{"data":{"id":17036,"title":"Star Citizen Monthly Report: March 2019","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/17036-Star-Citizen-Monthly-Report-March-2019","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/17036","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/17036","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly 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all go across our studios at the moment, as devs from the UK, US, and Germany put the hours into getting Alpha 3.5 into the Persistent Universe. Naturally, the latest patch features heavily this month, but look a little closer and there are plenty of tasks for Alpha 3.6 and beyond being worked on to wet your whistles.\n\nLast week, we updated the public roadmap with content all the way up to Alpha 3.9, where we\u2019ll be flying Vultures to Crusader and beyond. If you missed the latest update, take a look, as progress for these new features will start appearing in your monthly reports soon enough.\n\n\nAI \u2013 Character\nWe start with Character AI, who spent the month making general improvements, firstly to combat behaviors to make it easier for the team to assign different tactics to different characters. This work happily fixed a few bugs with vision perception and cover selection too. Secondly, NPC locomotion saw the integration of the collision avoidance system into smooth locomotion, which now takes into consideration the edge of walkable navigation areas. Naturally, bug fixing, stability fixes, and optimizations were also done for Alpha 3.5.\n\nAI \u2013 Ships\nShip AI implemented new pilot skill levels to vary the agility of enemy ships and determine how they balance self-preservation and aggression. Improvements were also made to how non-player traffic behaves around landing zones.\n\nAI \u2013 Social\nThe Social AI Team finished the first pass of \u2018scooching\u2019, which made its monthly report debut last month. If you missed it, scooching enables a character to fluidly move from one action to another within a group of useables.\n\nDesign supported the set up of the bartender\/vendor character by providing necessary tech pieces where needed. Optimization started on usables, including the caching of usable entries and TPS query time-slicing.\nAnimation\nMarch saw Animation readying mission-giver Tecia Pacheco for her Alpha 3.5 debut and finishing the animation sets for Recco Battaglia and the ship dealers.\u202fThey also implemented new female emotes and brought the male versions up to the current quality standard, which included stopping a plague of different technical issues. Focus was also on two big-ticket items: developing the final jump system and the female playable character. Finally, the team worked on the combat AI system, adding new weapon options for enemies to use against the player.\n\nArt \u2013 Characters\nCharacter Art were one of the many teams collaborating on Alpha 3.5\u2019s facial customizer. This coincided with the adding of the female playable character into the game and creating new armors wearable by both sexes (which will continue into the foreseeable future). Tecia Pacheco\u2019s hair was tidied up before launch and the few non-Alpha-3.5-related hours were spent refining the hair creation pipeline.\nArt \u2013 Environment\nMany Environment Art devs devoted the month to Alpha 3.5, making quality-of-life improvements, bug fixing, and polishing assets. Several locations, including Hurston and Lorville, were refined and tweaked to give an overall improved visual experience. The ongoing planet tech development rolls on too, with current efforts becoming the foundation of wider improvements coming later in the year. The team are also looking into ways to better scale natural features like canyons, with first tests looking promising. The final touches were added to ArcCorp ahead of its big release, with huge strides made early in the month when Area18, Riker Spaceport, and the surrounding city received finalized textures, materials, and finishes. While the planet was \u2018content complete\u2019 a while ago, the last stages of development saw countless optimization tasks completed to make it good enough for players to explore. The final level of detail (LOD) tweaks were completed to enable the assets to perform well in-engine, along with other technical aspects like tweaking view distance ratios, altering vis-areas, and merging meshes. Art of distant buildings and advertising added the final touch to the city\u2019s vistas.\nArt \u2013 Tech\nTech Art worked on the user interface for Character Customizer v2, which will see the light of day in Alpha 3.6. While the current version gives users all the required functionality, the process can be thoroughly streamlined through a number of layout and functionality amends. These changes have been prototyped and are awaiting implementation by the Gameplay Team. Tasks towards extending the character creation \u2018DNA gene pool\u2019 were also completed, which will eventually increase the number of heads the user can choose from and blend together. While still being significantly fewer than the planned final amount, the enhanced pool will give players much greater variety compared to the nine heads per male and female available in Alpha 3.5. Alongside customization, they fixed a few weapon-related bugs for both dev builds and Alpha 3.5, such as wrongly-oriented attachments, broken or missing animations, and a tagging issue causing the player character to be assigned the wrong animations. They supported Weapon Art with rigging and engine setup for several upcoming releases and worked with Animation and AI Programming on the first implementation of the new usable system.\nAudio\nAlpha 3.5 features the new flight model, the development of which presented an unmissable opportunity to expand on the ship audio experience. Improvements include new sound effects for strain and vibration, afterburners, maneuvering thrusters, and atmospheric flight. They also include accurate point source sound emitters and general improvements to the overall design, implementation, and mix. Naturally, attention was given to ArcCorp and Area18, with new environmental dialogue, music, and sound effects implemented to contribute to the overall sense of a thriving metropolis. These include PA announcements, diegetic music, spot ambiance effects, dynamic advert audio, and systemic planetary ambiances. The team\u2019s work is again complemented by the brilliant ArcCorp music cue from composer Pedro Camacho. Audio was also produced for the Kastak Arms Coda pistol, Gemini S71 assault rifle, Xi\u2019an Kahix rocket launcher, and Banu Tachyon ship cannon. Finally for Audio, notable developments were made to the Foley system, including better footstep material recognition, redesigned depressurized footsteps, and varying footstep effects dependant on character heaviness and footwear. The Foley sound effect sync was improved when running too, as were collision sounds when rag-dolling.\nBackend Services\nThroughout the past month, Backend Services supported Alpha 3.5, fixed various bugs, and adjusted backend-supported features. On the main development front, great progress was made on the GIM rewrite, with the new matchmaker successfully tested internally. The GIM\u2019s internal match\/group management system also came to life. These changes are significant because, rather than being code existing inside the legacy GIM application, they are now individual and highly fault-tolerant services that can be scaled as the project develops. Another major change was the introduction of the variable service, which came with a surprisingly high volume and rate of data. One of the team\u2019s goals this month was to provide much needed insight and analytics on various types of data coming from the DGS. So, a new system was created to track the rate of individual DGSs along with information about specific variables, enabling the team to fine-tune how data is serialized and how often it\u2019s pushed to the backend. The first major part of the iCache has been completed and tested internally, too. The iCache is a highly distributed and fault-tolerant storage\/query engine that greatly out-performs the current pCache. It provides an indexing and query system that can be utilized by other services for specific and complex item queries. This system is important going forward, particularly as the Persistent Universe sees greater volumes of players and server meshing comes online.\nCommunity\nThe community celebrated St. Patrick\u2019s Day (or Stella Fortuna!) with a screenshot contest calling for in-game party pics. Plenty of outstanding images of memorable moments were received, but there were only three pots of gold to hand out \u2013 the lucky winners taking home a Constellation Phoenix Emerald, Mustang Delta, and Ursa Rover Fortuna. March saw the unveiling of the multi-crew explorer, the Corsair. Should any prospective pathfinders be unsure whether they want to sail the stars in Drake\u2019s latest, the recently released Q&A should help. Jump Point, the monthly subscriber-only magazine, took an even deeper dive into the Corsair\u2019s design process along with a behind-the-scenes look at the new character customizer, a Whitley\u2019s Guide on MISC\u2019s Reliant series, and more. Shouts of \u2018Triggerfish!\u2019 could be heard across the \u2018verse when we announced our first new merchandise offerings of 2019 on April 1st: The Scents of Star Citizen collection. Classic fragrances of the past meet the mysterious essence of the future in Quantum, an innovative cultivation that transcends space and time.\nContent \u2013 Vehicles\nWhile the Vehicle Content Team predominantly focused on the three MISC Reliant variants and continuing work on the 300 series, they found time to work with Animation on a better system for setting up character ship entry and exit animations. The also tackled a variety of vehicle bugs leading up to the release of Alpha 3.5.