgen soll. Mit diesem System k\u00f6nnen die Spieler konfigurieren, wie sich die Leistung in ihren Schiffen bewegt, welche Komponenten Leistung erhalten, wie viel sie erhalten und woher sie sie beziehen. Gleichzeitig sollte es sch\u00e4ndlicheren Spielern erm\u00f6glicht werden, dieses System zu sabotieren. Gleichzeitig sind nun auch die Systeme Pl\u00fcnderung, Inneres Denken und Verwendbarkeit\/Interakteur vollst\u00e4ndig konzipiert und gehen in die Produktion. Es wurde viel Arbeit investiert, um sicherzustellen, dass alle unsere verwendbaren Requisiten und Animationsmetriken f\u00fcr sie richtig standardisiert sind, so dass wir die Arbeit nicht zweimal machen m\u00fcssen und alles zusammenpasst, sobald es im Spiel ist.\n\nAuf der KI-Seite entwerfen wir ein System, das Archetypen und Ladevorg\u00e4nge schnell genug erzeugen kann, um eine ganze Galaxie zu f\u00fcllen, ohne dass wir jeden einzelnen NSC manuell bauen m\u00fcssen. Im Grunde genommen kann das System durch die Definition von Regels\u00e4tzen und Tag-Sets die Archetypen erstellen, die zu ihrem Equipment passen, woher sie stammen, was ihre Aufgabe ist, was die Kleiderordnung in dem Bereich ist, in dem sie sich befinden, welchen Rang sie haben usw. Abgesehen davon gibt es auch eine Menge Arbeit bei der Entwicklung der Werkzeuge, die wir f\u00fcr das Gehirn und die Logik unserer neuen, auf Subsumption basierenden KI ben\u00f6tigen.\n\nSowohl System- als auch Leveldesigner haben die Arbeit f\u00fcr das n\u00e4chste Jahr und die kommenden Releases geplant, um sicherzustellen, dass wir ein realistischeres Bild davon haben, was mit der vorgegebenen Zeit gemacht werden kann.\n\n\nIngenieurwesen\nRenderer-Refactoring: Auf der Renderer-Seite haben wir einige Hausreinigungen und Optimierungen vorgenommen. Basierend auf den Refaktorierungen des letzten Monats zur Erh\u00f6hung der Objektanzahl haben wir begonnen, den Daten-Upload auf die GPU zu vereinfachen. Bisher basiert das CryeEngine-System auf Reflexion, so dass der Code herausfinden konnte, welche Daten auf der GPU ben\u00f6tigt wurden und diese Daten nur hochladen konnte. Das klingt zwar nach einer soliden Idee, aber das Herausfinden, was ben\u00f6tigt wurde, war teurer als ein direkter Daten-Upload. Also begannen wir, diese Reflexionscodepfade in den zeitkritischen Bereichen zu entfernen. Dies verbesserte auch die Lesbarkeit des Codes, da wir nun sehen k\u00f6nnen, was der Code tut und nicht die Logik, um herauszufinden, was zu tun ist. Im Zusammenhang mit dieser \u00c4nderung haben wir auch sichergestellt, dass wir die gleichen Daten nur einmal auf die GPU hochladen. Zuvor hat es f\u00fcr jedes Objekt einen Datenpuffer hochgeladen und dann die gleichen Daten erneut hochgeladen, wenn der Code sich f\u00fcr die Verwendung von Instanzen entschieden hat. Dies ist nun behoben.\n\nDaten-Patcher: Auf dem Data Patcher (dem Werkzeug, das f\u00fcr die Erstellung der Daten f\u00fcr die Engine verantwortlich sein wird, die verwendet werden sollen, wenn wir auf inkrementelles Patchen umsteigen), haben wir ein wenig Fortschritte gemacht, indem wir besser definiert haben, wie die Daten gespeichert werden sollen. Hier gibt es nicht viele meldepflichtige Fortschritte, da es sich bei den Arbeiten um Infrastrukturdiskussionen handelt.\n\nOptimierungen: Um den Streaming-Code weiter zu optimieren, haben wir ihn wieder um die Unterst\u00fctzung von Timeslicing erweitert. Auf diese Weise fallen die Kosten f\u00fcr die Aktualisierung der Entfernung zu Objekten, die f\u00fcr den Spieler nicht sichtbar sind, seltener an.\n\nTag System kommt in das ZoneSystem: Die anf\u00e4ngliche Unterst\u00fctzung wurde geschrieben, um das Speichern von Tags innerhalb des ZoneSystems zu unterst\u00fctzen. Ein Tag ist eine kleine Zeichenkette, die wir verwenden, um einem Entit\u00e4tsobjekt Kontextinformationen zu geben. Wenn wir zum Beispiel wissen wollen, ob etwas ein Stuhl ist, k\u00f6nnen wir es als Stuhl markieren. Auf diese Weise kann das KI-System alle Objekte abfragen und herausfinden, ob es sich um St\u00fchle handelt. Wir haben solche Systeme bereits im Motor, aber diesen fehlen r\u00e4umliche Informationen, so dass sie nur antworten k\u00f6nnen: Ist dieses Objekt ein Stuhl, aber nicht \"finde mich alle St\u00fchle um mich herum\". Dies f\u00fchrte zu einigen ineffizienten L\u00f6sungen, da der Code rohe Gewalt anwenden musste, um viele Objekte zu erhalten und deren Typ zu \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen. Um diese Einschr\u00e4nkung zu \u00fcberwinden, verlagern wir die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Tags in das ZoneSystem, unser r\u00e4umliches Positionssystem. Dies erforderte einige \u00c4nderungen und neue Systeme:\n\nDas Speichern und Vergleichen einer Zeichenkette ist nicht sehr effizient auf einem Computer (aber sehr praktisch f\u00fcr einen Menschen, deshalb brauchen wir sie), also haben wir einen Trie implementiert, um uns eine sehr effiziente M\u00f6glichkeit zu geben, einzigartige Zeichenketten auf einen festen ganzzahligen Bereich abzubilden. (Wir wollten einen ganzzahligen Bereich anstelle eines Hash erhalten, da ein Bereich uns eine bessere Breitphasenpr\u00fcfung und effizientere Datenspeicherung erm\u00f6glicht) Da nicht alle Datentypen, die wir im ZoneSystem gespeichert haben, Tags erfordern, haben wir das gesamte Zonensystem flexibler gestaltet, damit der Client-Code die zu speichernden Eigenschaften pro Objekttyp festlegen kann. Dies reduzierte auch unseren Speicherverbrauch im Kreuzritterbereich um 50 MB. Wir haben einen speziellen Zuweiser f\u00fcr die Tags implementiert, damit sie effizient vom Low-Level-Zonensystem, das in SIMD implementiert ist, geholt werden k\u00f6nnen, so dass die Tags einer bestimmten Gr\u00f6\u00dfe und Ausrichtung folgen m\u00fcssen. Und als letztes haben wir Code implementiert, um das Filtern von Tags nach einem DNF (Disjunctive Normal Form) zu erm\u00f6glichen, das ein festes Format ist und f\u00fcr die effiziente \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung beliebiger boolescher Ausdr\u00fccke verwendet werden kann. Runtime Skel-Erweiterungen: Das Charakteranpassungssystem in Star Citizen verwendet intern eine Motorfunktion namens \"skinned attachments\". Mit enth\u00e4uteten Aufs\u00e4tzen ist es m\u00f6glich, jeden deformierbaren Gegenstand auf einem Charakter (z.B. Stoff, Schuhe, Raumanz\u00fcge, Helme, etc.) und sogar ganze K\u00f6rperteile wie Gesichter, H\u00e4nde oder Ober- und Unterk\u00f6rperteile zu ersetzen. Jedes Hautattachment hat seine eigenen Gelenke, die automatisch durch das Basisskelett animiert und deformiert werden. Es ist auch m\u00f6glich, enth\u00e4utete Aufs\u00e4tze zu verwenden, die mehr Gelenke und unterschiedliche Gelenke haben als das Basisskelett, und es ist m\u00f6glich, alle Arten von Skeletten zusammenzuf\u00fchren, sogar Skelette von v\u00f6llig unterschiedlichen Charakteren. Das bedeutet, dass Sie ein minimalistisches Basisskelett haben k\u00f6nnen, das durch ein beliebig komplexes Enth\u00e4utungsskelett erweitert werden kann. In der urspr\u00fcnglichen CryEngine war dies eine Offline- oder Ladezeitfunktion, da der gesamte Prozess ziemlich CPU-intensiv war. F\u00fcr Star Citizen haben wir daraus ein Laufzeit-Feature gemacht, das es uns erm\u00f6glicht, ein Basisskelett jederzeit zu erweitern, w\u00e4hrend das Spiel l\u00e4uft, egal ob der Charakter lebt und Animationen spielt oder sich in einem driven- oder floppy-ragdoll-Zustand befindet. Das bedeutet, dass Sie nicht im Voraus wissen m\u00fcssen, welche Art von Verbindungen Sie im Basisskelett ben\u00f6tigen, noch m\u00fcssen Sie zus\u00e4tzliche Verbindungen mit sich f\u00fchren, nur f\u00fcr den Fall, dass Sie sie ben\u00f6tigen. Stattdessen k\u00f6nnen Sie mit dem System nach Belieben und bei Bedarf neue Verbindungen hinzuf\u00fcgen.\n\nGanzk\u00f6rpererfahrung: Wir haben auch viel Zeit investiert, um die Ganzk\u00f6rpererfahrung in der ersten Person zu verbessern. Unser Hauptziel war es, das Head-Bobbing anpassbar zu machen. In Star Citizen ist das Headbobbing ein nat\u00fcrlicher Nebeneffekt der Mocap-Daten, da Dritte und Egoisten die gleiche Animation verwenden. Um die Kontrollen so reibungslos und pr\u00e4zise wie m\u00f6glich zu gestalten, haben wir eine neue IK-L\u00f6sung implementiert, um alle unerw\u00fcnschten Effekte aus den K\u00f6rperanimationen der dritten Person auf die Erste-Person-Ansicht und das Waffenhandling zu eliminieren.\n\n\nTechnische Kunst\nFrankfurt TechArt ist immer mit dem RND besch\u00e4ftigt und unterst\u00fctzt aktiv jede Disziplin, die Hilfe ben\u00f6tigt. Diesen Monat haben wir bei der Augenstabilisierung f\u00fcr FPS geholfen, die die Kamerabewegung beim Spielen in FPS stabilisiert, die bisherigen Ergebnisse waren wirklich gut. Wir unterst\u00fctzen auch das Feature oder RND f\u00fcr das itemport IK-System f\u00fcr Spiele, es entwickelt sich ebenfalls positiv.\n\nAuf unserer DCC[Maya] Pipeline-Front wird es viel stabiler, braucht aber immer noch etwas mehr Unterst\u00fctzung, da wir es st\u00e4ndig aktualisieren oder ausgeben. Wir haben auch Fehler behoben und Waffen Assets an allen Fronten wie Rigs unterst\u00fctzt, Rendermesh aktualisiert, Entity-Setup, Mannequin-Setup usw.\n\nInsgesamt beteiligt sich TechArt an neuen Funktionen und unterst\u00fctzt weiterhin den t\u00e4glichen Betrieb.\n\n\nVFX\nIm vergangenen Monat hat das Frankfurter VFX-Team an Einzelspieler-Missionen der Staffel 42 gearbeitet. Dies umfasst fast alle Aspekte von VFX wie Ambient\/Umgebungseffekte, Skript-Action-Effekte und sogar einige filmische Effekte. Dies erfordert auch eine faire Zusammenarbeit mit den einzelnen Level-Designern und K\u00fcnstlern. Sobald sie fertig sind, kann VFX einen Abschnitt des Levels mit Requisiten entwerfen und bauen, um ihn dann mit den entsprechenden Effekten zu dekorieren. Alles von Feuer und Explosionen bis hin zu Blut und Wasser.\n\n\nQualit\u00e4tssicherung\nDiesen Monat haben wir in der QA eng mit unserem hauseigenen Engineering-Team zusammengearbeitet, um den Fortschritt auf den verfahrenstechnischen Planeten zu testen, wie im Anh\u00e4nger von Sch\u00fcler zu Planet zu sehen ist. Bei einem so gro\u00dfen Planeten k\u00f6nnen Sie sich vorstellen, wie viele Probleme wir bei unseren Tests hatten. Einschlie\u00dflich, aber nicht beschr\u00e4nkt auf den Buggy, der darauf besteht, auf seiner z-Achse zu fahren und sich allen Gesetzen der Schwerkraft zu widersetzen. Wir haben auch einige Zeit damit verbracht, alle Charaktere, die sich derzeit in Star Citizen und Squadron 42 befinden, auf Probleme zu \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen, die unsere Filmentwickler blockieren k\u00f6nnten. Infolgedessen konnten wir mehrere Staffel 42 Charaktere identifizieren, die definitiv bessere Tage erlebt hatten. Sean Tracy, Ali Brown und Okka Kyaw sprangen an Bord, um zu helfen, und wir konnten die Probleme schnell l\u00f6sen, so dass unsere Filmentwickler weiterhin erstaunliche Filmsequenzen f\u00fcr Star Citizen erstellen k\u00f6nnen. Schlie\u00dflich haben wir den Rest des Monats damit verbracht, Chris Raine und Chris Bolte bei der Erfassung von Profiling und Concurrency-Daten f\u00fcr die PTU-Server zu unterst\u00fctzen. Die Community war eine gro\u00dfe Hilfe und hat sich zusammengeschlossen, um so viele Spieler wie m\u00f6glich auf die PTU-Server zu laden, damit wir mit einem Hi-Load-Server Daten sammeln k\u00f6nnen, um zur L\u00f6sung der Framerate Drops beizutragen, die die \u00d6ffentlichkeit in Crusader erlebt hat. Der Mai war bei weitem unser verkehrsreichster Monat in der QA, aber wir h\u00e4tten es nicht weniger erwartet, da unser Universum von Tag zu Tag gr\u00f6\u00dfer wird.\n\nWir zielen auf Fehlverhalten ab.\n\nVon der Unterst\u00fctzung von Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 bis hin zur Arbeit an einigen spannenden Inhalten, die Sie in den kommenden Patches sehen werden, hatten wir einen arbeitsreichen Monat bei BHVR! Hier ist die d\u00fcnne.....\n\n\nIngenieurwesen\nF\u00fcr das Engineering-Team ging dieser Monat sehr schnell vorbei. Es wurde viel M\u00fche darauf verwendet, 2.4 aus der T\u00fcr zu bekommen und hart an den \u00fcbrig gebliebenen k\u00f6rnigen Details zu arbeiten.\n\nWir haben vor allem Features wie das Einkaufssystem und Cry Astro poliert und debugged.