{"data":{"id":15704,"title":"Monthly Studio Report: January 2017","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/15704-Monthly-Studio-Report-January-2017","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/15704","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/15704","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly 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Citizens!\n\nWelcome to 2017 (or should we say 2947?) Since our last report, we\u2019ve published a major patch (Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 with Star Marine) and have continued to make great progress towards our next updates. The launch of Star Marine was a major milestone for Star Citizen, and thanks to our dedicated community we have plenty of feedback on the FPS updates to work from. Before we move on to 2.6.1 (which is now available for testing on the PTU!) and beyond, however, let\u2019s take a look back at the month that was January 2017 in Star Citizen\u2019s development.\n\nCloud Imperium Los Angeles\nEngineering\n\nA new year marked by new challenges, new ideas and a whole lot of progress. We have been hard at work on our modular character customization screen, a system built on the item framework which will let players equip their characters however they choose. In addition, the LA Engineering team spent January making real progress towards the core systems that will allow us to have solar system sized maps and all the complicated components that come with it. To enable this, we had to reimagine entities including fundamental components such as lights, continue work on an intelligent radar system, and revisit how we build level hierarchies. It\u2019s still some ways off, but we can see the principles in practice. January also saw the first technical application of node-based controller managers \u2013 this system opens the door to improved networking of item components and is the first real step towards multi-crew ship gameplay. Not flashy enough? How about explosions! We added a new damage controller that will bring things like explosive props and destroyable objects to the Item System framework soon.\n\n\nTech Design\nThis month our Tech Designers have been hard at work on new ships, Item 2.0 support, and prototyping. As for ships, the Buccaneer and Cutlass Black have hit the greybox phase. The Aurora update is going smoothly and really looking good. Calix prototyped how players could interact with the world and items, while Kirk did some work with our studios across the pond on general ship balance, in-game pricing, and underlining systems.\nArt\nThe LA Ship Art team of Elwin Bachiller, Daniel Kamentsky and Byungjin Hyun dove right into the Drake Buccaneer (which has wrapped up in Greybox Art and moved onto Final Art) as well as a big update to the RSI Aurora. On the Concept Art side, in addition to supporting the Drake Buccaneer, Justin Wentz has been very busy creating concept art for a new Anvil ship.\n\nThis month, the Character Art team created new armor for the Persistent Universe. Most notably, the Explorer Suit, which will be used for (you guessed it!) exploring our vast universe! Another new addition is the Heavy Marine armor, which will be available soon in Star Marine. We\u2019ve also continued working on creating more clothes for our shops and building outfits for new NPCs that will soon be seen on our various planets.\n\n\nTech Content\nThe Technical Content Team consists of two teams: Technical Art and Technical Animation. Technical Content is a global team with staff in all studios performing various roles.\n\nSean Tracy has spent the last month roadmapping for the rest of the year, working with 3lateral and other outsourcers on some R+D projects that will be revealed soon, as well as training and supporting the Technical Art and Technical Animation teams.\n\nOn the Technical Art front, Atri Dave has been working with our FPS weapon team to optimize weapons, ensure grips are universal (to males and females) as well as doing some R+D with our animation programmers for a more advanced version of foot anchoring that adapts leg IK and ground alignment based on whether characters are on their heels or on the balls of their feet. Robert Dickerson has been building up a Substance Painter pipeline for the various content teams. Alex Remotti recently joined the team and within his first couple weeks has already made an enormous impact by taking ownership over the procedurally generated environments for planets, space stations and other objects in the universe. He\u2019s already integrated the initial system into the planet editor which allows us to spawn outposts\/buildings using the splatter maps from the ecosystems. Matthew Intrieri and Patrick Salerno have been making important updates to systems and art for the Super Hornet, Mustang and many other ships, as well as planning out the rest of the year in terms of \u201cpaying off\u201d some tech debt that\u2019s accrued on some of the older ships. Forrest Stephan has been working on S42 features as well as reviewing props and weapons for performance optimizations.\n\nOn the Technical Animation side, it\u2019s been no less busy! Matthias Jaeger has been working on improving and implementing tools improvements for animators. These include space switching (IK\/FK switching tools), prop rigging, health tests, bone influence reduction tools, and more. Rob Howes, the lead technical animator in the department, has been busy supporting cinematics and animation whilst leading the technical animation team. He\u2019s prepared a roadmap for the rest of the year as well as doing R+D on distributed batching solutions for animation builds. Further he\u2019s continued to iterate with animation on some issues surrounding using a separate female skeleton. Vineet Chander has done massive batches of updates to our facial and head assets, of which there are over 120! Sometimes relatively minor issues are discovered, for example the eyelids for most faces were a bit \u201csleepy\u201d looking and he\u2019s made changes so that this is longer the case. Adam Sirrelle has developed some important tools including automated LOD creation of the facial assets. Additionally, Adam has created an extra tool for the developers that allow them to much more easily manage the creation of DBA\u2019s (Database of Animations) which are massively optimized containers for animation data. John Riggs is working on updates to the female rig, updates to the hands for better gripping of weapons, and rolling out some skinning tools for the rest of the team. Gaige Hallman has done the lion\u2019s share of work when it comes to zoning and ensuring the modularity of the characters and the skinning that goes with that, while also working on zone culling and difficult aspect of modularity that occur around the neck and head of characters. Mark McCall is Tech Content\u2019s resident bugsmashing ninja. While sometimes spending weeks fixing bug after bug, Mark still manages to enact major changes, such as unifying the data structure for eyes and teeth on characters as well as creating tools surrounding hair\/scalp rigging. Last but not least, Erik Link has implemented facial idles on the pilots for 2.6.1 and chases up animators and content creators when there is asset build errors. He\u2019s been instrumental in getting our asset build errors down to 0 for 2.6.0\n\n\nNarrative\nThe Narrative team has been continuing to meet with designers at the various studios to chip away at narrative needs for 3.0, like fleshing out the mission stories we\u2019ll be able to generate for players and looking at the various storytelling possibilities for the various environments. We\u2019ve also embarked on a significant task of starting to build a database of text needs for Squadron 42 which will outline any terminals, Galactapedia entries, etc. that need to be in-game. There have been a handful of documents written up for additional set dressing for the levels of Star Marine; fun little ways to make Echo 11 more period-accurate or OP Station Demien reflective of the massacre that the level is attempting to recreate. Those conversations with art and design have led to the creation of a multi-page document on Snacks!\n\nWe\u2019ve also been having weekly discussions with Britton, our esteemed xenolinguist, who\u2019s continuing to build out the Xi\u2019an language. These conversations have led to some deeper dives into the Xi\u2019an society, so hopefully we\u2019ll be able to reveal some of that to you soon.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nLA QA spent most of the month aiding the LA Engineering and Tech Content teams conducting sweeps on the new frontend, ship self-destruction, damage states, missile functionality and recent changes to the character loadouts, as well as early iterations of Item 2.0. In addition, the team aided the Community team in capturing in-game footage for a number of segments, and also set up a Let\u2019s Talk About thread to gather feedback on the Mustang series of ships.\n\nCloud Imperium Austin Design\n\nThe majority of the ATX Design Team\u2019s time the past couple months has been spent defining details for PU \u201cShop Archetypes\u201d (some examples include Clothing Shop, Bar, Security Kiosk, Hospital, etc.) and creating design documents outlining details that are specific to each archetype. Each type of shop will have universal requirements that will apply across every shop of a specific type and this will help us save time in the long run when we then drill down into specific shop locations for upcoming landing zones and space stations. For example, every clothing shop is going to have clothing racks, mannequins, and stands to showcase the shop inventory and each display needs to follow a specific metric.\n\nWe\u2019ve also been busy building the pillars of what will become our first iteration of the PU Economy by establishing various details concerning in-game commodity types, trade routes within the Stanton System, and white\/black markets.\n\nLastly, we got final approval on the GDD for the \u201cShopping Kiosk\u201d feature and have broken down high level design requirements for UI Team and Game Code Team. This has been a long-gestating feature so we\u2019re happy to take it into the next stage of development.\n\n\nArt\nLighting Artist Emre Switzer wrapped up his work on lighting the Star Marine maps for 2.6.0 release and has now turned his attention to supporting Squadron 42 in lighting some of their environments.\n\nChris Smith and Josh Coons continue to make progress on their respective ships. Josh is in full swing on the Greybox Phase for the new Cutlass Black. Chris finished up his updates on the Super Hornet and has now turned his attention to a fantastic new vehicle that we\u2019re super excited to be working on.\n\n\nAnimation\nBryan Brewer and the PU Animation Team continue to make progress on Usable Interaction Animations to support Squadron 42. Most recently we\u2019ve gotten Pushups, Stretches, Leaning on a Table (various angles), and female versions of all the work zone animations complete. We\u2019ve also done a polish pass over some of the Usables to make them acceptable for use by the player in first-person.\n\nJay Brushwood and the Ship Animation Team have completed their work on the ship enter\/exit combat speed animations. They are currently in review with Animation Director Steve Bender and we\u2019re awaiting final sign off. While we wait, we have turned our attention to implementing animations on upcoming ships such as the Prospector and the Buccaneer.\n\n\nBackend Services\nThe Backend Team has been hard at work on a massive project to refactor our entire backend infrastructure to a new architecture we\u2019re calling Diffusion. Diffusion will be a truly cloud-oriented service architecture that will help improve high scalability and availability for our services. It will be powered by a top level \u201ccoordination\u201d layer written in a proprietary language developed by our Lead Server Engineer, Jason Ely.\n\nIn addition to developing Diffusion, the Backend Team has been supporting UI Team in implementing the new in-game Leaderboards.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nIn January, QA began immediately fielding test requests from development which included network message queue, serialized variables, particle preloading, megamap testing and AI balance tests. QA also very much focused on reporting issues with the Game-Dev stream to ensure it is stable so that Squadron 42 and 3.0 development may continue unabated. Some other things on QA\u2019s plate for January were training new specialists, updating internal documentation, QA tools development and new hire interviews.\n\n\nPlayer Relations\nJanuary wrapped up a very busy period for the Player Relations team. We worked over the holiday period to make sure that we kept up with our backers\u2019 support urgent requests, and used much of the month to catch up on the rest. To put in perspective, we were not caught up until April of last year from the busy holiday period\u2026 this year we\u2019ve accomplished that in January!\n\nPart of this is due to bridging our US and UK teams together, which will ultimately result in faster response times and more visibility to players. A big part of this involves Spectrum, which we will be excited to roll out to you on the main site soon. We really think you will love the entire rework of our forums and chat systems, and we think you will really appreciate our plans for building a better presence with you in chat and on the forums.\n\n\nIT\/Operations\nIt\u2019s the beginning of the year so IT gets busy with a great deal of internal housekeeping chores like inventories, license renewals, and general cleanup and organizational tasks. One of our larger projects has been focused on expanding the bandwidth between offices to keep up with our increasing daily file transfer and build replication load. We\u2019re also working closely with the DevOps team to supply hardware and infrastructure to support the growth of the build system as well as the continued work on the patch reduction project.\n\n\nLiveOps\/DevOps\nThe team has been working hard on multi-region support, the bulk of our efforts going toward the network and server side of our services. We are very happy to report that this work will pay dividends very soon in game and there will be more detailed information on this soon as well. We\u2019ve also been working on our internal tools including the build system, all of which share the same goals of performance and stability improvements while keeping costs down.\n\nFoundry 42 UK\nGraphics\n\nThe Graphics Team has been predominantly focusing on various lighting improvements such as shadow quality and performance within interiors. The GPU cube-map capturing is almost complete and we\u2019re starting to write systems that maximize this tech so we can achieve truly dynamic lighting on planets and space stations. Considering how so much of our concept art makes heavy use of rectangular lights, we\u2019ve started work on area lights. While this may sound simple, area lights are actually an active area of research for many game studios and are incredibly difficult to get right (both in terms of looks and performance). Lastly, we\u2019re in the early stages of planning for a new and vastly more efficient particle system that eventually will replace the current one.\n\n\nProgramming\nIn the ongoing release work, we\u2019ve been getting the leaderboards in and the new \u201cMega Map\u201d implemented. Under the hood on the network side will be the proper networked serialised variables and the message queue rewrite. Other general work includes the FPS actor code refactor to make it more reliable and robust, the mission system, item pickup and put down improvements, and 3D minimap, amongst other things.\n\n\nVFX\nOver this past month, we\u2019ve been doing some internal data clean-up using the Asset Manager, which culls and consolidates particle\/material texture libraries, working on improving particle streaming to allow for better dynamic loading (basically freeing up memory resources) and pipeline documentation updates. There have also been high level key feature planning breakdowns of key features like Atmospheric Flight Model Effects (AFFX) such as engine trails, contrails, entry\/exit and Screen-Based Area-of-Interest which will trigger screen-based effects based on camera speed and\/or proximity to a specified area. Plus, we\u2019ve been experimenting with new assets to blow stuff up.