\nDesign\nDesign\u2019s focus throughout March was on Area18, which included adjusting the AI, usables, stores, and more. Tecia Pacheco was given a design pass, while a new team member was inaugurated with tasks to improve both the Emergency Communication Network (ECN) and NPC spoofing missions (where NPCs send out service beacons asking for help). Regarding the in-game economy, a system built to create a robust and modular representation of item variance was polished and is now ready when needed. Inventories were also added to all new locations, including the new Alpha 3.5 weapons and items created by the Weapons Team.\nDevOps\nThe culmination of this year\u2019s first publishing cycle was especially busy for DevOps. The team publish internal builds every day of every month for internal testing, but demand increases drastically when additional publishes are needed for the Evocati and PTU. As the game grows, so does the complexity of deployments and the reporting requirements, with this month seeing a 69% increase in build activity. Most of this is due to the \u2018feature streams\u2019 that the team have worked on for the past few months, which isolate features from each other during development to avoid collision.\nEngineering\nThe Engine Team supported Alpha 3.5 with extensive profiling, optimization, bug fixes, and improvements to help Sentry, the PU crash database, better analyze and catalog existing issues. Rendering wise, they continued work on Temporal Sample Antialiasing (TSAA) with general quality improvements that translate to less flickering and a sharper picture. They also adjusted the TSAA bicubic filter based on frame time to prevent the accumulation of ringing artifacts at high framerates. For hair, they added an experimental option for custom tangents, removed the temporary scatter model, moved the hair mask to variation map alpha, improved edge masking, and added card support for the hair physically-based rendering (PBR) shader. For planetary ground fog (currently scheduled for Alpha 3.6), they refined the proxy mesh tessellation and moved pre-tessellation to jobs, did the first ray marching test and implementation, refined modeling of the fog gradient over terrain, and spent time rectifying floating point precision issues. They also completed rendering support for CPU-accessible textures for RTT video comms calls and optimized shaders to avoided unnecessary resource creation (e.g in GPU skinning). The Initial ImGUI integration was completed and will be used to unify and improve the in-game profiling tools. System and module integration were added to avoid an unorganized collection of tools and a text\/tag searchable configuration system for registered tools (similar to visual code) was implemented. To better improve load times, the team created a new load time profiler to track file access (times accessed, data transfer, etc.), amended the IO scheduler for SSDs and HDDs to give faster load times and response, and vastly improved file access in the shader system to speed up initialization at start-up. In addition to the compile-time analysis tool developed last month, they finalized an add-in tool to generate optimal uber file sets and, as a result, reshuffled game uber files for even better compile times.\n\nWork also began on a physics debugger that will allow the team to record issues, play them back, freeze time, etc. to help understand and speed up fixing complex physics issues.\nFeatures \u2013 Gameplay\nThroughout March, most of the team dedicated their time to working with the Character Team on the customizer, including the design flow, user interface, and the implementation of the female playable character. The rest focused on implementing comms video streaming improvements. All of the team\u2019s work this month made it into the Alpha 3.5 build, so can be seen by anyone in the Persistent Universe.\nFeatures \u2013 Vehicles\nImprovements to gimbaled weapons were finished for Alpha 3.5 and the radar and scanning systems received a polish, including the implementation of focus angle and ping fire. Under-the-hood progress was also made with vehicle item port tech, specifically with the vehicle .xml migration to Data-Forge. March\u2019s final stretch was spent fixing game crashes and bugs for the upcoming release.\nGraphics\nAlongside visual tweaks and fixing stability issues for Alpha 3.5, the team better aligned the sun and shadows with fog in large spaces (such as hangars) and fixed a persistent glitch with indoor lights. For vid-comms and general render-to-texture, the teams fixed a few issues that were interfering with brightness along with intermittent cases where lights on holograms were disappearing. They also switched most holographic scenes over to a forward-shaded render pipeline to improve efficiency. Graphics also got in on the gas cloud feature by supporting Design, adding the ability to rotate tunnel pieces, and creating a more intelligent streaming system to enable them to lay out large sections of the game without running over the memory budget.\nLevel Design\nThe Level Design Team barreled on with Area18, fixing bugs and generally preparing it for its unveiling. This included a lot of playtesting and tweaking of the room-system, landing areas, transit system, and more.\nPlanning began for the\u202fupcoming procedural tool and next set of procedural space stations. Prototyping was done on cave layouts and potential gameplay was ideated in close cooperation with the Environment Art Team. There were also updates to Lorville, with the addition of small and medium hangars and a new transit line between Teasa Spaceport and the Central Business District (CBD).\nLighting\nLike many others, Lighting almost entirely dedicated their month to finalizing Area18, which required collaboration with a lot of other teams. Particularly, they worked with Props and Environment Art in the final push to raise the visual standard and unify the look across the wider landing zone. Performance is always a concern, so special attention was paid to ensuring the maximum lighting quality was achieved within the defined frame budgets. After lessons were learned during the development of Lorville, the team were able to optimize the new location\u2019s lighting far more efficiently. Aside from Alpha 3.5, Lighting had a hand in the development of the character customizer by providing a clean, high-quality lighting rig for the UI. They also supported the reworking of the Echo 11 Star Marine map, providing additional polish, optimization, and clean-up.\n\n\n\nNarrative\nIn March, Narrative worked with Design to identify the production nodes and manufacturing locations of all of Star Citizen\u2019s corporations for the expanding economy system. This led to a review of the item inventories of Stanton\u2019s shops to make sure stores were carrying items appropriate for their location. The team also worked on generating names for various vehicles, including the Ursa Rover Fortuna. Narrative filled Area18 with a variety of posters, ads, and props to flesh out the lore of Stanton\u2019s newest landing zone. They also worked with the Live Design Team to support mission content for Tecia Pacheco. Finally, Alpha 3.5 will also provide a first look at the new Banu language that is being developed, so keep an eye out for more info on that.\nPlayer Relations\nPlayer Relations were busy throughout March supporting the Evocati and players smash bugs in the PTU. Initially, they worked alongside the Evocati for several builds to test out the new flight model. \u202fOnce it was stable, they added Concierge and Subscribers to test out the other key features. Eventually, all backers were welcomed into the PTU before Alpha 3.5\u2019s wider release. \u201cWe say it every month, but we can\u2019t thank our volunteers enough for the wonderful efforts they put into helping us build this game (especially you Avocados!).\u201d\nProps\nAt the start of March, the Props Team took Area18\u2019s assets from the \u2018modeling complete\u2019 phase through to \u2018final art\u2019, which included the technical set up, LODs, prefab setup, and bug fixing.\u202fThey reached \u2018content complete\u2019 status half-way through the month before heading into the final polish pass.\u202fThe area\u2019s food carts were pushed a little further with branding and dressing prop variation, while the lighting was separated out to give the Lighting Team more control. Updates were also made to older street furniture to bring it up to standard and the team helped with the branding and signage assets used throughout the level. With persistent habs included in Alpha 3.5, a pass was completed to convert a whole host of props from static objects to interactive entities, while hand grip was set up to work with the player animations and additional physics set up. The team also took a pass at the Spectrum Unlimited kiosk, creating additional dressing, props, and magazines.\u202fThe month was rounded off with a final bug-fixing pass and, of course, turtles.\nQA\nQA\u2019s testing focus was on feature integration for the Alpha 3.5 branch.\u202fThey tested all the new content such as ArcCorp and its moons, Area18, the character customizer, female playable character, Origin 300i rework, and Reliant Variants. In addition, stability and performance testing ramped up in anticipation of the release and included daily performance captures to help narrow down and fix performance-related issues. The AI feature testers in Frankfurt worked hard to stay on top of the various issues that cropped up with the addition of new mission givers and changes to collision avoidance. The embedded tester for the Transit Team was kept busy debugging various low repro issues that seemed to be tied to server performance and caused issues such as players falling through floors and Lorville\u2019s trains not turning up. Memory corruption testing is currently ongoing to help track down crashes that occur randomly during normal gameplay. This testing is being done in the PTU using custom binaries provided by the Engine Team.