\n\nDie gute Nachricht ist, dass wir mit Release 2.4 die Grundlage f\u00fcr wirklich lustige Funktionen schaffen, die f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chsten Releases implementiert werden.\n\n\nDesign\nKein Wunder, dass es in diesem Monat fast ausschlie\u00dflich um Eink\u00e4ufe in Port Olisar und Area18 ging und die Funktionen auf die Live-Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von 2.4.0 vorbereitet wurden. Das bedeutet, die letzten verbliebenen Fehler zu beseitigen und an Verbesserungen zu arbeiten, wie z.B. das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von NSC-Verk\u00e4ufern oder das Beheben von Ladeproblemen.\n\nLevel Designer Jesse Kalb, half bei der Neugestaltung und Implementierung des neuen Port Modification Systems f\u00fcr die Flairartikel in den Hangars. Das Spiel hat viele Flair-Objekte, also mussten wir mit Turbulent zusammenarbeiten, um die Dinge mit dem neuen Design in Ordnung zu bringen. Hoffentlich werden die Spieler es genie\u00dfen, die Flairartikel zu platzieren und ihre Vitrinen individuell zu gestalten.\n\nZu einem anderen Thema hat der Technical Lead Level Designer Fran\u00e7ois Boucher den Weg f\u00fcr die Erstellung der CryEngine Level Struktur und ihrer Komponenten f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chste Karte, an der wir gerade arbeiten, die Piratenbasis, geebnet. Mit der Whitebox-Karte, direkt aus dem Ofen, von unseren Freunden in Frankfurt, haben wir die Karte so vorbereitet, dass sowohl Design- als auch Kunstteams an ihren jeweiligen Bereichen arbeiten konnten. Das bedeutet, Landepl\u00e4tze, Luftschleusen, T\u00fcren, Aufz\u00fcge, Spielerlaichen einzurichten und einen Sweetspot f\u00fcr diese Basis im Stanton-System zu finden.\n\nFrancois ist auch damit besch\u00e4ftigt, die Schiffskomponentenwerkstatt aufzubauen, die in K\u00fcrze in Port Olisar er\u00f6ffnet werden soll.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich begann das Designteam auch mit der Arbeit an den Ladenentw\u00fcrfen, Layouts und Whiteboxen, die wir auf der Piratenbasis finden werden. Die Stimmung auf der Piratenbasis wird anders sein, ebenso wie die Gesch\u00e4fte. Es werden noch mehr kommen, ich freue mich darauf, sie mit euch zu teilen!\n\n\nKunst\nEs war ein sehr aufregender Monat f\u00fcr das BHVR Art Team, denn wir haben mit der Produktion neuer Karten begonnen.\n\nEine davon ist eine neue Piraten-Raumstation, die wir haupts\u00e4chlich auf die globalen Aspekte der Karte konzentriert haben: Zusammensetzung, Ausrichtung, Grundausstattung und Auswertung der neuen Zusatzmodule, die f\u00fcr diese Karte ben\u00f6tigt werden.\n\nN\u00e4chsten Monat werden wir zum letzten Abrichtdurchlauf, zur Farbbalance, zur Aufkleberplatzierung und zum Polieren \u00fcbergehen.\n\nDie zweite Karte, ist eine neue Schiffsteilewerkstatt, die in einer zuk\u00fcnftigen Version verf\u00fcgbar sein wird. Dieser Laden hat einen tollen Charakter, deshalb haben wir viel Zeit damit verbracht, an dem Dressing und der Beleuchtung im ersten Durchgang zu arbeiten.\n\nN\u00e4chsten Monat werden wir mit dem Debuggen und Polieren fortfahren.\n\nF\u00fcr das Requisitenteam haben wir das neue Einkaufssystem weiter unterst\u00fctzt. Haupts\u00e4chlich arbeitet er an Artikelgestellen und Regalen.\n\nWir haben auch einige neue Requisiten fertig gestellt, die das Umweltteam sehr gerne jetzt einsetzen kann.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich sollten wir nicht die Verbesserungen und Debugging-Arbeiten vergessen, die f\u00fcr die kommende Version 2.4 durchgef\u00fchrt wurden.\n\nDie turbulente Kraft!\n\nGr\u00fc\u00dfe aus dem sonnigen Montreal, wo das Web-Team von Star Citizen hart an allem gearbeitet hat, von Buccaneer-Umfragen bis hin zu \u00c4nderungen bei der Anmeldung am Spiel! Hier sind einige Details zu den Projekten, an denen wir im letzten Monat gearbeitet haben.\n\n\nMulti-Faktor-Authentifizierung (MFA)\nF\u00fcr diejenigen, die nicht vertraut sind, ist Multi-Faktor-Authentifizierung oder MFA die Art von Sicherheit, die viele Menschen mit modernen MMOs und Web-Accounts verwenden, bei denen Sie einen speziellen Schl\u00fcsselcode oder etwas, das auf Ihr Handy geschrieben wurde, verwenden m\u00fcssen, um auf ein Konto zuzugreifen. Es h\u00e4lt Ihre Daten sicherer, da es f\u00fcr jeden viel schwieriger wird, einzudringen und Ihre Identit\u00e4t anzunehmen. Wir haben MFA schon eine ganze Weile in Arbeit, denn wir wissen, dass Sie Ihre Schiffe und Charaktere sicher halten wollen! Wir sind jetzt auf der Zielgeraden, da wir kurz davor stehen, die Entwicklung f\u00fcr die RSI-Website abzuschlie\u00dfen. Sobald die QA-Phase beginnt, werden wir mit CIG zusammenarbeiten, um sie zu testen und dann in der Community einzuf\u00fchren. Gleichzeitig arbeiten wir weiter an der MFA-Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr den Starter selbst, was besonders wichtig sein wird, da wir mehr Aspekte von Star Citizen aus dem Web in die Spielwelt selbst verlagern.\n\n\nKommunikationsplattform\nSie kennen das vielleicht besser als \"Organizations 2.0\", das wir fr\u00fcher in der Entwicklung von Star Citizen vorgestellt haben. Anstatt mit einem einfachen Update auf das aktuelle Org-System zu arbeiten, haben wir uns f\u00fcr die Entwicklung einer speziell entwickelten Kommunikationsplattform entschieden, die an viele Aspekte des Spiels angepasst werden kann. Die Entwicklung wird auf der neuen Plattform fortgesetzt, die f\u00fcr die erste Iteration v\u00f6llig neue Chat- und Forumsysteme beinhaltet. Wir haben einen Server f\u00fcr interne Tests eingerichtet, aber wir sind noch ein paar Monate von einem Beta-Start entfernt. Wenn es soweit ist, erh\u00e4lt die Evocati-Gruppe den ersten Zugang, um die Reifen zu treten!\n\nSpiel-Launcher\n3, 2, 1.... Start! Wir haben mit dem Team der CIG an der neuen Version des Game Launchers \/ Patcher gearbeitet. Die neue Version unterst\u00fctzt mehrere Umgebungen (z.B. PTU, Live) und mehrere Spiele (z.B. Star Citizen, Squadron 42) und erm\u00f6glicht Hintergrundpatching. In der ersten Phase wird die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che wie die aktuelle aussehen, aber wir werden in den folgenden Phasen neue Funktionen und Designs hinzuf\u00fcgen k\u00f6nnen, die der aktuelle Patcher nicht bedienen k\u00f6nnte. Dies ist ein aufregender Schritt f\u00fcr die Funktionsweise des Spiels, obwohl wir wissen, dass es f\u00fcr die Community wahrscheinlich nicht so aufregend ist wie das Anblick eines neuen Schiffes oder Planeten.\n\n\nUmsatz\nIch sch\u00e4tze, man k\u00f6nnte sagen, der Bucc h\u00e4lt hier an! Wir haben CIG beim Start des n\u00e4chsten gro\u00dfen Piratenj\u00e4gers unterst\u00fctzt, und alle unsere Kennzahlen besagen, dass es ein Hit ist! Um den Freibeuter zu unterst\u00fctzen, haben wir eine \"Drake-Kundenbefragung\" eingerichtet, die bestimmt, welche Bonuswaffe jeder, der das Schiff kauft, erh\u00e4lt. Dabei haben wir uns von der klassischen Ultima-Serie inspirieren lassen und versucht, die Star Citizen-Version des Quiz der Wahrsagerin zur Charakterbildung zu entwickeln. Immerhin ist Immersion nicht nur f\u00fcr das Spiel gedacht! Dieser Monat war auch der Monat, in dem die Geldgeber die Fr\u00fcchte unserer einmaligen Aktivit\u00e4ten ernten konnten: Wir haben Gutscheine an alle diejenigen von Ihnen verteilt, die an der Aktion teilgenommen haben. t in der Aprilscherze \"Big Benny\" enth\u00fcllen, alle Teilnehmer an den Shubin Rekrutierungsprogrammen, und auch alle, die an der neuesten Free Fly Promotion teilgenommen haben.\n\n\nHinter den Kulissen\nIn Vorbereitung auf die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von 2.4.0 haben wir mit CIG zusammengearbeitet, um die Plattformseite zu testen. Wenn ein Benutzer beispielsweise \u00c4nderungen an seinem Inventar auf der Website vornimmt, sollten diese auch im Spiel ber\u00fccksichtigt werden. Es gibt viele verschiedene Szenarien zu testen, also war es eine Zusammenarbeit zwischen uns und dem QS-Team der CIG. Dies ist einer dieser Bereiche, \u00fcber den die Geldgeber wahrscheinlich nicht allzu viel nachdenken, aber er ist notwendig f\u00fcr den \u00dcbergang zu einem wahrhaft persistenten Universum. Es ist toll, deine Schiffe im Inventar der Website zu sehen.... aber es ist viel gr\u00f6\u00dfer, wenn das Spiel sie verfolgt, ihre Upgrades, ihren Schadenstatus, ihren Standort in der Welt und so weiter.\n\nEbenfalls im Mai schickte Turbulent eine kleine Streikgruppe nach Austin, um eine Reihe von pers\u00f6nlichen Treffen abzuhalten, um verschiedene Themen wie Serverinfrastruktur, Analytik, Persistenz und den Issue Council zu diskutieren. Es ist m\u00f6glich, dass ein Teil des BBQ nach Stunden konsumiert wurde, und wir hatten laufende Gespr\u00e4che mit der CIG \u00fcber die IT-Infrastruktur und die Verbesserung der Leistung. Wie Sie erwarten k\u00f6nnen, ist dies ein komplexes Thema, aber wir hoffen, bis zum Ende des Sommers einige neue Ma\u00dfnahmen umgesetzt zu haben.\n\nVergessen Sie nicht einen knackigen Titel, Jared\n\nDieser Zug ist gerade dabei, zum Bahnhof zu gelangen. Ich werde dich nicht mit einem langen, langweiligen Intro aufhalten, genug, um zu sagen, ich k\u00f6nnte ein langes, langweiliges Intro schreiben, wenn ich wollte. Ich k\u00f6nnte es schaffen, Mann. Aber das werde ich nicht. Weil ich wei\u00df, dass du es eilig hast. Uh oh oh, wird das \u00fcberhaupt zu einer langen, langweiligen Einf\u00fchrung? Ich gehe besser zum n\u00e4chsten Abschnitt, bevor das passiert. Schnell. Los geht's.....\n\n\nTag f\u00fcr Tag\nJeden Tag komme ich, um mit einigen meiner Lieblingsmenschen auf der Welt zu arbeiten. Und Thomas Hennessy. Dieser Monat war ein Kampf mit Ben und Alexis, die f\u00fcr zwei Wochen auf Trauerurlaub nach Osten zur\u00fcckgingen, aber wir zogen mit einer neu gewonnenen Wertsch\u00e4tzung f\u00fcr den Arbeitsaufwand, den die beiden jeden Monat leisten, durch. Zwischen Ben und Alexis, die weg waren, und Sandi, die nach Gro\u00dfbritannien ging, waren es ein paar seltene Tage in dieser Woche, an denen das ganze Team zusammen war, aber mein Hauptmann Tyler Witkin half aus dem B\u00fcro in Austin aus und rief mich jeden Tag per Skype an, um mir Gesellschaft zu leisten und die Last zu tragen, w\u00e4hrend die Leute drau\u00dfen waren.\n\nIm Grunde genommen ist dieser Abschnitt nur, damit ich sagen kann, wie sehr ich die Menschen mag, mit denen ich arbeite. Ich bin in einer Stimmung.\n\n\nSendungen\nDie 10 Episoden dieses Monats f\u00fcr die Entwickler anstelle von Chris in Gro\u00dfbritannien deckten ein breites Spektrum an Themen und Gastgebern ab. Sean Tracy, Forrest Stephan, Adam Weiser, Omar Aweidah, Eric Keiron Davis, Gaige Hallman, Mark Abent, Randy Vasquez, Dave Haddock und Ben Lesnick traten alle f\u00fcr den Vorsitzenden in diesem Monat ein. Wir sind jede Woche sehr dankbar f\u00fcr die Zeit und M\u00fche, die unsere Entwickler aufwenden, um von ihrer Arbeit abzuweichen und mit der Community zu kommunizieren. Wir werden es ganz einfach nicht ohne sie tun.\n\nAround the Vers diversifiziert sein Angebot weiter, da wir uns am 30. Juni der 100. Episode n\u00e4hern. Wir untersuchten die Systeme Nexus, Tamsa und Min in Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy. Wir haben Leute wie die K\u00fcnstlerin Cheyne Hessler und die Macher von Voice Attack und HCS Voice Packs interviewt. Wir wagten uns in die Wunderwelt des Sternenb\u00fcrgers, um die gewaltige Arbeit der Fan-Organisation hervorzuheben, die das Imperial News Network Woche f\u00fcr Woche durchf\u00fchrt. Mit Ship Shape haben wir das Whitebox-Design sowohl des Drake Herald als auch der Drake Caterpillar erkundet. Und wir setzten uns mit dem Designer Matt Sherman und dem Konzeptk\u00fcnstler Jim Martin zu einer beispiellosen Erforschung des Drake Buccaneer Konzeptschiffes zusammen. In diesem Monat sind sicherlich Dinge wie Drake in Around the Vers aufgetaucht.\n\nReverse the Verse, unser w\u00f6chentlicher informeller Livestream mit den Fans, \u00fcberlebte die Abwesenheit von Ben und Alexis f\u00fcr zwei Wochen (wenn auch nur knapp), und die May Subscribers Edition sah Fragen an unsere Design- und Tech Art-Mitglieder eine ganze Stunde lang.