{"data":{"id":17671,"title":"Invictus Launch Week & Alpha 3.9.X 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Launch Week and Alpha 3.9.X Postmortem\nOn April 29, we launched Alpha 3.9 \u2013 Locked Up & Loaded, and followed that up with the launch of Alpha 3.9.1 and Invictus Launch Week (our version of Fleet Week in the \u2018verse) on May 22. The following is a postmortem offering our high-level thoughts on what went well, what didn\u2019t, and what we learned for next time. We believe giving you insight into our thought process is highly valuable and are planning on providing quarterly patch postmortems hereafter. Expect these to follow several weeks after our patch launches. Hello Citizens,\nLast month, on June 2, we wrapped up our inaugural Invictus Launch Week event (also known as Fleet Week). Drake Interplanetary crashed the party (of course), and while this event has been around for decades in the \u2018verse, in the real world, it was our first ever. By many metrics, it was an incredible success that massively exceeded all our expectations.\nWe set out to give you a glimpse of the kind of events we plan to run in the future. The Star Citizen universe is meant to be alive and dynamic, more so than any other MMO before it. And while we\u2019re still in alpha and have a fair way to go, we\u2019re already a live service game. As such, we wanted to both demonstrate a sliver of what a live event could be in our game and test out a number of firsts, including the introduction of our massive capital ships, event triggers, and much tighter integration between out-of-game and in-game events.\nThe combination of Invictus, a Free Fly, and the launch of Alpha 3.9 resulted in not just our best May on record, but our best month ever by every metric we use to measure success. Our funding is public and many of you have already seen that May was our best month ever for revenue. But even more gratifying for us was the unprecedented player engagement and growth we saw in new accounts created, new and old players flocking to the game, and record highs in peak concurrency.\nThanks to the allure of capital ships and the Free Fly, May 2020 broke our record for monthly active unique players by 50%. During Invictus, we achieved our highest totals in unique players, daily actives, and peak concurrency. On the first day of Invictus Launch Week on May 22, we had our highest Daily Active User (DAU) count ever. And every day after that for the entire week was higher still as we recorded more than a week of record DAUs. In fact, so many players logged in to Star Citizen during the week that the number of unique users from the 12-day event alone was greater than every single month up to that point in our entire history of operation.\nAs with many games and services that see record highs in traffic and concurrency, the crush of users put extreme stress on our services. At the event start, we had server crashes and degraded performance from the overload of users. While our backend teams worked around the clock and through the weekend to address issues and get the game back up and running, it was still disappointing for us to have such service disruption.\nGoing into Invictus Launch Week, we believed that we could handle the flood of new players. For one, May is typically a low traffic month for us, which was one of the reasons why we used it for our first Invictus event. Secondly, using four years of live service data going back to Alpha 2.0, we estimated a fairly robust surge in players greater than last year\u2019s Alpha 3.5 Free Fly (May 2019) but still slightly lower than our November and December numbers (our busiest months due to holiday traffic and Intergalactic Aerospace Expo event).\nBut as you now know, Fleet Week smashed all expectations. The thrill of seeing (and hijacking or destroying) Lightnings, Idrises, and Javelins; an IAE-style promotion; and a Free Fly converged to create our best month of engagement to date. Invictus had more than double the total unique users, new users, and DAU of our Alpha 3.5 Free Fly event last May. And during the first weekend of Invictus Launch Week, peak concurrency and daily unique logins were 10-times greater than normal. Instead of being an event that rivaled November\u2019s IAE or the December Alpha 3.8 patch release, Invictus Launch Week blew past both as May 2020 became our biggest month in history.\nBased on what we knew going into the week, and some of the work we did on Alpha 3.8, we felt we could handle the near-term load during the event, but we underestimated the sheer number of people logging in to play. The reality is that we\u2019ve known that our first-generation backend tech (that is rife with singletons) and inefficient data formats and usage patterns (on the client\/server side) would have scalability challenges beyond a certain number of users. That\u2019s why, for the last couple of years, we\u2019ve had the Backend Team furiously working to remedy these issues, with the first fruits of those labors due to arrive in Q4 2020. The major mistake on our side was that we thought that our first-gen tech could hold out for another few quarters. In addition, we didn\u2019t realize the impact that the first version of long-term persistence, activated in Alpha 3.8.1, would have on the size of the database fetches as we scaled up to unprecedented numbers of players. Since we don\u2019t reset all player accounts with each new patch (unless we have to), and we don\u2019t currently have limits on the number of items people can have, many players had thousands of items versus just a few dozen. The player load and the interim solutions for persistence all resulted in a perfect storm, causing server issues for a number of players.\nAlthough the unfortunate downside of this was degraded performance and stability that we had to quickly correct, there was a real upside to the unprecedented traffic, as painful and disappointing as the issues were. Only an event of this scale, with the massive load from Invictus Launch Week, could have exposed these short-term weaknesses. We are developing systems today, such as iCache and physical inventory, that will be able to handle the increased player traffic; however, they aren\u2019t deployed yet. But because of what we saw during Invictus, we are bringing some elements of our in-development scalable tech online earlier than we planned to. This will allow us to deal with the increased load that our growing engagement and long-term persistence have brought. Solutions to our most egregious backend bottlenecks should start rolling out later this year, but there will still be more work to do in the quarters beyond.\nWhile it may be frustrating to experience these growing pains with us, this is exactly why the live playtesting the community does now is essential; we just don\u2019t see the same loads and player behaviors internally, in Evocati, or even in the PTU. It\u2019s only when the game is played in our live environment at scale that we get the true, real-world testing we need to improve our service. So while we know it\u2019s frustrating to encounter these problems, exposure at this stage gives us the opportunity to make our systems more robust and scalable earlier than would normally be the case.\nOur popularity during Invictus Launch Week and the game\u2019s unprecedented growth over the past eight months has shown us that more and more gamers are coming to experience Star Citizen. And it\u2019s turned scalability into an even bigger priority for us than it was before Invictus Launch Week. We want people to be able to test, play, and experience Star Citizen. After all, our vision is to ultimately have not hundreds of thousands but millions of players in the \u2018verse. So while the technical issues during Invictus were indeed painful, we emerged from it with renewed effort and immediate actions to prepare us to scale for bigger and better things later in the year and beyond. And that means millions more will be able to enjoy a better Star Citizen experience because of the learnings from Invictus Launch Week.\n-CIG\nAlpha 3.9 introduced a good amount of new content, functionality, and improvements to existing features. Not only did we add the Klescher Rehabilitation Facility and prison escape gameplay, we also unveiled the New Babbage landing zone, microTech\u2019s moons, the Unified Friends List for better initiation of group play, the new \u201cPrice of Freedom\u201d Caterpillar mission, and more. For this first postmortem, we\u2019re taking a broader and more high-level look at the most prominent features of Alpha 3.9.X; we aren\u2019t as exhaustive or comprehensive here and may tweak the format while we find the right mix between giving meaningful insight and not getting bogged down in the details. Here, we\u2019ve asked our directors to weigh in on what went well, what didn\u2019t, and what we learned.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrisons\nThe first quarter of 2020 saw a major enhancement to Star Citizen\u2019s law system in the form of prisons, which enables criminal behavior to be punished. The initial iteration includes another tier of foundational work but is still pretty barebones versus where we eventually intend to go with it. For example, we knew from the outset that being locked up wasn\u2019t going to be particularly fun; other than some FPS mining, there wasn\u2019t yet enough variety to keep most players entertained for an extended duration. It was nevertheless important to get this feature out the door since it enhances other gameplay. To wit, there\u2019s now a real risk \u2013 in the form of time, as opposed to just lost aUEC and a respawn \u2013 to serious crimes like murder and smuggling that didn\u2019t previously exist, and that continues the trend of allowing players total freedom but pushing back in logical and appropriate ways. It was also important for us to start gathering information on how such mechanics affect player behavior; whether the risk of jail time dissuades certain types of behavior and to what degree.\nFor the second quarter, we found and fixed several important bugs, including most notoriously one where upon being released after having served your time, the screen would fade down and never fade up. Kiosk machines will now occasionally break and generate a repair mission, which should draw a fair amount of interest given the number of merits it awards versus what you can achieve mining. We\u2019ll be adding a number of other prison missions in the future.\nThe third quarter will feature several small but notable enhancements, including the ability to surrender to law enforcement at any time during a battle, additional exploitation of the ship impounding mechanic, and working commissary kiosks that allow prisoners to buy things with the merits that they\u2019ve earned. Locked doors, access cards, and codes will start playing an increasingly important role. The prison escape route will be tweaked so that gaining access to the tunnels requires first finding a security code, and we\u2019ll complement that in a future release by making the extraction process considerably more difficult. A couple of locked rovers outside the prison will reward those players who had the foresight to pilfer the access codes with a fast getaway.