\nShip Art\nLead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith completed the refactor of the Origin 300i and spent quite a bit of time getting the components modeled. He has now officially moved onto a new ship, which is currently in the whitebox phase. 3D Modeler Josh Coons continues his work on the Banu Defender and is working diligently to complete the greybox stage. Since everything on this ship is brand new and almost nothing is re-used from other ships, he is being assisted by Associate Vehicle Art Director Elwin Bachiller to ensure it\u2019s completed in time.\nSystem Design\nThe System Design Team finalized the current iteration of the no-fly zones around Area18 and ArcCorp, which required new features to be added to allow it to work at the scale required. Walla and Lyria both received their share of mining resources, with Walla getting unique Atacamite geode deposits. They also finalized their work on the unification of the vendor\/bartender AI, which will allow the same behavior to serve drinks at a bar and give players items from a shelf and weapons from a rack.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent supported the Alpha 3.5 features promotion, which highlighted character customization, ArcCorp, and the new flight model. They also supported St. Patrick\u2019s Day, which featured the new Ursa Rover Fortuna and a screenshot contest. The CMS backend migration continued and was deployed to the PTU (the changes will appear in the live environment within the next few weeks). Voice servers received an upgrade which will benefit from RTCP (data channel) improvements and enable active speaker detection in comms channels. The security of voice channels has also been improved. The Services Team continued working on video streams in comms channels in order to improve long-distance calls, too. Turbulent\u2019s upcoming Game Admin tool will support game designers as well as the Player Relations Team by providing key statistics as well as granular technical information on groups, lobbies, and voice channels. The design is now done and development has started on its first functionality, the general information display. Finally from Montreal, the Game Services Team continued working on the new framework that will impact all upcoming development of Star Citizen services. Thanks to this core modification, services including group, lobby, and voice channel will be more standardized and upcoming development milestones will be reached quicker.\nUI\nLast month, UI finalized the in-fiction advertisements and branding for ArcCorp and Area18. They progressed with the area map, including the ability to visually distinguish between different floors of an interior. As release day drew closer, they worked on various optimizations and bug-fixing.\nVehicles\nThis month, the Global Vehicle Team put the finishing touches to the Alpha 3.5 ships and steadily progressed with those beyond the latest release:\nThe largest sub-team is focused on the Origin 890 Jump, which has just completed the greybox stage and is now heading into the final art phase. Work is progressing on the Carrack, which now has the whole of the engineering section in the rear done to greybox and the habitation deck is only missing the captain\u2019s quarters to be greybox complete. The Vanguard series is heading to the final art stage, with the rear section and cockpit both receiving a pass. The exterior is up next. Greybox of the Banu Defender rolls on, while the Character Concept Team was called on to build a foundation for the Tevarin species that will be used to help design the Esperia Prowler.\nFinally, pre-production began on the P52 Merlin update, P72 Archimedes, and the Esperia Prowler.\nVFX\nThe VFX Team rolled out their recent GPU particle lighting changes, which includes a new optional specular shading model for particles. This multiplies the level of lighting the particle receives from the cube maps, causing it to sit within the environment more realistically. In the photo below, the left smoke effect uses the old lighting (without specular shading), while the right uses the new system. The team is currently looking at some of the older effects in the game and are reworking them to take advantage of the updated systems, such as the EMP, which was added some time ago and has since degraded due to issues with the old particle system. Regarding weapons, the team polished and optimized the new ballistic pistol and assault rifles and took the first pass at the Tachyon cannon; a brand-new weapon type that was in its R&D phase last month. On the ship side, the reworked 300i had a full VFX pass. Finally, as is usual in the run-up to a release, the team began their twice-weekly playtests, from which a fairly large \u2018snag list\u2019 was created and fixed.\nWeapons\nThe Weapon Art Team started work on the Apocalypse Arms Animus missile launcher, the Klaus & Werner Lumin SMG, and new upgrade levels for various ship weapons. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026","de_DE":"Im Moment l\u00e4uft alles in unseren Studios, denn Entwickler aus Gro\u00dfbritannien, den USA und Deutschland haben die Stunden damit verbracht, Alpha 3.5 ins Persistent Universe zu bringen. Nat\u00fcrlich bietet der neueste Patch diesen Monat viele Funktionen, aber schauen Sie etwas genauer hin und es gibt viele Aufgaben f\u00fcr Alpha 3.6 und dar\u00fcber hinaus, an denen gearbeitet wird, um Ihre Pfeifen zu benetzen.\n\nLetzte Woche haben wir die \u00f6ffentliche Roadmap mit Inhalten bis Alpha 3.9 aktualisiert, wo wir Geier nach Crusader und dar\u00fcber hinaus fliegen werden. Wenn Sie das letzte Update verpasst haben, werfen Sie einen Blick darauf, denn der Fortschritt bei diesen neuen Funktionen wird schon bald in Ihren Monatsberichten erscheinen.\nKI - Charakter\nWir beginnen mit der Charakter-KI, die den Monat damit verbrachte, allgemeine Verbesserungen vorzunehmen, zun\u00e4chst um das Verhalten zu bek\u00e4mpfen, um es dem Team zu erleichtern, verschiedenen Charakteren unterschiedliche Taktiken zuzuordnen. Diese Arbeit hat gl\u00fccklicherweise ein paar Fehler bei der Sehwahrnehmung und der Coverauswahl behoben. Zweitens wurde bei der NSC-Lokomotion das Kollisionsvermeidungssystem in eine reibungslose Lokomotion integriert, die nun den Rand begehbarer Navigationsbereiche ber\u00fccksichtigt. Nat\u00fcrlich wurden auch Bugfixes, Stabilit\u00e4tsfixes und Optimierungen f\u00fcr Alpha 3.5 durchgef\u00fchrt.\nKI - Schiffe\nDie SchiffskI implementierte neue Fertigkeiten f\u00fcr Piloten, um die Agilit\u00e4t feindlicher Schiffe zu variieren und zu bestimmen, wie sie Selbsterhaltung und Aggression ausbalancieren. Au\u00dferdem wurde das Verhalten des Nicht-Player-Verkehrs in den Landezonen verbessert.\nKI - Sozial\nDas Social AI Team beendete den ersten Durchgang von \"scooching\", das letzten Monat sein Deb\u00fct im Monatsbericht gab. Wenn du es verpasst hast, erm\u00f6glicht Scooching einem Charakter, innerhalb einer Gruppe von n\u00fctzlichen Gegenst\u00e4nden flie\u00dfend von einer Aktion zur anderen zu wechseln.\nDesign unterst\u00fctzte die Einrichtung des Barkeeper-\/Lieferantencharakters, indem es bei Bedarf die notwendigen technischen Teile zur Verf\u00fcgung stellte. Die Optimierung begann bei Usables, einschlie\u00dflich des Cachings von Usable-Eintr\u00e4gen und des TPS-Abfragezeitscheibens.\nAnimation\nIm M\u00e4rz bereitete Animation die Missionarin Tecia Pacheco f\u00fcr ihr Alpha 3.5-Deb\u00fct vor und beendete die Animationssets f\u00fcr Recco Battaglia und die Schiffsh\u00e4ndler.They implementierte auch neue weibliche Emotes und brachte die m\u00e4nnlichen Versionen auf den aktuellen Qualit\u00e4tsstandard, zu dem auch die Beendigung einer Plage mit verschiedenen technischen Problemen geh\u00f6rte. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt lag auf zwei Gro\u00dfprojekten: der Entwicklung des endg\u00fcltigen Sprungsystems und der weiblichen spielbaren Figur. Schlie\u00dflich arbeitete das Team an dem Kampf-KI-System und f\u00fcgte neue Waffenoptionen hinzu, die Feinde gegen den Spieler einsetzen konnten.\nKunst - Charaktere\nCharacter Art war eines der vielen Teams, die an dem Gesichts-Customizer von Alpha 3.5 arbeiteten. Dies fiel zeitlich zusammen mit der Hinzuf\u00fcgung des weiblichen spielbaren Charakters in das Spiel und der Schaffung neuer R\u00fcstungen, die von beiden Geschlechtern getragen werden k\u00f6nnen (was in absehbarer Zeit anhalten wird). Tecia Pacheco's Haare wurden vor der Markteinf\u00fchrung aufger\u00e4umt und die wenigen nicht mit Alpha-3,5 verbundenen Stunden mit der Verfeinerung der Haarkreationspipeline verbracht.\nKunst - Umwelt\nViele Entwickler von Environment Art widmeten den Monat Alpha 3.5, um die Lebensqualit\u00e4t zu verbessern, Fehler zu beheben und Verm\u00f6genswerte zu polieren. Mehrere Standorte, darunter Hurston und Lorville, wurden verfeinert und optimiert, um ein insgesamt verbessertes visuelles Erlebnis zu erm\u00f6glichen. Die laufende Entwicklung der Planetentechnologie geht ebenfalls weiter, wobei die aktuellen Bem\u00fchungen die Grundlage f\u00fcr weitere Verbesserungen im Laufe des Jahres bilden. Das Team untersucht auch M\u00f6glichkeiten, nat\u00fcrliche Merkmale wie Canyons besser zu skalieren, wobei erste Tests vielversprechend sind. Der letzte Schliff wurde ArcCorp vor seiner gro\u00dfen Ver\u00f6ffentlichung gegeben, mit riesigen Schritten Anfang des Monats, als Area18, Riker Spaceport und die umliegende Stadt endg\u00fcltige Texturen, Materialien und Oberfl\u00e4chen erhielten. W\u00e4hrend der Planet vor einiger Zeit \"content complete\" war, wurden in den letzten Entwicklungsstufen unz\u00e4hlige Optimierungsaufgaben abgeschlossen, um ihn f\u00fcr die Spieler gut genug zu machen. Die Feinabstimmung der Details (LOD) wurde abgeschlossen, damit die Anlagen gut funktionieren k\u00f6nnen, zusammen mit anderen technischen Aspekten wie dem Optimieren der Sichtweitenverh\u00e4ltnisse, dem \u00c4ndern von Visierbereichen und dem Zusammenf\u00fchren von Netzen. Die Kunst der fernen Geb\u00e4ude und die Werbung gaben den Blick auf die Stadt frei.