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nThe QA team has hardly let up this New Year. We\u2019ve been continuing on Squadron 42 testing, extensively testing weapon balance changes and Star Marine bug fixes. We launched an investigation into the prevalent lag issue during Last Stand battles on Echo 11 and held a feedback session about gamepad controls. Most exciting though has been the first steps into the new \u201cMega Map.\u201d\n\nAs always big thanks to all the backers, especially the Evocati and those who frequent the PTU. Your help is always invaluable and very much appreciated!\n\n\nArt\nWe kicked off the new year by putting some new to be announced ships into concept and we are about to wrap up on a new Anvil design.\n\nIn other ship news, the Reclaimer is already deep into production with dedicated teams focusing on the exterior and interior. On the outside, the exterior mesh has gone through a cleanup pass and work has started on shaders. External parts such as thrusters are also close to complete. On the interior, a modular kit has been assembled for the habitation areas and the first room is nearing completion.\n\nThe Prospector team has been polishing the main LOD geometry for both the interior and exterior while cleaning up various sections to pass along to the other teams, so they can begin making it flight ready.\n\nWork\u2019s also moving forward on the MISC Razor. The artists have been adapting the concept mesh to work within the constraints set by animation which has resulted in a much sleeker more technical design whilst trying to maintain the key design elements of the original concept- the aggressive \u2018Formula 1\u2019 feel.\n\nOnto some big news, the team\u2019s been doing a technical and sanity pass over the S42 interior sections. Tackling collision and LODs have been the primary focus to make sure it\u2019s in a workable state for the designers. During this review, we\u2019re going over various elements: cleaning up and polishing pieces, refining and adding further details that we felt was lacking, and making changes to meshes that needed it. We also spent some time going over the materials, making adjustments and improvements where possible and adding blends to the primary materials of the ship.\n\nOur props team continued working on the medium ship components and dressing sets such as tools, medical props and some assets needed for the ship interiors for S42.\n\nDestructible props were introduced in 2.6.0 which meant we needed to create destroyed versions of a chunk of assets. This was the first iteration so was kept to the more obvious assets. Moving forward, destruction will be seen on a much larger scale and include a wider variety of prop types.\n\nFor our environments, we left some of the team polishing the 2.6.0 levels in preparation for the 2.6.1 release. This included adding more narrative assets that add a bit more history and character to the levels.\n\nOn the SQ42 front, the Shubin base is having a major push visually at the moment, since it\u2019s a massive part of the story, we\u2019re making sure it\u2019s the hero it deserves to be.\n\nWe are also allocating more resource to work on the growing universe. Soon we\u2019ll have four concept artists working out moons, nebulas and space stations, no small task! Work has begun on the first three surface outposts. These modular asset sets can be configured in multiple ways to give variation to the smaller settlements that will be scattered across the planet surfaces.\n\nWe\u2019re looking at improving our planet\u2019s material systems to give a better overall read all the way from space down to a meter-scale surface area. We\u2019re doing a lot of R&D into how we dynamically and realistically scatter assets (rocks, vegetation etc.) onto the surface of a planet in a way that retains our visual fidelity and realism goals.\n\nConversely, we are spending some R&D time into what we want to achieve visually from space! Despite being composed of nothing, it\u2019s very surprising how much there is to test and discuss with how we want the void between stars to feel and change as the player makes his way around a system.\n\n\nAudio\nLike many of the departments, the Audio used the New Year as an opportunity to go back and do some housecleaning. We reviewed all the ships to make sure that the audio for the older ships are up to the standard of the newer ships, cleaned up some bug fixes\/polish for the upcoming 2.6.1 release and continued to support the community team and work on promotional materials.\n\nOn a technical front, we\u2019ve also continued to revise and improve our dialogue pipeline and audio propagation system. A first pass at a Mix System was completed and we\u2019re thrilled to announce that S42 will have a full music logic set in place and we\u2019ve continued working on building ambience for some of the locations for the single player. There have been multiple improvements implemented in Star Marine from weapon sounds to dialogue which you will be able to hear soon.\n\n\nUI\nThis month, the UI team has been primarily focused on improving and expanding the new front-end that was released in 2.6 with in-game leaderboards and a new pause menu, as well as performing various bug fixes.\n\nWe have also begun planning and scheduling for large scale UI features that we\u2019d like to include in upcoming releases. For instance, we have been working closely with design in order to define the user-experience for purchasing & selling through the kiosk interfaces.\n\n\nAnimation\nThe animation team has expanded this month. We\u2019re very excited to welcome two new additions to the team and are ready to drop them in the deep end. We\u2019ve gotten some fantastic feedback on 2.6 and have set to bug fixing and improving animations for the next patch. We\u2019ve been improving fps assets across the board and making grenade throws more responsive.\n\nIn other ongoing tasks, we\u2019ve made improvements on weapon animations, specifically reload animations and have begun to previz and iterate on feedback for new weapons coming down the pipeline. We\u2019ve also been making progress on improving prone locomotion assets and providing assistance to the ATX PU team to get female mocap data implemented to the usable animations for Subsumption.\n\n\nDesign\nThe S42 Design team have been preparing for the incoming new Mission System that will replace large elements of the levels that had previously been implemented with Flowgraph. It will be a far more robust system for us that will limit any possible inconsistencies with designer setup. Also, as the Object Container Streaming System progresses, we are making sure that we maximise performance by splitting up the other chapters in the game into logical object containers.\n\nThe Live team have been very busy with bug fixes and implementing a scoring rebalance for Arena Commander and Star Marine. There have also been some AI improvements for Space Flight that have been implemented and continued work on detailing the Stanton map.\n\nThe Tech team are still very busy moving ships functionality into the new Item 2.0 system in preparation for a whole host of new gameplay opportunities.\n\nThe Systems Designers have been working on adding a lot more detail to the framework of the multi-crew Seat Actions in preparation for meeting with Chris in early Feb.\n\nFoundry 42 DE\nAI\n\nFor AI, 2017 started with a one-week summit in the Los Angeles studio: we went through several topics that will be important for the improvements we want to do during the new year.\n\nIn the past few weeks, we\u2019ve been getting the core functionalities of Subsumption into the Subsumption Mission System. The goal is to give designers the tools to create a larger variety of missions as quickly as possible. To achieve that, we have been implementing a way to reuse a piece of logic through the creation of \u201cfunctions.\u201d Functions can either have a \u201cglobal\u201d or \u201clocal\u201d (to one activity or one mission) scope and they dynamically generate a task that can be used as a regular Subsumption task.\n\nGoing through the Crusader missions and rebuilding them in this new tool allowed us to identify and reorganize the functionalities that are currently required by designers to create their own logic. Just to give you some idea of the work done, here\u2019s a description of some of the functionalities we recently worked on:\n\nAdded a task to enable\/disable markers in the environment for the mission owner\n\nAbility to spawn dynamic Action Areas in the environment and react to the events they generate\n\nSupport for the InteractiveObjects to correctly handle the callbacks sent to the mission system\n\nAdded support for tracking dynamic spawning of the entity and the ownership of the requests. This will allow us to allow entities to despawn only other entities they owned. Also it makes much easier for a mission to clean up the resources created.\n\nWe improved the debug draw functionalities of Subsumption and the mission system and also added network support for the mission log (This is a sort of personal storage for the logs of each mission)\n\nWe created a SimpleAudioComponent that allows the mission system to communicate directly with the mission owner\u2019s client\n\nWe added a functionality to allow the spawning system to filter and limit the spawning of entities to specified Action Areas\n\nWe added the basic support to spawn Subsumption Platform\/Layers (We will give you more details about this in the upcoming weeks)\n\nFor the character AI, we have continued the work for finalizing the changes in the Cover System and the Posture Manager to allow those systems data to be correctly exported inside Object Containers and used at runtime in non z-up environment. We\u2019ve also been prototyping AI Characters reacting to players bumping into them by making sure that the movement code understands when progress over the movement cannot be achieved due to the player interrupting the character movement. We also continued our refactoring of the spaceships flight control, we are moving towards removing some layers of complexity and make more direct use of the IFCS from the AI perspective. This will allow us to benefit from any improvements made for the player in a much more straightforward way.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nDE QA like to refer to the month of January as the \u201ccatch-up\u201d month and used this time to tackle various test requests that required additional information as well as clearing out any Editor regression from Game-Dev that at the time was of a lower priority than regression in 2.6. We also spent a majority of January revamping our existing Editor checklists and documentation, as well as providing additional Editor training for testers in our UK office.\n\nAdditionally, we reviewed Star Marine feedback from our community and acted upon this feedback with test cases to provide additional information for our design team. The QA team also decided to review our existing sanity checks with Production and decide which were still useful to the team and which checks could be removed completely. We also used this opportunity to go over new bug tracking procedures with Production, so that we were all on the same page regarding labels that are used in our daily QA filters. Ivo Herzeg also kept us busy with changes made to the 1st person camera system, in which we were required to test all game modes. DE QA closed out the month with testing for Chris Bolte in order to track down a ZoneSystem crash that was plaguing our community in the latest 2.6 live release. We managed to finally reproduce this issue with 9 testers total (2 from DE and 7 from UK), which allowed Chris to narrow it down to being a logic error. Additional debugging was added to our Game-Dev branch and we will be attempting another playtest to reproduce this issue on Game-Dev, so that it can be finally fixed once and for all.\n\n\nCinematics\nPart of the Cinematics team is currently in a sprint to push towards a \u201cfinal\u201d look and feel for the conversation system that is used for talks between the player and NPCs (which the S42 campaign features a lot of).\n\nThis includes topics like:\n\nUI text placement and animation for dialogue choices\n\nSolving issues of: If, how and when to slow a player down running towards an NPC.\n\nHow to make \u201cgentle\u201d collisions between physics capsules when the player violates personal space by getting too close.\n\nHow to adjust recorded performances and manipulate the actor\u2019s Look or even Body pose to match for a changing player position. (we call that performance transformation)\n\nDynamic camera effects that kick in when the conversation is initialized both in a change of FOV and Depth of Field blur increasing.\n\nWe want our conversations to feel \u201cfilmic\u201d while still allowing the player freedom. Invoking a \u201ccinematic\u201d feel first and foremost means changing the lens to values that are more akin to how a film camera would depict a character. The engines FOV traditionally is calculated with a vertical FOV value. The current in-game on-foot FOV is at 55 which is equivalent to an extreme wide angle lens of approximately ~13mm (using 35mm film equivalent ARRI master prime lenses as a comparison). That kind of lens is bordering on fisheye lens territory. If the player gets close to a character using this kind of FOV it distorts faces, so what we are doing is gradually changing the FOV over a certain time down to 30 which is equivalent to a ~25mm wide angle portrait lens. We are finding this is a nice compromise of the faces revealing all of the awesome scanned detail by appearing big on screen while still allowing for a sense of orientation in regards to the background (if player decides to move during a conversation).\n\n\nEngine\nWork has started on our internal Solar system editor (SolEd), with a \u201ctop\/down\u201d universe view. We found that a custom editor extension became necessary due the massive scale of our solar system. It\u2019s now possible to drag and drop Object Containers containing planets, space station etc., and see in real-time planets and objects moving while zooming all the way from a galaxy view down to grains of dirt on a planet. Ongoing work continues on procedural objects distribution on planets, scattering of large rocks on moon\u2019s surfaces, initial passes of objects and vegetation blending with the planet terrain surface, improvements on particles distribution and vegetation \/ wind on a planetary scale. Initial passes on spawning Object Containers like small outposts on the planet surface, and initial work on adapting them to the environment with adjusting their parts to the terrain and blending the colors to make them more visually integrated like they were actually placed by Humans in the environment wrapped this month. And additional improvements have been added for large scale planet rendering like glossy surfaces and more artists controlled parameters.\n\nThere also has been effort towards reintroducing static code analysis as a mandatory part of the TryBuild system, Zone system fixes \/ optimizations, ongoing work on the new pak system for the patcher updates, and fixes and support for 2.6.1.\n\n\nTech Art\nThe Technical artists in Frankfurt have been busy supporting FPS features and weapons for 2.6. They improved the weapon IK grip setup, now almost all weapons are using the runtime IK grip which helps us to change left hand poses per weapon while keeping base animation the same. They also created new cVars for previsualizing and testing new weapons in the engine with all their functionality. On the Engine side, we are participating in R&D efforts to improve foot planting in game and we\u2019ve already started seeing good results.