\nDeparting from prison will eventually be more tightly integrated into the game so that, after serving your time, you\u2019ll be ferried by ship to a landing zone to be released rather than relying, as we do now, upon a fade down and teleport. There\u2019s also a lot of work to do on the AI side so that guards and inmates better contribute to making the area look and feel like a prison facility.\nTo ensure that the system\u2019s initial shortcomings weren\u2019t too pronounced, we temporarily limited the sentence durations and made sure to include a way to prematurely escape your confinement, albeit at the risk of a higher wanted level and \u2013 if recaptured \u2013 an even longer sentence. This is pretty simplistic at the moment (essentially a maze you have to navigate before you run out of oxygen) and another good example of where we intend to make some serious improvements. One of the major upgrades planned for next year is going to focus on injecting a lot of stealth, timing, and diversionary gameplay into the escape process so that it\u2019s much more fun and challenging.\nWe\u2019ll also be providing a lot of opportunities for melee combat within prisons next year \u2013 including the concept of gangs \u2013 and introducing some key mission-giving characters. These will include a shady guard and a powerful criminal boss with whom you can start to forge a relationship, which could prove very valuable on the outside, assuming you haven\u2019t learned from your incarceration and are looking to continue a life of crime.\nThe ultimate objective of prisons within Star Citizen is actually a bit ironic in that, while they are intended to serve as punishment and something most players will try their best to avoid, we want to ensure that they\u2019re so fun and interesting that players will view them as simply a different set of opportunities to exploit and challenges to solve.\n\n-Tony Zurovec, Persistent Universe Game Director\nActor Status\nThe Actor Status System (originally called Player Status) has been a goal since very early in the project and is now living and breathing in Alpha 3.9, with the system and a majority of features in place. This is an incredibly involved system that spans the entirety of the game and is intended to link many aspects from characters, animation, environments, items, and more to each other for differing results whether it\u2019s hunger, thirst, heat, cold, wind, vision, or movement. It replaces what was a very simple system of the player suffocating (and being killed) when exposed to space. The player character is notably now affected by the environment in a multitude of ways. And with this system, the environments not only vary dramatically visually, but now have meaningful gameplay elements within them to create specific identities. For example, a planet can be cold, which you can only survive in certain clothing for a given amount of time, but may have geysers to create pockets of warmth. The system itself has been completed; however, there is a robust design with intricately connected aspects still to come to Star Citizen, including weight, drug effects, and more exotic hazards that depend on other features coming along, such as the physical inventory.\nThis system was quite challenging to design, firstly due to the sheer interconnectedness between what might, on the surface, seem like disparate elements, and then further in approximating real-world behavior such as heat convection in what are extreme environments. Further, future-proofing the system for yet-to-be-added features added to this challenge. Lastly, garnering the support of so many different internal teams was a serious production undertaking, whether it was Graphics and VFX for the effects on the player vision, Audio for muffled hearing during hypothermia, Characters for the armor\/clothing for temperature and weather protection (or not!), UI for feedback to the player, FPS Design for stamina and heartrate re-balancing, Animation for the effort set and raising the hand in heavy winds without a helmet, and Props for complex animation and interaction with food and drink items. This was all made even more difficult to develop as environments, planets, and ships needed to have rigidly managed and correctly balanced data, else it would cause issues with all of these systems. We couldn\u2019t have simply left the kill trigger in for \u201cin atmosphere\u201d; Star Citizen demands deeper immersion than this. Now design, through the environment that the player exists in, can create complex effects and expect that players will need to provision themselves appropriately, such as not going out into the desert without water or not diving into an icy cave without an environmental suit. We are, in the end, quite happy with how this feature and system has gone in and look forward to hooking more systems into it.\n\nUnified Friends Service\nThe unification of our friends service was something treated as the utmost priority for one of our internal PU teams, with the main intention being making it as easy as possible to group-up and join games together within Star Citizen. Though this was always possible, it\u2019s now much easier to see your friends, see where they are playing, and join a party and launch into the game together.\nThis created much more work than anticipated, as it required a new service to unify the disparate elements and to ensure a real-time link between Spectrum contacts and the game. This also carries through into the game itself, which has updated notification of friend requests and automatic formation of in-game groups, which is a concept within the PU for chat, VOIP (Voice Over IP), and FOIP (Face Over IP). Linking up Spectrum to the front-end and then to the game seems obvious, but it suffered from different systems being completed at very different times, and it was long past time to clean it up. The front-end UI presents its own challenges as technically it\u2019s a mix of our new Building Blocks technology and of the legacy Flash. As this can break the entire flow, our front-end team avoided completely changing out the front-end and opted instead to make new elements from Building Blocks but leave the rest as it was. This was quite restricting and had the effect of leaving us with a functional UI that isn\u2019t quite as slick as you might expect. Though we are happy with the functionality the contacts\/friends list gives us, as a very social game we will be continuing work in this area to ensure an interface and functionality set that you\u2019d expect from a modern multiplayer game and to make it as easy as possible to play with your friends.\n\nAC\/SM Party and In-game Chat\/VOIP\/FOIP Support\nArena Commander and Star Marine have never had a fully-fledged chat system. For some time, there were obtuse commands (pressing various different key combinations known to only a few) that triggered a server command to \u201csay\u201d to all, but it wasn\u2019t something that was used by most and it was inaccessible to new players. Though acceptable in the very early state of Star Citizen, as the first gameplay module, it hadn\u2019t kept up with the groups system developed for the Persistent Universe. Now AC and SM share the same friends system and a similar squad system to that of the service mentioned earlier. You can now group together and launch into Arena Commander or Star Marine just as you can into the Persistent Universe, further enabling group and cooperative play. This was encouraged by the needs of the Star Marine game mode and Theaters of War (working title), which encourages in-vehicle groups (gunners and drivers speaking to each other) as well as joining and grouping together for matches. The main challenges are the varying number of players each game mode can support and the different server configurations that are running for session-based modes versus a persistent and perpetual game. Further difficulties are similar to those mentioned for the front-end and an immense amount of Flash having been put in place expecting and designed for a much different lobby concept. In the PU, although there is matchmaking, the requirements are not the same as in AC\/SM. An unfortunate victim of the current update is the private match lobby, which could not be updated in time. We would have preferred to not disable it. Though you can still group together and launch matches, these currently cannot be locked off, but we will be addressing this in future updates.\n\nAC\/SM Round Cycling\nIn previous versions of Arena Commander and Star Marine, players would be kicked out to the front-end when matches would end. There were technical challenges and issues for having done this in the past, as when Arena Commander originally launched, this was not the case. Arena Commander and Star Marine would reload their maps on the server, which is totally different from the Persistent Universe, which doesn\u2019t need to ever reload maps. This was incredibly important for Arena Commander and Star Marine, as play session length was cut short and players were arguably encouraged to leave the game when the round ended as they were kicked out and needed to go back through the various menus to return. We have managed to get around some of the technical hurdles and implemented round cycling so that players now get a proper and perpetual play experience. However, the fundamental issues haven\u2019t been addressed, which are clean reloads whilst keeping players grouped with their friends and matchmade into a new round. This has significantly increased play session length and also concurrency of players in both modes. Another change around this was updating our join-in-progress rules, which over time had become unsuitable to most modes and would avoid matchmaking players into already-started rounds.\n\nPersonal Inner Thought Radial\nThe Personal Inner Thought system had technically been in game in a very rudimentary state behind a cvar; some releases had it exposed and others didn\u2019t. It didn\u2019t fully accomplish the intention of being able to map any key to any interaction on the fly, and even more importantly, to be able to perform actions in all various contexts. The programming and design teams did an incredible job on this feature as Star Citizen has hundreds of potential actions depending on the context you are in and default key mappings are becoming increasingly complex and far less accessible.\nThis feature even introduced some developers to actions they weren\u2019t aware were possible or aren\u2019t obviously shared on the default key mappings, from as small as toggling a light on a weapon attachment to as large as deploying cargo ramps and doors. It also exposes emotes and other player activities whilst on foot. This should not, however, be confused with the Player Interaction System, which will also be getting some treatment in the future that has to do with specific, and contextual, interactions with items. Again, this was a huge challenge, not only to update and replace the bare bones implementation of old but also to implement UI and real-time key mapping onto the hundreds of actions, but it was very much worth the effort.