\nKunst - Technik\nTech Art arbeitete an der Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che f\u00fcr Character Customizer v2, der in Alpha 3.6 das Licht der Welt erblicken wird. W\u00e4hrend die aktuelle Version den Benutzern alle erforderlichen Funktionen bietet, kann der Prozess durch eine Reihe von Layout- und Funktionserweiterungen grundlegend rationalisiert werden. Diese \u00c4nderungen wurden prototypisch umgesetzt und warten auf die Umsetzung durch das Gameplay-Team. Die Aufgaben zur Erweiterung der Charaktererstellung \"DNA-Genpool\" wurden ebenfalls abgeschlossen, was letztendlich die Anzahl der K\u00f6pfe erh\u00f6hen wird, aus denen der Benutzer ausw\u00e4hlen und verschmelzen kann. Der erweiterte Pool ist zwar immer noch deutlich kleiner als der geplante Endbetrag, bietet den Spielern aber eine viel gr\u00f6\u00dfere Vielfalt als die neun K\u00f6pfe pro Mann und Frau in Alpha 3.5. Neben der Anpassung beheben sie einige waffenbezogene Fehler f\u00fcr dev-Builds und Alpha 3.5, wie z.B. falsch orientierte Anh\u00e4nge, defekte oder fehlende Animationen und ein Tagging-Problem, bei dem der Spielercharakter mit den falschen Animationen versehen wurde. Sie unterst\u00fctzten Weapon Art bei Rigging und Engine Setup f\u00fcr mehrere kommende Releases und arbeiteten mit Animation und AI Programming an der ersten Implementierung des neuen verwendbaren Systems.\nAudio\nAlpha 3.5 pr\u00e4sentiert das neue Flugmodell, dessen Entwicklung eine un\u00fcbersehbare Gelegenheit bot, das Schiffs-Audioerlebnis zu erweitern. Zu den Verbesserungen geh\u00f6ren neue Soundeffekte f\u00fcr Dehnung und Vibration, Nachbrenner, Man\u00f6vriertriebwerke und Atmosph\u00e4renflug. Dazu geh\u00f6ren auch pr\u00e4zise Punktquellen-Soundemitter und allgemeine Verbesserungen des gesamten Designs, der Implementierung und des Mixes. Nat\u00fcrlich wurde ArcCorp und Area18 Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt, wobei neue Umweltdialoge, Musik und Soundeffekte implementiert wurden, die zum Gesamtbild einer florierenden Metropole beitragen. Dazu geh\u00f6ren PA-Ank\u00fcndigungen, diegetische Musik, Spot-Ambiance-Effekte, dynamisches Werbeaudio und systemische planetarische Atmosph\u00e4ren. Erg\u00e4nzt wird die Arbeit des Teams erneut durch den brillanten ArcCorp-Musik-Cue des Komponisten Pedro Camacho. Audio wurde auch f\u00fcr die Kastak Arms Coda Pistole, Gemini S71 Sturmgewehr, Xi'an Kahix Raketenwerfer und Banu Tachyon Schiffskanone produziert. Schlie\u00dflich f\u00fcr Audio, wurden bemerkenswerte Entwicklungen am Foley-System vorgenommen, einschlie\u00dflich einer besseren Materialerkennung, neu gestalteter druckloser Schritte und unterschiedlicher Schritteffekte, die von der Charakterst\u00e4rke und dem Schuhwerk abh\u00e4ngen. Die Foley-Soundeffektsynchronisation wurde auch beim Laufen verbessert, ebenso wie Kollisionsger\u00e4usche beim Rag-Dolling.\nBackend Services\nIm Laufe des letzten Monats unterst\u00fctzten die Backend Services Alpha 3.5, beendeten verschiedene Fehler und passten die Backend-f\u00e4higen Funktionen an. Auf der Hauptentwicklungsseite wurden gro\u00dfe Fortschritte bei der Neuschreibung des GIM gemacht, wobei der neue Matchmaker intern erfolgreich getestet wurde. Auch das interne Match-\/Gruppenmanagementsystem der GIM wurde zum Leben erweckt. Diese \u00c4nderungen sind insofern von Bedeutung, als es sich nicht mehr um Code handelt, der innerhalb der bestehenden GIM-Anwendung existiert, sondern um individuelle und hochgradig fehlertolerante Dienste, die im Laufe der Projektlaufzeit skaliert werden k\u00f6nnen. Eine weitere wichtige \u00c4nderung war die Einf\u00fchrung des variablen Dienstes, der mit einem \u00fcberraschend hohen Datenvolumen und einer \u00fcberraschend hohen Datenrate einherging. Eines der Ziele des Teams in diesem Monat war es, die dringend ben\u00f6tigten Einblicke und Analysen zu verschiedenen Arten von Daten aus dem DGS zu liefern. So wurde ein neues System geschaffen, um die Rate der einzelnen DGSs zusammen mit Informationen \u00fcber bestimmte Variablen zu verfolgen, so dass das Team die Art und Weise, wie die Daten serialisiert werden und wie oft sie an das Backend weitergeleitet werden, anpassen kann. Auch der erste gro\u00dfe Teil des iCache wurde fertiggestellt und intern getestet. Der iCache ist eine hochverteilte und fehlertolerante Speicher-\/Abfrage-Engine, die den aktuellen pCache deutlich \u00fcbertrifft. Es bietet ein Indexierungs- und Abfragesystem, das von anderen Diensten f\u00fcr spezifische und komplexe Elementabfragen genutzt werden kann. Dieses System ist in Zukunft wichtig, zumal das Persistent Universe gr\u00f6\u00dfere Mengen an Spielern sieht und die Serververnetzung online geht.\nCommunity\n\nDie Community feierte den St. Patrick's Day (oder Stella Fortuna!) mit einem Screenshot-Wettbewerb, bei dem Partyfotos im Spiel angefordert wurden. Viele herausragende Bilder von unvergesslichen Momenten wurden empfangen, aber es gab nur drei T\u00f6pfe Gold zu verteilen - die gl\u00fccklichen Gewinner nahmen einen Constellation Phoenix Emerald, Mustang Delta und Ursa Rover Fortuna mit nach Hause. Im M\u00e4rz wurde der Multi-Crew-Explorer, der Corsair, enth\u00fcllt. Sollten sich zuk\u00fcnftige Pfadfinder unsicher sein, ob sie die Sterne in Drake's latest segeln wollen, sollten die k\u00fcrzlich ver\u00f6ffentlichten Q&As helfen. Jump Point, das monatliche Abonnentenmagazin, tauchte noch tiefer in den Designprozess des Corsair ein, zusammen mit einem Blick hinter die Kulissen auf den neuen Charakter-Customizer, einen Whitley's Guide \u00fcber die MISC Reliant-Serie und vieles mehr. Schreie von \"Dr\u00fcckerfisch\" waren in der gesamten Strophe zu h\u00f6ren, als wir am 1. April unsere ersten neuen Warenangebote f\u00fcr 2019 ank\u00fcndigten: Die D\u00fcfte der Star Citizen Kollektion. Klassische D\u00fcfte der Vergangenheit treffen in Quantum auf die geheimnisvolle Essenz der Zukunft, eine innovative Kultivierung, die Raum und Zeit \u00fcberschreitet.\nInhalt - Fahrzeuge\nW\u00e4hrend sich das Vehicle Content Team haupts\u00e4chlich auf die drei MISC Reliant Varianten konzentrierte und die Arbeit an der 300er Serie fortsetzte, fanden sie Zeit, mit Animation an einem besseren System zur Einrichtung von Animationen f\u00fcr die Ein- und Ausfahrt von Charakterschiffen zu arbeiten. Dabei wurden auch eine Vielzahl von Fahrzeugfehlern bis zur Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Alpha 3.5 behoben.\nDesign\nDer Schwerpunkt des Designs lag im M\u00e4rz auf Area18, wozu auch die Anpassung der KI, der Nutzbarkeit, der Gesch\u00e4fte und mehr geh\u00f6rte. Tecia Pacheco erhielt einen Designpass, w\u00e4hrend ein neues Teammitglied mit Aufgaben zur Verbesserung der Notfallkommunikationsnetzwerke (ECN) und der NPC-Spoofing-Missionen (wo NSCs Servicebaken aussenden, die um Hilfe baten) eingeweiht wurde. Im Hinblick auf die In-Game-Wirtschaft wurde ein System zur Erstellung einer robusten und modularen Darstellung der Item-Varianz ausgefeilt und ist nun bei Bedarf einsatzbereit. Auch an allen neuen Standorten wurden Vorr\u00e4te angelegt, einschlie\u00dflich der neuen Alpha 3.5-Waffen und der vom Waffenteam erstellten Gegenst\u00e4nde.\nDevOps\nDer H\u00f6hepunkt des ersten Verlagszyklus in diesem Jahr war f\u00fcr DevOps besonders intensiv. Das Team ver\u00f6ffentlicht interne Builds jeden Tag im Monat f\u00fcr interne Tests, aber die Nachfrage steigt drastisch an, wenn zus\u00e4tzliche Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen f\u00fcr die Evocati und PTU ben\u00f6tigt werden. Mit dem Wachstum des Spiels steigt auch die Komplexit\u00e4t der Bereitstellungen und der Berichtsanforderungen, wobei in diesem Monat eine Steigerung der Build-Aktivit\u00e4t um 69% zu verzeichnen war. Das meiste davon ist auf die \"Feature Streams\" zur\u00fcckzuf\u00fchren, an denen das Team seit einigen Monaten arbeitet und die w\u00e4hrend der Entwicklung Features voneinander isolieren, um Kollisionen zu vermeiden.\nIngenieurwesen\nDas Engine Team unterst\u00fctzte Alpha 3.5 mit umfangreichen Profilen, Optimierungen, Bugfixes und Verbesserungen, um Sentry, der PU-Crash-Datenbank, zu helfen, bestehende Probleme besser zu analysieren und zu katalogisieren. Sie setzten die Arbeit an Temporal Sample Antialiasing (TSAA) mit allgemeinen Qualit\u00e4tsverbesserungen fort, die zu weniger Flackern und einem sch\u00e4rferen Bild f\u00fchren. Sie passten auch den TSAA-Bikubikfilter basierend auf der Rahmenzeit an, um die Ansammlung von Ringartefakten bei hohen Frameraten zu verhindern. F\u00fcr das Haar wurde eine experimentelle Option f\u00fcr benutzerdefinierte Tangenten hinzugef\u00fcgt, das tempor\u00e4re Scatter-Modell entfernt, die Haarmaske auf die Variationskarte Alpha verschoben, die Kantenmaskierung verbessert und die Kartenunterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr den physisch basierten Rendering (PBR)-Shader hinzugef\u00fcgt. F\u00fcr den planetarischen Bodennebel (derzeit f\u00fcr Alpha 3.6 geplant) verfeinerten sie die Proxy-Mesh-Tessellierung und verschoben die Pre-Tessellierung auf Jobs, f\u00fchrten den ersten Ray-Marching-Test und die Implementierung durch, verfeinerten die Modellierung des Nebelgradienten \u00fcber dem Gel\u00e4nde und verbrachten Zeit damit, Gleitkomma-Pr\u00e4zisionsprobleme zu korrigieren. Sie vervollst\u00e4ndigten auch die Rendering-Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr CPU-zug\u00e4ngliche Texturen f\u00fcr RTT-Video-Kommandos und optimierte Shader, um unn\u00f6tige Ressourcenbildung zu vermeiden (z.B. beim GPU-Skinning). Die erste ImGUI-Integration wurde abgeschlossen und wird zur Vereinheitlichung und Verbesserung der In-Game-Profiling-Tools verwendet. Die System- und Modulintegration wurde hinzugef\u00fcgt, um eine unorganisierte Sammlung von Tools zu vermeiden, und es wurde ein Text\/Tag-suchbares Konfigurationssystem f\u00fcr registrierte Tools (\u00e4hnlich dem visuellen Code) implementiert. Um die Ladezeiten besser zu verbessern, entwickelte das Team einen neuen Ladezeit-Profiler zur Verfolgung des Dateizugriffs (Zugriffszeiten, Daten\u00fcbertragung usw.), \u00e4nderte den IO-Scheduler f\u00fcr SSDs und HDDs, um schnellere Ladezeiten und Reaktionen zu erm\u00f6glichen, und verbesserte den Dateizugriff im Shader-System, um die Initialisierung beim Start zu beschleunigen. Zus\u00e4tzlich zu dem im letzten Monat entwickelten Tool zur Kompilierungszeitanalyse wurde ein Add-In-Tool fertiggestellt, um optimale \u00dcber-Dateisets zu generieren und damit die Spiel\u00fcberdateien f\u00fcr noch bessere Kompilierungszeiten neu zu mischen.