\n\n\nIhr Jungs\nW\u00e4hrend ein weiterer Monat der Entwicklung vergeht, vergeht auch ein weiterer Monat mit Geschichten, Inhaltsvideos und Gemeinschaftsleistungen. Dies ist ein Abschnitt, den wir einbinden wollten, um alle Inhaltsersteller, Streamer und mehr hervorzuheben! Kurz gesagt, DU!\n\nIn erster Linie: PTU-Tester. Wir m\u00f6chten uns einen Moment Zeit nehmen, um all unseren PTU-Testern zu danken, die geduldig und begierig genug waren, im Laufe des Monats Mai Tausende von Fehlern und Feedback-Posts zu schreiben! Wie viele von euch wissen, war es unser erster Einsatz der Fokus-Testgruppe \"Evocati\", und es war ein Riesenerfolg! Wir freuen uns auf die Zusammenarbeit bei zuk\u00fcnftigen Patches\/Content! Ich danke dir vielmals!\n\nTwerk17 setzte seine fr\u00fchen Morgenstr\u00f6me fort, die uns nicht nur unterhalten, sondern uns auch sehr geholfen haben! Das Design- und QA-Team im britischen Studio hat den fr\u00fchen Morgenplan von Twerk17 genutzt, um Gameplay und Bugs zu beobachten und zu analysieren! Danke, dass du ein tolles Twerk bist!\n\nObwohl nicht Star Citizen-bezogen, erwarben einige verschiedene Familien Miniatur-Copiloten! Herzlichen Gl\u00fcckwunsch an die Familie von STLYoungblood und NighthawkZale, die beide einen +1 zum B\u00fcrgerz\u00e4hler hinzugef\u00fcgt haben!\n\nStreamer\/Entertainer\/Entwickler Geekdomo wurde erfolgreich operiert, und wir alle sind sehr froh zu h\u00f6ren, dass es ihm gut geht!\n\nWir k\u00f6nnten leicht genug schreiben, um diesen Abschnitt allein l\u00e4nger als die Gesamtheit des Monatsberichts zu machen. Diese Gemeinschaft ist wirklich zu etwas Sinnvollem herangewachsen. Wir sind alle miteinander verbunden, nicht nur als Unterst\u00fctzer des gleichen Spiels, sondern auch als Tr\u00e4umer des gleichen Universums. Einige m\u00f6gen Piraten sein, w\u00e4hrend andere militante UEE-Soldaten, aber wir teilen ein gemeinsames Ziel: \u00fcber die Grenzen der Konformit\u00e4t und der traditionellen Spielver\u00f6ffentlichung hinauszugehen, um zu versuchen, ein lebendiges, atmendes Universum zu schaffen, das wir schon immer zum Leben erwecken wollten. Diese Community ist zu einem sicheren Hafen f\u00fcr uns Sci-Fi-Geeks geworden und wir lieben sie. Wir m\u00f6chten uns bei allen bedanken, die ihre Unterst\u00fctzung und Geduld f\u00fcr das Team und dieses Projekt gezeigt haben, w\u00e4hrend wir weiter daran arbeiten, die beste verdammte Weltraumsimulation aller Zeiten zu machen! Wir k\u00f6nnten es aufrichtig nicht ohne dich machen!\n\nVorausschauend\nBuilding Star Citizen ist harte Arbeit, aber es ist der beste Job der Welt. Jeder Tag, an dem wir arbeiten, ist unserem Traum einen Tag n\u00e4her gekommen: das riesige, hartn\u00e4ckige Universum von Star Citizen und ein unvergleichliches Einzelspieler-Kinoerlebnis in Squadron 42. Wir wissen, dass es immer R\u00fcckschl\u00e4ge, Schwierigkeiten, Herausforderungen geben wird, die wir nicht vorhergesagt haben.... aber wir haben das Privileg, diesen Kampf zusammen mit einem unglaublichen Entwicklungsteam und einer erstaunlichen Community zu f\u00fchren.\n\nUnser n\u00e4chstes Release wird Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 sein, das gerade getestet wird. Alpha 2.4 ist ein weiterer wichtiger Schritt auf dem Weg zu unserem Ziel, mit der Einf\u00fchrung von Persistenz und dem ersten Teil der In-Game-Wirtschaft. Wir freuen uns sehr, dass Spieler in der Spielwelt Credits verdienen, anstatt sie \u00fcber Voyager Direct zu kaufen, was schon seit langem ein Ziel ist. Wir haben bereits gesehen, was die Spieler mit dem Starfarer, unserem bisher gr\u00f6\u00dften Schiff, auf den Testservern machen, und wir k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten zu sehen, was passiert, wenn alle mit dem Boarding beginnen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nWir gehen auch in die \"Convention-Saison\", mit geplanten Auftritten auf der Gamescom, DragonCon und unserer eigenen CitizenCon. Wir werden in K\u00fcrze weitere Details zu diesen Ereignissen mitteilen und dar\u00fcber, wie Sie mit dem Team sowohl pers\u00f6nlich als auch entfernt interagieren k\u00f6nnen. Es gibt viel, wor\u00fcber wir reden wollen, und dann wollen wir noch mehr in deine H\u00e4nde bekommen. Wir werden weiterhin K\u00e4fer zerschlagen, Welten erschaffen und Geschichten erz\u00e4hlen.... und wir sind froh, dass du dabei bist!\n\nWir sehen uns in der Strophe.","zh_CN":"Greetings Citizens!\n\nAs most of you know, we\u2019ve been working hard to launch Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 this month. The patch is currently on the PTU undergoing testing from our backers. As they can attest, we\u2019re battling some blockers largely related to networking. We\u2019re making good progress, and will keep you updated\u2026 we\u2019re as eager as anyone to see our backers battling it out aboard Starfarers, shopping for clothes and earning in-game currency. Meanwhile, development goes on for all aspects of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, whether they\u2019re intended for Alpha 2.4 or a future release. Without further ado, here\u2019s May, 2016 straight from the developers that lived it!\n\nWest Coast, Best Coast\n\nHello Citizens of the Stars. Once again it is that time where we share what our developers in the City of Angels have been up to. Needless to say, getting 2.4.0 out the door has completely dominated all of our schedules. Ensuring we release a quality product to you is always our top priority; however, doing so requires quite a large amount of attention to detail when you are attempting to create one of the most technically advanced games ever. So let us recount what each team at the CIG-LA office has been up to during what has been an unusually overcast-weathered month of May.\n\n\nEngineering\nMuch of what is happening in 2.4.0 is based upon what the Engineering team has been laying down tracks for. Shopping, persistence, bug fixes, and so much more. While Mark Abent has been focused on the 2.4 Phys Controller and Seat Integration, he and Paul Reindell have been helping the Engineering team in supporting the Persistence and Shopping features.\n\nAriel Xu has still been poring over his Port Editor and Loadout Editor and has recently implemented simulation parameters into the Loadout Editor. This will allow simulations between similar assets such as collision proxies, ropes, etc. These kinds of internally-built tools help streamline the design and engineering process.\n\nChad Zamzow has started working on Coolers and Heat Sinks, updating the technical design document and has started testing the system in ships along with testing the functionality of how IR and heat signatures can be tuned. While Patrick Mathieu has done a code merge for the Seats and Controller managers, he has also had a hand in several other systems such as the Energy Control Manager (for power plants), Flight Controls, and the game\u2019s event system. Chad McKinney wrote a technical design doc for the engineers on Signal Pipes after he worked on the Entity Health components (essentially the wear & tear functionality of components that are being sync\u2019d with Tech Design). Chad has also been helping the QA team by providing custom builds for QA to test very specific parameters of the game. Flight Engineer John Pritchett has also been hard at work, currently in the UK office working on positional controls for capital-class ships.\n\n\nTech Design\nBeing a Technical Designer is much more than coming up with game design ideas. A Technical Designer has to know how these systems and designs are able to function within the game based on certain parameters such as game engine limitations, resources, etc. With those things in mind, Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome has started testing the Power Plants and Shields 2.0 systems along with designing an overview of how overheating\/heat spiking will affect ship components. On the ship side, Kirk has also been working on the Origin 85x and coordinating efforts with the Engineering team on how heat and wear will function in terms of design.\n\nAlong with ship systems, as many of our astute readers know, the Tech Design team also performs the designing of how ship functionality will operate in-game. Calix Reneau has started working on the F7A Hornet, the Prowler, and space stations while Matt Sherman has been working on the white box for the long-awaited Drake Herald all while getting the Reliant flight-ready.\n\nMatt has also been working on supporting the newly-revealed Buccaneer and has also added some much needed updates to the Carrack design brief. There is a touch of Exploration he has been peering into but let\u2019s wait until next month\u2019s report so we can report on what he has accomplished thus far.\n\nThe LA Tech Design team was also joined by a new member, Stephen Hosmer. So stay tuned for next month\u2019s report to see what our newest Tech Designer will have accomplished by then.\n\n\nArt & Animation\nThe Art team was joined by our new Character Art Director, Josh Herman, who brings quite a bit of experience with him in regards to characters and delivering the highest of quality.\n\nCG Supervisor Forrest Stephan has not only been working on clothing support for the character team for 2.4.0, his efforts also look steps beyond what we are currently delivering and extend out to 2.5.0 and further.\n\nA large number of the artists have been dedicated to building the upcoming Caterpillar. Gurmukh Bhasin and Justin Wentz, our ship Concept Artists, have been doing exterior passes of the Caterpillar. This included adjusting the Command Module, turrets, decals, tractor beam room, engines and cargo, as well as the materials pass. On the interior side, Daniel Kamentsky and \u201cJin\u201d Hyun have been busy with the interior cargo module.\n\nThe other half of the CIG LA Art staff continues to work on character art. Omar Aweidah and Cheyne Hessler\u2019s bespoke character hair is currently in progress and looking fabulous while Jeremiah Lee\u2019s costume concepts have been perfected and approved to move into production.\n\n\nGlobal Technical Content\nAs we have explained in the past, the Global Tech Content team is a difficult one to categorize because it extends into everything we do at CIG at a global level. We had a new Associate Tech Animator join the team and are excited he\u2019s here! Erik Link started this month and will be working with our animation team so stay tuned for next month\u2019s report to see what accomplishments he has contributed to the team. But for now, Erik has been working on cleaning up Mannequin and digging deep into our systems to help increase our deliveries.\n\nLast month we reported Gaige Hallman had been working on the clothing volume system to determine how clipping will work. While a few related bugs have popped up, Gaige was pretty swift at getting them resolved and has been working on asset rigging for the Shubin Miner uniform, while John Riggs has been working on fixing the Vanduul Hand Geo and Skeleton just to name a few.\n\nMatt Intrieri, apart from working on asset validation tool, he has started on the Tech Art white box for the Drake Herald while Patrick Salerno has been working on the Reliant grey box Tech Art. Last but not least, Mark McCall completed working on skinning and implementing the RSI Pilot Flight Suit Jetpack.\n\n\nNarrative\nContinuing from our last update:\n\nSquadron 42, Squadron 42, Squadron 42.\n\nYeah, we were on full-blast for the past month. Both Will and I were over in the UK to help out with the pick-up performance capture shoot. We got to have some familiar faces back to the set as well as some new actors join the show. We were thrilled to have on set to play the role of . It went better than any of us could\u2019ve imagined and was spectacular to watch this character who\u2019s been kicking around for a while, finally be brought to life in such a dynamic way.\n\nOtherwise, on the PU front we\u2019ve been delving into things that shan\u2019t be made public yet, so unfortunately there\u2019s not a lot to tell.\n\nNow, back to the mines of Squadron 42.\n\nUntil\u2014\n\nOh, if you haven\u2019t heard, there has been a revamping of the Ask A Dev forum thread. We\u2019ve just started to dive back in and answer your questions, but if you had a question that was still unanswered from the old Ask A Dev \u2013 Lore thread, feel free to repost it in the new one and we will do our best to get to it, progress permitting.