\n-Sean Tracy, Technical Director, Content\n-Richard Tyrer, Combat Pillar Director\nNew Babbage v2\nThis was easily one of the largest and most complex Landing Zones we\u2019ve done to date. Compared to previous Landing Zones, we tried to give more freedom to the player to explore the location and improve the accessibility the player has to the planet through the introduction of surface entrances. Moving forwards, we are keen to keep improving this experience to be as seamless as possible.\nNew Babbage features an expansion of the Hi-Tech architectural style, which is the first time this has been showcased since we did the outpost designs. The team had a great time developing the architectural language and how it fit the narrative of the location and climate.\nNew Babbage also utilized our new lighting features, which means we can design lighting scenarios based on the time of day. During the development of The Promenade, we had a lot of fun with this feature as it enables us to create multiple moods and experiences within the same space. Right now we are implementing day and night light designs into some existing locations, so keep your eyes peeled.\nInside the domes of New Babbage we have various exotic and engineered botanicals, with display screens giving some backstory. This is the first step towards weaving the rich and complex lore of a location into the game environment for players to discover.\nLow Orbital Stations Around Planets\nThe experience of being able to stand on a viewing deck in a spacestation and look out over a planetary sunrise is something we\u2019ve wanted to put into the game for some time. Also, being able to see the same station from the ground is what the scale in Star Citizen is all about.\n\nKlescher Automated Prison\nAs the perfect contrast to the warm interior climate, we introduced the first prison location into the game. It was the first release where we delivered two major ground locations at the same time.\nWe wanted to maximize on the cave development work we\u2019ve already done, so we designed the central hub to feed off into a sprawling cave network. This gave the perfect space to try and work off your sentence.\nThe escape route featured a variety of advanced traversal along with a visual theme of feeling like you\u2019re working through the various layers of the infrastructure. In the future, we would like to expand on this experience and introduce more complexity to challenge the escapee.\nMoons of microTech\nCalliope, Clio, and Euterpe were an exercise in seeing how flexible the new Planetary v4 tech would be for us. The idea was to see how quickly we could define a unique visual identity for these moons utilizing the existing biome asset packs we had already created. Also with the introduction of the player status, we were able to define some extremely cold and hostile climates to complement the barren landscapes.\n\n-Ian Leyland, Star Citizen Art Director\nPrice of Freedom Mission\nWe got this built fairly quickly, since it leveraged a lot of what we learned in creating the 890 Jump mission (URGENT: Boarding Action in Progress). The goal was to provide an illicit variant of the 890 Jump mission that would be part of a Mission Giver experience. This means that it is partially bespoke, more in-depth in the design, and has an overall gameplay loop for the mission type.\nWhen concepting this mission, we knew that we wanted to build off of the core navigational mixture of flying, EVA, and ground traversal. Then, we sprinkled in a unique combat scenario in a spaceship that the player has multiple different ways to solve.\nWhenever we build a new mission, we always run into some challenges either on the development side or bugs in our systems. Here are just a few examples: The designer was dealing with learning the new UI Building Blocks Tech\n\nThe initial collision pass on the Caterpillar wasn\u2019t setup for FPS gunplay\n\nOriginally the laptop was supposed to be a datapad that the player would have to scroll through to find the right contacts. However, because of time constraints, we had to use the laptop\n\nThere were tech hurdles that the team faced with the Vis Areas in the Caterpillar\n\nOverall we are extremely happy with the result of the mission and hope everyone gets a chance to play it.\n\n-Todd Papy, Star Citizen Live Director\nMoving forward, expect to read similar postmortems on Alpha 3.10 and future patches as we invite you to hear from our directors on the successes, challenges, and learnings in the aftermath of each update. Alongside our goal to revamp our roadmap to be more reflective of progress (stay tuned for more news on that soon), this is one of our initiatives to provide a more transparent look into our open development process.","de_DE":"Invictus-Einf\u00fchrungswoche und Alpha 3.9.X Postmortem\nAm 29. April starteten wir Alpha 3.9 - Locked Up & Loaded, und im Anschluss daran starteten wir Alpha 3.9.1 und am 22. Mai die Invictus Launch Week (unsere Version der Flottenwoche im 'Vers'). Im Folgenden finden Sie eine Obduktion, in der wir auf hoher Ebene unsere Gedanken dar\u00fcber darlegen, was gut gelaufen ist, was nicht gut gelaufen ist und was wir f\u00fcr das n\u00e4chste Mal gelernt haben. Wir glauben, dass es sehr wertvoll ist, Ihnen einen Einblick in unseren Denkprozess zu geben, und planen, im Folgenden viertelj\u00e4hrliche Leichenbestattungen vorzulegen. Wir gehen davon aus, dass diese einige Wochen nach der Einf\u00fchrung unserer Pflaster folgen werden.\n\n\nHallo B\u00fcrger,\nLetzten Monat, am 2. Juni, beendeten wir unsere Er\u00f6ffnungsveranstaltung zur Invictus-Startwoche (auch als Flottenwoche bekannt). Drake Interplanetare st\u00fcrzte die Party (nat\u00fcrlich) ab, und obwohl es dieses Ereignis in der 'Verse, in der realen Welt, schon seit Jahrzehnten gibt, war es unser erstes \u00fcberhaupt. Nach vielen Ma\u00dfst\u00e4ben war es ein unglaublicher Erfolg, der alle unsere Erwartungen massiv \u00fcbertroffen hat.\nWir haben uns vorgenommen, Ihnen einen Einblick in die Art von Veranstaltungen zu geben, die wir f\u00fcr die Zukunft planen. Das Sternenb\u00fcrger-Universum soll lebendig und dynamisch sein, mehr als jedes andere MMO vor ihm. Und solange wir uns noch im Alpha-Stadium befinden und noch einen fairen Weg vor uns haben, sind wir bereits ein Live-Service-Spiel. Als solches wollten wir sowohl einen Teil dessen demonstrieren, was ein Live-Ereignis in unserem Spiel sein k\u00f6nnte, als auch eine Reihe von Neuerungen ausprobieren, darunter die Einf\u00fchrung unserer massiven Gro\u00dfkampfschiffe, Ereignisausl\u00f6ser und eine viel engere Integration zwischen Ereignissen au\u00dferhalb des Spiels und im Spiel.\nDie Kombination aus Invictus, einer Freifliege und der Einf\u00fchrung von Alpha 3.9 f\u00fchrte nicht nur zu unserem besten Mai seit Beginn der Aufzeichnungen, sondern auch zu unserem besten Monat aller Zeiten, gemessen an jeder Metrik, mit der wir den Erfolg messen. Unsere Finanzierung ist \u00f6ffentlich, und viele von Ihnen haben bereits gesehen, dass der Mai unser bisher bester Monat f\u00fcr Einnahmen war. Aber noch erfreulicher war f\u00fcr uns das beispiellose Spielerengagement und das Wachstum, das wir bei der Einrichtung neuer Konten, dem Ansturm neuer und alter Spieler und den Rekordh\u00f6chstst\u00e4nden bei der Spitzenkonkurrenz verzeichnen konnten.\nDank der Anziehungskraft der Kapitalschiffe und der Freifliege brachen wir im Mai 2020 unseren Rekord f\u00fcr monatliche aktive Einzelspieler um 50%. W\u00e4hrend Invictus erreichten wir unsere h\u00f6chsten Gesamtzahlen bei den Einzelspielern, den t\u00e4glichen Aktivit\u00e4ten und der Spitzenkonkurrenz. Am ersten Tag der Invictus-Startwoche am 22. Mai hatten wir die h\u00f6chste Anzahl t\u00e4glicher aktiver Nutzer (DAU), die wir je hatten. Und jeder Tag danach war w\u00e4hrend der gesamten Woche noch h\u00f6her, da wir mehr als eine Woche lang Rekord-DAUs verzeichneten. Tats\u00e4chlich haben sich w\u00e4hrend der Woche so viele Spieler bei Star Citizen eingeloggt, dass die Anzahl der einmaligen Benutzer allein durch das 12-Tage-Ereignis gr\u00f6\u00dfer war als in jedem einzelnen Monat bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt in unserer gesamten Geschichte.\nWie bei vielen Spielen und Diensten, die Rekordh\u00f6hen beim Datenverkehr und bei der Gleichzeitigkeit verzeichnen, stellt der Andrang der Nutzer eine extreme Belastung f\u00fcr unsere Dienste dar. Zu Beginn des Ereignisses hatten wir Serverabst\u00fcrze und Leistungseinbu\u00dfen durch die \u00dcberlastung der Benutzer. W\u00e4hrend unsere Backend-Teams rund um die Uhr und das ganze Wochenende hindurch arbeiteten, um Probleme zu beheben und das Spiel wieder zum Laufen zu bringen, war es dennoch entt\u00e4uschend f\u00fcr uns, eine solche Unterbrechung des Dienstes zu haben.\nAls wir in die Invictus-Startwoche gingen, glaubten wir, dass wir die Flut neuer Spieler bew\u00e4ltigen k\u00f6nnten. Zum einen ist der Mai f\u00fcr uns typischerweise ein Monat mit geringem Verkehrsaufkommen, was einer der Gr\u00fcnde war, warum wir ihn f\u00fcr unsere erste Invictus-Veranstaltung genutzt haben. Zweitens sch\u00e4tzten wir auf der Grundlage von vier Jahren Live-Service-Daten, die auf Alpha 2.0 zur\u00fcckgehen, einen ziemlich robusten Anstieg an Spielern, der gr\u00f6\u00dfer war als bei der letztj\u00e4hrigen Alpha 3.5 Free Fly (Mai 2019), aber immer noch etwas niedriger als unsere Zahlen f\u00fcr November und Dezember (unsere verkehrsreichsten Monate aufgrund des Urlaubsverkehrs und der Intergalactic Aerospace Expo-Veranstaltung).\nAber wie Sie jetzt wissen, hat die Flottenwoche alle Erwartungen zunichte gemacht. Der Nervenkitzel, Blitze, Idrisse und Speere zu sehen (und zu entf\u00fchren oder zu zerst\u00f6ren), eine Werbeaktion im IAE-Stil und ein Freiflug kamen zusammen, um unseren bisher besten Monat des Engagements zu schaffen. Invictus hatte mehr als doppelt so viele Einzelbenutzer, neue Benutzer und DAU wie unsere Alpha 3.5 Free Fly-Veranstaltung im vergangenen Mai. Und w\u00e4hrend des ersten Wochenendes der Invictus-Startwoche waren die Spitzengleichzeitigkeit und die t\u00e4glichen einmaligen Anmeldungen 10-mal gr\u00f6\u00dfer als normal. Anstatt ein Ereignis zu sein, das mit der IAE im November oder der Alpha 3.8-Patch-Ver\u00f6ffentlichung im Dezember rivalisierte, ging die Invictus-Startwoche an beiden vorbei, da der Mai 2020 unser gr\u00f6\u00dfter Monat in der Geschichte wurde.