\nDie Arbeit begann auch mit einem Physik-Debugger, der es dem Team erm\u00f6glicht, Probleme aufzuzeichnen, abzuspielen, die Zeit einzufrieren usw., um komplexe physikalische Probleme zu verstehen und zu beschleunigen.\nFunktionen - Gameplay\nDen ganzen M\u00e4rz \u00fcber widmete der Gro\u00dfteil des Teams seine Zeit der Arbeit mit dem Charakter-Team am Customizer, einschlie\u00dflich des Designflows, der Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che und der Implementierung des weiblichen spielbaren Charakters. Der Rest konzentrierte sich auf die Implementierung von Verbesserungen beim Comms-Video-Streaming. Die gesamte Arbeit des Teams in diesem Monat hat es in den Alpha 3.5 Build geschafft, so dass es f\u00fcr jeden im Persistent Universe sichtbar ist.\nMerkmale - Fahrzeuge\nVerbesserungen an kardanischen Waffen wurden f\u00fcr Alpha 3.5 abgeschlossen und die Radar- und Scansysteme erhielten eine Politur, einschlie\u00dflich der Implementierung von Fokuswinkel und Ping-Feuer. Auch bei der Port-Technologie f\u00fcr Fahrzeugartikel wurden Fortschritte erzielt, insbesondere bei der Migration von vehicle.xml nach Data-Forge. Die letzte Etappe im M\u00e4rz war die Behebung von Spielabbr\u00fcchen und Fehlern f\u00fcr die kommende Version.\nGrafiken\nNeben visuellen Optimierungen und der Behebung von Stabilit\u00e4tsproblemen f\u00fcr Alpha 3.5 richtete das Team Sonne und Schatten bei Nebel in gro\u00dfen R\u00e4umen (z.B. Hangars) besser aus und behebt eine anhaltende St\u00f6rung bei Innenbeleuchtung. F\u00fcr Videokompositionen und allgemeine Render-zu-Textur beheben die Teams einige Probleme, die die Helligkeit st\u00f6rten, sowie intermittierende F\u00e4lle, in denen Lichter auf Hologrammen verschwinden. Sie haben auch die meisten holographischen Szenen auf eine vorw\u00e4rts gerichtete Render-Pipeline umgestellt, um die Effizienz zu verbessern. Die Grafik hat auch die Gaswolkenfunktion genutzt, indem sie Design unterst\u00fctzt, die M\u00f6glichkeit hinzugef\u00fcgt hat, Tunnelst\u00fccke zu drehen, und ein intelligenteres Streaming-System geschaffen hat, das es ihnen erm\u00f6glicht, gro\u00dfe Teile des Spiels zu gestalten, ohne das Speicherbudget zu \u00fcberschreiten.\nLeveldesign\nDas Level Design Team st\u00fcrzte sich auf Area18, behebt Fehler und bereitet sie im Allgemeinen auf ihre Enth\u00fcllung vor. Dazu geh\u00f6rten viele Spieletests und Optimierungen des Raumsystems, der Landepl\u00e4tze, des Verkehrssystems und vieles mehr.\nDie Planung f\u00fcr das Verfahrenswerkzeug the\u202fupcoming und den n\u00e4chsten Satz von verfahrenstechnischen Raumstationen begann. Das Prototyping erfolgte auf H\u00f6hlenanlagen und das m\u00f6gliche Gameplay wurde in enger Zusammenarbeit mit dem Environment Art Team entwickelt. Auch Lorville wurde aktualisiert, mit kleinen und mittleren Hangars und einer neuen Transitlinie zwischen Teasa Spaceport und dem Central Business District (CBD).\nBeleuchtung\nWie viele andere auch, widmete Lighting seinen Monat fast ausschlie\u00dflich dem Abschluss von Area18, was die Zusammenarbeit mit vielen anderen Teams erforderte. Insbesondere arbeiteten sie im letzten Schritt mit Requisiten und Umweltkunst zusammen, um den visuellen Standard zu erh\u00f6hen und den Look \u00fcber die gesamte Landezone hinweg zu vereinheitlichen. Die Leistung ist immer ein Anliegen, daher wurde besonderes Augenmerk darauf gelegt, dass die maximale Lichtqualit\u00e4t innerhalb der definierten Rahmenbudgets erreicht wird. Nachdem bei der Entwicklung von Lorville Erfahrungen gesammelt wurden, konnte das Team die Beleuchtung des neuen Standortes wesentlich effizienter optimieren. Neben Alpha 3.5 war Lighting an der Entwicklung des Charakter-Customizers beteiligt, indem es ein sauberes, hochwertiges Lichtrigg f\u00fcr die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che bereitstellte. Sie unterst\u00fctzten auch die \u00dcberarbeitung der Echo 11 Star Marine Map, die zus\u00e4tzliche Politur, Optimierung und Bereinigung erm\u00f6glicht.\n\n\nNarrativ\nIm M\u00e4rz arbeitete Narrative mit Design zusammen, um die Produktionsknoten und Produktionsstandorte aller Star Citizen's Unternehmen f\u00fcr das expandierende Wirtschaftssystem zu identifizieren. Dies f\u00fchrte zu einer \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung der Artikelbest\u00e4nde der Stanton-L\u00e4den, um sicherzustellen, dass die Gesch\u00e4fte die f\u00fcr ihren Standort geeigneten Artikel f\u00fchren. Das Team arbeitete auch daran, Namen f\u00fcr verschiedene Fahrzeuge zu generieren, darunter den Ursa Rover Fortuna. Narrative f\u00fcllte Area18 mit einer Vielzahl von Postern, Anzeigen und Requisiten, um die Geschichte der neuesten Landezone von Stanton zu veranschaulichen. Sie arbeiteten auch mit dem Live Design Team zusammen, um den Mission Content f\u00fcr Tecia Pacheco zu unterst\u00fctzen. Schlie\u00dflich wird Alpha 3.5 auch einen ersten Blick auf die neue Sprache Banu werfen, die gerade entwickelt wird, also haltet Ausschau nach weiteren Informationen dar\u00fcber.\n\nSpielerbeziehungen\nDie Spielerbeziehungen waren den ganzen M\u00e4rz \u00fcber sehr intensiv, unterst\u00fctzten die Evocati und die Spieler zerschlagen Fehler in der PTU. Zun\u00e4chst arbeiteten sie zusammen mit der Evocati mehrere Bauten lang daran, das neue Flugmodell zu testen. Once war es stabil, sie f\u00fcgten Concierge und Abonnenten hinzu, um die anderen wichtigen Funktionen zu testen. Schlie\u00dflich wurden alle Geldgeber vor dem gr\u00f6\u00dferen Release von Alpha 3.5 in der PTU begr\u00fc\u00dft. \"Wir sagen es jeden Monat, aber wir k\u00f6nnen unseren Freiwilligen nicht genug f\u00fcr die wunderbaren Bem\u00fchungen danken, die sie unternommen haben, um uns beim Bau dieses Spiels zu helfen (besonders euch Avocados!).\"\nRequisiten\nAnfang M\u00e4rz brachte das Requisitenteam die Assets von Area18 von der Phase der \"Modellierung komplett\" bis hin zur \"finalen Kunst\", die das technische Setup, die LODs, das Prefab-Setup und die Fehlerbehebung umfasste.They erreichte Mitte des Monats den Status \"Content Complete\", bevor es in den letzten Durchgang ging.Die Speisewagen des \u202fThe-Bereichs wurden mit Branding und Requisitenvariation etwas weiter geschoben, w\u00e4hrend die Beleuchtung getrennt wurde, um dem Lighting Team mehr Kontrolle zu geben. Auch \u00e4ltere Stadtm\u00f6bel wurden aktualisiert, um sie auf den neuesten Stand zu bringen, und das Team half bei den Branding- und Beschilderungselementen, die im gesamten Stockwerk verwendet wurden. Da in Alpha 3.5 hartn\u00e4ckige Gewohnheiten enthalten sind, wurde ein Pass erstellt, um eine ganze Reihe von Requisiten von statischen Objekten in interaktive Objekte umzuwandeln, w\u00e4hrend der Handgriff so eingerichtet wurde, dass er mit den Spieleranimationen und zus\u00e4tzlichen physikalischen Einstellungen arbeitet. Das Team nahm auch am Spectrum Unlimited Kiosk einen Pass und kreierte zus\u00e4tzliche Dressings, Requisiten und Magazine.Der Monat \u202fThe wurde mit einem letzten Bugfixing-Pass und nat\u00fcrlich mit Schildkr\u00f6ten abgerundet.\n\nQA\nDer Testfokus der Qualit\u00e4tssicherung lag auf der Funktionsintegration f\u00fcr den Alpha 3.5-Zweig.They testete alle neuen Inhalte wie ArcCorp und seine Monde, Area18, den Charakter-Customizer, den weiblichen spielbaren Charakter, Origin 300i Rework und Reliant Variants. Dar\u00fcber hinaus wurden die Stabilit\u00e4ts- und Leistungstests in Erwartung des Releases beschleunigt und mit t\u00e4glichen Leistungsaufzeichnungen versehen, um leistungsbezogene Probleme einzugrenzen und zu beheben. Die KI-Feature-Tester in Frankfurt arbeiteten hart daran, die verschiedenen Probleme im Auge zu behalten, die sich durch die Aufnahme neuer Missionsgeber und \u00c4nderungen bei der Kollisionsvermeidung ergaben. Der eingebettete Tester f\u00fcr das Transit-Team war damit besch\u00e4ftigt, verschiedene Probleme mit niedriger Reproduktion zu debuggen, die an die Serverleistung gebunden zu sein schienen und Probleme verursachten, wie z.B. das Herunterfallen von Spielern durch die B\u00f6den und das Nichtauftauchen von Lorvilles Z\u00fcgen. Die Pr\u00fcfung der Speicher-Korruption wird derzeit durchgef\u00fchrt, um Abst\u00fcrze aufzusp\u00fcren, die w\u00e4hrend des normalen Spielablaufs zuf\u00e4llig auftreten. Diese Tests werden in der PTU mit Hilfe von benutzerdefinierten Bin\u00e4rdateien durchgef\u00fchrt, die vom Motor-Team bereitgestellt werden.\nSchiffskunst\nChris Smith, Lead Vehicle Artist, vervollst\u00e4ndigte den Refactor des Origin 300i und verbrachte einige Zeit damit, die Komponenten zu modellieren. Er ist nun offiziell auf ein neues Schiff umgezogen, das sich derzeit in der Whitebox-Phase befindet. Der 3D-Modellierer Josh Coons setzt seine Arbeit am Banu Defender fort und arbeitet flei\u00dfig daran, die Greybox-Phase abzuschlie\u00dfen. Da alles auf diesem Schiff brandneu ist und fast nichts von anderen Schiffen wiederverwendet wird, wird er von Associate Vehicle Art Director Elwin Bachiller unterst\u00fctzt, um sicherzustellen, dass es rechtzeitig fertig wird.