\n\nAs I was saying, until next month.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nThis month the CIG-LA Quality Assurance team was all hands on deck and focused on all the new 2.4 features, including the new PU Clothing, and the shopping system, a vast amount of persistence and performance testing, and help troubleshoot stability issues. Saitek was gracious enough to provide us with a Saitek X-56 Rhino H.O.T.A.S. peripheral so we were able to put the controller through its paces after a very short fight over who got to use it first. However, the most exciting thing this month was the privilege of an early look at preliminary large scale solar systems with procedural planets, going from space, to atmosphere, and eventually landing on the ground. At this point the terrain is visually pretty sparse looking, but this early on, the excitement is about the technology itself. There\u2019s nothing quite like flying through and around canyons in an M50!\n\n\nConclusion\nThere you have it folks; that was the month of May in a nutshell for us at the Los Angeles branch of Cloud Imperium Games. It should go without saying that there is much more going on behind the scenes to make all of these milestones possible and we can\u2019t wait until you see what we unveil next.\n\nGame Dev: Bigger in Texas\n\nWe\u2019ve continued to crank away on 2.4.0 through the month of May. We\u2019ve generated 145 builds from the build system; we deployed 98 internal server builds and published 14 of them to the PTU for external feedback. Everyone in the studio has been working night and day and we\u2019ve been making a lot of great progress to support the many technological and design changes that are part of this version. We\u2019re very excited to see this version continue its march soon to the Live server, and as you can imagine teams are already hard at work on 2.5 and beyond.\n\n\nDevelopment\nThe merry month of May has been a productive one for the Austin Dev Team. We\u2019ve spent most of the month wrapping up our tasks for 2.4.0 and planning ahead for 2.5.0. The Design Team has been polishing features in 2.4.0, specifically Shopping and Port Modification, so that they are in tip-top shape for when 2.4.0 goes Live. Robert Gaither has jumped over from QA to help out with placing all of the item ports in the hangars so that you guys are able to customize the layout of your flair objects and ships. He\u2019s been meticulous in making sure that the item port placement makes sense for each type of flair and linking up the item ports so that placing larger flair and ships cancels out the ability to place smaller flair and ships in the immediate vicinity.\n\nLead Designer Rob Reininger has been polishing and fixing bugs with the Shopping experience, in addition to planning for several features coming down the pipe. We\u2019ve got a final design for \u201cKiosk Purchasing\u201d in front of CR and are awaiting feedback. This feature will allow for purchasing of items that are too large to display in a conventional shop, such as ship components, ship weapons, and the ships themselves! We\u2019re also putting focus on designing additional phases of \u201cTry On\/Inspect Mode\u201d where each type of clothing asset will have a specific camera record that \u201czooms in\u201d to specific parts of the body depending on what you\u2019re trying on. So for example if you\u2019re trying on shoes, the camera will zoom in to the feet. There will also be specific \u201cTry On\u201d animations for the character as well so that the character can check himself out while he is trying on the latest and greatest swanky apparel.\n\nSpeaking of new swanky apparel, both Rob and Robert have been working with the Character Team to create briefs for and schedule in additional assets for future releases. Our goal from this point forward is to have new clothing assets ready for every new release. Sometimes these will just be material\/texture variants of existing assets but sometimes we\u2019ll have brand new assets from all-new clothing lines and manufacturers. Our major focus for 2.5.0 will be to have some more grungy frontier clothing ready for you guys.\n\nDesigner Pete Mackay has been iterating on the ship pricing formula he\u2019s been working on. He\u2019s also been designated as the Design Owner for Game Analytics going forward as well. Pete has been talking back and forth with the Gameplay Engineering Team, the Server Engineering Team, the DevOps Team, and the Platform Team to nail down the best approach for capturing and displaying game analytics from various aspects of Star Citizen. We want to know how you guys are playing so we can focus on the things you like the most and get you more of what you love, and tracking game analytics is the best way to do that.\n\nThe Backend Services Team has been furiously smashing bugs with the Persistence Backend all month in an effort to get it ready for release. This is the most massive change to our core technology we\u2019ve had since the debut of the Large World tech, and with that comes a lot of hiccups that need ironing out. The team has been doing a great job though and we\u2019re in the final stages of polish on this before release. We\u2019re now looking ahead to 2.5.0 and beyond. Our near-term taskload includes Persistent UEC, which will allow us to actually use UEC as part of Persistence instead of just our test currency Alpha UEC. Ian Guthrie at Wyrmbyte has also helped us create an Analytics Service for Gameplay Engineers to hook into to provide the data that Pete Mackay needs as mentioned above. As always, we\u2019ll be knocking out bugs with Persistence as we see them as well.\n\nThe Art and Animation Teams are trucking along with their longer-term tasks. The Ship Team is still up to their eyeballs in the work for the Hornet F7A and the Herald. Jay Brushwood has been on the set of the mocap shoot at Imaginarium the past couple weeks capturing new enter\/exit animations for all the ships, which we\u2019ll start getting in pretty soon so you guys can get in and out of your ships more quickly! Daniel Craig has wrapped up his work on the updated 300i enter\/exit animations and will be moving on to the Avenger next. Our PU Team has been supporting S42 with implementing background animations. They\u2019ve specifically been working on animations for the Mess Hall scenes and interacting with Ship Terminals. They also helped us out in a pinch by getting in some new \u201cWeapon Inspect\u201d animations that you can see in action while inspecting the weapons in the shops. Oh, and that death animation that happens for when a player enters an airlock without his spacesuit on? You can thank Vanessa Landeros for that!\n\nEmre Switzer has been doing a lighting revamp for several areas of the game. He\u2019s already tackled ArcCorp and will be moving on to Crusader next. He\u2019ll also be touching up some of the ships as well, like the Reliant.\n\nLastly, we wanted to reach out and give a hearty thanks to Mark Skelton for all of his effort and devotion to this project and especially this studio. Mark has moved on to a new project and new chapter, but we wish him all the best in his future endeavors and can\u2019t express enough how sorely he\u2019ll be missed. Thanks Mark!\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nApril\u2019s 2.4.0 testing continued well into May with the build making its way to the PTU. As of this writing, QA has deployed 14 builds to the PTU since the initial release to the Evocati testers.\n\nWith the assistance of the testers on the PTU, we\u2019ve been able to reliably reproduce a number of various issues which resulted in Code 7 disconnects. This has greatly assisted us with identifying the various causes of these disconnections, which has allowed the Network Engineers to address them as we identify them. As a result, a significant number of these specific disconnects have been corrected since the start of the PTU. We\u2019ve also seen a number of server\/client crashes fixed, as well as improvements to the Port Modification system, and a large number of fixes related to shopping. Not to mention, enough improvements in item persistence to allow us to begin persisting the database across multiple builds.\n\nInternally, we\u2019ve been gathering lots of server\/client performance data for the Engineering team to analyze to see if there\u2019s any improvements that can be made in the short term to help with performance while we wait on the larger improvements coming later.\n\nWe\u2019d also like to welcome Tori Turner to the QA Team, who has been assisting our Squadron 42 testing team.\n\nThat about wraps up this month, aside from continuing 2.4.0 and Squadron 42 testing there\u2019s nothing much new to report\u2026 well, aside from preliminary testing for Procedural Planets, as well as the first forays into the Solar System map\u2026\n\n\nGame Support\nMay was another busy but solid month for the Game Support Team.\n\nAs everyone knows, 2.4.0 has been not just our focus, but the entire company\u2019s focus. Chris Danks and Will Leverett spent the first part of the month with Evocati Test Flight, helping get bugs into Issue Council and then into our dev pipeline. As 2.4.0 managed to get into a state where we needed more people, we opened up to our PTU 1st Wave testers, and then Subscribers.\n\nTo build any community, you have to dedicate time and energy, and we\u2019re very proud of the fact that CIG has allowed Game Support to do just that with both Evocati and PTU testers. We\u2019ve put a lot of effort into making this successful, and we could not be more pleased with how awesome our volunteer testers have been. It\u2019s really through their passion for this project that we have had such fantastic results which have helped us tremendously in our efforts to complete 2.4.0.\n\nAs a reminder, for those wanting to participate in Evocati or PTU, it\u2019s possible through being an active member of the Issue Council. We\u2019ll be adding to both Evocati and PTU ranks later this summer, so jump on in at https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/community\/issue-council!\n\nWe were also thrilled that our friends at Turbulent visited us for a week in Austin. We got to spend a healthy amount of time on a variety of topics, not the least of which is Issue Council improvements. We\u2019ve identified a handful of requests that we\u2019re going to start developing on, some of which came from the community, some internally. We\u2019ll be very excited to get those out!\n\nWe\u2019re also growing in Austin, Texas! We\u2019ve been interviewing candidates for a Game Support role to help with various tasks such as account security, technical support, and our publishing process, and we\u2019ll be excited to have another hand to improve the level of service we can provide.\n\n\nIT\/Operations\nMore progress was seen on the patch reduction size project in the month of April. As previously mentioned, this is a big overhaul so it\u2019s definitely going to be summer before we get to the point where we can roll this out to everyone but we\u2019re hoping to start seeing real world use of the new system soon for internal testing. This month has been all about carefully incorporating the changes which support the new patching system into our build pipeline without affecting regularly scheduled deployments. This is no small task but we are making progress on schedule as we had hoped.\n\nAs we work through the build pipeline we have found that it may be possible to obtain some further optimizations in the build process. Much in the way we are breaking out data in to its smallest parts which will allow us to deliver more granular changes within our patches under the new system, we\u2019re now identifying ways we should be able to increase granularity in our build process. If this works, we may be able to compile portions of the build down to certain individual changes further reducing dependencies on other aspects of the larger build. In other words, by reducing dependencies we might be able to kick certain types of build changes out in seconds where normally we would have to wait minutes or sometimes hours for that type of fix.