\nAufgrund dessen, was wir im Laufe der Woche wussten, und aufgrund der Arbeit, die wir an Alpha 3.8 geleistet haben, waren wir der Meinung, dass wir die kurzfristige Belastung w\u00e4hrend des Ereignisses bew\u00e4ltigen konnten, aber wir untersch\u00e4tzten die schiere Anzahl der Menschen, die sich zum Spielen einloggten. Die Realit\u00e4t ist, dass wir wussten, dass unsere Backend-Technologie der ersten Generation (mit vielen Singletons) und die ineffizienten Datenformate und Nutzungsmuster (auf der Client\/Server-Seite) ab einer bestimmten Anzahl von Benutzern Probleme mit der Skalierbarkeit haben w\u00fcrden. Aus diesem Grund hat das Backend-Team in den letzten Jahren intensiv an der L\u00f6sung dieser Probleme gearbeitet. Die ersten Fr\u00fcchte dieser Arbeit werden im 4. Quartal 2020 erwartet. Der gr\u00f6\u00dfte Fehler auf unserer Seite war, dass wir dachten, dass unsere Technologie der ersten Generation noch einige Quartale aushalten k\u00f6nnte. Dar\u00fcber hinaus war uns nicht klar, welche Auswirkungen die erste Version der Langzeitpersistenz, die in Alpha 3.8.1 aktiviert wurde, auf die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe der Datenbank haben w\u00fcrde, die wir auf eine noch nie dagewesene Anzahl von Spielern aufgestockt haben. Da wir nicht mit jedem neuen Patch alle Spielerkonten zur\u00fccksetzen (es sei denn, wir m\u00fcssen es tun) und wir derzeit kein Limit f\u00fcr die Anzahl der Gegenst\u00e4nde haben, die die Spieler haben k\u00f6nnen, hatten viele Spieler Tausende von Gegenst\u00e4nden gegen\u00fcber nur ein paar Dutzend. Die Auslastung der Spieler und die Zwischenl\u00f6sungen f\u00fcr die Persistenz f\u00fchrten alle zu einem perfekten Sturm, der bei einer Reihe von Spielern Serverprobleme verursachte.\nObwohl die ungl\u00fcckliche Kehrseite davon eine verminderte Leistung und Stabilit\u00e4t war, die wir schnell korrigieren mussten, hatte der beispiellose Datenverkehr, so schmerzhaft und entt\u00e4uschend die Probleme auch waren, eine echte positive Seite. Nur ein Ereignis dieses Ausma\u00dfes, mit der massiven Belastung durch die Invictus-Startwoche, h\u00e4tte diese kurzfristigen Schw\u00e4chen aufdecken k\u00f6nnen. Wir entwickeln heute Systeme wie iCache und physische Inventarisierung, die in der Lage sein werden, den erh\u00f6hten Spielerverkehr zu bew\u00e4ltigen; sie sind jedoch noch nicht im Einsatz. Aber wegen dessen, was wir w\u00e4hrend Invictus gesehen haben, bringen wir einige Elemente unserer in der Entwicklung befindlichen skalierbaren Technologie fr\u00fcher als geplant online. Dies wird es uns erm\u00f6glichen, mit der erh\u00f6hten Belastung fertig zu werden, die unser wachsendes Engagement und unsere langfristige Ausdauer mit sich gebracht haben. L\u00f6sungen f\u00fcr unsere ungeheuerlichsten Backend-Engp\u00e4sse sollten noch in diesem Jahr auf den Weg gebracht werden, aber in den Quartalen danach wird es noch mehr zu tun geben.\nEs mag zwar frustrierend sein, diese wachsenden Schmerzen mit uns zu erleben, aber genau deshalb sind die Live-Spieltests, die die Gemeinschaft jetzt durchf\u00fchrt, so wichtig; wir sehen einfach nicht die gleichen Belastungen und das gleiche Spielerverhalten intern, in Evocati oder sogar in der PTU. Erst wenn das Spiel in unserer Live-Umgebung in gro\u00dfem Ma\u00dfstab gespielt wird, erhalten wir die echten, realit\u00e4tsnahen Tests, die wir brauchen, um unseren Service zu verbessern. W\u00e4hrend wir also wissen, dass es frustrierend ist, auf diese Probleme zu sto\u00dfen, gibt uns die Exposition in diesem Stadium die M\u00f6glichkeit, unsere Systeme fr\u00fcher als normalerweise \u00fcblich robuster und skalierbarer zu machen.\nUnsere Popularit\u00e4t w\u00e4hrend der Invictus-Startwoche und das beispiellose Wachstum des Spiels in den letzten acht Monaten hat uns gezeigt, dass immer mehr Spieler kommen, um Star Citizen zu erleben. Und es hat die Skalierbarkeit f\u00fcr uns zu einer noch gr\u00f6\u00dferen Priorit\u00e4t gemacht, als es vor der Invictus-Startwoche der Fall war. Wir m\u00f6chten, dass die Leute Star Citizen testen, spielen und erleben k\u00f6nnen. Schlie\u00dflich ist es unsere Vision, letztendlich nicht Hunderttausende, sondern Millionen von Spielern zu haben. W\u00e4hrend die technischen Probleme w\u00e4hrend der Invictus-Woche in der Tat schmerzhaft waren, sind wir mit erneuten Anstrengungen und Sofortma\u00dfnahmen daraus hervorgegangen, um uns darauf vorzubereiten, sp\u00e4ter im Jahr und dar\u00fcber hinaus f\u00fcr gr\u00f6\u00dfere und bessere Dinge zu skalieren. Und das bedeutet, dass Millionen mehr in der Lage sein werden, eine bessere Sternenb\u00fcrger-Erfahrung zu genie\u00dfen, weil die Lehren aus der Invictus-Startwoche gezogen wurden.\n-CIG\nMit Alpha 3.9 wurde eine ganze Reihe neuer Inhalte, Funktionen und Verbesserungen bestehender Funktionen eingef\u00fchrt. Wir haben nicht nur die Klescher-Rehabilitationseinrichtung und das Spielprinzip des Gef\u00e4ngnisausbruchs hinzugef\u00fcgt, sondern auch die Landezone New Babbage, die Monde von microTech, die Liste der vereinigten Freunde f\u00fcr einen besseren Einstieg in das Gruppenspiel, die neue Caterpillar-Mission \"Preis der Freiheit\" und vieles mehr vorgestellt. F\u00fcr diese erste Obduktion werfen wir einen breiteren und anspruchsvolleren Blick auf die hervorstechendsten Merkmale von Alpha 3.9.X; wir sind hier nicht so ersch\u00f6pfend oder umfassend und k\u00f6nnen das Format optimieren, w\u00e4hrend wir die richtige Mischung finden, um sinnvolle Einblicke zu gew\u00e4hren und uns nicht in den Details zu verzetteln. Hier haben wir unsere Direktoren gebeten, zu beurteilen, was gut gelaufen ist, was nicht gut gelaufen ist und was wir gelernt haben.\n\n\n\n\nGef\u00e4ngnisse\nIm ersten Quartal des Jahres 2020 wurde das Rechtssystem des Sternenb\u00fcrgers in Form von Gef\u00e4ngnissen erheblich verbessert, wodurch kriminelles Verhalten bestraft werden kann. Die anf\u00e4ngliche Iteration umfasst eine weitere Stufe der Grundlagenarbeit, ist aber im Vergleich zu dem, was wir letztendlich damit erreichen wollen, immer noch ziemlich d\u00fcrftig. Zum Beispiel wussten wir von Anfang an, dass es keinen besonderen Spa\u00df machen w\u00fcrde, eingesperrt zu sein; abgesehen von einigen FPS-Bergbauarbeiten gab es noch nicht genug Abwechslung, um die meisten Spieler \u00fcber einen l\u00e4ngeren Zeitraum zu unterhalten. Dennoch war es wichtig, dieses Feature vor die T\u00fcr zu bekommen, da es das andere Gameplay verbessert. Das hei\u00dft, es besteht jetzt eine echte Gefahr - in Form von Zeit, im Gegensatz zu gerade verlorenem aUEC und einem Respawn - f\u00fcr schwere Verbrechen wie Mord und Schmuggel, die vorher nicht existierten, und das setzt den Trend fort, den Spielern v\u00f6llige Freiheit zu gew\u00e4hren, sie aber auf logische und angemessene Weise zur\u00fcckzudr\u00e4ngen. Es war f\u00fcr uns auch wichtig, damit zu beginnen, Informationen dar\u00fcber zu sammeln, wie sich solche Mechanismen auf das Verhalten der Spieler auswirken; ob und in welchem Ma\u00dfe das Risiko einer Gef\u00e4ngnisstrafe von bestimmten Verhaltensweisen abschreckt.\nF\u00fcr das zweite Quartal haben wir mehrere wichtige Fehler gefunden und behoben, darunter den ber\u00fcchtigten, bei dem der Bildschirm bei der Entlassung nach Verb\u00fc\u00dfung der Strafe nach unten und nie nach oben verblasste. Kiosk-Maschinen gehen nun gelegentlich kaputt und erzeugen eine Reparaturmission, die angesichts der Anzahl der Verdienste, die sie auszeichnet, im Vergleich zu dem, was Sie im Bergbau erreichen k\u00f6nnen, auf reges Interesse sto\u00dfen d\u00fcrfte. Wir werden in Zukunft eine Reihe weiterer Gef\u00e4ngnismissionen hinzuf\u00fcgen.\nIm dritten Quartal wird es mehrere kleine, aber bemerkenswerte Verbesserungen geben, darunter die M\u00f6glichkeit, sich w\u00e4hrend einer Schlacht jederzeit den Strafverfolgungsbeh\u00f6rden zu ergeben, die zus\u00e4tzliche Ausbeutung des Schiffsbeschlagnahmemechanikers und funktionierende Kommissariatskioske, an denen Gefangene Dinge mit den Verdiensten kaufen k\u00f6nnen, die sie sich verdient haben. Verschlossene T\u00fcren, Zugangskarten und Codes werden eine immer wichtigere Rolle spielen. Der Fluchtweg der Gefangenen wird so optimiert werden, dass f\u00fcr den Zugang zu den Tunneln zun\u00e4chst ein Sicherheitscode gefunden werden muss, und wir werden dies in einer zuk\u00fcnftigen Ver\u00f6ffentlichung erg\u00e4nzen, indem wir den Ausbruchsprozess erheblich erschweren. Ein paar verschlossene Rover au\u00dferhalb des Gef\u00e4ngnisses werden diejenigen Spieler, die die Voraussicht hatten, die Zugangscodes zu stehlen, mit einer schnellen Flucht belohnen.\nDas Verlassen des Gef\u00e4ngnisses wird schlie\u00dflich enger in das Spiel integriert werden, so dass Sie nach Verb\u00fc\u00dfung Ihrer Zeit per Schiff zu einer Landezone gebracht werden, um freigelassen zu werden, anstatt sich, wie wir es jetzt tun, auf ein Fade Down und einen Teleport zu verlassen. Auch auf der KI-Seite gibt es noch viel zu tun, damit Wachen und Insassen besser dazu beitragen k\u00f6nnen, dass das Gebiet wie ein Gef\u00e4ngnis aussieht und sich auch so anf\u00fchlt.\nUm sicherzustellen, dass die anf\u00e4nglichen Unzul\u00e4nglichkeiten des Systems nicht zu stark ausgepr\u00e4gt waren, haben wir die Strafdauern vor\u00fcbergehend begrenzt und daf\u00fcr gesorgt, dass eine M\u00f6glichkeit vorgesehen wurde, sich vorzeitig aus der Haft zu befreien, wenn auch mit dem Risiko einer h\u00f6heren Fahndungsstufe und - falls wieder gefasst - einer noch l\u00e4ngeren Strafe. Dies ist im Moment ziemlich einfach (im Wesentlichen ein Labyrinth, in dem man sich bewegen muss, bevor einem der Sauerstoff ausgeht) und ein weiteres gutes Beispiel daf\u00fcr, wo wir einige ernsthafte Verbesserungen vornehmen wollen. Eine der wichtigsten Verbesserungen, die f\u00fcr n\u00e4chstes Jahr geplant sind, wird sich darauf konzentrieren, dem Fluchtprozess eine Menge Stealth-, Zeit- und Ablenkungsspielraum zu geben, damit er viel mehr Spa\u00df macht und eine gr\u00f6\u00dfere Herausforderung darstellt.\nWir werden n\u00e4chstes Jahr auch viele Gelegenheiten f\u00fcr den Nahkampf in den Gef\u00e4ngnissen bieten - einschlie\u00dflich des Konzepts der Gangs - und einige Schl\u00fcsselfiguren einf\u00fchren, die den Auftrag geben. Dazu geh\u00f6ren ein zwielichtiger W\u00e4chter und ein m\u00e4chtiger Verbrecherboss, mit dem Sie beginnen k\u00f6nnen, eine Beziehung aufzubauen, die sich drau\u00dfen als sehr wertvoll erweisen k\u00f6nnte, vorausgesetzt, Sie haben aus Ihrer Inhaftierung nichts gelernt und wollen weiterhin ein kriminelles Leben f\u00fchren.\nDas letztendliche Ziel von Gef\u00e4ngnissen innerhalb von Star Citizen ist insofern etwas ironisch, als sie zwar als Bestrafung gedacht sind und die meisten Spieler versuchen werden, dies zu vermeiden, aber wir wollen sicherstellen, dass sie so unterhaltsam und interessant sind, dass die Spieler sie einfach als eine andere Art von Gelegenheiten zum Ausnutzen und Herausforderungen zum L\u00f6sen sehen.