{"data":{"id":18696,"title":"Letter from the Chairman","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/SCW\/18696-API","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/18696","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/18696","channel":"Transmission","category":"General","series":"From the Chairman","images":[],"images_count":2,"translations":{"en_EN":"Letter from the Chairman\n05\/18\/2022 - 1:00 PM\n\nYear in Review\n\u201cDon\u2019t drive Angry!\u201d\n\nPhil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day 1993\n\nIn some ways last year felt like we were stuck just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day repeating the same cycles as 2020; just when we thought we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants emerged to send cases skyrocketing again and communities back into lockdown and other safety measures. The world grew increasingly weary and fatigued from the toll of both the pandemic and the necessary measures to keep people as safe as possible. And even as a large part of the world is starting to return to normal, the specter of a new potential variant that can evade the vaccines and is more transmissible haunts us. Hopefully with readily available vaccines in most countries and a certain degree of built-in protection from prior infections, COVID will continue to transition to an endemic disease, something that certainly is not great, but not nearly as deadly as before, a virus that we can get on with our lives and live with just like the common Flu or Cold.\n\nBecause of the ups and downs of last year, we are only just starting to get back to the office. The first studio where it became possible to start working together in person, at any scale, was our UK studio in Manchester, where I have been spending a lot of time since last fall. I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure. Our offices in Frankfurt, Austin, and Los Angeles are only just starting to return to the office now that the local authorities have deemed it safe enough to lift various requirements. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we were proud of how we transitioned seamlessly to a work-from-home environment, but as the situation dragged on, it became clear that we were missing the benefits of spontaneous collaboration and team building that come from working in person, near each other. The time I have spent with the Squadron team in the UK has only reinforced this, as the ability to walk over to someone\u2019s desk and see the issue or having a conversation in passing about a problem or a creative thought, makes an enormous difference to progress. When everyone is working remotely it becomes more of a slog to problem solve on the fly, or easily get or give feedback, and you end up with far more meetings \/ video calls. In our internal tracking we found that we had six times as many meetings when everyone was working from home than when we were in the office. I personally felt the difference in our release cadence; it took us a little longer to get each patch out than before, and it became harder to solve or fix bugs which hung around longer than previously. I have also seen the trend in the industry as a whole, with pretty much any large title being delayed, or in some unfortunate cases released before they should have been. For this reason, despite our ability to work fully remote, we are focused on getting people back together, working with each other side by side for extended periods. Going back to the office does not mean a return to the old work patterns and policies, as the extended lockdowns, combined with working remotely for two years has given us new insights into work life balance for our staff. We have altered our global work policy to allow for flexi-hours and a hybrid of in person and work from home, depending on both an employee\u2019s and manager\u2019s needs, with emphasis on being cognizant of our employees\u2019 life situations.\n\nDespite the challenges of the last year, I am proud of how much we accomplished in 2021. In fact, looking back at the year in review, I am amazed at the amount of content and features we delivered to our players. In January of last year, the community was able to play the first iteration of the XenoThreat Incursion, our first dynamic event that players praised for bringing together the pieces of Star Citizen for a thrilling server-wide encounter. While only our first iteration, this event already showed glimpses of the full promise of the Persistent Universe. In April of 2021, we released Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy and delivered drive-in caves and sinkholes, planet tech improvements, ship-to-station docking, and more. With Invictus Launch Week, we opened the doors of the Javelin for the first time to let people take a walking tour of the mighty UEE destroyer, and brought the Bengal into orbit to showcase our biggest capital ship yet in the \u2019verse.\n\nHowever, we really started to hit our stride in the second half of 2021 with the release of Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, when we finished the Stanton system by launching the gas giant Crusader and the landing zone of Orison. Accompanying that were a host of Quality of Life improvements and our first iteration of Volumetric Clouds.