\n\nWe certainly have more discovery and testing to perform but hopefully we will have much more to report in this are as our work on our huge patch project progresses.\n\n\nLiveOps\/DevOps\nThis month we have been super busy keeping up with the dev teams work on persistence. We\u2019ve delivered 18 publishes to PTU along with countless deployments for QA and individual use dev testing. Literally, countless deployments because at some point we lost track during the late nights. Our primary build system cranked out 145 builds generating a total of 18,350 gigs of data. Alternate build systems aren\u2019t tracked but are doing almost as much work considering that we\u2019re now requiring code pre-builds prior to code being checked in for the testing and production builds.\n\nApril has also been a month of spring cleaning for us. We\u2019ve reworked a number of internal tools and docs and we\u2019ve completed our planning for our new publish orchestration system. The goal of this project is to make our publishes more automated and configurable. Currently we have a decent system which is fairly dependable but the addition of persistence has shown us that we must be able to make a myriad of configuration changes quickly and easily rather than manually. Our new system will enable all of this for us and be much more extendable meaning we can handle changes much better than we can today. While this may not show up as a neat flashy thing that people see in the game, we\u2019re really happy we get to do this work because it makes the job of publishing Star Citizen so much better in the long run.\n\nForging Ahead\n\nGreetings Citizens,\n\nAnother productive month in Manchester! Chris spent some time with the team this month working on Squadron 42, and we\u2019re very excited to be getting closer to sharing more information on that part of the project. Here\u2019s a report from each department about what we did this month:\n\n\nConcept Art\nAhhh the month of May, everything is blossoming and so is the teams work \u2013 we are really getting into a groove here and the concept team are pumping out a lot of super high quality work. We\u2019ve done a large amount of work for future ships this month, these aren\u2019t needed for Sq42 but are needed for the persistent universe and to keep on expanding the roles in the games, we have 4 unannounced ships\/vehicles in concept right now and they are almost all complete, it\u2019s hard to choose which will be my favourite, they are all really exciting in their own way!\n\nWe\u2019ve also continued to work heavily on ship items, mainly power plants, coolers and shield generators \u2013 look out for the Gorgon Industries \u2013 it\u2019s got some serious bite :D Weapons are continuing both on FPS and ships, working out upgrade paths for all the different sizes of ship guns and how to be efficient with our designs but also give the fans what they\u2019d like. Props and prop dressing has continued, the list of required props is getting longer by the day so we will take on additional resources to fill that gap so that Sq42 can look its best. That\u2019s all for now folks!\n\n\nEnvironment Art\nThe last few remaining art bugs for 2.4 have been ironed out, hopefully you guys will be playing it before too long as we\u2019re looking forward to seeing what you guys think of the new features. As always the team is hard at work on Sq42 development, not too much information can be told but we are ending the Greyboxing phase for the Shubin interior levels, finishing out Final Art on some other undisclosed locations. We are still pushing forward on Final Art for our VS level, everything from lighting, materials, atmospherics, props, terrain, rocks, and buildings are being worked on. That\u2019s all for this month folks, enjoy 2.4!\n\n\nProps\nThis month has been a heads down and getting things done month. After wrapping up 2.4 requests and bugs the team have been focusing on either ship items (formally components) or props to add narrative to Squadron 42. Because of the way we approach the props anything we create can be used anywhere in the game, even if we theme particular props to tell a story in one area we can then override the material and reuse the asset in another area, this means we get a bit more reuse for our time investment and it reduces art fatigue.\n\nBen Curtis has been spending a lot of time on documentation this month, now we have the new shader tech mentioned last month it\u2019s time to get thorough documentation together and update some of the old ones. We have a few new starters over the next month so it\u2019s important to have everything easy to find and refer back to, as we get more resources in the future this becomes more and more important.\n\nLooking forward the whole team will be focusing on the ship items for a couple of sprints to make sure there is plenty of content when the feature goes live. It is going to be a busy month but we can\u2019t wait to get all the content out to the players so you can start really customising the performance of your ships and making them your own.\n\n\nSpaceships\nWork continues on our \u2018big guns,\u2019 the Idris, Javelin and Bengal. As we reported last month, interior work on the Idris has largely wrapped up and we\u2019ve moved to building some story-specific Squadron 42 variations\u2026 but we can\u2019t talk about those just yet! The Javelin and Bengal exteriors are ongoing, with the latter\u2019s team benefiting greatly from the work done on the former.\n\nTowards the smaller end of the spectrum, work is ongoing on the F7A Hornet, which will be the hero ship for Squadron 42. We\u2019re going for updates to the Hornet that make it clear this is a different, military-specific version, and so far the results are great! We\u2019ll share more of that as Squadron 42 gets closer. We also completed work on \u2018pods\u2019 for the Argo transport which will let you use it for a number of different utility functions.\n\nOn the concept side, we are finishing up work on one of the ships you\u2019ve been waiting for: the Drake Dragonfly \u201cspace motorcycle.\u201d We think we\u2019ve come up with a plan for a very cool, very SMALL ship that\u2019s going to work very well alongside some upcoming game systems. More on that soon! We also pitched several designs for Aegis\u2019 next ship. Can\u2019t reveal more yet, but it\u2019s a tough one!\n\n\nGraphics\nThis month the graphics team have finished off a number of features and fixes which we hope will be in the backers\u2019 hands very soon.\n\nThe first of these is a major upgrade to the particle lighting system. Previously the particles were lit by a different system to the rest of the game, and while this was cheaper it had many visual problems such as lack of shadows and incorrect brightness or colour for some light types. We\u2019ve now changed it so that it uses the new tiled-lighting system and so matches the rest of the lighting much better, but we\u2019ve also added fully volumetric shadowing. This means we get accurate shafts of light passing through particles which looks very impressive in our tests and we can\u2019t wait to see what the artists can do with this.\n\nThe tiled lighting system in general has also had a major upgrade, partly to allow the particle lighting, but primarily to achieve greater performance on modern GPUs. This has been deactivated in recent public builds but we expect it to be enabled in the next major release. While looking at the lighting we\u2019ve also started to improve the quality of rectangular area lights. Real-time renderers need to make many compromises to achieve any form of area lighting in real time, but we\u2019re hoping to improve the results of these because sci-fi environments so often use rectangular lights.\n\nOur work on the various high-dynamic-ranges features continues with the completion of the light-linking feature to allow realistic levels of brightness and glow from our lights. Next we\u2019ll be focussing on the exposure control system to make it better approximate the complexities of the human eye and brain\u2019s amazing ability to adapt to environments which high contrast or very low light levels.\n\nSome other more minor changes include: uncapping the GPU texture budget so that GPUs with more memory can benefit from higher texture resolutions and less likelihood of seeing any \u2018popping\u2019 from the texture streaming, completion of our internal render-profiler, continuation of our major UI refactor mentioned last month, and various bug fixes with culling.\n\n\nEngineering\nFor the engineering team, much of this month has involved 2.4.0 and helping get it into a state where we can finally release it to live. Bone has been finishing off the port modification system, allowing to customise your hangar and change your ship loadout from inside the game, and it is now complete and is in the final stages of bug fixing and polish. Similarly the shopping is all in and working and again we\u2019re just fixing up any bugs and polish that comes along.\n\nOur network team have been up busy fixing up the disconnection issues we\u2019ve been finding on the PTU build. Unfortunately these have been pretty gnarly and hard to track down and fix, they\u2019ve been coming from the changes required for persistence not playing well with the current networking system. One change required of persistence is being able to reuse entity ids, which the engine was never really designed to do, and as a result we\u2019re having to deal with the consequences of that. Long term George is working on a new message queue system which should be able to deal with all these problems a lot better.\n\nIn-between the bug fixing and polish Craig has spent some more time on the carrier takeoff and landing, Steve has been making more progress on the Object Container system and also our entity component system, which breaks down an entity\u2019s update into smaller individual blocks which can easily be reused. It will help clean up a lot of the codebase as well as helping on the performance side. Sadly for the UK office he\u2019s now leaving us and moving to our sunny LA office, our loss and their gain.\n\nGordon\u2019s been doing more polish work on the cover, as well as the vaulting and mantling. Romulo has been doing the player refactor and moving armour over to the new Item 2.0, as well as some weapon polish. Jens has been working on player moving and the head stabilisation.\n\nAudio\nThis month, will try to keep this a bit snappier just because there\u2019s a lot to cover. Apologies for flitting between bullet points and paragraphs!\n\nDarren Lambourne has been busy with:\n\nSetting up new variable boost layer for thrusters on many ships\n\n2nd Pass on BEHR Laser Cannon S5\n\nReworking and fixing anim sounds across several ships, including Connie pilot\/co-pilot seats. General stock-take of missing audio\n\nBeginning setup of the AEGS Idris audio scheme\n\nGeneral bugfixing across several ships\n\nLuke Hatton has been working on:\n\nThe cockpit interactive user-interface sound, adding sounds for the power distribution triangle and shield distribution\n\nThe Aurora series now have their own pass-by whoosh sounds and should be more easily distinguished when flying past you\n\nOn the FPS side, sounds for hitting targets with projectile weapons have gone in, along with kill confirmation sounds for both friendly and enemy characters\n\nStefan Rutherford performed something akin to open-heart bypass surgery on the Wwise project side of things \u2013 he generally maintains this, ably assisted by Jason Cobb. We\u2019ve put a lot of thought recently into how the game will be mixed (both for S42 and the Live release) and as part of ensuring things work and scale this needed doing. On top of this, he produced new FPS weapon sounds and editing up the recent weapon recording session material.\n\nBoth Phil Smallwood and Bob Rissolo were on-set at Imaginarium to continue with recording duties for our monumental Squadron 42 cinematics. Our lovely new dialogue rig, the D1000 got its first major run out, which Phil\u2019s been debugging a little, smoothing any rough edges. Both returned to master and edit the resultant dialogue.