\n-Tony Zurovec, Spielleiter von Persistent Universe\n\nSchauspieler-Status\nDas Schauspieler-Status-System (urspr\u00fcnglich Spieler-Status genannt) war schon sehr fr\u00fch im Projekt ein Ziel und wird nun in Alpha 3.9 gelebt, wobei das System und eine Mehrheit der Funktionen bereits vorhanden sind. Dabei handelt es sich um ein unglaublich involviertes System, das sich \u00fcber das gesamte Spiel erstreckt und viele Aspekte von Charakteren, Animationen, Umgebungen, Gegenst\u00e4nden und mehr miteinander verbinden soll, um unterschiedliche Ergebnisse zu erzielen, sei es Hunger, Durst, Hitze, K\u00e4lte, Wind, Vision oder Bewegung. Es ersetzt das bisher sehr einfache System, bei dem der Spieler erstickt (und get\u00f6tet) wird, wenn er dem Weltraum ausgesetzt ist. Der Charakter des Spielers wird nun in vielf\u00e4ltiger Weise von der Umgebung beeinflusst. Und mit diesem System unterscheiden sich die Umgebungen nicht nur visuell dramatisch, sondern haben nun auch sinnvolle Spielelemente in sich, um spezifische Identit\u00e4ten zu schaffen. Zum Beispiel kann ein Planet kalt sein, was man nur in bestimmter Kleidung f\u00fcr eine bestimmte Zeitspanne \u00fcberleben kann, aber er kann auch Geysire haben, um W\u00e4rmenester zu schaffen. Das System selbst ist bereits fertiggestellt; es gibt jedoch ein robustes Design mit kompliziert miteinander verkn\u00fcpften Aspekten, die dem Sternenb\u00fcrger noch bevorstehen, darunter Gewicht, Drogenwirkung und exotischere Gefahren, die von anderen Merkmalen abh\u00e4ngen, wie etwa dem physischen Inventar.\nDas Design dieses Systems war eine ziemliche Herausforderung, erstens wegen der schieren Verbindung zwischen Elementen, die oberfl\u00e4chlich betrachtet als disparate Elemente erscheinen k\u00f6nnten, und zweitens wegen der Ann\u00e4herung an das Verhalten in der realen Welt, wie z.B. W\u00e4rmekonvektion in extremen Umgebungen. Dar\u00fcber hinaus wurde diese Herausforderung durch die Zukunftssicherheit des Systems im Hinblick auf noch hinzuzuf\u00fcgende Funktionen erweitert. Schlie\u00dflich war es ein ernsthaftes Produktionsvorhaben, die Unterst\u00fctzung so vieler verschiedener interner Teams zu erhalten, ob es sich nun um Grafiken und VFX f\u00fcr die Auswirkungen auf die Sicht des Spielers handelte, um Audio f\u00fcr ged\u00e4mpftes H\u00f6ren bei Unterk\u00fchlung, um Charaktere f\u00fcr die R\u00fcstung\/Bekleidung zum Schutz vor Temperatur und Wetter (oder auch nicht!), um die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che f\u00fcr das Feedback an den Spieler, um FPS-Design f\u00fcr Ausdauer und Wiederherstellung des Herzfrequenz-Ausgleichs, um Animationen f\u00fcr die gestellte Anstrengung und das Heben der Hand bei starkem Wind ohne Helm und um Requisiten f\u00fcr komplexe Animationen und die Interaktion mit Speisen und Getr\u00e4nken. All dies wurde noch schwieriger zu entwickeln, da Umgebungen, Planeten und Schiffe streng gemanagte und korrekt ausbalancierte Daten haben mussten, da es sonst Probleme mit all diesen Systemen verursachen w\u00fcrde. Wir h\u00e4tten nicht einfach den Kill-Trigger f\u00fcr \"in Atmosph\u00e4re\" stecken lassen k\u00f6nnen; der Sternenb\u00fcrger verlangt ein tieferes Eintauchen als dies. Nun kann das Design durch die Umgebung, in der sich der Spieler befindet, komplexe Effekte erzeugen und erwarten, dass die Spieler sich entsprechend ausstatten m\u00fcssen, z.B. nicht ohne Wasser in die W\u00fcste hinausgehen oder nicht ohne Umweltanzug in eine eisige H\u00f6hle tauchen. Letztendlich sind wir mit der Einf\u00fchrung dieser Funktion und dieses Systems recht zufrieden und freuen uns darauf, weitere Systeme daran anzuschlie\u00dfen.\nDienst der vereinten Freunde\nDie Vereinheitlichung des Dienstes unserer Freunde wurde von einem unserer internen PU-Teams als oberste Priorit\u00e4t behandelt, wobei die Hauptabsicht darin bestand, es so einfach wie m\u00f6glich zu machen, sich zu gruppieren und Spiele innerhalb von Star Citizen zusammenzulegen. Obwohl dies schon immer m\u00f6glich war, ist es jetzt viel einfacher, seine Freunde zu sehen, zu sehen, wo sie spielen, und sich einer Partei anzuschlie\u00dfen und gemeinsam in das Spiel einzusteigen.\nDies verursachte viel mehr Arbeit als erwartet, da ein neuer Dienst erforderlich war, um die verschiedenen Elemente zu vereinheitlichen und eine Echtzeitverbindung zwischen den Spectrum-Kontakten und dem Spiel zu gew\u00e4hrleisten. Dies setzt sich auch im Spiel selbst fort, in dem die Benachrichtigung \u00fcber Freundschaftsanfragen und die automatische Bildung von Gruppen im Spiel aktualisiert wurden, was ein Konzept innerhalb der PU f\u00fcr Chat, VOIP (Voice Over IP) und FOIP (Face Over IP) ist. Die Verbindung von Spectrum mit dem Front-End und dann mit dem Spiel scheint offensichtlich, aber es litt darunter, dass verschiedene Systeme zu sehr unterschiedlichen Zeiten fertiggestellt wurden, und es war l\u00e4ngst \u00fcberf\u00e4llig, dies zu bereinigen. Die Front-End-Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che stellt ihre eigenen Herausforderungen dar, da sie technisch gesehen eine Mischung aus unserer neuen Building Blocks-Technologie und der alten Flash-Technologie ist. Da dies den gesamten Fluss unterbrechen kann, hat unser Front-End-Team es vermieden, das Front-End vollst\u00e4ndig auszutauschen, und sich stattdessen daf\u00fcr entschieden, neue Elemente aus Building Blocks zu erstellen, den Rest aber so zu belassen, wie er war. Das war ziemlich einschr\u00e4nkend und hatte zur Folge, dass wir eine funktionale Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che hatten, die nicht ganz so glatt ist, wie man erwarten w\u00fcrde. Obwohl wir mit der Funktionalit\u00e4t, die uns die Kontakt-\/Freundesliste bietet, zufrieden sind, werden wir als sehr geselliges Spiel die Arbeit in diesem Bereich fortsetzen, um eine Oberfl\u00e4che und einen Funktionssatz zu gew\u00e4hrleisten, den man von einem modernen Mehrspieler-Spiel erwarten w\u00fcrde, und um es so einfach wie m\u00f6glich zu machen, mit seinen Freunden zu spielen.\nAC\/SM Party und In-Game-Chat\/VOIP\/FOIP-Unterst\u00fctzung\nArena Commander und Star Marine hatten noch nie ein vollwertiges Chat-System. Eine Zeit lang gab es stumpfe Befehle (das Dr\u00fccken verschiedener Tastenkombinationen, die nur wenigen bekannt waren), die einen Serverbefehl ausl\u00f6sten, um allen \"etwas zu sagen\", aber das war nicht etwas, das von den meisten benutzt wurde und f\u00fcr neue Spieler unzug\u00e4nglich war. Obwohl es im sehr fr\u00fchen Stadium von Star Citizen als erstes Spielmodul akzeptabel war, hatte es nicht mit dem f\u00fcr das Persistent Universe entwickelten Gruppensystem Schritt gehalten. Jetzt teilen sich AC und SM das gleiche Freundessystem und ein \u00e4hnliches Kadersystem wie der bereits erw\u00e4hnte Dienst. Sie k\u00f6nnen sich jetzt in Gruppen zusammenschlie\u00dfen und in Arena Commander oder Star Marine genauso wie im Persistent Universe starten, was das Gruppen- und kooperative Spiel weiter erm\u00f6glicht. Dies wurde durch die Erfordernisse des Spielmodus \"Star Marine\" und \"Theaters of War\" (Arbeitstitel) gef\u00f6rdert, der sowohl fahrzeuginterne Gruppen (Kanoniere und Fahrer, die miteinander sprechen) als auch den Zusammenschluss und die Gruppierung f\u00fcr Spiele f\u00f6rdert. Die gr\u00f6\u00dften Herausforderungen sind die unterschiedliche Anzahl von Spielern, die jeder Spielmodus unterst\u00fctzen kann, und die verschiedenen Serverkonfigurationen, die f\u00fcr sitzungsbasierte Modi im Vergleich zu einem dauerhaften und fortw\u00e4hrenden Spiel laufen. Weitere Schwierigkeiten \u00e4hneln denen, die f\u00fcr das Front-End erw\u00e4hnt wurden, und eine immense Menge an Flash wurde in Erwartung und f\u00fcr ein ganz anderes Lobby-Konzept eingesetzt. In der PU gibt es zwar Matchmaking, aber die Anforderungen sind nicht die gleichen wie bei AC\/SM. Ein ungl\u00fcckliches Opfer des aktuellen Updates ist die private Match-Lobby, die nicht rechtzeitig aktualisiert werden konnte. Wir h\u00e4tten es vorgezogen, sie nicht zu deaktivieren. Man kann zwar immer noch Gruppen bilden und Spiele starten, aber diese k\u00f6nnen derzeit nicht gesperrt werden, aber wir werden uns in zuk\u00fcnftigen Updates damit befassen.\nAC\/SM-Runde Radsport\nIn fr\u00fcheren Versionen von Arena Commander und Star Marine wurden Spieler bei Spielende an die Front hinausgeworfen. Daf\u00fcr gab es technische Herausforderungen und Probleme, da dies in der Vergangenheit nicht der Fall war, als Arena Commander urspr\u00fcnglich gestartet wurde. Arena Commander und Sternenmarine w\u00fcrden ihre Karten auf dem Server neu laden, was sich v\u00f6llig vom Persistent Universe unterscheidet, bei dem Karten nie neu geladen werden m\u00fcssen. Dies war f\u00fcr den Arena-Commander und die Sternenflotte unglaublich wichtig, da die Dauer der Spielsitzung verk\u00fcrzt wurde und die Spieler wohl dazu ermutigt wurden, das Spiel zu verlassen, wenn die Runde zu Ende war, da sie rausgeworfen wurden und durch die verschiedenen Men\u00fcs zur\u00fcckkehren mussten. Es ist uns gelungen, einige der technischen H\u00fcrden zu \u00fcberwinden, und wir haben das Rundenradfahren eingef\u00fchrt, so dass die Spieler nun ein richtiges und dauerhaftes Spielerlebnis haben. Die grunds\u00e4tzlichen Probleme wurden jedoch noch nicht gel\u00f6st, n\u00e4mlich das saubere Nachladen, w\u00e4hrend die Spieler mit ihren Freunden gruppiert und in eine neue Runde gebracht werden. Dies hat die L\u00e4nge der Spielsitzungen und auch die Gleichzeitigkeit der Spieler in beiden Modi deutlich erh\u00f6ht. Eine weitere \u00c4nderung in diesem Zusammenhang war die Aktualisierung unserer Mitmachregeln, die mit der Zeit f\u00fcr die meisten Modi ungeeignet geworden waren und die es vermeiden w\u00fcrden, Spieler in bereits begonnene Runden zu bringen.\nPers\u00f6nlicher innerer Gedankenradius\nDas System des Pers\u00f6nlichen Inneren Gedankens war technisch gesehen in einem sehr rudiment\u00e4ren Zustand hinter einer cvar im Spiel gewesen; bei einigen Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen war es offengelegt, bei anderen nicht. Es erf\u00fcllte nicht ganz die Absicht, in der Lage zu sein, jeden Schl\u00fcssel zu jeder beliebigen Interaktion on the fly abzubilden und, was noch wichtiger ist, in der Lage zu sein, Aktionen in allen verschiedenen Kontexten durchzuf\u00fchren. Die Programmier- und Design-Teams haben bei diesem Feature unglaubliche Arbeit geleistet, da der Sternenb\u00fcrger Hunderte von m\u00f6glichen Aktionen je nach dem Kontext hat, in dem Sie sich befinden, und die Standard-Tastenzuordnungen immer komplexer und weit weniger zug\u00e4nglich werden.\nDiese Funktion f\u00fchrte sogar einige Entwickler in Aktionen ein, von denen sie nicht wussten, dass sie m\u00f6glich sind oder die sie offensichtlich nicht \u00fcber die Standard-Tastenbelegungen mit anderen teilen, von so klein wie das Umschalten einer Leuchte an einer Waffenanlage bis hin zu so gro\u00df wie das Ausfahren von Laderampen und T\u00fcren. Es zeigt auch Emotes und andere Spieleraktivit\u00e4ten auf, w\u00e4hrend sie zu Fu\u00df unterwegs sind. Dies sollte jedoch nicht mit dem Spieler-Interaktionssystem verwechselt werden, das in Zukunft ebenfalls eine Behandlung erfahren wird, die mit spezifischen und kontextbezogenen Interaktionen mit Gegenst\u00e4nden zu tun hat. Auch dies war wieder eine gro\u00dfe Herausforderung, nicht nur um die nackte Implementierung der alten Implementierung zu aktualisieren und zu ersetzen, sondern auch um die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che und die Echtzeit-Tastaturzuordnung f\u00fcr die Hunderte von Aktionen zu implementieren, aber es war die M\u00fche sehr wert.