\n\n\nDesign\nThe Level Design team in Frankfurt is prototyping the modularity systems for Satellites, Surface Outposts and Space Station Interiors which is almost complete. Currently, the Environment Art team is providing us with greybox versions of the components that we will use to assemble the modular locations.\n\nWith our locations, the main goal is always to use them to complement upcoming systems, provide a base for future game play, as well as add to the feeling of a living, functional and realistic universe. This doesn\u2019t always mean that the gameplay related to a location will be available when we release the station template, rather we try to ensure that once said system\/gameplay becomes available we already have the location required. For this reason (and as seen on previous ATVs) we are continuing our work on the Truck Stop, Refinery and Cargo Station, the first design phase of these is complete and they have now been handed over to the Environment Art team.\n\nThe System Design guys have been refactoring our usable system to allow both AI and players to make use of the same objects at the same time (such as AI and player sitting at the same table, interacting with each other). We\u2019re also adding support for multiple actions to be performed while inside a usable and smoothly transitioning between these actions (character sitting at a table can be eating, talking, scratching his nose, sleeping with his head on the table etc.)\n\nThe Oxygen, Breathing & Stamina systems have started being implemented and soon we will have players begin to carry their own oxygen supplies or risk turning blue in the face. The system should handle everything from how the oxygen tank delivers breathable air to the helmet, to how the player breathes said air and how his body converts that into actual usable stamina. At the same time, all actions are being converted to consume this stamina, so you will want to keep your character supplied with oxygen if you want them to be capable of performing various actions.\n\nLanding and Take-off systems are also going into implementation mode as we are unifying Squadron 42 and PU mechanics. The system should easily handle everything from the more basic taking off in the PU to the fully cinematic experiences needed in S42. Basically we\u2019re implementing an air traffic control system that allows players to queue for landing permissions and makes sure that people don\u2019t block landing sites for everyone else.\n\nSmall additions were also made to the Mercenary and Bounty Hunter career designs and the systems needed for these. Customs are also receiving some design love as we are start to gate what the player can bring in legally and how smuggling things in high security areas works.\n\n\nVFX\nThe Frankfurt VFX team has been continuing to work with the programming team on the tools required to spawn various particles across the planets. One of the more recent additions has been the implementation of planetary wind. Due to the spherical nature of the planets, the wind had to be completely rewritten to work correctly across the surface of a planet. This will help to make the environments feel more alive, from blowing around smoke and dust to rustling the leaves on the vegetation.\n\n\nEnvironmental Art\nThe environment team here in Frankfurt has grown again with two new people joining the team this month. With the increased amount of environment artists, we\u2019re able to put even more effort into our procedural planet tech. We\u2019ve been recently building great looking assets for individual moons, as well as refining our procedural tech and tools for moons, full planets, and full systems. One key element of the planetary tech that we\u2019ve been focusing on is the procedural scattering system, which will allow us to procedurally scatter rocks, plants, trees and other elements across planets based on artist defined rules. While the tech is still in development, the first automated results are already promising and are improving every day.\n\nTurbulent\n\nSpectrum Alpha\nWe are working hard towards Spectrum\u2019s initial public alpha release alongside SC 2.6.1. We can\u2019t wait for you guys to get your hands on it with your Orgs. In its first incarnation, expect the web version of public and private chat, forums, search functionality as well as member presence and a decent mobile experience.\n\nThe Evocati and volunteer testers have been invaluable in providing initial feedback and bug reports (yeah, yeah we have those too!) on the PTU since December. Our weekly build process and direct contact with users have really helped us focus on the features and bug fixes that matter the most to those who use the tools. Once it is released to live, we will be continuously working to build out and improve Spectrum with your feedback.\n\nAfter the live release and stabilization phase, we plan on adding more community customization features and create dedicated mobile applications so Spectrum can follow you everywhere you go.\n\nWe will share more details about our roadmap once we get this first major release out of the way!\n\n\nSales\nComing off the holiday break, two promo competitions were introduced, a revamped Vanduul Swarm and the all new Pirate Swarm. These modes tested players\u2019 skills to the limit and if they were able to complete all waves of the challenge, they were awarded an aggressor badge to display their accomplishment. For a limited time, these successful pilots were also given the ability to purchase the Vanduul Glaive upon completing Vanduul Swarm and the new Pirate Caterpillar upon completing the Pirate Swarm.\n\nTo close out the month, the sleek Dragonfly Posters and the comfortable Squadron 42 Hoodies were put back on the merchandise store, but get them soon before they are gone!\n\nCommunity\n\n\nBroadcasts\nJanuary saw a number of changes to our community content. Around the Verse continues to be refined as we explore new ways to showcase progress without monopolizing too much of our developer\u2019s time. Our January Subscriber\u2019s Town Hall featured Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec and Todd Papy. It was a rare opportunity to have all these important leads sitting and chatting in the same place. We also launched two new shows. Star Citizen Happy Hour is a way to involve fan broadcasters and CIG developers in a gameplay session and casual hangout with the community. Then there\u2019s our other new show focused on YOU. Citizens of the Stars highlights the amazing contributions you make to the Star Citizen experience. It also features \u2018Quantum Questions,\u2019 in which CIG developers answer your questions\u2026 as many as they can in two minutes! If there\u2019s one constant in our broadcast output, it\u2019s change. We\u2019ll continue to iterate throughout the rest of 2017 and beyond in an effort to bring you the best and most relevant content possible.\n\n\nEvents\nCommunity Managers Jared Huckaby and Tyler Witkin went to PAX South and attended the local Bar Citizen event in San Antonio. Opportunities to hang out and meet the backers are one of the best parts of our job, and the folks who turned out for this event were a stellar group, as usual. Remember that Bar Citizen events are 100% fan organized. You can see if there\u2019s one in your area and maybe even find help planning one at the fan website barcitizen.sc.\n\n\nThis Week in Star Citizen\nThe old Community Manager\u2019s Log and Schedule has evolved into a new, weekly front page post called This Week in Star Citizen. The post highlights what\u2019s happening each week, and provides a look at some of the content you may have missed from the Star Citizen community.\n\nFinally, testing continues on Spectrum, the upcoming replacement to our current forum and chat systems. You can join the testing now at ptu.cloudimperiumgames.com\/spectrum with new builds going out each week. We\u2019re excited to roll out the first official iteration of Spectrum in the near future. We\u2019ll continue to add intended features and iterate on it based on your feedback throughout the remainder of the year.","de_DE":"Gr\u00fc\u00dfe B\u00fcrger!\n\nWillkommen im Jahr 2017 (oder sollten wir sagen 2947?) Seit unserem letzten Bericht haben wir einen Major Patch ver\u00f6ffentlicht (Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 mit Star Marine) und haben weiterhin gro\u00dfe Fortschritte bei unseren n\u00e4chsten Updates gemacht. Die Einf\u00fchrung von Star Marine war ein wichtiger Meilenstein f\u00fcr Star Citizen, und dank unserer engagierten Community haben wir viel Feedback zu den FPS-Updates, von denen aus wir arbeiten k\u00f6nnen. Bevor wir zu 2.6.1 (das jetzt zum Testen auf der PTU verf\u00fcgbar ist!) und dar\u00fcber hinaus \u00fcbergehen, werfen wir jedoch einen Blick zur\u00fcck auf den Monat Januar 2017 in der Entwicklung von Star Citizen.\n\nCloud Imperium Los Angeles\nIngenieurwesen\n\nEin neues Jahr, das von neuen Herausforderungen, neuen Ideen und einer Menge Fortschritt gepr\u00e4gt ist. Wir haben hart an unserem modularen Charakteranpassungsbildschirm gearbeitet, einem System, das auf dem Item-Framework basiert, das es Spielern erm\u00f6glicht, ihre Charaktere nach Belieben auszustatten. Dar\u00fcber hinaus hat das LA Engineering Team im Januar echte Fortschritte in Richtung der Kernsysteme gemacht, die es uns erm\u00f6glichen werden, Karten in der Gr\u00f6\u00dfe eines Sonnensystems und all die damit verbundenen komplizierten Komponenten zu erhalten. Um dies zu erm\u00f6glichen, mussten wir uns Entit\u00e4ten mit grundlegenden Komponenten wie Leuchten neu vorstellen, die Arbeit an einem intelligenten Radarsystem fortsetzen und erneut untersuchen, wie wir Ebenenhierarchien aufbauen. Es ist noch ein weiter Weg, aber wir k\u00f6nnen die Prinzipien in der Praxis sehen. Im Januar gab es auch die erste technische Anwendung von knotenbasierten Controllermanagern - dieses System \u00f6ffnet die T\u00fcr zu einer verbesserten Vernetzung der Item-Komponenten und ist der erste echte Schritt in Richtung Multi-Crew-Schiff-Gameplay. Nicht auff\u00e4llig genug? Wie w\u00e4re es mit Explosionen! Wir haben einen neuen Schadenscontroller hinzugef\u00fcgt, der Dinge wie explosive Requisiten und zerst\u00f6rbare Objekte in K\u00fcrze in das Item System Framework einbinden wird.\n\n\nTechnisches Design\nDiesen Monat haben unsere Tech Designer hart an neuen Schiffen, der Unterst\u00fctzung von Item 2.0 und dem Prototyping gearbeitet. Was Schiffe betrifft, so haben der Freibeuter und das Entermesser Schwarz die Greybox-Phase erreicht. Das Aurora-Update l\u00e4uft reibungslos und sieht wirklich gut aus. Calix prototypisierte, wie Spieler mit der Welt und den Gegenst\u00e4nden interagieren konnten, w\u00e4hrend Kirk einige Arbeiten mit unseren Studios auf der anderen Seite des Teiches an der allgemeinen Schiffsbilanz, den Preisen im Spiel und den Unterstreichungssystemen durchf\u00fchrte.\n\n\n\nKunst\nDas LA Ship Art Team von Elwin Bachiller, Daniel Kamentsky und Byungjin Hyun taucht direkt in den Drake Buccaneer (der sich in Greybox Art verpackt hat und auf Final Art umgestiegen ist) sowie ein gro\u00dfes Update der RSI Aurora. Auf der Seite der Konzeptkunst war Justin Wentz neben der Unterst\u00fctzung des Drake Buccaneer sehr besch\u00e4ftigt mit der Erstellung von Konzeptkunst f\u00fcr ein neues Amboss-Schiff.\n\nDiesen Monat hat das Character Art Team eine neue R\u00fcstung f\u00fcr das Persistente Universum entwickelt. Vor allem der Entdeckeranzug, mit dem wir (Sie haben es erraten!) unser riesiges Universum erkunden werden! Eine weitere Neuerung ist die Heavy Marine R\u00fcstung, die bald in Star Marine erh\u00e4ltlich sein wird. Wir haben auch weiter daran gearbeitet, mehr Kleidung f\u00fcr unsere Gesch\u00e4fte zu kreieren und Outfits f\u00fcr neue NSCs zu bauen, die bald auf unseren verschiedenen Planeten zu sehen sein werden.\n\n\nTechnischer Inhalt\nDas Technical Content Team besteht aus zwei Teams: Technische Kunst und technische Animation. Technical Content ist ein globales Team mit Mitarbeitern in allen Studios, die verschiedene Rollen \u00fcbernehmen.\n\nSean Tracy hat den letzten Monat des Jahres damit verbracht, Roadmapping f\u00fcr den Rest des Jahres zu erstellen, mit 3-lateralen und anderen Auftraggebern an einigen F+E-Projekten zu arbeiten, die bald bekannt gegeben werden, sowie die Teams f\u00fcr technische Kunst und technische Animation zu trainieren und zu unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nIm Bereich der technischen Kunst hat Atri Dave mit unserem FPS-Waffenteam zusammengearbeitet, um die Waffen zu optimieren, die Griffe universell einsetzbar zu machen (f\u00fcr M\u00e4nner und Frauen) und mit unseren Animationsprogrammierern etwas Forschung und Entwicklung f\u00fcr eine fortschrittlichere Version der Fu\u00dfverankerung zu betreiben, die Bein IK und Bodenausrichtung je nachdem, ob die Charaktere auf den Fersen oder auf den Ballen ihrer F\u00fc\u00dfe sitzen, anpasst. Robert Dickerson hat f\u00fcr die verschiedenen Content Teams eine Substance Painter-Pipeline aufgebaut. Alex Remotti ist vor kurzem dem Team beigetreten und hat bereits in den ersten Wochen einen enormen Einfluss ausge\u00fcbt, indem er die Verantwortung f\u00fcr die prozedural erzeugten Umgebungen f\u00fcr Planeten, Raumstationen und andere Objekte im Universum \u00fcbernommen hat. Er hat bereits das urspr\u00fcngliche System in den Planeteneditor integriert, was es uns erm\u00f6glicht, Au\u00dfenposten\/Geb\u00e4ude mit Hilfe der Splatterkarten aus den \u00d6kosystemen zu spawnen. Matthew Intrieri und Patrick Salerno haben wichtige Aktualisierungen der Systeme und der Kunst f\u00fcr die Super Hornet, Mustang und viele andere Schiffe vorgenommen und den Rest des Jahres geplant, um einige technische Schulden, die auf einigen der \u00e4lteren Schiffe entstanden sind, \"abzuzahlen\". Forrest Stephan hat an S42-Funktionen gearbeitet und Requisiten und Waffen f\u00fcr Leistungsoptimierungen \u00fcberpr\u00fcft.\n\nAuf der Seite der Technischen Animation war es nicht weniger stressig! Matthias Jaeger hat an der Verbesserung und Implementierung von Werkzeugverbesserungen f\u00fcr Animatoren gearbeitet. Dazu geh\u00f6ren Raumschalter (IK\/FK-Schaltwerkzeuge), St\u00fctzenausr\u00fcstung, Gesundheitstests, Knocheneinflussreduzierungswerkzeuge und vieles mehr. Rob Howes, der leitende technische Animateur in der Abteilung, war damit besch\u00e4ftigt, Kinofilme und Animationen zu unterst\u00fctzen und leitete das Team f\u00fcr technische Animationen. Er hat eine Roadmap f\u00fcr den Rest des Jahres erstellt und F+E f\u00fcr verteilte Batching-L\u00f6sungen f\u00fcr Animationsbuilds durchgef\u00fchrt. Weiterhin hat er weiterhin mit Animationen zu einigen Themen, die die Verwendung eines separaten weiblichen Skeletts betreffen, iteriert. Vineet Chander hat riesige Mengen an Aktualisierungen an unseren Gesichts- und Kopfteilen vorgenommen, von denen es \u00fcber 120 gibt! Manchmal werden relativ kleine Probleme entdeckt, zum Beispiel die Augenlider f\u00fcr die meisten Gesichter waren etwas \"verschlafen\" und er hat \u00c4nderungen vorgenommen, so dass dies l\u00e4nger der Fall ist. Adam Sirrelle hat einige wichtige Werkzeuge entwickelt, darunter die automatisierte LOD-Erstellung der Gesichtswerte. Zus\u00e4tzlich hat Adam ein zus\u00e4tzliches Werkzeug f\u00fcr die Entwickler entwickelt, das es ihnen erm\u00f6glicht, die Erstellung von DBA's (Database of Animations), die massiv optimierte Container f\u00fcr Animationsdaten sind, viel einfacher zu verwalten. John Riggs arbeitet an Updates f\u00fcr das weibliche Rig, an Updates f\u00fcr die H\u00e4nde zum besseren Greifen von Waffen und an der Einf\u00fchrung einiger Skinning-Tools f\u00fcr den Rest des Teams. Gaige Hallman hat den L\u00f6wenanteil der Arbeit geleistet, wenn es um die Zonierung und die Sicherstellung der Modularit\u00e4t der Charaktere und des damit verbundenen Skinning geht, w\u00e4hrend er auch an der Zonenauslesung und dem schwierigen Aspekt der Modularit\u00e4t gearbeitet hat, die um den Hals und den Kopf der Charaktere herum auftreten. Mark McCall ist Tech Contents residenter Bugsmashing Ninja. W\u00e4hrend Mark manchmal Wochen damit verbringt, Fehler nach Fehler zu beheben, gelingt es ihm immer noch, wichtige \u00c4nderungen vorzunehmen, wie z.B. die Vereinheitlichung der Datenstruktur f\u00fcr Augen und Z\u00e4hne von Charakteren sowie die Entwicklung von Werkzeugen rund um das Haar- und Kopfhaut-Rigging. Last but not least hat Erik Link f\u00fcr 2.6.1 Gesichtsidles an den Piloten implementiert und jagt Animatoren und Content-Ersteller, wenn es Fehler beim Aufbau von Assets gibt. Er hat wesentlich dazu beigetragen, dass unsere Fehler beim Erstellen von Assets auf 0 f\u00fcr 2.6.0 gesenkt wurden.