\n\nMatteo Cerquone has mostly worked on Squadron 42 ambiences, with Ross; assisted with checking fidelity of sounds affected by a wholesale conversion settings change in Wwise (part of a general optimisation pass), and cleaning up old Foley events in the character tool.\n\nRoss Tregenza did:\n\nA lot more work on the Music Logic system \u2013 it now has huge web of fully functional states combined with a growing web of momentary stings, and all new music in place, it\u2019s also beginning to expand beyond space-flight music into FPS & EVA\n\nSquadron 42 level ambient sounds \u2013 the levels are advancing well with Ross and Matteo starting to add a load of ambient audio to the spaces, lots of levels really starting to come alive there.\n\nBattle-chatter \u2013 working with the AI guys to start getting the battle-chatter dialogue systems up and running properly\n\nSimon Price has continued laying down pieces of the dialogue pipeline, improving the scalability of it over the last month. Most recently he\u2019s been working on migrating dialogue data over to use external sources. Perhaps that doesn\u2019t seem hugely exciting but it\u2019s part of the overall ethos of keeping things sensible and not overloading the Wwise project with duplicated structure.\n\nSam Hall has been working on a system for dynamically loading audio assets, to ensure we only have loaded in memory what\u2019s absolutely necessary. Different kinds of sounds have different requirements as to how resident they tend to need to be; some kinds (such as ambient sounds that aren\u2019t required to synchronize too much) can stream in, and any kind of latency isn\u2019t perceptible or appreciable. Others, such as gunshots that the player triggers, need to be ready to go instantly. So after sorting through what needs to be resident and what doesn\u2019t, it\u2019s been a question of ensuring the system can bring in audio assets to memory as soon as they\u2019re needed in each case. For a game such as ours it\u2019s important we only have loaded, what\u2019s important to the player; loading everything won\u2019t be an option while scaling up of the universe continues apace.\n\nSam\u2019s also been adding more music logic events and parameter tweaks to improve the dynamic music experience. And of course has been fixing audio bugs as they\u2019ve arisen.\n\nGraham Phillipson\u2019s been busy on the in-game VOIP tech, we\u2019ve actually had something that we could demo internally as a result of this which went down well \u2013 of course, we\u2019re really keen on getting this out to the community. Adding to the ability for the community to, well, commune, I think it\u2019s going to be a huge benefit for everyone and it\u2019s been great to hear it in action. Standard audio bug fixing duties and audio system back-end stuff too, much as usual. Graham added the ability to assign parameters to Audio Trigger Spots which gave all the sound designers much cheer. Though this seems a small thing in the grand scheme, it ensures we\u2019re not just creating new objects in Wwise for subtle contextual changes to audio in the game; it allows us to add change at the point where the change is required rather than, again, duplicating contexts at source as well as at the destination.\n\nEwan Brown is a new Senior Audio Programmer and has been settling in, getting to know the code-base and how things fit together, providing tool support to the likes of Mannequin. There\u2019s a lot to pick up on and he\u2019s going to be assisting Sam and Ross with their musical endeavours too.\n\nJason Cobb has been busy with the following:\n\nDeveloped audio build validation scripts\n\nBug fix various voice leaks, documented two test cases for fixes needed for Flowgraph audio triggers to play correctly with zones\n\nBug fix support for hard-coded mat_water material fx\n\nStarted development game audio inventory script\n\nVarious wwise project upkeep, optimizations, support for Stephan\u2019s environment re-org effort\n\nArea-based mix state markup for multicrew ships. 90% complete\n\nInvestigated situation for markup of single-seater ship interiors.\n\nAnd that\u2019s all for the moment, please do ask more questions on the forums and we will try to get the whole audio team answering where applicable. Thanks for listening!\n\nVFX\nIt\u2019s been a busy month for the VFX team (I know, I know, we say that every month!). Lots of fine-tuning and bug-fixing has gone in for the imminent 2.4 release \u2013 specifically fixing up a couple of particle effects causing memory leaks (easy to fix, not always so easy to find the culprit though!) and a further optimization pass on the new plasma shotgun.\n\nAway from the live release, we have really started to get our teeth into Squadron 42 effects to a more polished level of quality. Obviously we can\u2019t give away too many spoilers, but it\u2019s really exciting to be working on such a diverse range of environments and set pieces. From billowing dust and water sprays, and obviously a lot of explosions, we\u2019ve got it all going on. It\u2019s really starting to come together.\n\nOn the weapons side of things, we have begun a clean-up of our impact effects libraries. Specifically here, we are creating surface-specific impact effects so if you fire your ballistic machine gun down at the dusty ground, you will get a kick-up of dust as opposed to a huge blast of sparks. Nothing ground-breaking here but necessary nonetheless and will go a long way towards enhancing the player experience.\n\nWe also began to flesh out VFX-related plans for the incredible procedural planet tech. We have some simple but effective ideas as to how we can place effects on a planetary scale (hint: we won\u2019t be manually placing them) It\u2019s really important that we are smart about this, so we can save time in the long run whilst allowing us to maintain the same quality and scale of effects across a planet. Looking good so far!\n\nFinally \u2013 and this may be mentioned in the graphics team write-up \u2013 some exciting news about particle lighting. We are close to moving over to the new tiled lighting system for particles. This will allow much more accurate shadow-receiving \u2013 large spinning fan casting long dark shadows in a steamy corridor? Check!\n\nChanging the Worlds\n\nThe weathers not sure what it wants to do out here in Frankfurt, sunny and hot, overcast and raining, last month had a fair share of it all. The office grew by 2 people in May, Janine helping out with production and David joining the weapons art team. We\u2019re just about at capacity in the office so we officially started an expansion. When we moved into the office space last July the owners of the building put the adjoining space on hold for us for a full year, one of the perks they offer to new tenants. At that time we didn\u2019t know if we would have any need for it, but thought it was a nice gesture.\n\nThe team has also been doing some excellent work not detailed below on the procedural system\u2026 they would rather let you see it in action than spoil all the details now, so stay tuned on that front!\n\nThis month we also kicked things into gear with Gamescom, it only makes sense for Frankfurt to help out as much as we can since we live here. Not too much can be said at this point, but we\u2019ll definitely be there in August.\n\n\nCinematics\nThis month we had our 2nd performance capture shoot for SQ42 at Imaginarium Studios in Ealing London that complemented and completed scenes in the earlier chapters.\n\nLast summer was our main shoot that gave us approx. 75% of all needed material for SQ42\u2019s story. With this new shoot complete and another final shoot upcoming in July we will have collected every bit of performance! Highlight of this shoot were scenes with the Idris\u2019 quartermaster handing out big guns as well as an in-universe spectrum show with a furious and most importantly hilarious host!\n\nFor the shoot the Cinematic team built some of the needed environments to be used for live-mocap and coordinated efforts to get all needed level segments, characters sorted in time for live-mocap to be effective. (Live-mocap is a process where we can see the motion data live in our engine on actual in-game characters inside the actual scenes\/levels)\n\nMichael, our Lead Cinematic Designer, has finished a first pass on an important, longer cinematic piece that happens in the middle of the story campaign.\n\nThe Cinematic animators have been providing support to the Gameplay team in the UK while they wait for data to get back from the shoot. They\u2019re also finishing up sorting the quad cam video data from last year\u2019s p-cap shoot. When that\u2019s done the animators on the Cinematic team will review the p-cap shots with the quad cam data and make sure that the animations are playing out as they are intended.\n\n\nAI\nSubsumption editor has been updated to version 0.901 and we started to implement some more functionalities exposed now in the tools for the designers. First of all we created some new Subsumption tasks to allow designers to use the following functionalities:\n\n1. Querying the Tactical Point System\n2. Move to a specific cover location\n3. Shoot from the cover the NPC is in to his attention target\n\nWe exposed a way for designers to suggest the next activity or subactivity for a given NPC. We also completed the first pass to support Action Areas. As we explained in the monthly report from April, those are the elements in the world that allow designers to mark areas with specific information: a multicrew space ship, for example, might have an engine room, a hangar, a control room and so on. Action Areas allow the NPCs to reason about the environment to fulfil their tasks. Those game elements are also used to notify the NPC when another NPC is entering\/exiting the area or to re-route specific events that are intended for the characters present in the area. We also implemented the basic code to handle Subsumption events, designers can create those specifying different properties (for example if the event is something the NPCs should see to perceive it, if they should hear it, if there is a max range in which the event can be received, and so on) and Subsumption keeps track of all this data.\n\nWe also completed the first pass on using the Usables\/Interactors as navigation links. This unification step was required since Squadron 42 and Star Citizen are not only using the classic navigation links to allow characters to jump, vault, and so on. We also have links to connect the navigation through the usage of items (for example passing from room 1 and room 2 may require the AI to open a door) and these items can also be used by the players, making everything even more complicated. Using the Interactors makes sure that an NPC that opens a door doesn\u2019t require any different code to synchronize the action with other players or other AI characters, making all the code flow much more consistent.\n\nRegarding behaviors, we are currently embedding specific \u201cmental states\u201d to allow the normal NPCs behaviors to cope better with cinematic scenes and in-ship state (piloting a ship, controlling a turret, and so on)\n\nRegarding the ships behavior we are almost done with the first pass to improve the behaviors of the ship assigned to restrict their movement into specific areas. We currently have missions where spaceships need to guard specific environmental elements or where ships cannot leave specific boundaries to avoid being destroyed.\n\nCurrently boundaries where always considered as a soft restriction on the ships behavior, but we are now expanding the ships behavior to correctly handle a strong spacial restriction.\n\nThis month we also spent time on improving stability and performances of the live game, so that all of you guys can continue to enjoy each release of Star Citizen.\n\n\nWeapons\nThis month the weapon art team finished two new ship weapons and did extensive work on the weapon material library. On top of that we are currently modelling a new ballistic submachine gun and doing the final touches on the Scourge Railgun detailing and texturing. The Railgun is meant to be a visual target for all the new weapons to come, so we\u2019ve taken some extra time to take it to a gold standard level of quality.