\n\nThen, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences, we introduced v0 of our Medical Gameplay, Looting, Bombing, and Personal Inventory, just to name a few new features. Coupled with our continuing improvements in performance and stability, and the drastic reduction in server crashes (which usually manifest themselves to a user as the infamous 30K error; connection lost to the server), Star Citizen the game was finally starting to come together in a way it had never done before.\n\nAnd as great as our 2020 year was in terms of engagement and sentiment, the back half of 2021 was at another level. We saw more people than ever before flocking to Star Citizen, carried in on waves of good will and excitement from current players asking their friends to join, and from complete newcomers awed by the spectacle of Crusader, the gameplay of XenoThreat, and the opportunities from new features like Personal Inventory and Looting. And to cap off the year, when we launched Alpha 3.16: Return to Jumptown, veteran players returned to see our fresh, new take on the classic Jumptown emergent battlegrounds and were amazed at just how far the game had progressed.\n\nOur wins in 2021 set us up for an absolutely historic start to 2022. So far, we have blown past all our projections on new players joining the \u2018verse. In fact, this year, we have more than doubled our rate of New User acquisition, and with the recent launch of Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, we are seeing over two thousand new players a day joining the \u2018verse. Our DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by over 50% since the numbers I shared in my last Letter from the Chairman in December 2020, and with this latest patch, we are enjoying double the daily login traffic of our last April patch launch. We are enjoying MAU (Monthly Active Users) which is well beyond the highs of 2020. And we have had nearly 1 million New Accounts created since then, and more than half a million New Pledging Players join the game. And this week, we had our 2 millionth unique player log in to play Star Citizen. We are on track this year to break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins this year, and more than 0 million in lifetime revenue.\n\nAll of this is due to the incredible support we receive from you combined with the progress we have been making in Star Citizen, which brings new curious gamers into the \u2018verse. It is heartening to see the feedback and impressions from newer members of the community when they first start playing Star Citizen.\n\nFor all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance\u2026 that becomes another planet, that you can enter it\u2019s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.\n\nSometimes it isn\u2019t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.\n\nMany that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.\n\nTHANK YOU!\n\nRoad to 4.0\nBack in December 2017, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 was published to the live servers after a unified push from our developers around the globe. This monumental patch introduced our brand new procedural planetary technology and the first planetary bodies you could land on and go anywhere across the surface of the three moons of Crusader. It also included a new mission system, improved shopping, new cargo mechanics, and doubled our server player cap. To date Star Citizen 3.0 was probably the biggest incremental jump in gameplay and content, which is why we incremented the Alpha designation from 2.X to 3.X, and it was a whole eight months between 2.6.3 and 3.0.\n\nThis year, we find ourselves on a similar path with three huge technology initiatives that will fundamentally change the experience and immersion into Star Citizen. The first of these is what we are calling Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) which is the foundational tech that enables Server Meshing (SM). PES is the hardest part of the work needed for SM and is the one that has required the most engineering. It fundamentally changes how we record state in the Universe and delivers a level of persistence that you just don\u2019t see in other games, whether they are MMOs or even single-player experiences. Up until now, all persistence in the game has been tied to a player\u2019s inventory; ships you own or items you hold physically or in the virtual inventories of items you own. If you\u2019ve physically attached an item inside your vehicle, say a rifle to a weapons rack, when you log out or stow the vehicle it will remember all the attached items and anything in that vehicle\u2019s virtual inventory. However, if you drop or place something loosely, even inside a ship you own, it won\u2019t be associated with any player inventory. So, when you log out (or if the server crashes), the item will not be there when logging on or re-joining. With PES we are recording the state of every dynamic object in the game, irrelevant of whether it is \u201cowned\u201d or held by a player. That means that you could drop a gun or a med pen in a forested area on Microtech and return several days later after logging out to find the gun or med pen still there (assuming another player didn\u2019t grab them!).