\n\n\nNarrativ\nDas Narrative Team hat sich weiterhin mit Designern in den verschiedenen Studios getroffen, um den Erz\u00e4hlbedarf f\u00fcr 3.0 zu ermitteln, wie z.B. die Mission Stories, die wir f\u00fcr Spieler generieren k\u00f6nnen, zu konkretisieren und die verschiedenen Storytelling-M\u00f6glichkeiten f\u00fcr die verschiedenen Umgebungen zu untersuchen. Wir haben auch eine wichtige Aufgabe \u00fcbernommen, n\u00e4mlich den Aufbau einer Datenbank mit dem Textbedarf f\u00fcr die Staffel 42, die alle Terminals, Galactapedia-Eintr\u00e4ge usw., die im Spiel ben\u00f6tigt werden, beschreibt. Es gab eine Handvoll Dokumente, die f\u00fcr die zus\u00e4tzliche Ausstattung der Ebenen von Star Marine geschrieben wurden; lustige kleine Wege, Echo 11 periodengenauer zu machen oder OP Station Demien reflektiert das Massaker, das die Ebene nachzubilden versucht. Aus diesen Gespr\u00e4chen mit Kunst und Design entstand ein mehrseitiges Dokument \u00fcber Snacks!\n\nWir hatten auch w\u00f6chentliche Gespr\u00e4che mit Britton, unserem gesch\u00e4tzten Xenolinguisten, der die Xi'an-Sprache weiter entwickelt. Diese Gespr\u00e4che haben zu tieferen Eintauchen in die Xi'an-Gesellschaft gef\u00fchrt, so dass wir hoffentlich bald etwas davon enth\u00fcllen k\u00f6nnen.\n\n\nQualit\u00e4tssicherung\nLA QA verbrachte den gr\u00f6\u00dften Teil des Monats damit, die LA Engineering und Tech Content Teams bei der Durchf\u00fchrung von Sweeps auf dem neuen Frontend, der Selbstzerst\u00f6rung von Schiffen, Schadenszust\u00e4nden, der Raketenfunktionalit\u00e4t und den j\u00fcngsten \u00c4nderungen an den Charakterauslastungen sowie fr\u00fchen Iterationen von Item 2.0 zu unterst\u00fctzen. Dar\u00fcber hinaus unterst\u00fctzte das Team das Community-Team bei der Aufnahme von In-Game-Material f\u00fcr eine Reihe von Segmenten und richtete einen Let's Talk About-Thread ein, um Feedback \u00fcber die Mustang-Serie von Schiffen zu erhalten.\n\nCloud Imperium Austin Design\n\nDer Gro\u00dfteil der Zeit, die das ATX Design Team in den letzten Monaten damit verbracht hat, Details f\u00fcr PU \"Shop Archetypes\" zu definieren (einige Beispiele sind Clothing Shop, Bar, Security Kiosk, Hospital, etc.) und Design-Dokumente zu erstellen, die Details enthalten, die f\u00fcr jeden Archetyp spezifisch sind. Jeder Shop-Typ wird universelle Anforderungen haben, die f\u00fcr jeden Shop eines bestimmten Typs gelten, was uns langfristig Zeit sparen hilft, wenn wir dann in bestimmte Shop-Standorte f\u00fcr kommende Landezonen und Raumstationen aufschl\u00fcsseln. Zum Beispiel wird jedes Bekleidungsgesch\u00e4ft \u00fcber Kleiderst\u00e4nder, Schaufensterpuppen und St\u00e4nder verf\u00fcgen, um das Ladeninventar zu pr\u00e4sentieren, und jedes Display muss einer bestimmten Metrik folgen.\n\nWir waren auch damit besch\u00e4ftigt, die S\u00e4ulen f\u00fcr unsere erste Iteration der PU-Wirtschaft aufzubauen, indem wir verschiedene Details \u00fcber In-Game-Rohstoffarten, Handelsrouten innerhalb des Stanton-Systems und Wei\u00df\/Schwarz-M\u00e4rkte festgelegt haben.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich haben wir die endg\u00fcltige Freigabe des GDD f\u00fcr das Feature \"Shopping Kiosk\" erhalten und die hohen Designanforderungen an das UI-Team und das Game Code Team aufgeschl\u00fcsselt. Dies ist ein seit langem bekanntes Merkmal, deshalb freuen wir uns, es in die n\u00e4chste Entwicklungsstufe zu bringen.\n\n\nKunst\nDer Lichtk\u00fcnstler Emre Switzer hat seine Arbeit an der Beleuchtung der Star Marine Maps f\u00fcr die Version 2.6.0 abgeschlossen und sich nun darauf konzentriert, Squadron 42 bei der Beleuchtung einiger ihrer Umgebungen zu unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nChris Smith und Josh Coons machen weiterhin Fortschritte auf ihren jeweiligen Schiffen. Josh ist in vollem Gange auf der Greybox Phase f\u00fcr das neue Cutlass Black. Chris hat seine Aktualisierungen der Super Hornet abgeschlossen und hat nun seine Aufmerksamkeit auf ein fantastisches neues Fahrzeug gelenkt, an dem wir super begeistert sind.\n\n\nAnimation\nBryan Brewer und das PU Animation Team machen weiterhin Fortschritte bei Usable Interaction Animations zur Unterst\u00fctzung von Squadron 42. In letzter Zeit haben wir Pushups, Stretches, Leaning on a Table (verschiedene Winkel) und weibliche Versionen aller Arbeitszonenanimationen erhalten. Wir haben auch einen Polish Pass \u00fcber einige der Usables gemacht, um sie f\u00fcr den Einsatz durch den Spieler in der First-Person akzeptabel zu machen.\n\nJay Brushwood und das Ship Animation Team haben ihre Arbeit an den Animationen f\u00fcr die Ein- und Ausstiegskampfgeschwindigkeit abgeschlossen. Sie befinden sich derzeit im Review mit Animation Director Steve Bender und wir warten auf die endg\u00fcltige Freigabe. W\u00e4hrend wir warten, haben wir uns der Implementierung von Animationen auf kommenden Schiffen wie der Prospector und der Buccaneer gewidmet.\n\n\nBackend Services\nDas Backend-Team hat hart an einem umfangreichen Projekt gearbeitet, um unsere gesamte Backend-Infrastruktur auf eine neue Architektur umzustellen, die wir Diffusion nennen. Diffusion wird eine wirklich Cloud-orientierte Service-Architektur sein, die dazu beitr\u00e4gt, die hohe Skalierbarkeit und Verf\u00fcgbarkeit unserer Dienste zu verbessern. Es wird von einer hochrangigen \"Koordinationsschicht\" getragen, die in einer propriet\u00e4ren Sprache geschrieben wurde, die von unserem Lead Server Engineer Jason Ely entwickelt wurde.\n\nZus\u00e4tzlich zur Entwicklung von Diffusion hat das Backend-Team das UI-Team bei der Implementierung der neuen Ingame-Ranglisten unterst\u00fctzt.\n\n\nQualit\u00e4tssicherung\nIm Januar begann die QA sofort mit der Umsetzung von Testanforderungen aus der Entwicklung, die Netzwerknachrichtenwarteschlange, serialisierte Variablen, Partikelvorladung, Megamap-Tests und KI-Balancetests umfassten. Die Qualit\u00e4tssicherung konzentrierte sich auch sehr stark auf die Berichterstattung \u00fcber Probleme mit dem Game-Dev-Stream, um sicherzustellen, dass er stabil ist, so dass die Entwicklung der Squadron 42 und 3.0 unvermindert fortgesetzt werden kann. Einige andere Dinge, die QA f\u00fcr Januar auf dem Programm standen, waren die Schulung neuer Spezialisten, die Aktualisierung der internen Dokumentation, die Entwicklung von QA-Tools und Interviews mit neuen Mitarbeitern.\n\n\nSpielerbeziehungen\nDer Januar beendete eine sehr arbeitsreiche Zeit f\u00fcr das Player Relations-Team. Wir haben w\u00e4hrend der Ferienzeit gearbeitet, um sicherzustellen, dass wir mit den dringenden Anfragen unserer Geldgeber Schritt halten konnten, und einen Gro\u00dfteil des Monats genutzt, um den Rest nachzuholen. Aus heutiger Sicht wurden wir erst im April letzten Jahres von der arbeitsreichen Ferienzeit eingeholt.... dieses Jahr haben wir das im Januar geschafft!\n\nEin Teil davon ist darauf zur\u00fcckzuf\u00fchren, dass wir unsere Teams in den USA und Gro\u00dfbritannien zusammenf\u00fchren, was letztendlich zu schnelleren Reaktionszeiten und mehr Transparenz f\u00fcr die Spieler f\u00fchren wird. Ein gro\u00dfer Teil davon betrifft Spectrum, das wir gerne bald auf der Hauptsite einf\u00fchren werden. Wir glauben wirklich, dass du die gesamte \u00dcberarbeitung unserer Foren und Chatsysteme lieben wirst, und wir denken, dass du unsere Pl\u00e4ne, mit dir im Chat und in den Foren eine bessere Pr\u00e4senz aufzubauen, wirklich sch\u00e4tzen wirst.\n\n\nIT\/Betrieb\nEs ist der Jahresanfang, so dass die IT-Abteilung mit vielen internen Hausarbeiten wie Inventuren, Lizenzerneuerungen, allgemeinen Aufr\u00e4um- und Organisationsaufgaben besch\u00e4ftigt ist. Eines unserer gr\u00f6\u00dferen Projekte konzentrierte sich auf die Erweiterung der Bandbreite zwischen den B\u00fcros, um mit unserem t\u00e4glich zunehmenden Datentransfer Schritt zu halten und die Replikationslast zu erh\u00f6hen. Wir arbeiten auch eng mit dem DevOps-Team zusammen, um Hardware und Infrastruktur bereitzustellen, um das Wachstum des Build-Systems sowie die weitere Arbeit am Patch-Reduktionsprojekt zu unterst\u00fctzen.\n\n\nLiveOps\/DevOps\/DevOps\nDas Team hat hart an der multiregionalen Unterst\u00fctzung gearbeitet, der Gro\u00dfteil unserer Bem\u00fchungen geht in Richtung Netzwerk- und Serverseite unserer Dienste. Wir freuen uns sehr, Ihnen mitteilen zu k\u00f6nnen, dass sich diese Arbeit sehr bald im Spiel auszahlen wird und es wird auch bald detailliertere Informationen dazu geben. Wir haben auch an unseren internen Tools einschlie\u00dflich des Build-Systems gearbeitet, die alle die gleichen Ziele verfolgen: Performance- und Stabilit\u00e4tsverbesserungen bei gleichzeitiger Kostenreduzierung.\n\nGie\u00dferei 42 UK\nGrafiken\n\nDas Grafik-Team hat sich haupts\u00e4chlich auf verschiedene Beleuchtungsverbesserungen wie Schattenqualit\u00e4t und Leistung in Innenr\u00e4umen konzentriert. Die GPU-Cube-Map-Erfassung ist fast abgeschlossen und wir beginnen damit, Systeme zu schreiben, die diese Technologie maximieren, damit wir eine wirklich dynamische Beleuchtung auf Planeten und Raumstationen erreichen k\u00f6nnen. In Anbetracht der Tatsache, dass so viel von unserer Konzeptkunst stark rechteckige Leuchten verwendet, haben wir mit der Arbeit an Fl\u00e4chenleuchten begonnen. Obwohl dies einfach klingen mag, sind Fl\u00e4chenleuchten eigentlich ein aktives Forschungsgebiet f\u00fcr viele Game Studios und unglaublich schwer zu finden (sowohl in Bezug auf Aussehen als auch Leistung). Schlie\u00dflich befinden wir uns in der Anfangsphase der Planung f\u00fcr ein neues und wesentlich effizienteres Partikelsystem, das schlie\u00dflich das bisherige ersetzen wird.\n\n\nProgrammierung\nIn der laufenden Release-Phase haben wir die Ranglisten eingef\u00fchrt und die neue \"Mega Map\" implementiert. Unter der Haube auf der Netzwerkseite befinden sich die richtigen serialisierten Variablen im Netzwerk und das Umschreiben der Nachrichtenwarteschlange. Weitere allgemeine Arbeiten umfassen den FPS Akteurscode Refactor, um ihn zuverl\u00e4ssiger und robuster zu machen, das Missionssystem, Artikelaufnahme und -ablage, Verbesserungen und 3D-Minimap, unter anderem.\n\n\nVFX\nIm letzten Monat haben wir einige interne Datenbereinigungen mit dem Asset Manager durchgef\u00fchrt, der Partikel-\/Materialtexturbibliotheken ausw\u00e4hlt und konsolidiert, wobei wir an der Verbesserung des Partikel-Streams gearbeitet haben, um eine bessere dynamische Beladung (im Wesentlichen die Freisetzung von Speicherressourcen) und Aktualisierungen der Pipeline-Dokumentation zu erm\u00f6glichen. Es gab auch hochrangige Key-Feature-Planungsaufschl\u00fcsselung von Schl\u00fcsselfunktionen wie Atmospheric Flight Model Effects (AFFX) wie Triebwerksspuren, Kondensstreifen, Ein-\/Ausg\u00e4nge und Screen-Based Area-of-Interest, die bildschirmbasierte Effekte basierend auf der Kamerageschwindigkeit und\/oder der N\u00e4he zu einem bestimmten Bereich ausl\u00f6sen. Au\u00dferdem haben wir mit neuen Verm\u00f6genswerten experimentiert, um Sachen in die Luft zu jagen.\n\n\nQualit\u00e4tssicherung\nDas QS-Team hat dieses neue Jahr kaum aufgegeben. Wir haben die Tests von Staffel 42 fortgesetzt, umfangreiche Tests von Waffenbalancen und Star Marine Bugfixes durchgef\u00fchrt. Wir haben eine Untersuchung des vorherrschenden Lag-Problems w\u00e4hrend der Last Stand-Schlachten auf Echo 11 eingeleitet und eine Feedback-Sitzung \u00fcber die Gamepad-Steuerung durchgef\u00fchrt. Am spannendsten waren jedoch die ersten Schritte in die neue \"Mega Map\".\n\nWie immer vielen Dank an alle Geldgeber, insbesondere an die Evocati und an diejenigen, die die PTU besuchen. Deine Hilfe ist immer von unsch\u00e4tzbarem Wert und wird sehr gesch\u00e4tzt!\n\n\nKunst\nWir haben das neue Jahr mit dem Konzept einiger neuer, angek\u00fcndigter Schiffe begonnen und sind dabei, ein neues Anvil-Design zu entwickeln.\n\nIn anderen Schiffsmeldungen ist der Reclaimer bereits tief in der Produktion mit engagierten Teams, die sich auf das \u00c4u\u00dfere und Innere konzentrieren. Auf der Au\u00dfenseite hat das Au\u00dfennetz einen Reinigungsdurchgang durchlaufen und die Arbeiten an den Shadern haben begonnen. Auch externe Teile wie Triebwerke sind fast vollst\u00e4ndig. Im Inneren wurde ein modularer Bausatz f\u00fcr die Wohnbereiche zusammengestellt und der erste Raum steht kurz vor der Fertigstellung.\n\nDas Prospector-Team hat die Hauptgeometrie der LOD sowohl f\u00fcr den Innen- als auch f\u00fcr den Au\u00dfenbereich poliert und dabei verschiedene Abschnitte gereinigt, die an die anderen Teams weitergegeben werden, damit sie mit der Vorbereitung des Fluges beginnen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nAuch am MISC Rasiermesser wird weiter gearbeitet. Die K\u00fcnstler haben das Konzeptnetz so angepasst, dass es innerhalb der durch die Animation gesetzten Grenzen arbeitet, was zu einem viel schlankeren, technischeren Design gef\u00fchrt hat, w\u00e4hrend sie versuchten, die wichtigsten Designelemente des urspr\u00fcnglichen Konzepts - das aggressive Formel-1-Feeling - zu erhalten.\n\nAuf einige gro\u00dfe Neuigkeiten hin hat das Team einen technischen und vern\u00fcnftigen Durchgang \u00fcber die S42-Innenteile gemacht. Die Bek\u00e4mpfung von Kollisionen und LODs war das Hauptaugenmerk, um sicherzustellen, dass sie f\u00fcr die Designer in einem funktionsf\u00e4higen Zustand sind. W\u00e4hrend dieser \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung gehen wir auf verschiedene Elemente ein: Aufr\u00e4umen und Polieren von St\u00fccken, Verfeinern und Hinzuf\u00fcgen weiterer Details, die uns fehlen, und \u00c4nderungen an Geweben, die dies erfordern. Wir haben auch einige Zeit damit verbracht, die Materialien durchzugehen, Anpassungen und Verbesserungen vorzunehmen, wo immer dies m\u00f6glich ist, und Mischungen zu den Ausgangsmaterialien des Schiffes hinzuzuf\u00fcgen.\n\nUnser Requisitenteam arbeitete weiterhin an den mittleren Schiffskomponenten und Verbandsk\u00e4sten wie Werkzeugen, medizinischen Requisiten und einigen Gegenst\u00e4nden, die f\u00fcr die Schiffsinnenr\u00e4ume von S42 ben\u00f6tigt werden.\n\nZerst\u00f6rbare Requisiten wurden in 2.6.0 eingef\u00fchrt, was bedeutete, dass wir zerst\u00f6rte Versionen eines Teils der Assets erstellen mussten. Dies war die erste Iteration, bei der man sich auf die offensichtlicheren Verm\u00f6genswerte konzentrierte. In Zukunft wird die Zerst\u00f6rung in viel gr\u00f6\u00dferem Umfang zu sehen sein und eine gr\u00f6\u00dfere Vielfalt an Requisitentypen umfassen.\n\nF\u00fcr unsere Umgebungen lie\u00dfen wir einen Teil des Teams die Level 2.6.0 polieren, um uns auf das Release 2.6.1 vorzubereiten. Dies beinhaltete das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von mehr narrativen Elementen, die den Ebenen etwas mehr Geschichte und Charakter verleihen.\n\nAn der SQ42-Front hat die Shubin-Basis im Moment einen gro\u00dfen visuellen Schub, da sie ein gro\u00dfer Teil der Geschichte ist, stellen wir sicher, dass sie der Held ist, der sie zu sein verdient.\n\nWir stellen auch mehr Ressourcen zur Verf\u00fcgung, um an dem wachsenden Universum zu arbeiten. Bald werden wir vier Konzeptk\u00fcnstler haben, die Monde, Nebel und Raumstationen ausarbeiten, keine leichte Aufgabe! Die Arbeiten an den ersten drei oberirdischen Au\u00dfenposten haben begonnen. Diese modularen Asset-Sets k\u00f6nnen auf verschiedene Weise konfiguriert werden, um die kleineren Siedlungen, die \u00fcber die Planetenoberfl\u00e4chen verteilt sind, zu variieren.\n\nWir pr\u00fcfen die Verbesserung der Materialsysteme unseres Planeten, um eine bessere Gesamtlesbarkeit vom Weltraum bis hinunter zu einer metergro\u00dfen Oberfl\u00e4che zu erreichen. Wir betreiben viel Forschung und Entwicklung, um herauszufinden, wie wir Verm\u00f6genswerte (Felsen, Vegetation usw.) dynamisch und realistisch auf die Oberfl\u00e4che eines Planeten verteilen, so dass unsere Ziele der visuellen Treue und des Realismus erhalten bleiben.