\n\nWe\u2019ve also been joined by a new starter, David, bringing the weapon art team size up to 4 people now.\n\n\nDesign\nLevel Designers have been working on finalizing the layout for the Outlaw Base, it\u2019s had a first art pass and will come back to them for a mark-up phase before release. This base is also scheduled for a tiered release so there will be a lot of back and forth between art and level designers as areas get released an new ones get added. The guys are also working hard on the Truck Stop base which is a nice place for pilots to stop to refuel, grab a bite to eat, get some supplies before they head out on big journeys. Another area in which level designers are working in is adding landing sites on procedurally generated planets.\n\nThe system designers have finalized the Power Distribution system which once implemented should power all our ships from single seaters to capitals and even stations. This system will allow players to configure how power travels within their ships, which components get power, how much do they get and where do they draw it from. At the same time it should allow more nefarious players to sabotage said system. At the same time the Looting, Inner Though and the Usable\/Interactor systems are also fully designed now and are heading into production. A lot of work went into ensuring that all our usable props and animation metrics for them are properly standardized so we don\u2019t have to do the work twice and everything will fit together once it\u2019s in game.\n\nOn the AI side we are designing a system that can generate archetypes and loadouts quick enough to fill an entire galaxy without us having to manually build each individual NPC. Basically by defining rulesets and tag sets the system will be able to create said archetypes matching their gear to where they came from, what their job is, what the dress code is in the area they are in, what rank they are etc. Besides that, there is also a lot of work going on in designing the tools we will need for the brains and logic of our new Subsumption based AI.\n\nBoth system and level designers have been planning out the work for the next year and the upcoming releases to make sure we have a more realistic picture of what can be done with the allotted time.\n\n\nEngineering\nRenderer refactoring: On the Renderer side, we did some housecleaning and optimizations. Based on the refactorings from last month to increase the object count, we started to simplify the data upload to the GPU. Previously the CryeEngine system is based on reflection, so that the code could find out what data was needed on the GPU and only upload this data. While this sounds like a solid idea, finding out what was needed was more expensive than a straight data upload. So we began to remove those reflection code paths in the time critical areas. This also improved the readability of the code, as we can now see what the code does and not the logic to find out what to do. Related to this change, we also ensured to only upload the same data once to GPU. Previously it uploaded a data buffer for each object, and then uploaded the same data again if the code decided to use instancing. This is now fixed.\n\nData Patcher: On the Data Patcher (the tool which will be responsible to create the data for the engine to use when we switch to incremental patching), we made a little progress by better defining how to store the data. Not much reportable progress here as much work is about infrastructure discussions.\n\nOptimizations: To further optimize the streaming code, we added timeslicing support to it again. This way the cost to update the distance to objects not visible to the player is done less frequent.\n\nTag System comes into the ZoneSystem: Initial support was written to support storing tags inside the ZoneSystem. A Tag is a small string which we use to give context information to an entity object. For example if we want to know if something is a chair, we can tag it as a chair. This way the AI system can ask all objects and find out if they are chairs. We already have such systems inside the engine but those are lacking spatial information, so they can only answer: is this object a chair, but not \u201cfind me all chairs around me\u201d. This lead to some in-efficient solutions as the code had to brute force get many objects and check their type. To overcome this limitation we are moving the support for tags into the ZoneSystem, our spatial position system. This required some changes and new systems:\n\nStoring and comparing a string is not very efficient on a computer (but very convenient for a human, thus we need it), so we implemented a Trie to allow us to very an efficient way to map unique strings to a fixed integer range. (We wanted to get an integer range instead of a hash as a range allows us some better broad phase checks and more efficient data storage)\n\nSince not all data types which we stored inside the ZoneSystem require tags, we made the whole zone system more flexible to allow the client code to specify the properties to store per object type. This also reduced our memory usage in crusader by 50MB.\n\nWe implemented a specialized allocator for the tags so they can be efficiently culled by the low level zone system, which is implemented in SIMD, so the tags must follow a certain size and alignment.\n\nAnd as a last thing, we implemented code to allow filtering tags by a DNF (Disjunctive normal form), which is a fixed format and can be used for efficient checking of arbitrary boolean expressions.\n\nRuntime Skel-Extensions: The character customization system in Star Citizen is internally using an engine feature called \u201cskinned attachments\u201d. With skinned attachments it is possible to replace every deformable item on a character (i.e. cloth, shoes, spaces suits, helmets, etc) and even entire body parts such as faces, hands, or upper and lower body parts. Each skin-attachment has its own set of joints that are automatically animated and deformed by the base skeleton. It is also possible to use skinned attachments that have more joints and different joints then the base skeleton and it is possible to merge all types of skeletons together, even skeletons from totally different characters. That means you can have a minimalistic base skeleton which can be extended by an arbitrarily complex skinning skeleton. In the original CryEngine this was an offline- or loading-time feature, because the entire process was pretty CPU intensive. For Star Citizen we turned this into a runtime-feature that allows us to extend a base-skeleton anytime while the game is running, no matter if the character is alive and playing animations or in a driven- or floppy-ragdoll state. This means that you don\u2019t have to know in advance the type of joints you might need in the base skeleton nor do you have to carry extra joints around just in case you might need them. Instead the system allows you to add new joints at will and whenever they are required.\n\nFull-Body Experience: we also invested a lot of time to improve the full-body experience in first person. Our main goal was to make the head-bobbing customizable. In Star Citizen the head-bobbing is a natural side-effect of the mocap data, because third- and first-person are using the same animation. To make the controls as smooth and precise as possible, we implemented a new IK-solution to eliminate all unwanted effects from the 3rd person body animations on the first person view and weapon handling.\n\n\nTech Art\nFrankfurt TechArt is always busy with RND and actively supporting any discipline who needs help. This month we were helping with Eye stabilization for FPS , which will stabilize camera movement while playing in FPS, the results so far have been really good. We\u2019re also supporting feature or RND for the itemport IK system for game, it\u2019s moving positively as well.\n\nOn our DCC[Maya] pipeline front it is becoming much more stable but still needs a bit more support as we keep updating or expending it. We were also fixing bugs and supporting weapon Assets on all fronts like rigs, updating rendermesh, entity setup, Mannequin setup etc.\n\nOverall TechArt is participating for new features as well as keep supporting daily operations.\n\n\nVFX\nThe past month the Frankfurt VFX team has been working on Squadron 42 single player missions. This covers almost all aspects of VFX such as ambient\/environment effects, scripted action effects and even some cinematic effects. This also requires a fair deal of collaboration with the individual level designers and artists. Once they are done designing and building a section of the level with props, VFX can then move in and decorate it with the appropriate effects. Everything from fire and explosions to blood and water.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nThis month in QA we\u2019ve been working closely with our in-house Engineering team to test progress on the procedural planets, as seen in the Pupil to Planet trailer. With such a large scale planet you can imagine the number of issues we encountered throughout our testing. Including, but not limited to the buggy insisting on driving on its z-axis, defying all laws of gravity!! We also spent some time checking all characters currently in Star Citizen and Squadron 42 for issues that might be blocking our cinematic developers. As a result, we were able to identify multiple Squadron 42 characters that had definitely seen better days. Sean Tracy, Ali Brown, and Okka Kyaw jumped on board to assist and we were able to resolve the issues quickly, so that our cinematic developers will be able to continue to create amazing cinematic sequences for Star Citizen. Lastly, we spent the remainder of the month assisting Chris Raine and Chris Bolte with gathering profiling and concurrency data for the PTU servers. The community was a great help and rallied together to load as many players onto the PTU servers as possible so that we could collect data with a hi-load server in order to contribute to resolving the framerate drops the public has been experiencing in Crusader. May has by far been our busiest month in QA, but we would not have expected any less as our universe grows larger each day.\n\nWe Aim to Misbehaviour\n\nFrom supporting Star Citizen Alpha 2.4 to working on some exciting content you\u2019ll be seeing in the coming patches, we had a busy month at BHVR! Here\u2019s the skinny\u2026\n\n\nEngineering\nFor the engineering team, this month went by very quickly. A lot of effort was put on getting 2.4 out of the door, working hard on the leftover nitty gritty details.\n\nWe mainly polished and debugged features like the shopping system and cry astro.\n\nThe good news is that with release 2.4, we are establishing the foundation for really fun features that will be implemented for the next releases.\n\n\nDesign\nWith no surprise, this month was almost all about shopping in both Port Olisar and Area18, getting features ready for 2.4.0 live release. This means, sorting out the last remaining bugs and working on improvements like for example; adding NPC shopkeepers or fixing some load out issues.\n\nLevel Designer Jesse Kalb, helped out re-design and implement the new port modification system for the flair items in the hangars. The game has many flair objects, so we had to work with Turbulent on getting things working right with the new design. Hopefully, players will enjoy placing the flair items and customizing their display cases.\n\nOn a different topic, Technical Lead Level Designer Fran\u00e7ois Boucher, led the way for the creation of the CryEngine level structure and its components for the next map we are currently working on, the Pirate Base. With the whitebox map, hot out of the oven, from our friends in Frankfurt, we prepared the map so both Design and Art teams could work on their respective sections. This means, setting up landing pads, airlocks, doors, elevators, player spawning and finding a sweet spot for this base in the Stanton System.\n\nFrancois is also busy setting up the ship components shop that is going to open soon on Port Olisar.\n\nFinally, the design team also started working on the shop designs, layouts and whiteboxes that we are going to find on the Pirate base. The mood is going to be different on the Pirate base and so will the shops. More to come, looking forward to further share with you guys!