\nSystemdesign\nDas System Design Team finalisierte die aktuelle Iteration der Flugverbotszonen um Area18 und ArcCorp, die neue Funktionen erforderten, damit sie in dem erforderlichen Umfang arbeiten konnten. Walla und Lyria erhielten beide ihren Anteil an den Bergbau-Ressourcen, wobei Walla einzigartige Atacamit-Geodenvorkommen erhielt. Sie haben auch ihre Arbeit an der Vereinheitlichung der Vendor\/Barder-KI abgeschlossen, die es dem gleichen Verhalten erm\u00f6glicht, Getr\u00e4nke an einer Bar zu servieren und Spielern Gegenst\u00e4nde aus einem Regal und Waffen aus einem Regal zu geben.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent unterst\u00fctzte die Alpha 3.5 Features Promotion, die die Charakteranpassung, ArcCorp und das neue Flugmodell hervorhob. Sie unterst\u00fctzten auch den St. Patrick's Day, der den neuen Ursa Rover Fortuna und einen Screenshot-Wettbewerb vorstellte. Die CMS-Backend-Migration wurde fortgesetzt und in die PTU implementiert (die \u00c4nderungen werden in den n\u00e4chsten Wochen in der Live-Umgebung erscheinen). Sprachserver erhielten ein Upgrade, das von RTCP-Verbesserungen (Datenkanal) profitiert und die aktive Sprechererkennung in Kommunikationskan\u00e4len erm\u00f6glicht. Auch die Sicherheit der Sprachkan\u00e4le wurde verbessert. Das Serviceteam arbeitete weiterhin an Video-Streams in Kommunikationskan\u00e4len, um auch Ferngespr\u00e4che zu verbessern. Turbulent's kommendes Game Admin-Tool wird sowohl Spieleautoren als auch das Player Relations Team unterst\u00fctzen, indem es wichtige Statistiken sowie detaillierte technische Informationen \u00fcber Gruppen, Lobbys und Sprachkan\u00e4le liefert. Das Design ist nun fertig und die Entwicklung der ersten Funktionalit\u00e4t, der allgemeinen Informationsdarstellung, hat begonnen. Schlie\u00dflich arbeitete das Game Services Team in Montreal weiter an dem neuen Framework, das sich auf alle anstehenden Entwicklungen von Star Citizen Services auswirken wird. Dank dieser Kernmodifikation werden die Dienste wie Gruppe, Lobby und Sprachkanal einheitlicher und die anstehenden Entwicklungsmeilensteine schneller erreicht.\nUI\nIm vergangenen Monat finalisierte die UI die fiktiven Anzeigen und das Branding f\u00fcr ArcCorp und Area18. Sie haben sich mit der Lagekarte weiterentwickelt, einschlie\u00dflich der M\u00f6glichkeit, verschiedene Stockwerke eines Innenraums visuell zu unterscheiden. Als der Ver\u00f6ffentlichungstag n\u00e4her r\u00fcckte, arbeiteten sie an verschiedenen Optimierungen und Bugfixes.\nFahrzeuge\nIn diesem Monat hat das Global Vehicle Team den letzten Schliff f\u00fcr die Alpha 3.5 Schiffe vorgenommen und diese \u00fcber die neueste Version hinaus kontinuierlich weiterentwickelt:\nDas gr\u00f6\u00dfte Subteam konzentriert sich auf den Origin 890 Jump, der gerade die Graybox-Phase abgeschlossen hat und nun in die finale Kunstphase geht. Die Arbeiten am Carrack, bei dem nun der gesamte Technikbereich im Heck mit Greybox ausgef\u00fchrt ist und das Wohndeck nur noch das Kapit\u00e4nsquartier als Greybox komplett fehlt, schreiten voran. Die Vanguard-Serie steuert auf die letzte Kunststufe zu, wobei der hintere Teil und das Cockpit beide einen Pass erhalten. Das \u00c4u\u00dfere ist als n\u00e4chstes dran. Greybox des Banu Defender rollt weiter, w\u00e4hrend das Character Concept Team aufgefordert wurde, eine Grundlage f\u00fcr die Tevarin-Arten zu schaffen, die bei der Entwicklung des Esperia Prowler helfen wird.\nSchlie\u00dflich begann die Vorproduktion f\u00fcr das Update der P52 Merlin, der P72 Archimedes und des Esperia Prowler.\nVFX\nDas VFX-Team f\u00fchrte die j\u00fcngsten \u00c4nderungen der GPU-Partikelbeleuchtung ein, die ein neues optionales Modell f\u00fcr die Spiegelung von Partikeln beinhalten. Dies multipliziert das Beleuchtungsniveau, das die Partikel von den W\u00fcrfelkarten erhalten, so dass sie realistischer in der Umgebung sitzen. Auf dem Foto unten verwendet der linke Raucheffekt die alte Beleuchtung (ohne Spiegelung), w\u00e4hrend der rechte das neue System verwendet. Das Team untersucht derzeit einige der \u00e4lteren Effekte im Spiel und \u00fcberarbeitet sie, um die Vorteile der aktualisierten Systeme zu nutzen, wie z.B. das EMP, das vor einiger Zeit hinzugef\u00fcgt wurde und seitdem aufgrund von Problemen mit dem alten Partikelsystem beeintr\u00e4chtigt wurde. Im Bereich der Waffen polierte und optimierte das Team die neuen ballistischen Pistolen und Sturmgewehre und nahm den ersten Durchgang an der Tachyon-Kanone, einem brandneuen Waffentyp, der sich letzten Monat in der Entwicklungsphase befand. Auf der Schiffsseite hatte der \u00fcberarbeitete 300i einen vollen VFX-Pass. Schlie\u00dflich begann das Team, wie im Vorfeld einer Ver\u00f6ffentlichung \u00fcblich, seine zweimal w\u00f6chentlichen Spieltests, aus denen eine ziemlich gro\u00dfe \"Snag List\" erstellt und behoben wurde.\nWaffen\nDas Weapon Art Team begann mit der Arbeit am Apocalypse Arms Animus Raketenwerfer, der Klaus & Werner Lumin SMG und neuen Upgrade-Levels f\u00fcr verschiedene Schiffswaffen. WIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT.....","zh_CN":"It\u2019s all go across our studios at the moment, as devs from the UK, US, and Germany put the hours into getting Alpha 3.5 into the Persistent Universe. Naturally, the latest patch features heavily this month, but look a little closer and there are plenty of tasks for Alpha 3.6 and beyond being worked on to wet your whistles.\n\nLast week, we updated the public roadmap with content all the way up to Alpha 3.9, where we\u2019ll be flying Vultures to Crusader and beyond. If you missed the latest update, take a look, as progress for these new features will start appearing in your monthly reports soon enough.\n\n\nAI \u2013 Character\nWe start with Character AI, who spent the month making general improvements, firstly to combat behaviors to make it easier for the team to assign different tactics to different characters. This work happily fixed a few bugs with vision perception and cover selection too. Secondly, NPC locomotion saw the integration of the collision avoidance system into smooth locomotion, which now takes into consideration the edge of walkable navigation areas. Naturally, bug fixing, stability fixes, and optimizations were also done for Alpha 3.5.\n\nAI \u2013 Ships\nShip AI implemented new pilot skill levels to vary the agility of enemy ships and determine how they balance self-preservation and aggression. Improvements were also made to how non-player traffic behaves around landing zones.\n\nAI \u2013 Social\nThe Social AI Team finished the first pass of \u2018scooching\u2019, which made its monthly report debut last month. If you missed it, scooching enables a character to fluidly move from one action to another within a group of useables.\n\nDesign supported the set up of the bartender\/vendor character by providing necessary tech pieces where needed. Optimization started on usables, including the caching of usable entries and TPS query time-slicing.\nAnimation\nMarch saw Animation readying mission-giver Tecia Pacheco for her Alpha 3.5 debut and finishing the animation sets for Recco Battaglia and the ship dealers.\u202fThey also implemented new female emotes and brought the male versions up to the current quality standard, which included stopping a plague of different technical issues. Focus was also on two big-ticket items: developing the final jump system and the female playable character. Finally, the team worked on the combat AI system, adding new weapon options for enemies to use against the player.\n\nArt \u2013 Characters\nCharacter Art were one of the many teams collaborating on Alpha 3.5\u2019s facial customizer. This coincided with the adding of the female playable character into the game and creating new armors wearable by both sexes (which will continue into the foreseeable future). Tecia Pacheco\u2019s hair was tidied up before launch and the few non-Alpha-3.5-related hours were spent refining the hair creation pipeline.\nArt \u2013 Environment\nMany Environment Art devs devoted the month to Alpha 3.5, making quality-of-life improvements, bug fixing, and polishing assets. Several locations, including Hurston and Lorville, were refined and tweaked to give an overall improved visual experience. The ongoing planet tech development rolls on too, with current efforts becoming the foundation of wider improvements coming later in the year. The team are also looking into ways to better scale natural features like canyons, with first tests looking promising. The final touches were added to ArcCorp ahead of its big release, with huge strides made early in the month when Area18, Riker Spaceport, and the surrounding city received finalized textures, materials, and finishes. While the planet was \u2018content complete\u2019 a while ago, the last stages of development saw countless optimization tasks completed to make it good enough for players to explore. The final level of detail (LOD) tweaks were completed to enable the assets to perform well in-engine, along with other technical aspects like tweaking view distance ratios, altering vis-areas, and merging meshes. Art of distant buildings and advertising added the final touch to the city\u2019s vistas.\nArt \u2013 Tech\nTech Art worked on the user interface for Character Customizer v2, which will see the light of day in Alpha 3.6. While the current version gives users all the required functionality, the process can be thoroughly streamlined through a number of layout and functionality amends. These changes have been prototyped and are awaiting implementation by the Gameplay Team. Tasks towards extending the character creation \u2018DNA gene pool\u2019 were also completed, which will eventually increase the number of heads the user can choose from and blend together. While still being significantly fewer than the planned final amount, the enhanced pool will give players much greater variety compared to the nine heads per male and female available in Alpha 3.5. Alongside customization, they fixed a few weapon-related bugs for both dev builds and Alpha 3.5, such as wrongly-oriented attachments, broken or missing animations, and a tagging issue causing the player character to be assigned the wrong animations. They supported Weapon Art with rigging and engine setup for several upcoming releases and worked with Animation and AI Programming on the first implementation of the new usable system.