\n\nUmgekehrt verbringen wir etwas Zeit mit Forschung und Entwicklung, um das zu erreichen, was wir visuell aus dem Weltraum erreichen wollen! Obwohl es aus nichts besteht, ist es sehr \u00fcberraschend, wie viel es zu testen und zu diskutieren gibt, wie wir wollen, dass sich die Leere zwischen den Sternen anf\u00fchlt und ver\u00e4ndert, w\u00e4hrend sich der Spieler durch ein System bewegt.\n\n\nAudio\nWie viele der Abteilungen nutzte auch die Audio das neue Jahr als Gelegenheit, um zur\u00fcckzukehren und die Hausreinigung durchzuf\u00fchren. Wir haben alle Schiffe \u00fcberpr\u00fcft, um sicherzustellen, dass das Audio f\u00fcr die \u00e4lteren Schiffe dem Standard der neueren Schiffe entspricht, einige Bugfixes\/Politur f\u00fcr die kommende Version 2.6.1 bereinigt und das Community-Team weiterhin unterst\u00fctzt und an Werbematerial gearbeitet.\n\nAuch technisch haben wir unsere Dialogpipeline und unser Audioverbreitungssystem weiter \u00fcberarbeitet und verbessert. Ein erster Durchgang an einem Mix-System wurde abgeschlossen und wir freuen uns, bekannt geben zu k\u00f6nnen, dass S42 \u00fcber eine vollst\u00e4ndige Musiklogik verf\u00fcgen wird, und wir haben unsere Arbeit an der Schaffung von Ambiente f\u00fcr einige der Standorte f\u00fcr den einzelnen Player fortgesetzt. Es wurden mehrere Verbesserungen in Star Marine implementiert, von Waffenger\u00e4uschen bis hin zum Dialog, die Sie in K\u00fcrze h\u00f6ren werden.\n\n\nUI\nIn diesem Monat konzentrierte sich das UI-Team vor allem auf die Verbesserung und Erweiterung des neuen Front-Ends, das in 2.6 ver\u00f6ffentlicht wurde, mit In-Game-Ranglisten und einem neuen Pausenmen\u00fc sowie auf die Durchf\u00fchrung verschiedener Bugfixes.\n\nWir haben auch mit der Planung und Terminierung von umfangreichen UI-Features begonnen, die wir in den kommenden Releases einbinden m\u00f6chten. So haben wir beispielsweise eng mit dem Design zusammengearbeitet, um die Benutzererfahrung f\u00fcr den Ein- und Verkauf \u00fcber die Kioskoberfl\u00e4chen zu definieren.\n\n\nAnimation\nDas Animationsteam hat sich in diesem Monat erweitert. Wir freuen uns sehr \u00fcber zwei Neuzug\u00e4nge im Team und sind bereit, sie ins kalte Wasser zu werfen. Wir haben ein fantastisches Feedback zu 2.6 erhalten und uns auf die Fehlerbehebung und Verbesserung der Animationen f\u00fcr den n\u00e4chsten Patch eingestellt. Wir haben die fps-Assets auf breiter Front verbessert und die Granatenw\u00fcrfe reaktionsschneller gemacht.\n\nIn anderen laufenden Aufgaben haben wir Verbesserungen an Waffenanimationen vorgenommen, insbesondere beim Nachladen von Animationen, und wir haben begonnen, das Feedback f\u00fcr neue Waffen, die in der Pipeline landen, zu verbessern und zu wiederholen. Wir haben auch Fortschritte bei der Verbesserung anf\u00e4lliger Fortbewegungsmittel und der Unterst\u00fctzung des ATX PU-Teams gemacht, um weibliche Mocap-Daten in die verwendbaren Animationen f\u00fcr Subsumption zu integrieren.\n\n\nDesign\nDas S42 Designteam hat sich auf das neue Missionssystem vorbereitet, das gro\u00dfe Teile der Ebenen ersetzen wird, die zuvor mit Flowgraph implementiert wurden. Es wird f\u00fcr uns ein weitaus robusteres System sein, das m\u00f6gliche Inkonsistenzen mit der Konfiguration des Designers begrenzt. Au\u00dferdem stellen wir im Laufe des Object Container Streaming Systems sicher, dass wir die Leistung maximieren, indem wir die anderen Kapitel im Spiel in logische Objektcontainer aufteilen.\n\nDas Live-Team war sehr besch\u00e4ftigt mit Bugfixes und der Implementierung eines Scoring-Rebalancing f\u00fcr Arena Commander und Star Marine. Es gab auch einige Verbesserungen der KI f\u00fcr die Raumfahrt, die umgesetzt wurden, und die Arbeit an der Detaillierung der Stanton-Karte wurde fortgesetzt.\n\nDas Tech-Team ist immer noch sehr damit besch\u00e4ftigt, die Funktionalit\u00e4t der Schiffe in das neue Item 2.0-System zu verlagern, um sich auf eine ganze Reihe neuer Spielm\u00f6glichkeiten vorzubereiten.\n\nDie Systemdesigner haben daran gearbeitet, den Rahmen der Seat Actions mit mehreren Schrauben viel detaillierter zu gestalten, um sich auf das Treffen mit Chris Anfang Februar vorzubereiten.\n\nGie\u00dferei 42 DE\nKI\n\nF\u00fcr die KI begann das Jahr 2017 mit einem einw\u00f6chigen Gipfel im Studio von Los Angeles: Wir haben mehrere Themen durchgegangen, die f\u00fcr die Verbesserungen, die wir im neuen Jahr durchf\u00fchren wollen, wichtig sein werden.\n\nIn den letzten Wochen haben wir die Kernfunktionalit\u00e4ten von Subsumption in das Subsumption Mission System \u00fcbernommen. Ziel ist es, den Designern die Werkzeuge an die Hand zu geben, um so schnell wie m\u00f6glich eine gr\u00f6\u00dfere Vielfalt an Missionen zu erstellen. Um dies zu erreichen, haben wir eine M\u00f6glichkeit implementiert, ein St\u00fcck Logik durch die Erstellung von \"Funktionen\" wiederzuverwenden. Funktionen k\u00f6nnen entweder einen \"globalen\" oder \"lokalen\" (zu einer Aktivit\u00e4t oder einer Mission) Umfang haben und erzeugen dynamisch eine Aufgabe, die als regul\u00e4re Unteraufgabe verwendet werden kann.\n\nDie Durchsicht der Kreuzrittermissionen und deren Neuaufbau in diesem neuen Tool erm\u00f6glichte es uns, die Funktionalit\u00e4ten zu identifizieren und zu reorganisieren, die derzeit von Designern ben\u00f6tigt werden, um ihre eigene Logik zu entwickeln. Nur um Ihnen einen Eindruck von der geleisteten Arbeit zu geben, hier eine Beschreibung einiger der Funktionalit\u00e4ten, an denen wir k\u00fcrzlich gearbeitet haben:\n\nAufgabe hinzugef\u00fcgt, um Marker in der Umgebung f\u00fcr den Missionseigent\u00fcmer zu aktivieren\/deaktivieren F\u00e4higkeit, dynamische Aktionsbereiche in der Umgebung zu spawnen und auf die Ereignisse zu reagieren, die sie erzeugen Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die InteractiveObjects, um die an das Missionssystem gesendeten R\u00fcckrufe korrekt zu handhaben Unterst\u00fctzung hinzugef\u00fcgt, um das dynamische spawnen der Entit\u00e4t und das Eigentum der Anfragen zu verfolgen. Dies wird es uns erm\u00f6glichen, dass Unternehmen nur andere Unternehmen, die sie besitzen, designieren k\u00f6nnen. Au\u00dferdem macht es einer Mission viel leichter, die geschaffenen Ressourcen zu bereinigen. Wir haben die Debug-Drawing-Funktionalit\u00e4ten von Subsumption und dem Missionssystem verbessert und auch die Netzwerkunterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr das Missionsprotokoll hinzugef\u00fcgt (Dies ist eine Art pers\u00f6nlicher Speicher f\u00fcr die Logs jeder Mission) Wir haben eine SimpleAudioComponent erstellt, die es dem Missionssystem erm\u00f6glicht, direkt mit dem Kunden des Missionseigent\u00fcmers zu kommunizieren Wir haben eine Funktionalit\u00e4t hinzugef\u00fcgt, die es dem Spawn-System erm\u00f6glicht, das Spawn von Entit\u00e4ten auf bestimmte Aktionsbereiche zu filtern und zu begrenzen Wir haben die grundlegende Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Spawn Subsumption Platform\/Layers hinzugef\u00fcgt (wir werden Ihnen in den kommenden Wochen weitere Details dazu mitteilen) F\u00fcr den Charakter AI, Wir haben die Arbeit an der Finalisierung der \u00c4nderungen im Cover-System und im Posture Manager fortgesetzt, damit diese Systemdaten korrekt in Objektcontainer exportiert und zur Laufzeit in einer Non-Z-Up-Umgebung verwendet werden k\u00f6nnen. Wir haben auch KI-Charaktere prototypisiert, die auf Spieler reagieren, die auf sie sto\u00dfen, indem wir sichergestellt haben, dass der Bewegungscode versteht, wann der Fortschritt \u00fcber die Bewegung nicht erreicht werden kann, da der Spieler die Charakterbewegung unterbricht. Wir haben auch unser Refactoring der Raumschiff-Flugsteuerung fortgesetzt, wir bewegen uns auf dem Weg, einige Komplexit\u00e4tsschichten zu beseitigen und das IFCS aus Sicht der KI direkter zu nutzen. Auf diese Weise k\u00f6nnen wir von allen Verbesserungen, die f\u00fcr den Spieler vorgenommen werden, wesentlich einfacher profitieren.\n\n\nQualit\u00e4tssicherung\nDE QA bezeichnete den Monat Januar gerne als \"Aufholmonat\" und nutzte diese Zeit, um verschiedene Testanfragen zu bearbeiten, die zus\u00e4tzliche Informationen erforderten, sowie jede Editor-Regression aus Game-Dev zu entfernen, die damals eine geringere Priorit\u00e4t hatte als die Regression in 2.6. Au\u00dferdem haben wir im Januar einen Gro\u00dfteil des Jahres damit verbracht, unsere bestehenden Editor-Checklisten und -Dokumentationen zu \u00fcberarbeiten und zus\u00e4tzliche Editor-Schulungen f\u00fcr Tester in unserem britischen B\u00fcro anzubieten.\n\nZus\u00e4tzlich haben wir das Feedback von Star Marine aus unserer Community \u00fcberpr\u00fcft und auf dieses Feedback mit Testf\u00e4llen reagiert, um unserem Designteam zus\u00e4tzliche Informationen zu liefern. Das QS-Team beschloss auch, unsere bestehenden Gesundheitschecks mit der Produktion zu \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen und zu entscheiden, welche f\u00fcr das Team noch n\u00fctzlich waren und welche Kontrollen vollst\u00e4ndig entfernt werden konnten. Wir nutzten diese Gelegenheit auch, um mit der Produktion \u00fcber neue Bug-Tracking-Verfahren zu sprechen, so dass wir alle auf der gleichen Seite waren, was die Etiketten betrifft, die in unseren t\u00e4glichen QA-Filtern verwendet werden. Ivo Herzeg besch\u00e4ftigte uns auch mit \u00c4nderungen am 1st Person Kamerasystem, bei dem wir alle Spielmodi testen mussten. DE QA beendete den Monat mit Tests auf Chris Bolte, um einen ZoneSystem-Crash aufzusp\u00fcren, der unsere Community in der neuesten Live-Version 2.6 plagte. Wir konnten dieses Problem schlie\u00dflich mit insgesamt 9 Testern (2 aus DE und 7 aus Gro\u00dfbritannien) reproduzieren, was Chris erlaubte, es auf einen logischen Fehler zu beschr\u00e4nken. Unserem Game-Dev-Zweig wurde zus\u00e4tzliches Debugging hinzugef\u00fcgt und wir werden einen weiteren Playtest versuchen, um dieses Problem auf Game-Dev zu reproduzieren, damit es ein f\u00fcr alle Mal endg\u00fcltig behoben werden kann.\n\n\nKinematiken\nEin Teil des Cinematics-Teams befindet sich derzeit in einem Sprint, um ein \"endg\u00fcltiges\" Look-and-Feel f\u00fcr das Konversationssystem zu entwickeln, das f\u00fcr Gespr\u00e4che zwischen dem Spieler und den NSCs verwendet wird (von denen die S42-Kampagne eine Menge enth\u00e4lt).\n\nDazu geh\u00f6ren Themen wie:\n\nPlatzierung von UI-Texten und Animation f\u00fcr Dialogentscheidungen L\u00f6sung von Problemen mit: Wenn, wie und wann ein Spieler langsamer wird, der auf einen NSC zu l\u00e4uft. Wie man \"sanfte\" Kollisionen zwischen Physikkapseln macht, wenn der Spieler den pers\u00f6nlichen Raum verletzt, indem er zu nahe kommt. Wie man aufgezeichnete Performances anpasst und den Look oder sogar die K\u00f6rperhaltung des Schauspielers an eine sich \u00e4ndernde Spielerposition anpasst. (wir nennen das Performance-Transformation) Dynamische Kameraeffekte, die einsetzen, wenn das Gespr\u00e4ch sowohl bei einer \u00c4nderung des FOV als auch bei zunehmender Sch\u00e4rfentiefe initialisiert wird. Wir wollen, dass sich unsere Gespr\u00e4che \"filmisch\" anf\u00fchlen und dem Spieler trotzdem die Freiheit lassen. Das Aufrufen eines \"filmischen\" Gef\u00fchls bedeutet in erster Linie, das Objektiv auf Werte umzustellen, die eher der Darstellung einer Figur durch eine Filmkamera entsprechen. Das FOV der Motoren wird traditionell mit einem vertikalen FOV-Wert berechnet. Das aktuelle FOV im Spiel liegt bei 55, was einem extremen Weitwinkelobjektiv von ca. ~13mm entspricht (im Vergleich dazu werden 35mm Film \u00e4quivalente ARRI Master Prime Objektive verwendet). Diese Art von Linse grenzt an das Gebiet der Fischaugenlinse. Wenn der Spieler einer Figur mit dieser Art von FOV nahe kommt, verzerrt er die Gesichter, so dass wir das FOV \u00fcber eine gewisse Zeit schrittweise auf 30 \u00e4ndern, was einem ~25mm Weitwinkel-Portraitobjektiv entspricht. Wir finden, dass dies ein sch\u00f6ner Kompromiss der Gesichter ist, die all die gro\u00dfartigen gescannten Details enth\u00fcllen, indem sie gro\u00df auf dem Bildschirm erscheinen und gleichzeitig ein Gef\u00fchl der Orientierung in Bezug auf den Hintergrund erm\u00f6glichen (wenn sich der Spieler w\u00e4hrend eines Gespr\u00e4chs bewegt).\n\n\nMotor\nDie Arbeit an unserem internen Sonnensystem-Editor (SolEd) mit einer \"Top\/Down\"-Ansicht des Universums hat begonnen. Wir fanden heraus, dass eine benutzerdefinierte Editor-Erweiterung aufgrund der massiven Gr\u00f6\u00dfe unseres Sonnensystems notwendig wurde. Es ist nun m\u00f6glich, Objektcontainer mit Planeten, Raumstation usw. per Drag-and-Drop zu verschieben und in Echtzeit Planeten und Objekte zu sehen, die sich bewegen, w\u00e4hrend sie den ganzen Weg von einer Galaxieansicht nach unten bis zu Schmutzk\u00f6rnern auf einem Planeten vergr\u00f6\u00dfern. Die laufenden Arbeiten an der Verteilung von Prozessobjekten auf Planeten, der Streuung gro\u00dfer Gesteine auf Mondoberfl\u00e4chen, den ersten Durchg\u00e4ngen von Objekten und der Vermischung der Vegetation werden fortgesetzt. mit der Gel\u00e4ndeoberfl\u00e4che des Planeten, Verbesserungen der Partikelverteilung und der Vegetation \/ des Windes im planetarischen Ma\u00dfstab. Erste \u00dcberlieferungen von laichenden Objektcontainern wie kleine Au\u00dfenposten auf der Planetenoberfl\u00e4che und erste Arbeiten zur Anpassung an die Umgebung mit der Anpassung ihrer Teile an das Gel\u00e4nde und der Mischung der Farben, um sie optisch besser zu integrieren, wie sie von Menschen in die diesen Monat eingepackte Umgebung gebracht wurden. Und es wurden zus\u00e4tzliche Verbesserungen f\u00fcr gro\u00dfformatige Planeten-Renderings wie gl\u00e4nzende Oberfl\u00e4chen und mehr von K\u00fcnstlern kontrollierte Parameter hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nEs wurden auch Bem\u00fchungen unternommen, die statische Code-Analyse als obligatorischen Bestandteil des TryBuild-Systems wieder einzuf\u00fchren, Zonensystem-Fixes \/ -Optimierungen, laufende Arbeiten am neuen Pak-System f\u00fcr die Patcher-Updates sowie Fixes und Support f\u00fcr 2.6.1.\n\n\nTechnische Kunst\nDie Frankfurter Technischen K\u00fcnstler waren damit besch\u00e4ftigt, FPS-Features und Waffen f\u00fcr 2.6 zu unterst\u00fctzen. Sie haben das Waffen-IK-Griff-Setup verbessert, jetzt verwenden fast alle Waffen den Laufzeit-IK-Griff, der uns hilft, die linke Hand pro Waffe zu wechseln und gleichzeitig die Basisanimation beizubehalten. Sie schufen auch neue cVars, um neue Waffen im Motor mit all ihrer Funktionalit\u00e4t zu visualisieren und zu testen. Auf der Engine-Seite beteiligen wir uns an F&E-Arbeiten zur Verbesserung der Fu\u00dfpflanzung im Wild und haben bereits gute Ergebnisse erzielt.\n\n\nDesign\nDas Frankfurter Level Design-Team prototypisiert die fast fertig gestellten Modularit\u00e4tssysteme f\u00fcr Satelliten, Surface Outposts und Space Station Interiors. Derzeit stellt uns das Environment Art Team Greybox-Versionen der Komponenten zur Verf\u00fcgung, aus denen wir die modularen Standorte zusammensetzen werden.\n\nBei unseren Standorten ist es immer das Hauptziel, sie zur Erg\u00e4nzung kommender Systeme zu nutzen, eine Basis f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Spiele zu schaffen und das Gef\u00fchl eines lebendigen, funktionalen und realistischen Universums zu vermitteln. Das bedeutet nicht immer, dass das Gameplay, das sich auf einen Ort bezieht, verf\u00fcgbar sein wird, wenn wir die Stationsvorlage freigeben, sondern wir versuchen sicherzustellen, dass wir, sobald dieses System\/Gameplay verf\u00fcgbar wird, bereits den gew\u00fcnschten Ort haben. Aus diesem Grund (und wie bei fr\u00fcheren ATVs) setzen wir unsere Arbeit an Truck Stop, Refinery und Cargo Station fort, die erste Designphase ist abgeschlossen und wurde nun an das Environment Art Team \u00fcbergeben.