\n\nThe technology to do this at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering. We have been working towards this since 2019 when we debuted Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS), which allows a server to only stream in and simulate only a portion of our universe, which is necessary if you are going to have multiple servers simulate different parts of the universe.\n\nThe development has not been without road bumps; we had to change our plans for how we would persist the state of the universe when we realized that the backend relational database we were planning on using with a host of services, which we had collectively dubbed \u201ciCache\u201d would likely not be able to have low latency at the scale we needed for the number of concurrent players we will need to support in the future. We pivoted to using a Graph database at the start of 2021, taking a different approach to the services and cache which we outlined in a virtual presentation during last year\u2019s CitizenCon. The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe. The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players. For PES to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services. For Server Meshing, only 4 more services are currently planned, so you can see just how much foundational tech for SM is in PES. As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication. The nice aspect of using tech like this is that it is designed to scale (just imagine how many concurrent users Google must handle) and there are lots of available third-party tools and code, compared to creating an internal custom protocol.\n\nAll this means that getting Persistent Entity Streaming to work would require the bulk of the tech we need to make Server Meshing viable. I am happy to report after 16 months of extremely focused work by 18 engineers, 3 dedicated QA, and 4 producers spread between CIG and Turbulent (who are managing the back-end data base in the cloud and its related services) that the team were able to demonstrate Persistent Entity Streaming working last week in our weekly internal Persistent Universe Update meeting.\n\nPaul Reindell, Our Director of Engineering for Online Tech, spun up a server, populated the Entity Graph to its initial state along with the Replication Layer (which is essentially an in memory cache for the universe state\/backend database that exists in the cloud to make sure read\/writes to the database do not bottleneck servers and clients), then connected a client, placed down a series of small objects like cans on the surface of Aberdeen, along with an 890 Jump and an Anvil Arrow. He then killed the server and the client. The server was restarted, we did not populate the Entity Graph (as it had been previously seeded on the initial startup), and then connected a client, warped to Aberdeen and everything was there as he placed it. This was a huge milestone as the state of the universe was recorded to the backend database and then when he restarted the server it just connected to the Replication Layer, which had initialized itself from the database (the Entity Graph) and continued with the universe at the state he left it.\n\nThat may not sound revolutionary to some of you, but I can tell you it was akin to Neil Armstrong taking \u201cone small step.\u201d Once Persistent Entity Streaming comes online, Star Citizen will be a different universe. Full persistence will provide over the coming years an experience in gaming that most other online games do not provide; a universe you can escape to, that is affected by your and other players\u2019 actions, with the state being dynamic and persistent. Crash land on a planet, and your shipwreck will persist, while you forage for food and water to survive, and perhaps wood to make a fire to keep warm. log off and come back to what you built. Or, perhaps once you have been rescued, another player will stumble on the wreck of your old ship and the long-extinguished campfire. Find a corner of the galaxy to make your own, collect resources and import material to build your outpost, decorate or arrange your hangar or home how you like.\n\nWith this tech in place, Server Meshing becomes possible, as the Replication Layer\/Entity Graph is the universe state that clients and servers write and read from. Because we have decoupled state from simulation, this allows us to have many Server Nodes all communicating with the Replication Layer, responsible for simulation of focused areas in the Universe, which allows us to scale our ability to simulate the overall universe, as a server is no longer responsible for every non-player entity, regardless of location or number. This means that instead of a server dropping to five frames per second due to simulation load, we can just spin up another, and then another to spread the simulation load and keep the update tick rate high. This is the ultimate goal of Dynamic Server Meshing and what we are working towards.\n\nNow, a fundamental change to how state is recorded, especially one that affects every dynamic object, not just a select few, is going to have a lot of edge cases and issues we have not come across yet or foreseen.