\nAudio\nAlpha 3.5 features the new flight model, the development of which presented an unmissable opportunity to expand on the ship audio experience. Improvements include new sound effects for strain and vibration, afterburners, maneuvering thrusters, and atmospheric flight. They also include accurate point source sound emitters and general improvements to the overall design, implementation, and mix. Naturally, attention was given to ArcCorp and Area18, with new environmental dialogue, music, and sound effects implemented to contribute to the overall sense of a thriving metropolis. These include PA announcements, diegetic music, spot ambiance effects, dynamic advert audio, and systemic planetary ambiances. The team\u2019s work is again complemented by the brilliant ArcCorp music cue from composer Pedro Camacho. Audio was also produced for the Kastak Arms Coda pistol, Gemini S71 assault rifle, Xi\u2019an Kahix rocket launcher, and Banu Tachyon ship cannon. Finally for Audio, notable developments were made to the Foley system, including better footstep material recognition, redesigned depressurized footsteps, and varying footstep effects dependant on character heaviness and footwear. The Foley sound effect sync was improved when running too, as were collision sounds when rag-dolling.\nBackend Services\nThroughout the past month, Backend Services supported Alpha 3.5, fixed various bugs, and adjusted backend-supported features. On the main development front, great progress was made on the GIM rewrite, with the new matchmaker successfully tested internally. The GIM\u2019s internal match\/group management system also came to life. These changes are significant because, rather than being code existing inside the legacy GIM application, they are now individual and highly fault-tolerant services that can be scaled as the project develops. Another major change was the introduction of the variable service, which came with a surprisingly high volume and rate of data. One of the team\u2019s goals this month was to provide much needed insight and analytics on various types of data coming from the DGS. So, a new system was created to track the rate of individual DGSs along with information about specific variables, enabling the team to fine-tune how data is serialized and how often it\u2019s pushed to the backend. The first major part of the iCache has been completed and tested internally, too. The iCache is a highly distributed and fault-tolerant storage\/query engine that greatly out-performs the current pCache. It provides an indexing and query system that can be utilized by other services for specific and complex item queries. This system is important going forward, particularly as the Persistent Universe sees greater volumes of players and server meshing comes online.\nCommunity\nThe community celebrated St. Patrick\u2019s Day (or Stella Fortuna!) with a screenshot contest calling for in-game party pics. Plenty of outstanding images of memorable moments were received, but there were only three pots of gold to hand out \u2013 the lucky winners taking home a Constellation Phoenix Emerald, Mustang Delta, and Ursa Rover Fortuna. March saw the unveiling of the multi-crew explorer, the Corsair. Should any prospective pathfinders be unsure whether they want to sail the stars in Drake\u2019s latest, the recently released Q&A should help. Jump Point, the monthly subscriber-only magazine, took an even deeper dive into the Corsair\u2019s design process along with a behind-the-scenes look at the new character customizer, a Whitley\u2019s Guide on MISC\u2019s Reliant series, and more. Shouts of \u2018Triggerfish!\u2019 could be heard across the \u2018verse when we announced our first new merchandise offerings of 2019 on April 1st: The Scents of Star Citizen collection. Classic fragrances of the past meet the mysterious essence of the future in Quantum, an innovative cultivation that transcends space and time.\nContent \u2013 Vehicles\nWhile the Vehicle Content Team predominantly focused on the three MISC Reliant variants and continuing work on the 300 series, they found time to work with Animation on a better system for setting up character ship entry and exit animations. The also tackled a variety of vehicle bugs leading up to the release of Alpha 3.5.\nDesign\nDesign\u2019s focus throughout March was on Area18, which included adjusting the AI, usables, stores, and more. Tecia Pacheco was given a design pass, while a new team member was inaugurated with tasks to improve both the Emergency Communication Network (ECN) and NPC spoofing missions (where NPCs send out service beacons asking for help). Regarding the in-game economy, a system built to create a robust and modular representation of item variance was polished and is now ready when needed. Inventories were also added to all new locations, including the new Alpha 3.5 weapons and items created by the Weapons Team.\nDevOps\nThe culmination of this year\u2019s first publishing cycle was especially busy for DevOps. The team publish internal builds every day of every month for internal testing, but demand increases drastically when additional publishes are needed for the Evocati and PTU. As the game grows, so does the complexity of deployments and the reporting requirements, with this month seeing a 69% increase in build activity. Most of this is due to the \u2018feature streams\u2019 that the team have worked on for the past few months, which isolate features from each other during development to avoid collision.\nEngineering\nThe Engine Team supported Alpha 3.5 with extensive profiling, optimization, bug fixes, and improvements to help Sentry, the PU crash database, better analyze and catalog existing issues. Rendering wise, they continued work on Temporal Sample Antialiasing (TSAA) with general quality improvements that translate to less flickering and a sharper picture. They also adjusted the TSAA bicubic filter based on frame time to prevent the accumulation of ringing artifacts at high framerates. For hair, they added an experimental option for custom tangents, removed the temporary scatter model, moved the hair mask to variation map alpha, improved edge masking, and added card support for the hair physically-based rendering (PBR) shader. For planetary ground fog (currently scheduled for Alpha 3.6), they refined the proxy mesh tessellation and moved pre-tessellation to jobs, did the first ray marching test and implementation, refined modeling of the fog gradient over terrain, and spent time rectifying floating point precision issues. They also completed rendering support for CPU-accessible textures for RTT video comms calls and optimized shaders to avoided unnecessary resource creation (e.g in GPU skinning). The Initial ImGUI integration was completed and will be used to unify and improve the in-game profiling tools. System and module integration were added to avoid an unorganized collection of tools and a text\/tag searchable configuration system for registered tools (similar to visual code) was implemented. To better improve load times, the team created a new load time profiler to track file access (times accessed, data transfer, etc.), amended the IO scheduler for SSDs and HDDs to give faster load times and response, and vastly improved file access in the shader system to speed up initialization at start-up. In addition to the compile-time analysis tool developed last month, they finalized an add-in tool to generate optimal uber file sets and, as a result, reshuffled game uber files for even better compile times.\n\nWork also began on a physics debugger that will allow the team to record issues, play them back, freeze time, etc. to help understand and speed up fixing complex physics issues.\nFeatures \u2013 Gameplay\nThroughout March, most of the team dedicated their time to working with the Character Team on the customizer, including the design flow, user interface, and the implementation of the female playable character. The rest focused on implementing comms video streaming improvements. All of the team\u2019s work this month made it into the Alpha 3.5 build, so can be seen by anyone in the Persistent Universe.\nFeatures \u2013 Vehicles\nImprovements to gimbaled weapons were finished for Alpha 3.5 and the radar and scanning systems received a polish, including the implementation of focus angle and ping fire. Under-the-hood progress was also made with vehicle item port tech, specifically with the vehicle .xml migration to Data-Forge. March\u2019s final stretch was spent fixing game crashes and bugs for the upcoming release.\nGraphics\nAlongside visual tweaks and fixing stability issues for Alpha 3.5, the team better aligned the sun and shadows with fog in large spaces (such as hangars) and fixed a persistent glitch with indoor lights. For vid-comms and general render-to-texture, the teams fixed a few issues that were interfering with brightness along with intermittent cases where lights on holograms were disappearing. They also switched most holographic scenes over to a forward-shaded render pipeline to improve efficiency. Graphics also got in on the gas cloud feature by supporting Design, adding the ability to rotate tunnel pieces, and creating a more intelligent streaming system to enable them to lay out large sections of the game without running over the memory budget.\nLevel Design\nThe Level Design Team barreled on with Area18, fixing bugs and generally preparing it for its unveiling. This included a lot of playtesting and tweaking of the room-system, landing areas, transit system, and more.