\n-Sean Tracy, Technischer Direktor, Inhalt\n-Richard Tyrer, Direktor der Kampfs\u00e4ule\nNeue Babbage v2\nDies war mit Abstand eine der gr\u00f6\u00dften und komplexesten Landezonen, die wir bisher eingerichtet haben. Im Vergleich zu fr\u00fcheren Landezonen haben wir versucht, dem Spieler mehr Freiheit bei der Erkundung des Ortes zu geben und die Zug\u00e4nglichkeit des Planeten f\u00fcr den Spieler durch die Einf\u00fchrung von Oberfl\u00e4cheneing\u00e4ngen zu verbessern. Im weiteren Verlauf sind wir bestrebt, diese Erfahrung weiter zu verbessern, um so nahtlos wie m\u00f6glich zu sein.\nNew Babbage bietet eine Erweiterung des Hi-Tech-Architekturstils, die zum ersten Mal seit der Entwicklung der Au\u00dfenposten pr\u00e4sentiert wird. Das Team hatte viel Spa\u00df bei der Entwicklung der Architektursprache und der Art und Weise, wie sie zur Erz\u00e4hlung des Ortes und des Klimas passt.\nNew Babbage nutzte auch unsere neuen Beleuchtungsfunktionen, was bedeutet, dass wir Beleuchtungsszenarien auf der Grundlage der Tageszeit entwerfen k\u00f6nnen. W\u00e4hrend der Entwicklung von The Promenade hatten wir viel Spa\u00df mit dieser Funktion, da sie es uns erm\u00f6glicht, mehrere Stimmungen und Erfahrungen im selben Raum zu schaffen. Im Moment implementieren wir Tag- und Nachtlichtdesigns an einigen bestehenden Orten, halten Sie also die Augen offen.\nIn den Kuppeln von New Babbage haben wir verschiedene exotische und k\u00fcnstliche Pflanzen, und auf den Bildschirmen k\u00f6nnen Sie die Hintergrundgeschichte verfolgen. Dies ist der erste Schritt, um die reichen und komplexen \u00dcberlieferungen eines Ortes in die Spielumgebung einzubinden, die die Spieler entdecken k\u00f6nnen.\nNiedrige Orbitalstationen um Planeten\nDie Erfahrung, in einer Raumstation auf einer Aussichtsplattform zu stehen und auf einen planetarischen Sonnenaufgang zu blicken, ist etwas, das wir schon seit einiger Zeit ins Spiel bringen wollten. Auch die M\u00f6glichkeit, dieselbe Station vom Boden aus sehen zu k\u00f6nnen, ist das, worum es bei Star Citizen geht.\nAutomatisiertes Gef\u00e4ngnis Klescher\nAls perfekten Kontrast zum warmen Innenklima haben wir den ersten Gef\u00e4ngnisstandort in das Spiel eingef\u00fchrt. Es war die erste Ver\u00f6ffentlichung, bei der wir zwei wichtige Bodenpositionen gleichzeitig geliefert haben.\nWir wollten die bereits geleistete H\u00f6hlenentwicklungsarbeit maximieren, also entwarfen wir den zentralen Knotenpunkt so, dass er in ein ausgedehntes H\u00f6hlennetzwerk eingespeist werden konnte. Dies bot den perfekten Raum, um zu versuchen, Ihren Satz abzuarbeiten.\nDer Fluchtweg bot eine Vielzahl von fortgeschrittenen Durchquerungen zusammen mit einem visuellen Thema, bei dem man das Gef\u00fchl hatte, man arbeite sich durch die verschiedenen Schichten der Infrastruktur. In Zukunft m\u00f6chten wir diese Erfahrung erweitern und mehr Komplexit\u00e4t einf\u00fchren, um den Entflohenen herauszufordern.\nMonde der Mikrotechnik\nCalliope, Clio und Euterpe waren eine \u00dcbung, um zu sehen, wie flexibel die neue Planetary v4 tech f\u00fcr uns sein w\u00fcrde. Die Idee war, zu sehen, wie schnell wir eine einzigartige visuelle Identit\u00e4t f\u00fcr diese Monde definieren k\u00f6nnten, indem wir die bestehenden Biome Asset Packs nutzen, die wir bereits erstellt hatten. Mit der Einf\u00fchrung des Spielerstatus konnten wir auch einige extrem kalte und feindliche Klimazonen definieren, um die kargen Landschaften zu erg\u00e4nzen.\n-Ian Leyland, Starb\u00fcrger Art Director\nPreis der Freiheit Mission\nWir haben es ziemlich schnell aufgebaut, da es viel von dem, was wir bei der Erstellung der Mission 890 Jump (URGENT: Boarding Action in Progress) gelernt haben, \u00fcbernommen hat. Ziel war es, eine illegale Variante der 890-Jump-Mission zu schaffen, die Teil der Erfahrung eines Missionsgebers sein sollte. Das bedeutet, dass sie teilweise ma\u00dfgeschneidert ist, in der Konstruktion vertieft wurde und eine allgemeine Spielschleife f\u00fcr den Missionstyp aufweist.\nAls wir diese Mission konzipierten, wussten wir, dass wir auf die Kernnavigationsmischung aus Fliegen, EVA und Bodendurchquerung aufbauen wollten. Dann haben wir ein einzigartiges Kampfszenario in einem Raumschiff eingestreut, das der Spieler auf mehrere verschiedene Arten l\u00f6sen kann.\nWann immer wir eine neue Mission bauen, sto\u00dfen wir immer auf einige Herausforderungen, entweder auf der Entwicklungsseite oder auf Fehler in unseren Systemen. Hier sind nur einige Beispiele: Der Designer besch\u00e4ftigte sich mit dem Erlernen der neuen UI Building Blocks Tech Der anf\u00e4ngliche Kollisionspass auf der Caterpillar war nicht f\u00fcr FPS gunplay eingerichtet Urspr\u00fcnglich sollte der Laptop ein Datenpad sein, durch das der Spieler bl\u00e4ttern musste, um die richtigen Kontakte zu finden. Aus Zeitgr\u00fcnden mussten wir jedoch den Laptop verwenden. Es gab technische H\u00fcrden, mit denen das Team in den Visabereichen der Caterpillar konfrontiert war. Insgesamt sind wir mit dem Ergebnis der Mission sehr zufrieden und hoffen, dass jeder eine Chance bekommt, sie zu spielen.\n-Todd Papy, Direktor von Star Citizen Live\nErwarten Sie in Zukunft \u00e4hnliche Postmortems \u00fcber Alpha 3.10 und zuk\u00fcnftige Patches, denn wir laden Sie ein, von unseren Direktoren \u00fcber die Erfolge, Herausforderungen und Erkenntnisse nach jeder Aktualisierung zu h\u00f6ren. Neben unserem Ziel, unseren Fahrplan zu \u00fcberarbeiten, um den Fortschritt besser zu reflektieren (bleiben Sie auf dem Laufenden, um bald mehr dar\u00fcber zu erfahren), ist dies eine unserer Initiativen, um einen transparenteren Einblick in unseren offenen Entwicklungsprozess zu geben.","zh_CN":"Invictus Launch Week and Alpha 3.9.X Postmortem\nOn April 29, we launched Alpha 3.9 \u2013 Locked Up & Loaded, and followed that up with the launch of Alpha 3.9.1 and Invictus Launch Week (our version of Fleet Week in the \u2018verse) on May 22. The following is a postmortem offering our high-level thoughts on what went well, what didn\u2019t, and what we learned for next time. We believe giving you insight into our thought process is highly valuable and are planning on providing quarterly patch postmortems hereafter. Expect these to follow several weeks after our patch launches. Hello Citizens,\nLast month, on June 2, we wrapped up our inaugural Invictus Launch Week event (also known as Fleet Week). Drake Interplanetary crashed the party (of course), and while this event has been around for decades in the \u2018verse, in the real world, it was our first ever. By many metrics, it was an incredible success that massively exceeded all our expectations.\nWe set out to give you a glimpse of the kind of events we plan to run in the future. The Star Citizen universe is meant to be alive and dynamic, more so than any other MMO before it. And while we\u2019re still in alpha and have a fair way to go, we\u2019re already a live service game. As such, we wanted to both demonstrate a sliver of what a live event could be in our game and test out a number of firsts, including the introduction of our massive capital ships, event triggers, and much tighter integration between out-of-game and in-game events.\nThe combination of Invictus, a Free Fly, and the launch of Alpha 3.9 resulted in not just our best May on record, but our best month ever by every metric we use to measure success. Our funding is public and many of you have already seen that May was our best month ever for revenue. But even more gratifying for us was the unprecedented player engagement and growth we saw in new accounts created, new and old players flocking to the game, and record highs in peak concurrency.\nThanks to the allure of capital ships and the Free Fly, May 2020 broke our record for monthly active unique players by 50%. During Invictus, we achieved our highest totals in unique players, daily actives, and peak concurrency. On the first day of Invictus Launch Week on May 22, we had our highest Daily Active User (DAU) count ever. And every day after that for the entire week was higher still as we recorded more than a week of record DAUs. In fact, so many players logged in to Star Citizen during the week that the number of unique users from the 12-day event alone was greater than every single month up to that point in our entire history of operation.\nAs with many games and services that see record highs in traffic and concurrency, the crush of users put extreme stress on our services. At the event start, we had server crashes and degraded performance from the overload of users. While our backend teams worked around the clock and through the weekend to address issues and get the game back up and running, it was still disappointing for us to have such service disruption.\nGoing into Invictus Launch Week, we believed that we could handle the flood of new players. For one, May is typically a low traffic month for us, which was one of the reasons why we used it for our first Invictus event. Secondly, using four years of live service data going back to Alpha 2.0, we estimated a fairly robust surge in players greater than last year\u2019s Alpha 3.5 Free Fly (May 2019) but still slightly lower than our November and December numbers (our busiest months due to holiday traffic and Intergalactic Aerospace Expo event).\nBut as you now know, Fleet Week smashed all expectations. The thrill of seeing (and hijacking or destroying) Lightnings, Idrises, and Javelins; an IAE-style promotion; and a Free Fly converged to create our best month of engagement to date. Invictus had more than double the total unique users, new users, and DAU of our Alpha 3.5 Free Fly event last May. And during the first weekend of Invictus Launch Week, peak concurrency and daily unique logins were 10-times greater than normal. Instead of being an event that rivaled November\u2019s IAE or the December Alpha 3.8 patch release, Invictus Launch Week blew past both as May 2020 became our biggest month in history.\nBased on what we knew going into the week, and some of the work we did on Alpha 3.8, we felt we could handle the near-term load during the event, but we underestimated the sheer number of people logging in to play. The reality is that we\u2019ve known that our first-generation backend tech (that is rife with singletons) and inefficient data formats and usage patterns (on the client\/server side) would have scalability challenges beyond a certain number of users. That\u2019s why, for the last couple of years, we\u2019ve had the Backend Team furiously working to remedy these issues, with the first fruits of those labors due to arrive in Q4 2020. The major mistake on our side was that we thought that our first-gen tech could hold out for another few quarters. In addition, we didn\u2019t realize the impact that the first version of long-term persistence, activated in Alpha 3.8.1, would have on the size of the database fetches as we scaled up to unprecedented numbers of players. Since we don\u2019t reset all player accounts with each new patch (unless we have to), and we don\u2019t currently have limits on the number of items people can have, many players had thousands of items versus just a few dozen. The player load and the interim solutions for persistence all resulted in a perfect storm, causing server issues for a number of players.