\n\nDie Systemdesigner haben unser verwendbares System \u00fcberarbeitet, damit sowohl die KI als auch die Spieler die gleichen Objekte gleichzeitig nutzen k\u00f6nnen (z.B. KI und Spieler, die am selben Tisch sitzen und miteinander interagieren). Wir f\u00fcgen auch Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr mehrere Aktionen hinzu, die w\u00e4hrend eines brauchbaren und reibungslosen \u00dcbergangs zwischen diesen Aktionen durchgef\u00fchrt werden sollen (Charakter, der an einem Tisch sitzt, kann essen, reden, seine Nase kratzen, mit dem Kopf auf dem Tisch schlafen usw.).\n\nDie Systeme Oxygen, Breathing & Stamina haben mit der Implementierung begonnen, und bald werden wir Spieler dazu bringen, ihre eigenen Sauerstoffvorr\u00e4te zu tragen, oder riskieren, blau im Gesicht zu werden. Das System sollte alles handhaben, von der Art und Weise, wie der Sauerstofftank atembare Luft an den Helm liefert, bis hin dazu, wie der Spieler diese Luft atmet und wie sein K\u00f6rper diese in tats\u00e4chlich nutzbare Ausdauer umwandelt. Gleichzeitig werden alle Aktionen umgewandelt, um diese Ausdauer zu verbrauchen, so dass du deinen Charakter mit Sauerstoff versorgen m\u00f6chtest, wenn du willst, dass er verschiedene Aktionen ausf\u00fchren kann.\n\nAuch die Lande- und Startsysteme gehen in den Implementierungsmodus, da wir die Mechanik von Staffel 42 und PU vereinheitlichen. Das System sollte alles leicht handhaben k\u00f6nnen, vom einfacheren Start in der PU bis hin zu den vollkinematischen Erfahrungen, die in S42 ben\u00f6tigt werden. Im Grunde genommen implementieren wir ein Flugsicherungssystem, das es den Spielern erm\u00f6glicht, sich in die Warteschlange f\u00fcr die Landeerlaubnis zu stellen und daf\u00fcr zu sorgen, dass die Leute die Landepl\u00e4tze nicht f\u00fcr alle anderen blockieren.\n\nKleine Erg\u00e4nzungen wurden auch zu den Karrieredesigns von S\u00f6ldner und Kopfgeldj\u00e4ger und den daf\u00fcr notwendigen Systemen vorgenommen. Der Zoll erh\u00e4lt auch etwas Designliebe, da wir beginnen, das, was der Spieler legal einbringen kann und wie der Schmuggel in Hochsicherheitsbereichen funktioniert, zu kontrollieren.\n\n\nVFX\nDas Frankfurter VFX-Team arbeitet weiterhin mit dem Programmierungsteam an den Werkzeugen, die ben\u00f6tigt werden, um verschiedene Partikel auf den Planeten zu erzeugen. Eine der j\u00fcngsten Erg\u00e4nzungen war die Einf\u00fchrung des planetarischen Windes. Aufgrund der sph\u00e4rischen Beschaffenheit der Planeten musste der Wind komplett neu geschrieben werden, um auf der Oberfl\u00e4che eines Planeten korrekt zu funktionieren. Dies wird dazu beitragen, dass sich die Umgebung lebendiger anf\u00fchlt, von Rauch und Staub bis hin zum Rascheln der Bl\u00e4tter auf der Vegetation.\n\n\nUmweltkunst\nDas Umweltteam hier in Frankfurt ist wieder gewachsen und hat in diesem Monat zwei neue Mitarbeiter eingestellt. Mit der gestiegenen Anzahl von Umweltk\u00fcnstlern k\u00f6nnen wir noch mehr Aufwand in unsere prozedurale Planetentechnologie stecken. Wir haben k\u00fcrzlich gro\u00dfartig aussehende Anlagen f\u00fcr einzelne Monde gebaut und unsere Verfahrenstechnik und Werkzeuge f\u00fcr Monde, Vollplaneten und Komplettsysteme verfeinert. Ein Schl\u00fcsselelement der Planetentechnologie, auf die wir uns konzentriert haben, ist das prozedurale Streusystem, das es uns erm\u00f6glichen wird, Gesteine, Pflanzen, B\u00e4ume und andere Elemente nach vom K\u00fcnstler definierten Regeln prozedural \u00fcber die Planeten zu streuen. W\u00e4hrend sich die Technologie noch in der Entwicklung befindet, sind die ersten automatisierten Ergebnisse bereits vielversprechend und werden jeden Tag besser.\n\nTurbulent\n\nSpektrum Alpha\nWir arbeiten intensiv an der ersten \u00f6ffentlichen Alpha-Version von Spectrum neben SC 2.6.1. Wir k\u00f6nnen es kaum erwarten, dass ihr Jungs es mit euren Orgs in die Finger bekommt. Erwarten Sie in seiner ersten Inkarnation die Web-Version von \u00f6ffentlichem und privatem Chat, Foren, Suchfunktionen sowie Mitgliederpr\u00e4senz und ein anst\u00e4ndiges mobiles Erlebnis.\n\nDie Evocati und die freiwilligen Tester waren seit Dezember unsch\u00e4tzbar wertvoll, um erstes Feedback und Fehlerberichte (ja, ja, ja, die haben wir auch!) \u00fcber die PTU zu liefern. Unser w\u00f6chentlicher Build-Prozess und der direkte Kontakt mit den Anwendern haben uns wirklich geholfen, uns auf die Funktionen und Bugfixes zu konzentrieren, die f\u00fcr diejenigen, die die Tools verwenden, am wichtigsten sind. Sobald es zum Leben erweckt wird, werden wir kontinuierlich daran arbeiten, Spectrum mit Ihrem Feedback aufzubauen und zu verbessern.\n\nNach der Live-Ver\u00f6ffentlichungs- und Stabilisierungsphase planen wir, weitere Community-Anpassungsfunktionen hinzuzuf\u00fcgen und spezielle mobile Anwendungen zu erstellen, damit Spectrum Ihnen \u00fcberallhin folgen kann.\n\nWir werden weitere Details \u00fcber unsere Roadmap mitteilen, sobald wir diese erste gro\u00dfe Version aus dem Weg ger\u00e4umt haben!\n\n\nUmsatz\nIm Anschluss an die Ferienpause wurden zwei Promo-Wettbewerbe eingef\u00fchrt, ein \u00fcberarbeiteter Vanduul-Schwarm und der brandneue Piratenschwarm. Diese Modi testeten die F\u00e4higkeiten der Spieler bis zum \u00c4u\u00dfersten, und wenn sie in der Lage waren, alle Wellen der Herausforderung zu meistern, erhielten sie ein Angreiferabzeichen, um ihre Leistung anzuzeigen. F\u00fcr eine begrenzte Zeit erhielten diese erfolgreichen Piloten auch die M\u00f6glichkeit, die Vanduul Glaive nach der Fertigstellung der Vanduul Swarm und die neue Pirate Caterpillar nach der Fertigstellung der Piratenschwarm zu kaufen.\n\nZum Abschluss des Monats wurden die schlanken Libelle Poster und die bequemen Squadron 42 Kapuzenpullover wieder auf den Merchandise Store gelegt, aber holen Sie sie sich kurz bevor sie weg sind!\n\nCommunity\n\n\nSendungen\nIm Januar gab es eine Reihe von \u00c4nderungen an unseren Community-Inhalten. Around the Vers wird weiterhin verfeinert, w\u00e4hrend wir neue Wege finden, um den Fortschritt zu pr\u00e4sentieren, ohne zu viel Zeit unseres Entwicklers zu monopolisieren. Im Rathaus unseres Januar-Abonnenten waren Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec und Todd Papy vertreten. Es war eine seltene Gelegenheit, all diese wichtigen Leads am selben Ort sitzen und plaudern zu lassen. Au\u00dferdem haben wir zwei neue Shows gestartet. Star Citizen Happy Hour ist eine M\u00f6glichkeit, Fansender und CIG-Entwickler in eine Gameplay-Session und ein lockeres Treffen mit der Community einzubinden. Dann gibt es noch unsere andere neue Show, die sich auf DICH konzentriert. Citizens of the Stars hebt die erstaunlichen Beitr\u00e4ge hervor, die Sie zum Erlebnis Star Citizen leisten. Es enth\u00e4lt auch \"Quantum Questions\", in denen CIG-Entwickler Ihre Fragen beantworten.... so viele wie m\u00f6glich in zwei Minuten! Wenn es eine Konstante in unserer Broadcast-Output gibt, ist es die Ver\u00e4nderung. Wir werden weiterhin den Rest des Jahres 2017 und dar\u00fcber hinaus wiederholen, um Ihnen die bestm\u00f6glichen und relevantesten Inhalte zu liefern.\n\n\nEvents\nDie Gemeindeverwalter Jared Huckaby und Tyler Witkin gingen zur PAX South und nahmen an der lokalen Bar Citizen Veranstaltung in San Antonio teil. Die M\u00f6glichkeit, sich zu treffen und die Geldgeber zu treffen, ist einer der besten Teile unseres Jobs, und die Leute, die sich f\u00fcr dieses Event entschieden haben, waren wie immer eine hervorragende Gruppe. Denken Sie daran, dass Bar Citizen Veranstaltungen zu 100% von Fans organisiert werden. Du kannst sehen, ob es einen in deiner N\u00e4he gibt und vielleicht findest du sogar Hilfe bei der Planung auf der Fanseite barcitizen.sc.\n\n\nDiese Woche im Star Citizen\nDas alte Community Manager's Log and Schedule hat sich zu einem neuen, w\u00f6chentlichen Titelbeitrag namens This Week in Star Citizen entwickelt. Der Beitrag hebt hervor, was jede Woche passiert, und gibt einen Einblick in einige der Inhalte, die Sie vielleicht in der Star Citizen-Community verpasst haben.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich wird das Testen auf Spectrum fortgesetzt, dem kommenden Ersatz f\u00fcr unsere aktuellen Foren- und Chat-Systeme. Sie k\u00f6nnen jetzt unter ptu.cloudimperiumgames.com\/spectrum an den Tests teilnehmen, wobei jede Woche neue Builds erscheinen. Wir freuen uns darauf, die erste offizielle Iteration von Spectrum in naher Zukunft einzuf\u00fchren. Wir werden weiterhin beabsichtigte Funktionen hinzuf\u00fcgen und basierend auf Ihrem Feedback im Laufe des Jahres wiederholen.","zh_CN":"Greetings Citizens!\n\nWelcome to 2017 (or should we say 2947?) Since our last report, we\u2019ve published a major patch (Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 with Star Marine) and have continued to make great progress towards our next updates. The launch of Star Marine was a major milestone for Star Citizen, and thanks to our dedicated community we have plenty of feedback on the FPS updates to work from. Before we move on to 2.6.1 (which is now available for testing on the PTU!) and beyond, however, let\u2019s take a look back at the month that was January 2017 in Star Citizen\u2019s development.\n\nCloud Imperium Los Angeles\nEngineering\n\nA new year marked by new challenges, new ideas and a whole lot of progress. We have been hard at work on our modular character customization screen, a system built on the item framework which will let players equip their characters however they choose. In addition, the LA Engineering team spent January making real progress towards the core systems that will allow us to have solar system sized maps and all the complicated components that come with it. To enable this, we had to reimagine entities including fundamental components such as lights, continue work on an intelligent radar system, and revisit how we build level hierarchies. It\u2019s still some ways off, but we can see the principles in practice. January also saw the first technical application of node-based controller managers \u2013 this system opens the door to improved networking of item components and is the first real step towards multi-crew ship gameplay. Not flashy enough? How about explosions! We added a new damage controller that will bring things like explosive props and destroyable objects to the Item System framework soon.\n\n\nTech Design\nThis month our Tech Designers have been hard at work on new ships, Item 2.0 support, and prototyping. As for ships, the Buccaneer and Cutlass Black have hit the greybox phase. The Aurora update is going smoothly and really looking good. Calix prototyped how players could interact with the world and items, while Kirk did some work with our studios across the pond on general ship balance, in-game pricing, and underlining systems.\nArt\nThe LA Ship Art team of Elwin Bachiller, Daniel Kamentsky and Byungjin Hyun dove right into the Drake Buccaneer (which has wrapped up in Greybox Art and moved onto Final Art) as well as a big update to the RSI Aurora. On the Concept Art side, in addition to supporting the Drake Buccaneer, Justin Wentz has been very busy creating concept art for a new Anvil ship.\n\nThis month, the Character Art team created new armor for the Persistent Universe. Most notably, the Explorer Suit, which will be used for (you guessed it!) exploring our vast universe! Another new addition is the Heavy Marine armor, which will be available soon in Star Marine. We\u2019ve also continued working on creating more clothes for our shops and building outfits for new NPCs that will soon be seen on our various planets.\n\n\nTech Content\nThe Technical Content Team consists of two teams: Technical Art and Technical Animation. Technical Content is a global team with staff in all studios performing various roles.\n\nSean Tracy has spent the last month roadmapping for the rest of the year, working with 3lateral and other outsourcers on some R+D projects that will be revealed soon, as well as training and supporting the Technical Art and Technical Animation teams.\n\nOn the Technical Art front, Atri Dave has been working with our FPS weapon team to optimize weapons, ensure grips are universal (to males and females) as well as doing some R+D with our animation programmers for a more advanced version of foot anchoring that adapts leg IK and ground alignment based on whether characters are on their heels or on the balls of their feet. Robert Dickerson has been building up a Substance Painter pipeline for the various content teams. Alex Remotti recently joined the team and within his first couple weeks has already made an enormous impact by taking ownership over the procedurally generated environments for planets, space stations and other objects in the universe. He\u2019s already integrated the initial system into the planet editor which allows us to spawn outposts\/buildings using the splatter maps from the ecosystems. Matthew Intrieri and Patrick Salerno have been making important updates to systems and art for the Super Hornet, Mustang and many other ships, as well as planning out the rest of the year in terms of \u201cpaying off\u201d some tech debt that\u2019s accrued on some of the older ships. Forrest Stephan has been working on S42 features as well as reviewing props and weapons for performance optimizations.\n\nOn the Technical Animation side, it\u2019s been no less busy! Matthias Jaeger has been working on improving and implementing tools improvements for animators. These include space switching (IK\/FK switching tools), prop rigging, health tests, bone influence reduction tools, and more. Rob Howes, the lead technical animator in the department, has been busy supporting cinematics and animation whilst leading the technical animation team. He\u2019s prepared a roadmap for the rest of the year as well as doing R+D on distributed batching solutions for animation builds. Further he\u2019s continued to iterate with animation on some issues surrounding using a separate female skeleton. Vineet Chander has done massive batches of updates to our facial and head assets, of which there are over 120! Sometimes relatively minor issues are discovered, for example the eyelids for most faces were a bit \u201csleepy\u201d looking and he\u2019s made changes so that this is longer the case. Adam Sirrelle has developed some important tools including automated LOD creation of the facial assets. Additionally, Adam has created an extra tool for the developers that allow them to much more easily manage the creation of DBA\u2019s (Database of Animations) which are massively optimized containers for animation data. John Riggs is working on updates to the female rig, updates to the hands for better gripping of weapons, and rolling out some skinning tools for the rest of the team. Gaige Hallman has done the lion\u2019s share of work when it comes to zoning and ensuring the modularity of the characters and the skinning that goes with that, while also working on zone culling and difficult aspect of modularity that occur around the neck and head of characters. Mark McCall is Tech Content\u2019s resident bugsmashing ninja. While sometimes spending weeks fixing bug after bug, Mark still manages to enact major changes, such as unifying the data structure for eyes and teeth on characters as well as creating tools surrounding hair\/scalp rigging. Last but not least, Erik Link has implemented facial idles on the pilots for 2.6.1 and chases up animators and content creators when there is asset build errors. He\u2019s been instrumental in getting our asset build errors down to 0 for 2.6.0\n\n\nNarrative\nThe Narrative team has been continuing to meet with designers at the various studios to chip away at narrative needs for 3.0, like fleshing out the mission stories we\u2019ll be able to generate for players and looking at the various storytelling possibilities for the various environments. We\u2019ve also embarked on a significant task of starting to build a database of text needs for Squadron 42 which will outline any terminals, Galactapedia entries, etc. that need to be in-game. There have been a handful of documents written up for additional set dressing for the levels of Star Marine; fun little ways to make Echo 11 more period-accurate or OP Station Demien reflective of the massacre that the level is attempting to recreate. Those conversations with art and design have led to the creation of a multi-page document on Snacks!