\n\n2022 TESTING AND RELEASE CADENCE\nBecause of this, we are going to be approaching 3.18 differently than our previous releases. We are anticipating that 3.18 will require a much longer time in the Evocati\/PTU phase than our previous releases, due to the fundamental change in how the game tracks state. We know we will also need testing at scale, as in our experience we see different issues when we go from internal testing to Evocati to PTU wave 1, then wave 2 and so on. Players do crazy things, and lots of players creates lots of crazy cases we had not considered, which expose bugs and edge cases. Our guess is that it may be as long as three months in the PTU stage, but it is hard to predict. For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage\u2019s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!\n\nAs it did not make much sense to engineer the revamped physical Cargo system and Salvage for the old system, these two features have been engineered for PES (you want wrecks from player battles to stick around so you can salvage!) and will arrive with 3.18.\n\nHowever, we do not want engagement and content to stall because of PES requiring longer testing, so we are planning to release a content-rich Alpha 3.17.2 patch with known stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay in late June. The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.\n\nThe goal will then be to get 2-3 months of testing on 3.18 in PTU for an Alpha 3.18 release to LIVE in late Q3. I know many of you have been waiting for Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, and Persistent Entity Streaming for a long time, and I am excited to see us in the home stretch to finally bring it to you. I think 3.18 will be an amazing update that is an even bigger game-changer than 3.15 was, but we want to make sure we give it the proper time to test so we can deliver it to you at the best quality possible.\n\nAlongside our Persistent Streaming work the Engine and Graphic teams have been making great progress on the second big technical initiative we\u2019ve been working on the past two years; a complete replacement of our graphics engine with what we call \u201cGen 12\u201d, which is multithreaded and much more efficient approach to rendering which gets the most out of modern graphics APIs like Vulkan. This allows us to utilize the modern graphics power of PCs more efficiently and not tie up the main game update loop with waiting around for draw call submissions and the like. We are looking at getting the bulk of this functionality in for the Live release of 3.18 with the release of the Vulkan functionality a little later, but hopefully by the end of the year.\n\nThis leaves us with our third large technical initiative, Server Meshing.\n\nAs you might have guessed, we will approach Server Meshing in much the same way that we are rolling out Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be a truly new era in Star Citizen. It will mean our final tech building block \u2013 Server Meshing \u2013 will have been delivered. The first implementation will be what we call Static Server Meshing (SSM), where each server is given a defined area to simulate, but as soon as SSM is stable we will move towards Dynamic Server Meshing with subsequent releases which will allow much more scalability as servers will not be bound by location, but instead will be distributed by load, allowing for much better simulation performance in any given area of the universe.\n\nWith 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the \u2018verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.\n\nOur current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well \/ easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.\n\nThis special 2022 release cadence will not be particularly unusual to most players, if you pull back and look at it in a broad sense. We will still have 4 big end-of-quarter releases, as well as 2 big mid-quarter releases for Fleet Week in May and IAE in November. Players who are not steeped in our development process will still enjoy and experience rapid content releases every quarter, and as we get into the second half of 2022, you will see a lot more meaningful gameplay making its way into the \u2018verse. With another run of XenoThreat, updates to Jumptown, new Dynamic Events, additional locations and points of interest to explore, and more patch updates, there will be no shortage of gameplay and content to experience. And by year\u2019s end, players will be able to enjoy Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo refactor, and Bounty Hunter v2 gameplay on Live.\n\nMeanwhile, those who are following our development closest, and providing the critical service of helping us test our biggest tech, will be able to get their hands on Persistent Streaming and Server Meshing this year, as we put them into test in 3.18 and 4.0 in PTU during the summer and winter, respectively. Sometimes, the wait can be the hardest when we are closest to the finish line, but this year, I am so excited to share our release plans for our key tech building blocks, and I know many of you cannot wait to jump into PTU and start testing later this year.