\nAlthough the unfortunate downside of this was degraded performance and stability that we had to quickly correct, there was a real upside to the unprecedented traffic, as painful and disappointing as the issues were. Only an event of this scale, with the massive load from Invictus Launch Week, could have exposed these short-term weaknesses. We are developing systems today, such as iCache and physical inventory, that will be able to handle the increased player traffic; however, they aren\u2019t deployed yet. But because of what we saw during Invictus, we are bringing some elements of our in-development scalable tech online earlier than we planned to. This will allow us to deal with the increased load that our growing engagement and long-term persistence have brought. Solutions to our most egregious backend bottlenecks should start rolling out later this year, but there will still be more work to do in the quarters beyond.\nWhile it may be frustrating to experience these growing pains with us, this is exactly why the live playtesting the community does now is essential; we just don\u2019t see the same loads and player behaviors internally, in Evocati, or even in the PTU. It\u2019s only when the game is played in our live environment at scale that we get the true, real-world testing we need to improve our service. So while we know it\u2019s frustrating to encounter these problems, exposure at this stage gives us the opportunity to make our systems more robust and scalable earlier than would normally be the case.\nOur popularity during Invictus Launch Week and the game\u2019s unprecedented growth over the past eight months has shown us that more and more gamers are coming to experience Star Citizen. And it\u2019s turned scalability into an even bigger priority for us than it was before Invictus Launch Week. We want people to be able to test, play, and experience Star Citizen. After all, our vision is to ultimately have not hundreds of thousands but millions of players in the \u2018verse. So while the technical issues during Invictus were indeed painful, we emerged from it with renewed effort and immediate actions to prepare us to scale for bigger and better things later in the year and beyond. And that means millions more will be able to enjoy a better Star Citizen experience because of the learnings from Invictus Launch Week.\n-CIG\nAlpha 3.9 introduced a good amount of new content, functionality, and improvements to existing features. Not only did we add the Klescher Rehabilitation Facility and prison escape gameplay, we also unveiled the New Babbage landing zone, microTech\u2019s moons, the Unified Friends List for better initiation of group play, the new \u201cPrice of Freedom\u201d Caterpillar mission, and more. For this first postmortem, we\u2019re taking a broader and more high-level look at the most prominent features of Alpha 3.9.X; we aren\u2019t as exhaustive or comprehensive here and may tweak the format while we find the right mix between giving meaningful insight and not getting bogged down in the details. Here, we\u2019ve asked our directors to weigh in on what went well, what didn\u2019t, and what we learned.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nPrisons\nThe first quarter of 2020 saw a major enhancement to Star Citizen\u2019s law system in the form of prisons, which enables criminal behavior to be punished. The initial iteration includes another tier of foundational work but is still pretty barebones versus where we eventually intend to go with it. For example, we knew from the outset that being locked up wasn\u2019t going to be particularly fun; other than some FPS mining, there wasn\u2019t yet enough variety to keep most players entertained for an extended duration. It was nevertheless important to get this feature out the door since it enhances other gameplay. To wit, there\u2019s now a real risk \u2013 in the form of time, as opposed to just lost aUEC and a respawn \u2013 to serious crimes like murder and smuggling that didn\u2019t previously exist, and that continues the trend of allowing players total freedom but pushing back in logical and appropriate ways. It was also important for us to start gathering information on how such mechanics affect player behavior; whether the risk of jail time dissuades certain types of behavior and to what degree.\nFor the second quarter, we found and fixed several important bugs, including most notoriously one where upon being released after having served your time, the screen would fade down and never fade up. Kiosk machines will now occasionally break and generate a repair mission, which should draw a fair amount of interest given the number of merits it awards versus what you can achieve mining. We\u2019ll be adding a number of other prison missions in the future.\nThe third quarter will feature several small but notable enhancements, including the ability to surrender to law enforcement at any time during a battle, additional exploitation of the ship impounding mechanic, and working commissary kiosks that allow prisoners to buy things with the merits that they\u2019ve earned. Locked doors, access cards, and codes will start playing an increasingly important role. The prison escape route will be tweaked so that gaining access to the tunnels requires first finding a security code, and we\u2019ll complement that in a future release by making the extraction process considerably more difficult. A couple of locked rovers outside the prison will reward those players who had the foresight to pilfer the access codes with a fast getaway.\nDeparting from prison will eventually be more tightly integrated into the game so that, after serving your time, you\u2019ll be ferried by ship to a landing zone to be released rather than relying, as we do now, upon a fade down and teleport. There\u2019s also a lot of work to do on the AI side so that guards and inmates better contribute to making the area look and feel like a prison facility.\nTo ensure that the system\u2019s initial shortcomings weren\u2019t too pronounced, we temporarily limited the sentence durations and made sure to include a way to prematurely escape your confinement, albeit at the risk of a higher wanted level and \u2013 if recaptured \u2013 an even longer sentence. This is pretty simplistic at the moment (essentially a maze you have to navigate before you run out of oxygen) and another good example of where we intend to make some serious improvements. One of the major upgrades planned for next year is going to focus on injecting a lot of stealth, timing, and diversionary gameplay into the escape process so that it\u2019s much more fun and challenging.\nWe\u2019ll also be providing a lot of opportunities for melee combat within prisons next year \u2013 including the concept of gangs \u2013 and introducing some key mission-giving characters. These will include a shady guard and a powerful criminal boss with whom you can start to forge a relationship, which could prove very valuable on the outside, assuming you haven\u2019t learned from your incarceration and are looking to continue a life of crime.\nThe ultimate objective of prisons within Star Citizen is actually a bit ironic in that, while they are intended to serve as punishment and something most players will try their best to avoid, we want to ensure that they\u2019re so fun and interesting that players will view them as simply a different set of opportunities to exploit and challenges to solve.\n\n-Tony Zurovec, Persistent Universe Game Director\nActor Status\nThe Actor Status System (originally called Player Status) has been a goal since very early in the project and is now living and breathing in Alpha 3.9, with the system and a majority of features in place. This is an incredibly involved system that spans the entirety of the game and is intended to link many aspects from characters, animation, environments, items, and more to each other for differing results whether it\u2019s hunger, thirst, heat, cold, wind, vision, or movement. It replaces what was a very simple system of the player suffocating (and being killed) when exposed to space. The player character is notably now affected by the environment in a multitude of ways. And with this system, the environments not only vary dramatically visually, but now have meaningful gameplay elements within them to create specific identities. For example, a planet can be cold, which you can only survive in certain clothing for a given amount of time, but may have geysers to create pockets of warmth. The system itself has been completed; however, there is a robust design with intricately connected aspects still to come to Star Citizen, including weight, drug effects, and more exotic hazards that depend on other features coming along, such as the physical inventory.\nThis system was quite challenging to design, firstly due to the sheer interconnectedness between what might, on the surface, seem like disparate elements, and then further in approximating real-world behavior such as heat convection in what are extreme environments. Further, future-proofing the system for yet-to-be-added features added to this challenge. Lastly, garnering the support of so many different internal teams was a serious production undertaking, whether it was Graphics and VFX for the effects on the player vision, Audio for muffled hearing during hypothermia, Characters for the armor\/clothing for temperature and weather protection (or not!), UI for feedback to the player, FPS Design for stamina and heartrate re-balancing, Animation for the effort set and raising the hand in heavy winds without a helmet, and Props for complex animation and interaction with food and drink items. This was all made even more difficult to develop as environments, planets, and ships needed to have rigidly managed and correctly balanced data, else it would cause issues with all of these systems. We couldn\u2019t have simply left the kill trigger in for \u201cin atmosphere\u201d; Star Citizen demands deeper immersion than this. Now design, through the environment that the player exists in, can create complex effects and expect that players will need to provision themselves appropriately, such as not going out into the desert without water or not diving into an icy cave without an environmental suit. We are, in the end, quite happy with how this feature and system has gone in and look forward to hooking more systems into it.\n\nUnified Friends Service\nThe unification of our friends service was something treated as the utmost priority for one of our internal PU teams, with the main intention being making it as easy as possible to group-up and join games together within Star Citizen. Though this was always possible, it\u2019s now much easier to see your friends, see where they are playing, and join a party and launch into the game together.