\n\nWe\u2019ve also been having weekly discussions with Britton, our esteemed xenolinguist, who\u2019s continuing to build out the Xi\u2019an language. These conversations have led to some deeper dives into the Xi\u2019an society, so hopefully we\u2019ll be able to reveal some of that to you soon.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nLA QA spent most of the month aiding the LA Engineering and Tech Content teams conducting sweeps on the new frontend, ship self-destruction, damage states, missile functionality and recent changes to the character loadouts, as well as early iterations of Item 2.0. In addition, the team aided the Community team in capturing in-game footage for a number of segments, and also set up a Let\u2019s Talk About thread to gather feedback on the Mustang series of ships.\n\nCloud Imperium Austin Design\n\nThe majority of the ATX Design Team\u2019s time the past couple months has been spent defining details for PU \u201cShop Archetypes\u201d (some examples include Clothing Shop, Bar, Security Kiosk, Hospital, etc.) and creating design documents outlining details that are specific to each archetype. Each type of shop will have universal requirements that will apply across every shop of a specific type and this will help us save time in the long run when we then drill down into specific shop locations for upcoming landing zones and space stations. For example, every clothing shop is going to have clothing racks, mannequins, and stands to showcase the shop inventory and each display needs to follow a specific metric.\n\nWe\u2019ve also been busy building the pillars of what will become our first iteration of the PU Economy by establishing various details concerning in-game commodity types, trade routes within the Stanton System, and white\/black markets.\n\nLastly, we got final approval on the GDD for the \u201cShopping Kiosk\u201d feature and have broken down high level design requirements for UI Team and Game Code Team. This has been a long-gestating feature so we\u2019re happy to take it into the next stage of development.\n\n\nArt\nLighting Artist Emre Switzer wrapped up his work on lighting the Star Marine maps for 2.6.0 release and has now turned his attention to supporting Squadron 42 in lighting some of their environments.\n\nChris Smith and Josh Coons continue to make progress on their respective ships. Josh is in full swing on the Greybox Phase for the new Cutlass Black. Chris finished up his updates on the Super Hornet and has now turned his attention to a fantastic new vehicle that we\u2019re super excited to be working on.\n\n\nAnimation\nBryan Brewer and the PU Animation Team continue to make progress on Usable Interaction Animations to support Squadron 42. Most recently we\u2019ve gotten Pushups, Stretches, Leaning on a Table (various angles), and female versions of all the work zone animations complete. We\u2019ve also done a polish pass over some of the Usables to make them acceptable for use by the player in first-person.\n\nJay Brushwood and the Ship Animation Team have completed their work on the ship enter\/exit combat speed animations. They are currently in review with Animation Director Steve Bender and we\u2019re awaiting final sign off. While we wait, we have turned our attention to implementing animations on upcoming ships such as the Prospector and the Buccaneer.\n\n\nBackend Services\nThe Backend Team has been hard at work on a massive project to refactor our entire backend infrastructure to a new architecture we\u2019re calling Diffusion. Diffusion will be a truly cloud-oriented service architecture that will help improve high scalability and availability for our services. It will be powered by a top level \u201ccoordination\u201d layer written in a proprietary language developed by our Lead Server Engineer, Jason Ely.\n\nIn addition to developing Diffusion, the Backend Team has been supporting UI Team in implementing the new in-game Leaderboards.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nIn January, QA began immediately fielding test requests from development which included network message queue, serialized variables, particle preloading, megamap testing and AI balance tests. QA also very much focused on reporting issues with the Game-Dev stream to ensure it is stable so that Squadron 42 and 3.0 development may continue unabated. Some other things on QA\u2019s plate for January were training new specialists, updating internal documentation, QA tools development and new hire interviews.\n\n\nPlayer Relations\nJanuary wrapped up a very busy period for the Player Relations team. We worked over the holiday period to make sure that we kept up with our backers\u2019 support urgent requests, and used much of the month to catch up on the rest. To put in perspective, we were not caught up until April of last year from the busy holiday period\u2026 this year we\u2019ve accomplished that in January!\n\nPart of this is due to bridging our US and UK teams together, which will ultimately result in faster response times and more visibility to players. A big part of this involves Spectrum, which we will be excited to roll out to you on the main site soon. We really think you will love the entire rework of our forums and chat systems, and we think you will really appreciate our plans for building a better presence with you in chat and on the forums.\n\n\nIT\/Operations\nIt\u2019s the beginning of the year so IT gets busy with a great deal of internal housekeeping chores like inventories, license renewals, and general cleanup and organizational tasks. One of our larger projects has been focused on expanding the bandwidth between offices to keep up with our increasing daily file transfer and build replication load. We\u2019re also working closely with the DevOps team to supply hardware and infrastructure to support the growth of the build system as well as the continued work on the patch reduction project.\n\n\nLiveOps\/DevOps\nThe team has been working hard on multi-region support, the bulk of our efforts going toward the network and server side of our services. We are very happy to report that this work will pay dividends very soon in game and there will be more detailed information on this soon as well. We\u2019ve also been working on our internal tools including the build system, all of which share the same goals of performance and stability improvements while keeping costs down.\n\nFoundry 42 UK\nGraphics\n\nThe Graphics Team has been predominantly focusing on various lighting improvements such as shadow quality and performance within interiors. The GPU cube-map capturing is almost complete and we\u2019re starting to write systems that maximize this tech so we can achieve truly dynamic lighting on planets and space stations. Considering how so much of our concept art makes heavy use of rectangular lights, we\u2019ve started work on area lights. While this may sound simple, area lights are actually an active area of research for many game studios and are incredibly difficult to get right (both in terms of looks and performance). Lastly, we\u2019re in the early stages of planning for a new and vastly more efficient particle system that eventually will replace the current one.\n\n\nProgramming\nIn the ongoing release work, we\u2019ve been getting the leaderboards in and the new \u201cMega Map\u201d implemented. Under the hood on the network side will be the proper networked serialised variables and the message queue rewrite. Other general work includes the FPS actor code refactor to make it more reliable and robust, the mission system, item pickup and put down improvements, and 3D minimap, amongst other things.\n\n\nVFX\nOver this past month, we\u2019ve been doing some internal data clean-up using the Asset Manager, which culls and consolidates particle\/material texture libraries, working on improving particle streaming to allow for better dynamic loading (basically freeing up memory resources) and pipeline documentation updates. There have also been high level key feature planning breakdowns of key features like Atmospheric Flight Model Effects (AFFX) such as engine trails, contrails, entry\/exit and Screen-Based Area-of-Interest which will trigger screen-based effects based on camera speed and\/or proximity to a specified area. Plus, we\u2019ve been experimenting with new assets to blow stuff up.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nThe QA team has hardly let up this New Year. We\u2019ve been continuing on Squadron 42 testing, extensively testing weapon balance changes and Star Marine bug fixes. We launched an investigation into the prevalent lag issue during Last Stand battles on Echo 11 and held a feedback session about gamepad controls. Most exciting though has been the first steps into the new \u201cMega Map.\u201d\n\nAs always big thanks to all the backers, especially the Evocati and those who frequent the PTU. Your help is always invaluable and very much appreciated!\n\n\nArt\nWe kicked off the new year by putting some new to be announced ships into concept and we are about to wrap up on a new Anvil design.\n\nIn other ship news, the Reclaimer is already deep into production with dedicated teams focusing on the exterior and interior. On the outside, the exterior mesh has gone through a cleanup pass and work has started on shaders. External parts such as thrusters are also close to complete. On the interior, a modular kit has been assembled for the habitation areas and the first room is nearing completion.\n\nThe Prospector team has been polishing the main LOD geometry for both the interior and exterior while cleaning up various sections to pass along to the other teams, so they can begin making it flight ready.\n\nWork\u2019s also moving forward on the MISC Razor. The artists have been adapting the concept mesh to work within the constraints set by animation which has resulted in a much sleeker more technical design whilst trying to maintain the key design elements of the original concept- the aggressive \u2018Formula 1\u2019 feel.\n\nOnto some big news, the team\u2019s been doing a technical and sanity pass over the S42 interior sections. Tackling collision and LODs have been the primary focus to make sure it\u2019s in a workable state for the designers. During this review, we\u2019re going over various elements: cleaning up and polishing pieces, refining and adding further details that we felt was lacking, and making changes to meshes that needed it. We also spent some time going over the materials, making adjustments and improvements where possible and adding blends to the primary materials of the ship.\n\nOur props team continued working on the medium ship components and dressing sets such as tools, medical props and some assets needed for the ship interiors for S42.\n\nDestructible props were introduced in 2.6.0 which meant we needed to create destroyed versions of a chunk of assets. This was the first iteration so was kept to the more obvious assets. Moving forward, destruction will be seen on a much larger scale and include a wider variety of prop types.\n\nFor our environments, we left some of the team polishing the 2.6.0 levels in preparation for the 2.6.1 release. This included adding more narrative assets that add a bit more history and character to the levels.\n\nOn the SQ42 front, the Shubin base is having a major push visually at the moment, since it\u2019s a massive part of the story, we\u2019re making sure it\u2019s the hero it deserves to be.\n\nWe are also allocating more resource to work on the growing universe. Soon we\u2019ll have four concept artists working out moons, nebulas and space stations, no small task! Work has begun on the first three surface outposts. These modular asset sets can be configured in multiple ways to give variation to the smaller settlements that will be scattered across the planet surfaces.\n\nWe\u2019re looking at improving our planet\u2019s material systems to give a better overall read all the way from space down to a meter-scale surface area. We\u2019re doing a lot of R&D into how we dynamically and realistically scatter assets (rocks, vegetation etc.) onto the surface of a planet in a way that retains our visual fidelity and realism goals.\n\nConversely, we are spending some R&D time into what we want to achieve visually from space! Despite being composed of nothing, it\u2019s very surprising how much there is to test and discuss with how we want the void between stars to feel and change as the player makes his way around a system.\n\n\nAudio\nLike many of the departments, the Audio used the New Year as an opportunity to go back and do some housecleaning. We reviewed all the ships to make sure that the audio for the older ships are up to the standard of the newer ships, cleaned up some bug fixes\/polish for the upcoming 2.6.1 release and continued to support the community team and work on promotional materials.\n\nOn a technical front, we\u2019ve also continued to revise and improve our dialogue pipeline and audio propagation system. A first pass at a Mix System was completed and we\u2019re thrilled to announce that S42 will have a full music logic set in place and we\u2019ve continued working on building ambience for some of the locations for the single player. There have been multiple improvements implemented in Star Marine from weapon sounds to dialogue which you will be able to hear soon.\n\n\nUI\nThis month, the UI team has been primarily focused on improving and expanding the new front-end that was released in 2.6 with in-game leaderboards and a new pause menu, as well as performing various bug fixes.\n\nWe have also begun planning and scheduling for large scale UI features that we\u2019d like to include in upcoming releases. For instance, we have been working closely with design in order to define the user-experience for purchasing & selling through the kiosk interfaces.\n\n\nAnimation\nThe animation team has expanded this month. We\u2019re very excited to welcome two new additions to the team and are ready to drop them in the deep end. We\u2019ve gotten some fantastic feedback on 2.6 and have set to bug fixing and improving animations for the next patch. We\u2019ve been improving fps assets across the board and making grenade throws more responsive.\n\nIn other ongoing tasks, we\u2019ve made improvements on weapon animations, specifically reload animations and have begun to previz and iterate on feedback for new weapons coming down the pipeline. We\u2019ve also been making progress on improving prone locomotion assets and providing assistance to the ATX PU team to get female mocap data implemented to the usable animations for Subsumption.\n\n\nDesign\nThe S42 Design team have been preparing for the incoming new Mission System that will replace large elements of the levels that had previously been implemented with Flowgraph. It will be a far more robust system for us that will limit any possible inconsistencies with designer setup. Also, as the Object Container Streaming System progresses, we are making sure that we maximise performance by splitting up the other chapters in the game into logical object containers.\n\nThe Live team have been very busy with bug fixes and implementing a scoring rebalance for Arena Commander and Star Marine. There have also been some AI improvements for Space Flight that have been implemented and continued work on detailing the Stanton map.\n\nThe Tech team are still very busy moving ships functionality into the new Item 2.0 system in preparation for a whole host of new gameplay opportunities.\n\nThe Systems Designers have been working on adding a lot more detail to the framework of the multi-crew Seat Actions in preparation for meeting with Chris in early Feb.\n\nFoundry 42 DE\nAI\n\nFor AI, 2017 started with a one-week summit in the Los Angeles studio: we went through several topics that will be important for the improvements we want to do during the new year.\n\nIn the past few weeks, we\u2019ve been getting the core functionalities of Subsumption into the Subsumption Mission System. The goal is to give designers the tools to create a larger variety of missions as quickly as possible. To achieve that, we have been implementing a way to reuse a piece of logic through the creation of \u201cfunctions.