\n\nBuilding for Longevity\nIt is easy to only focus on our development progress and the work we have ahead in building Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but there is another very important element of our journey that is often overlooked. Not only are we building two hugely ambitious games to rival anything released by the biggest AAA studios, but we\u2019ve had to build the company to build the technology and make the games from scratch at the same time.\n\nThe day I stepped out on the stage at GDC, we had no formal employees, three founders in Ortwin, Sandi and myself, and a handful of people that had helped like Forrest Stephan, David Haddock and David Swofford, sometimes moonlighting from their day job (with permission of course) like Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy and Paul Reindell and a few friends from my old Origin and Digital Anvil days like Sergio Rosas and his CGBot art outsourcing company, to create the demo and build the website.\n\nToday we have 780 people on staff, plus an extended family of over 130 working closely with us at Turbulent in Montreal, with many more that will join us in the coming months. We have a seven-person Global Talent Acquisition team that focuses exclusively on trying to hire the best talent possible for CIG. To give you an idea of the scale of TA work, they helped us hire 168 people in 2021, and so far, this year have helped us recruit 128 people already.\n\n\nIn 2022, we will continue to grow in all departments, increasing our headcount to approximately 840 and bring us closer to release for Star Citizen and Squadron 42.\n\nOne challenge we have been facing is that we have nowhere near enough room at several of our studios for new hires that joined us during the pandemic. Because of this, we signed long-term leases on two offices in brand new and state of the art buildings in Manchester and Frankfurt last year.\n\nWe are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion \/ performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42\u2019s launch.\n\nIn Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.\n\nWe\u2019re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too.\n\nWe are building long-term homes that will provide the facilities to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.\n\nCitizenCon\nShows such as CitizenCon are huge undertakings that require lots of planning, and although life is slowly returning to normal, restrictions are only now just lifting. And as cases are still largely unpredictable, we see that planning big shows may still be a bit premature. The uncertainty surrounding resumed normality has impacted our ability to plan a physical show. Traditionally, we would already be deep in planning and execution for a CitizenCon today, if we were going to hold an event this October; however, we have not been able to do so yet. It does seem many of our peers in the industry are encountering similar conundrums, as E3 only recently canceled their physical show. In addition, Los Angeles, where we would hold this year\u2019s show tends to be very cautious and is more apt to impose restrictions on large in-person gatherings in the event of a new variant blowing up.\n\nBecause of this, combined with the huge amount of work the company is trying to deliver this year, not to mention moving 70% of the company into two new offices, we have decided not to hold a physical CitizenCon this year. We very much hope that next year we will be able to commit to an in-person event as we miss the opportunity to mix in person with all of you and be invigorated by your enthusiasm and excitement.\n\nAt the same time though, we know we could not have come this far without our community, and we are grateful for each and every one of you that has supported us along this journey. It being our 10th anniversary as a company and a community, we are going to be celebrating virtually with a virtual CitizenCon, like we did last year.\n\nOne difference to last year is that there will be no keynote gameplay demo to headline this event as this would pull valuable resources away from our game development teams that are working hard to get Persistent Streaming, Gen 12\/Vulkan and Server Meshing in your hands, not to mention also delivering more of the content and gameplay that has proven so successful in bringing in new players and retaining old and new users alike.\n\nInstead, CitizenCon will be a celebration of you, the community, with presentations and panels from our developers, to share with you the progress we are making and the near future of what you can expect from Star Citizen in the year ahead. And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we\u2019re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.\n\nBar Citizen World Tour\nIt has been more than 2 years since we have had the opportunity to spend time with all of you in person, and while we will not be together for CitizenCon, we cannot hold out another year! For that reason, we plan to kick off a robust \u201cBar Citizen World Tour\u201d this Summer, perfectly coinciding with the in-lore holiday, First Contact Day (Definitely read up on the backstory to see why this fits so nicely!). We would also like to take this perfect opportunity to coin a new out-of-game annual holiday: International Bar Citizen Day. We will celebrate this inaugural new holiday by hosting Bar Citizen events simultaneously near all our development studios in mid-June, details on the when\/where coming very soon.