\nThis created much more work than anticipated, as it required a new service to unify the disparate elements and to ensure a real-time link between Spectrum contacts and the game. This also carries through into the game itself, which has updated notification of friend requests and automatic formation of in-game groups, which is a concept within the PU for chat, VOIP (Voice Over IP), and FOIP (Face Over IP). Linking up Spectrum to the front-end and then to the game seems obvious, but it suffered from different systems being completed at very different times, and it was long past time to clean it up. The front-end UI presents its own challenges as technically it\u2019s a mix of our new Building Blocks technology and of the legacy Flash. As this can break the entire flow, our front-end team avoided completely changing out the front-end and opted instead to make new elements from Building Blocks but leave the rest as it was. This was quite restricting and had the effect of leaving us with a functional UI that isn\u2019t quite as slick as you might expect. Though we are happy with the functionality the contacts\/friends list gives us, as a very social game we will be continuing work in this area to ensure an interface and functionality set that you\u2019d expect from a modern multiplayer game and to make it as easy as possible to play with your friends.\n\nAC\/SM Party and In-game Chat\/VOIP\/FOIP Support\nArena Commander and Star Marine have never had a fully-fledged chat system. For some time, there were obtuse commands (pressing various different key combinations known to only a few) that triggered a server command to \u201csay\u201d to all, but it wasn\u2019t something that was used by most and it was inaccessible to new players. Though acceptable in the very early state of Star Citizen, as the first gameplay module, it hadn\u2019t kept up with the groups system developed for the Persistent Universe. Now AC and SM share the same friends system and a similar squad system to that of the service mentioned earlier. You can now group together and launch into Arena Commander or Star Marine just as you can into the Persistent Universe, further enabling group and cooperative play. This was encouraged by the needs of the Star Marine game mode and Theaters of War (working title), which encourages in-vehicle groups (gunners and drivers speaking to each other) as well as joining and grouping together for matches. The main challenges are the varying number of players each game mode can support and the different server configurations that are running for session-based modes versus a persistent and perpetual game. Further difficulties are similar to those mentioned for the front-end and an immense amount of Flash having been put in place expecting and designed for a much different lobby concept. In the PU, although there is matchmaking, the requirements are not the same as in AC\/SM. An unfortunate victim of the current update is the private match lobby, which could not be updated in time. We would have preferred to not disable it. Though you can still group together and launch matches, these currently cannot be locked off, but we will be addressing this in future updates.\n\nAC\/SM Round Cycling\nIn previous versions of Arena Commander and Star Marine, players would be kicked out to the front-end when matches would end. There were technical challenges and issues for having done this in the past, as when Arena Commander originally launched, this was not the case. Arena Commander and Star Marine would reload their maps on the server, which is totally different from the Persistent Universe, which doesn\u2019t need to ever reload maps. This was incredibly important for Arena Commander and Star Marine, as play session length was cut short and players were arguably encouraged to leave the game when the round ended as they were kicked out and needed to go back through the various menus to return. We have managed to get around some of the technical hurdles and implemented round cycling so that players now get a proper and perpetual play experience. However, the fundamental issues haven\u2019t been addressed, which are clean reloads whilst keeping players grouped with their friends and matchmade into a new round. This has significantly increased play session length and also concurrency of players in both modes. Another change around this was updating our join-in-progress rules, which over time had become unsuitable to most modes and would avoid matchmaking players into already-started rounds.\n\nPersonal Inner Thought Radial\nThe Personal Inner Thought system had technically been in game in a very rudimentary state behind a cvar; some releases had it exposed and others didn\u2019t. It didn\u2019t fully accomplish the intention of being able to map any key to any interaction on the fly, and even more importantly, to be able to perform actions in all various contexts. The programming and design teams did an incredible job on this feature as Star Citizen has hundreds of potential actions depending on the context you are in and default key mappings are becoming increasingly complex and far less accessible.\nThis feature even introduced some developers to actions they weren\u2019t aware were possible or aren\u2019t obviously shared on the default key mappings, from as small as toggling a light on a weapon attachment to as large as deploying cargo ramps and doors. It also exposes emotes and other player activities whilst on foot. This should not, however, be confused with the Player Interaction System, which will also be getting some treatment in the future that has to do with specific, and contextual, interactions with items. Again, this was a huge challenge, not only to update and replace the bare bones implementation of old but also to implement UI and real-time key mapping onto the hundreds of actions, but it was very much worth the effort.\n-Sean Tracy, Technical Director, Content\n-Richard Tyrer, Combat Pillar Director\nNew Babbage v2\nThis was easily one of the largest and most complex Landing Zones we\u2019ve done to date. Compared to previous Landing Zones, we tried to give more freedom to the player to explore the location and improve the accessibility the player has to the planet through the introduction of surface entrances. Moving forwards, we are keen to keep improving this experience to be as seamless as possible.\nNew Babbage features an expansion of the Hi-Tech architectural style, which is the first time this has been showcased since we did the outpost designs. The team had a great time developing the architectural language and how it fit the narrative of the location and climate.\nNew Babbage also utilized our new lighting features, which means we can design lighting scenarios based on the time of day. During the development of The Promenade, we had a lot of fun with this feature as it enables us to create multiple moods and experiences within the same space. Right now we are implementing day and night light designs into some existing locations, so keep your eyes peeled.\nInside the domes of New Babbage we have various exotic and engineered botanicals, with display screens giving some backstory. This is the first step towards weaving the rich and complex lore of a location into the game environment for players to discover.\nLow Orbital Stations Around Planets\nThe experience of being able to stand on a viewing deck in a spacestation and look out over a planetary sunrise is something we\u2019ve wanted to put into the game for some time. Also, being able to see the same station from the ground is what the scale in Star Citizen is all about.\n\nKlescher Automated Prison\nAs the perfect contrast to the warm interior climate, we introduced the first prison location into the game. It was the first release where we delivered two major ground locations at the same time.\nWe wanted to maximize on the cave development work we\u2019ve already done, so we designed the central hub to feed off into a sprawling cave network. This gave the perfect space to try and work off your sentence.\nThe escape route featured a variety of advanced traversal along with a visual theme of feeling like you\u2019re working through the various layers of the infrastructure. In the future, we would like to expand on this experience and introduce more complexity to challenge the escapee.\nMoons of microTech\nCalliope, Clio, and Euterpe were an exercise in seeing how flexible the new Planetary v4 tech would be for us. The idea was to see how quickly we could define a unique visual identity for these moons utilizing the existing biome asset packs we had already created. Also with the introduction of the player status, we were able to define some extremely cold and hostile climates to complement the barren landscapes.\n\n-Ian Leyland, Star Citizen Art Director\nPrice of Freedom Mission\nWe got this built fairly quickly, since it leveraged a lot of what we learned in creating the 890 Jump mission (URGENT: Boarding Action in Progress). The goal was to provide an illicit variant of the 890 Jump mission that would be part of a Mission Giver experience. This means that it is partially bespoke, more in-depth in the design, and has an overall gameplay loop for the mission type.\nWhen concepting this mission, we knew that we wanted to build off of the core navigational mixture of flying, EVA, and ground traversal. Then, we sprinkled in a unique combat scenario in a spaceship that the player has multiple different ways to solve.\nWhenever we build a new mission, we always run into some challenges either on the development side or bugs in our systems. Here are just a few examples: The designer was dealing with learning the new UI Building Blocks Tech\n\nThe initial collision pass on the Caterpillar wasn\u2019t setup for FPS gunplay\n\nOriginally the laptop was supposed to be a datapad that the player would have to scroll through to find the right contacts. However, because of time constraints, we had to use the laptop\n\nThere were tech hurdles that the team faced with the Vis Areas in the Caterpillar\n\nOverall we are extremely happy with the result of the mission and hope everyone gets a chance to play it.\n\n-Todd Papy, Star Citizen Live Director\nMoving forward, expect to read similar postmortems on Alpha 3.10 and future patches as we invite you to hear from our directors on the successes, challenges, and learnings in the aftermath of each update. Alongside our goal to revamp our roadmap to be more reflective of progress (stay tuned for more news on that soon), this is one of our initiatives to provide a more transparent look into our open development process."},"links_count":0,"comment_count":142,"created_at":"2020-07-02T18:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"5 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 21:02:39","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":17670,"next_id":17672}}