\n\n\nArt\nIt was a very exciting month for the BHVR Art Team, because we began production on new maps.\n\nOne of them is a new pirate space station, which we mostly concentrated our efforts on the global aspects of the map like: composition, orientation, basic dressing and evaluating the new extra modules that will be required for this map.\n\nNext month, we will move to final dressing pass, color balance, decal placement and polishing.\n\nThe second map, is a new ship parts shop that will be available on a future release. This shop has great character, so we have spent a good chunk of time working on the dressing and first pass lighting.\n\nNext month, we are moving on debugging and polishing.\n\nFor the props team, we continued supporting the new shopping system. Mainly working on item racks and shelves.\n\nWe have also completed several new props that the environment team is extremely happy to be able to use now.\n\nFinally, let\u2019s not forget the improvements and debugging work that was done for the upcoming 2.4 release.\n\nThe Turbulent Power!\n\nGreetings from sunny Montreal where Star Citizen\u2019s web team have been hard at work on everything from Buccaneer surveys to changing how you log in to the game! Here are some specifics on the projects we were working on this past month.\n\n\nMulti-Factor Authentication (MFA)\nFor those that aren\u2019t familiar, Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA, is the type of security many people use with modern MMOs and web accounts, where you need to use a special key code or something texted to your cell phone to access an account. It keeps your data more secure by making it much harder for anyone to break in and assume your identity. We\u2019ve had MFA in the works for quite a while, as we know you want to keep your ships and characters safe! We\u2019re in the home stretch now, as we are close to completing the development of it for the RSI website. Once the QA phase starts, we will be working with CIG to test it and then roll out to the community. At the same time, we are continuing to work on MFA support for the game launcher itself, which will be especially important as we move more aspects of Star Citizen from the web to the game world itself.\n\n\nCommunication Platform\nYou may know this better as \u2018Organizations 2.0,\u2019 which we pitched earlier in Star Citizen\u2019s development. Instead of going with a simple update to the current Org system, we\u2019ve opted to develop a purpose-built communications platform that can be adapted for many aspects of the game. Development continues on the new platform, which includes completely new chat and forum systems for the first iteration. We have set up a server for internal testing, but we\u2019re still a few months away from a beta launch. When the time comes, the Evocati group will get the first access to kick the tires!\n\nGame Launcher\n3, 2, 1\u2026 launch! We have been working with the team at CIG on the new version of the game launcher\/patcher. The new version will support multiple environments (e.g. PTU, live) and multiple games (e.g. Star Citizen, Squadron 42), and will allow for background patching. In the first phase, the user interface will look like the current one, but we will be able to add new functionality and design in subsequent phases that the current patcher wouldn\u2019t be able to handle. This is an exciting step for how the game \u2018works,\u2019 although we know it\u2019s probably not as thrilling to the community as seeing a new ship or planet.\n\n\nSales\nI guess you could say, the Bucc stops here! We assisted CIG in launching the next great pirate fighter, and all our metrics say it\u2019s a hit! To support the Buccaneer, we built a \u2018Drake customer survey\u2019 site that will determine what bonus weapon everyone who purchases the ship will get. We took inspiration from the classic Ultima series for this, trying to come up with Star Citizen\u2019s version of the fortune teller\u2019s quiz used for character generation. After all, immersion isn\u2019t just for the game! This month was also the month where backers could reap the rewards of our one-off operations: we distributed coupons to all those of you who took part in the April Fools \u201cBig Benny\u201d reveal, all the entrants in the Shubin recruitment programs, and also everyone who joined in for the latest Free Fly promo.\n\n\nBehind-the-Scenes\nIn preparation for the release of 2.4.0, we have been working with CIG to test the platform side. For example, if a user makes changes to their inventory on the website, they should be reflected in the game too. There are many different scenarios to test, so it\u2019s been a collaborative effort between us and CIG\u2019s QA team. This is one of those areas backers probably don\u2019t think too much about, but is necessary for the move to a true persistent universe. It\u2019s great seeing your ships in the inventory of the website\u2026 but it\u2019s a lot greater having the game track them, their upgrades, their damage status, their location in the world and so on.\n\nAlso in May, Turbulent sent a small strikeforce to Austin for a series of face-to-face meetings to discuss various issues, such as server infrastructure, analytics, persistence, and the Issue Council. It is possible that some BBQ was consumed after hours, and we\u2019ve had ongoing discussions with CIG about IT infrastructure, and improving performance. As you would expect, this is a complex subject, but we hope to have implemented some new measures by the end of summer.\n\nDon\u2019t Forget a Snappy Title, Jared\n\nThis train is just about to the station. I won\u2019t hold you up with a long, boring intro, suffice to say, I could write a long, boring intro if I wanted to. I could do it, man. But I won\u2019t. Because I know you\u2019re in a hurry. Uh oh, is this becoming a long, boring intro anyway? I\u2019d better move onto the next section before that happens. Quickly. Let\u2019s go\u2026\n\n\nDay-to-Day\nEach day I come to work with some of my favorite people in the world. And Thomas Hennessy. This month was a struggle with Ben and Alexis gone back east for two weeks on Bereavement Leave, but we pulled through with a newfound appreciation for the amount of work the two of them do each and every month. Between Ben and Alexis being gone, and Sandi going to the UK, it was a rare few days this week when the whole team was together, but my main man Tyler Witkin helped out from the Austin office, calling me on Skype each day to keep me company, and help shoulder the load while folks were out.\n\nBasically, this section is just so I can say how much I like the people I work with. I\u2019m in a mood.\n\n\nBroadcasts\nThis month\u2019s 10 for the Developers episodes in lieu of Chris being in the UK covered a wide range of topics and hosts. Sean Tracy, Forrest Stephan, Adam Weiser, Omar Aweidah, Eric Keiron Davis, Gaige Hallman, Mark Abent, Randy Vasquez, Dave Haddock and Ben Lesnick all stepped up to step in for the Chairman this month. We are extremely grateful each and every week for the time and effort our developers put in stepping away from their work to communicate with the community. We quite simply going not do it without them.\n\nAround the Verse continues to diversify it\u2019s offering as we approach the 100th episode on June 30th. We explored the Nexus, Tamsa, and Min systems in Loremaker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy. We interviewed folks like artist Cheyne Hessler and the makers of Voice Attack and HCS Voice Packs. We ventured into the Wonderful World of Star Citizen to highlight the tremendous work fan-organization The Imperial News Network does week in and week out. With Ship Shape, we explored the whitebox design of both the Drake Herald and the Drake Caterpillar. And we sat down with designer Matt Sherman and Concept Artist Jim Martin to for an unprecedented exploration of the Drake Buccaneer concept ship. Things certainly came up Drake in Around the Verse this month.\n\nReverse the Verse, our weekly informal livestream with the fans survived the absence of Ben and Alexis for two weeks (if only barely) and the May Subscribers Edition saw questions posed to our Design and Tech Art members for a full hour.\n\n\nYou Guys\nAs another month of development passes, so does another month of stories, content videos, and community accomplishments. This is a section we wanted to include to highlight all of the content creators, streamers, and more! For short, YOU!\n\nFirst and foremost: PTU Testers. We want to take a moment to express our appreciation for all of our PTU testers who were patient and eager enough to write thousands of bugs and feedback posts over the course of May! As many of you know, this was our first time utilizing the focus-test group titled \u201cEvocati\u201d, and it was a smashing success! We look forward to collaborating together on future patches\/content! Thank you so much!\n\nTwerk17 continued his early morning streams that not only entertained us, but helped us greatly! The Design and QA team in the UK studio have utilized Twerk17\u2019s early morning schedule to watch\/analyze game-play and bugs! Thanks for being awesome Twerk!\n\nWhile not Star Citizen related, a couple of different families acquired miniature co-pilots! Congratulations to STLYoungblood\u2019s family and NighthawkZale\u2019s family for both adding a +1 to the citizen count!\n\nStreamer\/entertainer\/developer Geekdomo underwent a successful surgery, and we are all very happy to hear he is doing well!\n\nWe could easily write enough to make this section alone longer than the entirety of the monthly report. This community has really grown into something meaningful. We are all connected to each other not just as backers of the same game, but as dreamers of the same universe. Some may be pirates, while others militant UEE soldiers, but we share one goal in common: stepping outside the box of conformity and traditional game publication in order to try and bring a living, breathing universe that we have always wanted to play to life. This community has become a safe-haven for us sci-fi geeks and we love it. We want to give a huge thank you to everyone who has shown their support and patience for the team and this project as we continue progress on making the best damn space sim ever! We sincerely could not do it without you!\n\nLooking Ahead\nBuilding Star Citizen is hard work, but it\u2019s the best job in the world. Every day we work is one day closer to our dream: the massive persistent universe of Star Citizen and an unparalleled single player cinematic experience in Squadron 42. We know there will always be setbacks, difficulties, challenges we didn\u2019t predict\u2026 but we\u2019re privileged to fight this battle alongside an incredible development team and an amazing community.\n\nOur next release will be Star Citizen Alpha 2.4, which is being tested as we speak. Alpha 2.4 represents another important step towards our goal, with the introduction of persistence and the first part of the in-game economy. We\u2019re very excited to have players earn credits in the game world instead of buying them through Voyager Direct, which has been a goal for a long time. We\u2019ve already seen what players are doing with the Starfarer, our largest ship launched to date, on the test servers and we can\u2019t wait to see what happens when everybody can start boarding.\n\nWe are also heading into \u2018convention season,\u2019 with appearances planned at Gamescom, DragonCon and our own CitizenCon. We\u2019ll be sharing more details about these events shortly and how you can interact with the team both in person and remote. There\u2019s a lot we want to talk about and then even more we want to get into your hands. We\u2019ll keep smashing bugs, creating worlds and telling stories\u2026 and we\u2019re happy to have you along for the ride!\n\nWe\u2019ll see you in the \u2018Verse."},"links_count":0,"comment_count":98,"created_at":"2016-06-03T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"9 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-13 22:51:15","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":15363,"next_id":15365}}