\nPlanning began for the\u202fupcoming procedural tool and next set of procedural space stations. Prototyping was done on cave layouts and potential gameplay was ideated in close cooperation with the Environment Art Team. There were also updates to Lorville, with the addition of small and medium hangars and a new transit line between Teasa Spaceport and the Central Business District (CBD).\nLighting\nLike many others, Lighting almost entirely dedicated their month to finalizing Area18, which required collaboration with a lot of other teams. Particularly, they worked with Props and Environment Art in the final push to raise the visual standard and unify the look across the wider landing zone. Performance is always a concern, so special attention was paid to ensuring the maximum lighting quality was achieved within the defined frame budgets. After lessons were learned during the development of Lorville, the team were able to optimize the new location\u2019s lighting far more efficiently. Aside from Alpha 3.5, Lighting had a hand in the development of the character customizer by providing a clean, high-quality lighting rig for the UI. They also supported the reworking of the Echo 11 Star Marine map, providing additional polish, optimization, and clean-up.\n\n\n\nNarrative\nIn March, Narrative worked with Design to identify the production nodes and manufacturing locations of all of Star Citizen\u2019s corporations for the expanding economy system. This led to a review of the item inventories of Stanton\u2019s shops to make sure stores were carrying items appropriate for their location. The team also worked on generating names for various vehicles, including the Ursa Rover Fortuna. Narrative filled Area18 with a variety of posters, ads, and props to flesh out the lore of Stanton\u2019s newest landing zone. They also worked with the Live Design Team to support mission content for Tecia Pacheco. Finally, Alpha 3.5 will also provide a first look at the new Banu language that is being developed, so keep an eye out for more info on that.\nPlayer Relations\nPlayer Relations were busy throughout March supporting the Evocati and players smash bugs in the PTU. Initially, they worked alongside the Evocati for several builds to test out the new flight model. \u202fOnce it was stable, they added Concierge and Subscribers to test out the other key features. Eventually, all backers were welcomed into the PTU before Alpha 3.5\u2019s wider release. \u201cWe say it every month, but we can\u2019t thank our volunteers enough for the wonderful efforts they put into helping us build this game (especially you Avocados!).\u201d\nProps\nAt the start of March, the Props Team took Area18\u2019s assets from the \u2018modeling complete\u2019 phase through to \u2018final art\u2019, which included the technical set up, LODs, prefab setup, and bug fixing.\u202fThey reached \u2018content complete\u2019 status half-way through the month before heading into the final polish pass.\u202fThe area\u2019s food carts were pushed a little further with branding and dressing prop variation, while the lighting was separated out to give the Lighting Team more control. Updates were also made to older street furniture to bring it up to standard and the team helped with the branding and signage assets used throughout the level. With persistent habs included in Alpha 3.5, a pass was completed to convert a whole host of props from static objects to interactive entities, while hand grip was set up to work with the player animations and additional physics set up. The team also took a pass at the Spectrum Unlimited kiosk, creating additional dressing, props, and magazines.\u202fThe month was rounded off with a final bug-fixing pass and, of course, turtles.\nQA\nQA\u2019s testing focus was on feature integration for the Alpha 3.5 branch.\u202fThey tested all the new content such as ArcCorp and its moons, Area18, the character customizer, female playable character, Origin 300i rework, and Reliant Variants. In addition, stability and performance testing ramped up in anticipation of the release and included daily performance captures to help narrow down and fix performance-related issues. The AI feature testers in Frankfurt worked hard to stay on top of the various issues that cropped up with the addition of new mission givers and changes to collision avoidance. The embedded tester for the Transit Team was kept busy debugging various low repro issues that seemed to be tied to server performance and caused issues such as players falling through floors and Lorville\u2019s trains not turning up. Memory corruption testing is currently ongoing to help track down crashes that occur randomly during normal gameplay. This testing is being done in the PTU using custom binaries provided by the Engine Team.\nShip Art\nLead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith completed the refactor of the Origin 300i and spent quite a bit of time getting the components modeled. He has now officially moved onto a new ship, which is currently in the whitebox phase. 3D Modeler Josh Coons continues his work on the Banu Defender and is working diligently to complete the greybox stage. Since everything on this ship is brand new and almost nothing is re-used from other ships, he is being assisted by Associate Vehicle Art Director Elwin Bachiller to ensure it\u2019s completed in time.\nSystem Design\nThe System Design Team finalized the current iteration of the no-fly zones around Area18 and ArcCorp, which required new features to be added to allow it to work at the scale required. Walla and Lyria both received their share of mining resources, with Walla getting unique Atacamite geode deposits. They also finalized their work on the unification of the vendor\/bartender AI, which will allow the same behavior to serve drinks at a bar and give players items from a shelf and weapons from a rack.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent supported the Alpha 3.5 features promotion, which highlighted character customization, ArcCorp, and the new flight model. They also supported St. Patrick\u2019s Day, which featured the new Ursa Rover Fortuna and a screenshot contest. The CMS backend migration continued and was deployed to the PTU (the changes will appear in the live environment within the next few weeks). Voice servers received an upgrade which will benefit from RTCP (data channel) improvements and enable active speaker detection in comms channels. The security of voice channels has also been improved. The Services Team continued working on video streams in comms channels in order to improve long-distance calls, too. Turbulent\u2019s upcoming Game Admin tool will support game designers as well as the Player Relations Team by providing key statistics as well as granular technical information on groups, lobbies, and voice channels. The design is now done and development has started on its first functionality, the general information display. Finally from Montreal, the Game Services Team continued working on the new framework that will impact all upcoming development of Star Citizen services. Thanks to this core modification, services including group, lobby, and voice channel will be more standardized and upcoming development milestones will be reached quicker.\nUI\nLast month, UI finalized the in-fiction advertisements and branding for ArcCorp and Area18. They progressed with the area map, including the ability to visually distinguish between different floors of an interior. As release day drew closer, they worked on various optimizations and bug-fixing.\nVehicles\nThis month, the Global Vehicle Team put the finishing touches to the Alpha 3.5 ships and steadily progressed with those beyond the latest release:\nThe largest sub-team is focused on the Origin 890 Jump, which has just completed the greybox stage and is now heading into the final art phase. Work is progressing on the Carrack, which now has the whole of the engineering section in the rear done to greybox and the habitation deck is only missing the captain\u2019s quarters to be greybox complete. The Vanguard series is heading to the final art stage, with the rear section and cockpit both receiving a pass. The exterior is up next. Greybox of the Banu Defender rolls on, while the Character Concept Team was called on to build a foundation for the Tevarin species that will be used to help design the Esperia Prowler.\nFinally, pre-production began on the P52 Merlin update, P72 Archimedes, and the Esperia Prowler.\nVFX\nThe VFX Team rolled out their recent GPU particle lighting changes, which includes a new optional specular shading model for particles. This multiplies the level of lighting the particle receives from the cube maps, causing it to sit within the environment more realistically. In the photo below, the left smoke effect uses the old lighting (without specular shading), while the right uses the new system. The team is currently looking at some of the older effects in the game and are reworking them to take advantage of the updated systems, such as the EMP, which was added some time ago and has since degraded due to issues with the old particle system. Regarding weapons, the team polished and optimized the new ballistic pistol and assault rifles and took the first pass at the Tachyon cannon; a brand-new weapon type that was in its R&D phase last month. On the ship side, the reworked 300i had a full VFX pass. Finally, as is usual in the run-up to a release, the team began their twice-weekly playtests, from which a fairly large \u2018snag list\u2019 was created and fixed.\nWeapons\nThe Weapon Art Team started work on the Apocalypse Arms Animus missile launcher, the Klaus & Werner Lumin SMG, and new upgrade levels for various ship weapons. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026"},"links_count":3,"comment_count":2,"created_at":"2019-04-12T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"7 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 22:20:12","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":17035,"next_id":17037}}