\u201d Functions can either have a \u201cglobal\u201d or \u201clocal\u201d (to one activity or one mission) scope and they dynamically generate a task that can be used as a regular Subsumption task.\n\nGoing through the Crusader missions and rebuilding them in this new tool allowed us to identify and reorganize the functionalities that are currently required by designers to create their own logic. Just to give you some idea of the work done, here\u2019s a description of some of the functionalities we recently worked on:\n\nAdded a task to enable\/disable markers in the environment for the mission owner\n\nAbility to spawn dynamic Action Areas in the environment and react to the events they generate\n\nSupport for the InteractiveObjects to correctly handle the callbacks sent to the mission system\n\nAdded support for tracking dynamic spawning of the entity and the ownership of the requests. This will allow us to allow entities to despawn only other entities they owned. Also it makes much easier for a mission to clean up the resources created.\n\nWe improved the debug draw functionalities of Subsumption and the mission system and also added network support for the mission log (This is a sort of personal storage for the logs of each mission)\n\nWe created a SimpleAudioComponent that allows the mission system to communicate directly with the mission owner\u2019s client\n\nWe added a functionality to allow the spawning system to filter and limit the spawning of entities to specified Action Areas\n\nWe added the basic support to spawn Subsumption Platform\/Layers (We will give you more details about this in the upcoming weeks)\n\nFor the character AI, we have continued the work for finalizing the changes in the Cover System and the Posture Manager to allow those systems data to be correctly exported inside Object Containers and used at runtime in non z-up environment. We\u2019ve also been prototyping AI Characters reacting to players bumping into them by making sure that the movement code understands when progress over the movement cannot be achieved due to the player interrupting the character movement. We also continued our refactoring of the spaceships flight control, we are moving towards removing some layers of complexity and make more direct use of the IFCS from the AI perspective. This will allow us to benefit from any improvements made for the player in a much more straightforward way.\n\n\nQuality Assurance\nDE QA like to refer to the month of January as the \u201ccatch-up\u201d month and used this time to tackle various test requests that required additional information as well as clearing out any Editor regression from Game-Dev that at the time was of a lower priority than regression in 2.6. We also spent a majority of January revamping our existing Editor checklists and documentation, as well as providing additional Editor training for testers in our UK office.\n\nAdditionally, we reviewed Star Marine feedback from our community and acted upon this feedback with test cases to provide additional information for our design team. The QA team also decided to review our existing sanity checks with Production and decide which were still useful to the team and which checks could be removed completely. We also used this opportunity to go over new bug tracking procedures with Production, so that we were all on the same page regarding labels that are used in our daily QA filters. Ivo Herzeg also kept us busy with changes made to the 1st person camera system, in which we were required to test all game modes. DE QA closed out the month with testing for Chris Bolte in order to track down a ZoneSystem crash that was plaguing our community in the latest 2.6 live release. We managed to finally reproduce this issue with 9 testers total (2 from DE and 7 from UK), which allowed Chris to narrow it down to being a logic error. Additional debugging was added to our Game-Dev branch and we will be attempting another playtest to reproduce this issue on Game-Dev, so that it can be finally fixed once and for all.\n\n\nCinematics\nPart of the Cinematics team is currently in a sprint to push towards a \u201cfinal\u201d look and feel for the conversation system that is used for talks between the player and NPCs (which the S42 campaign features a lot of).\n\nThis includes topics like:\n\nUI text placement and animation for dialogue choices\n\nSolving issues of: If, how and when to slow a player down running towards an NPC.\n\nHow to make \u201cgentle\u201d collisions between physics capsules when the player violates personal space by getting too close.\n\nHow to adjust recorded performances and manipulate the actor\u2019s Look or even Body pose to match for a changing player position. (we call that performance transformation)\n\nDynamic camera effects that kick in when the conversation is initialized both in a change of FOV and Depth of Field blur increasing.\n\nWe want our conversations to feel \u201cfilmic\u201d while still allowing the player freedom. Invoking a \u201ccinematic\u201d feel first and foremost means changing the lens to values that are more akin to how a film camera would depict a character. The engines FOV traditionally is calculated with a vertical FOV value. The current in-game on-foot FOV is at 55 which is equivalent to an extreme wide angle lens of approximately ~13mm (using 35mm film equivalent ARRI master prime lenses as a comparison). That kind of lens is bordering on fisheye lens territory. If the player gets close to a character using this kind of FOV it distorts faces, so what we are doing is gradually changing the FOV over a certain time down to 30 which is equivalent to a ~25mm wide angle portrait lens. We are finding this is a nice compromise of the faces revealing all of the awesome scanned detail by appearing big on screen while still allowing for a sense of orientation in regards to the background (if player decides to move during a conversation).\n\n\nEngine\nWork has started on our internal Solar system editor (SolEd), with a \u201ctop\/down\u201d universe view. We found that a custom editor extension became necessary due the massive scale of our solar system. It\u2019s now possible to drag and drop Object Containers containing planets, space station etc., and see in real-time planets and objects moving while zooming all the way from a galaxy view down to grains of dirt on a planet. Ongoing work continues on procedural objects distribution on planets, scattering of large rocks on moon\u2019s surfaces, initial passes of objects and vegetation blending with the planet terrain surface, improvements on particles distribution and vegetation \/ wind on a planetary scale. Initial passes on spawning Object Containers like small outposts on the planet surface, and initial work on adapting them to the environment with adjusting their parts to the terrain and blending the colors to make them more visually integrated like they were actually placed by Humans in the environment wrapped this month. And additional improvements have been added for large scale planet rendering like glossy surfaces and more artists controlled parameters.\n\nThere also has been effort towards reintroducing static code analysis as a mandatory part of the TryBuild system, Zone system fixes \/ optimizations, ongoing work on the new pak system for the patcher updates, and fixes and support for 2.6.1.\n\n\nTech Art\nThe Technical artists in Frankfurt have been busy supporting FPS features and weapons for 2.6. They improved the weapon IK grip setup, now almost all weapons are using the runtime IK grip which helps us to change left hand poses per weapon while keeping base animation the same. They also created new cVars for previsualizing and testing new weapons in the engine with all their functionality. On the Engine side, we are participating in R&D efforts to improve foot planting in game and we\u2019ve already started seeing good results.\n\n\nDesign\nThe Level Design team in Frankfurt is prototyping the modularity systems for Satellites, Surface Outposts and Space Station Interiors which is almost complete. Currently, the Environment Art team is providing us with greybox versions of the components that we will use to assemble the modular locations.\n\nWith our locations, the main goal is always to use them to complement upcoming systems, provide a base for future game play, as well as add to the feeling of a living, functional and realistic universe. This doesn\u2019t always mean that the gameplay related to a location will be available when we release the station template, rather we try to ensure that once said system\/gameplay becomes available we already have the location required. For this reason (and as seen on previous ATVs) we are continuing our work on the Truck Stop, Refinery and Cargo Station, the first design phase of these is complete and they have now been handed over to the Environment Art team.\n\nThe System Design guys have been refactoring our usable system to allow both AI and players to make use of the same objects at the same time (such as AI and player sitting at the same table, interacting with each other). We\u2019re also adding support for multiple actions to be performed while inside a usable and smoothly transitioning between these actions (character sitting at a table can be eating, talking, scratching his nose, sleeping with his head on the table etc.)\n\nThe Oxygen, Breathing & Stamina systems have started being implemented and soon we will have players begin to carry their own oxygen supplies or risk turning blue in the face. The system should handle everything from how the oxygen tank delivers breathable air to the helmet, to how the player breathes said air and how his body converts that into actual usable stamina. At the same time, all actions are being converted to consume this stamina, so you will want to keep your character supplied with oxygen if you want them to be capable of performing various actions.\n\nLanding and Take-off systems are also going into implementation mode as we are unifying Squadron 42 and PU mechanics. The system should easily handle everything from the more basic taking off in the PU to the fully cinematic experiences needed in S42. Basically we\u2019re implementing an air traffic control system that allows players to queue for landing permissions and makes sure that people don\u2019t block landing sites for everyone else.\n\nSmall additions were also made to the Mercenary and Bounty Hunter career designs and the systems needed for these. Customs are also receiving some design love as we are start to gate what the player can bring in legally and how smuggling things in high security areas works.\n\n\nVFX\nThe Frankfurt VFX team has been continuing to work with the programming team on the tools required to spawn various particles across the planets. One of the more recent additions has been the implementation of planetary wind. Due to the spherical nature of the planets, the wind had to be completely rewritten to work correctly across the surface of a planet. This will help to make the environments feel more alive, from blowing around smoke and dust to rustling the leaves on the vegetation.\n\n\nEnvironmental Art\nThe environment team here in Frankfurt has grown again with two new people joining the team this month. With the increased amount of environment artists, we\u2019re able to put even more effort into our procedural planet tech. We\u2019ve been recently building great looking assets for individual moons, as well as refining our procedural tech and tools for moons, full planets, and full systems. One key element of the planetary tech that we\u2019ve been focusing on is the procedural scattering system, which will allow us to procedurally scatter rocks, plants, trees and other elements across planets based on artist defined rules. While the tech is still in development, the first automated results are already promising and are improving every day.\n\nTurbulent\n\nSpectrum Alpha\nWe are working hard towards Spectrum\u2019s initial public alpha release alongside SC 2.6.1. We can\u2019t wait for you guys to get your hands on it with your Orgs. In its first incarnation, expect the web version of public and private chat, forums, search functionality as well as member presence and a decent mobile experience.\n\nThe Evocati and volunteer testers have been invaluable in providing initial feedback and bug reports (yeah, yeah we have those too!) on the PTU since December. Our weekly build process and direct contact with users have really helped us focus on the features and bug fixes that matter the most to those who use the tools. Once it is released to live, we will be continuously working to build out and improve Spectrum with your feedback.\n\nAfter the live release and stabilization phase, we plan on adding more community customization features and create dedicated mobile applications so Spectrum can follow you everywhere you go.\n\nWe will share more details about our roadmap once we get this first major release out of the way!\n\n\nSales\nComing off the holiday break, two promo competitions were introduced, a revamped Vanduul Swarm and the all new Pirate Swarm. These modes tested players\u2019 skills to the limit and if they were able to complete all waves of the challenge, they were awarded an aggressor badge to display their accomplishment. For a limited time, these successful pilots were also given the ability to purchase the Vanduul Glaive upon completing Vanduul Swarm and the new Pirate Caterpillar upon completing the Pirate Swarm.\n\nTo close out the month, the sleek Dragonfly Posters and the comfortable Squadron 42 Hoodies were put back on the merchandise store, but get them soon before they are gone!\n\nCommunity\n\n\nBroadcasts\nJanuary saw a number of changes to our community content. Around the Verse continues to be refined as we explore new ways to showcase progress without monopolizing too much of our developer\u2019s time. Our January Subscriber\u2019s Town Hall featured Chris Roberts, Erin Roberts, Tony Zurovec and Todd Papy. It was a rare opportunity to have all these important leads sitting and chatting in the same place. We also launched two new shows. Star Citizen Happy Hour is a way to involve fan broadcasters and CIG developers in a gameplay session and casual hangout with the community. Then there\u2019s our other new show focused on YOU. Citizens of the Stars highlights the amazing contributions you make to the Star Citizen experience. It also features \u2018Quantum Questions,\u2019 in which CIG developers answer your questions\u2026 as many as they can in two minutes! If there\u2019s one constant in our broadcast output, it\u2019s change. We\u2019ll continue to iterate throughout the rest of 2017 and beyond in an effort to bring you the best and most relevant content possible.\n\n\nEvents\nCommunity Managers Jared Huckaby and Tyler Witkin went to PAX South and attended the local Bar Citizen event in San Antonio. Opportunities to hang out and meet the backers are one of the best parts of our job, and the folks who turned out for this event were a stellar group, as usual. Remember that Bar Citizen events are 100% fan organized. You can see if there\u2019s one in your area and maybe even find help planning one at the fan website barcitizen.sc.\n\n\nThis Week in Star Citizen\nThe old Community Manager\u2019s Log and Schedule has evolved into a new, weekly front page post called This Week in Star Citizen. The post highlights what\u2019s happening each week, and provides a look at some of the content you may have missed from the Star Citizen community.\n\nFinally, testing continues on Spectrum, the upcoming replacement to our current forum and chat systems. You can join the testing now at ptu.cloudimperiumgames.com\/spectrum with new builds going out each week. We\u2019re excited to roll out the first official iteration of Spectrum in the near future. We\u2019ll continue to add intended features and iterate on it based on your feedback throughout the remainder of the year."},"links_count":0,"comment_count":70,"created_at":"2017-02-10T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"9 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-04-25 10:00:01","valid_relations":["images","links","translations"],"prev_id":15703,"next_id":15705}}