\n\nAfter that, we plan to branch out and bring the fun to events that may not be as close to our studios. Our Community Team is planning to embrace Bar Citizens around the globe with renewed vigor, bringing goodies and developers with them to greet and mingle with all of you as part of the celebration of our 10th anniversary.\n\nKeep a close eye on Spectrum in the weeks to come, as the team will begin exploring which Bar Citizen events to attend. So, if you are hosting your own event, we want to hear from you.\n\nFinal Thoughts\nWhile some of you will no doubt be disappointed to hear the news about no physical show and no keynote demo at CitizenCon, the team and I felt it was much more important that we focus on making development progress so that we could maintain the pace of delivery we have been hitting since Alpha 3.14.\n\nThis year is a big one for all of us on Star Citizen: You can expect to see Invictus Launch Week moving into the clouds of Crusader, the promise of Persistent Entity Streaming making its way to the \u2018verse, as well as big game-changing features like Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, new events and missions, enhancements to Jumptown, ships I know you\u2019re waiting on like the Corsair, Vulture, and Hull C; as well as more Quality of Life and New Player Onboarding improvements to make Star Citizen even more playable and welcoming than it is today. And that is without mentioning Pyro and Server Meshing, which we are aggressively working towards letting you test by end of year, pending how difficult it is to get Persistent Entity Streaming stable. We think you would all rather be playing this new content than hearing about it. So, we will use our time this year to focus on development and delivering to you the tech, features, and content you are waiting for.\n\nThe developers at CIG tend to get a lot of attention, which is well deserved as it is the most talented development team I have ever worked with. But there are a lot more people beyond development at CIG - as they say, \u201cit takes a village\u201d!\n\nWithout our Publishing and Live-Ops team the servers would not be up 24\/7 in the cloud, and you would not be able to download or play Star Citizen. Without our Quality Assurance teams tireless testing and feedback Star Citizen would be unplayable. Without the backend and web teams at Turbulent, you would not be able to log on, have a website to read news and information or a forum to participate in healthy debate on, pledge or launch Star Citizen. Without our Studio Experience Team looking after the health of our organization, there would not be a creative environment as ambitious as Star Citizen. Without our Finance and Legal teams, we could not have built a company as unique and groundbreaking as CIG. Without our Marketing and Community teams, there would not be any communication about our plans, no dazzling trailers to tease and excite about future content, and no real back and forth between the Community and CIG. Without our Customer Support and Player Experience Teams, you would not get the help you need, nor have the ability to give feedback on gameplay in a way it can be quantified. Without our IT department we would not be able to work together, whether in the office or from home, nor would we be able to compile code or create beautiful assets. Without our People department, there would be nobody that is there to hire, listen, guide and help our staff.\n\nAnd without all of you, with your enthusiasm and patience, there would be no Star Citizen, Squadron 42 or Cloud Imperium Games.\n\nAs we move closer to achieving the critical milestones outlined above, we cannot help but feel an immense amount of appreciation for each and every one of you who shares in the collective dream of Star Citizen. The path ahead is more vibrant than ever, but in some ways the collective journey together, the moments and fun that people have along the way as we build Star Citizen together is as rewarding as the ultimate destination.\n\nAnd that is what makes this game and community special.\n\n\nFrom all of us at Cloud Imperium, we will see you at Bar Citizen, Digital CitizenCon and in the PTU!\n\n5.0 explorersLong-rangeMaterialism cargo health devoid of selfOrdnanceClose-rangeEvolving greedOps bridge align us withMissionsSilicon Origin 300 develop gridPainInhabitedQuantum leap","de_DE":"Brief des Vorsitzenden\n18.05.2022 - 13:00 UHR\n\nDas Jahr im R\u00fcckblick\n\"Fahr nicht w\u00fctend!\"\n\nPhil Connors (Bill Murray), Murmeltiertag 1993\n\nIn gewisser Weise f\u00fchlte sich das vergangene Jahr so an, als w\u00fcrden wir wie Bill Murray in Murmeltiertag feststecken und dieselben Zyklen wie 2020 wiederholen. Gerade als wir dachten, wir s\u00e4hen Licht am Ende des Tunnels mit der COVID-19-Pandemie, tauchten neue Varianten auf, die die F\u00e4lle wieder in die H\u00f6he schnellen lie\u00dfen und die Gemeinden wieder zu Abriegelungen und anderen Sicherheitsma\u00dfnahmen zwangen. Die Welt wurde zunehmend m\u00fcde und ersch\u00f6pft von den Auswirkungen der Pandemie und den notwendigen Ma\u00dfnahmen, um die Menschen so sicher wie m\u00f6glich zu halten. Und selbst wenn ein gro\u00dfer Teil der Welt zur Normalit\u00e4t zur\u00fcckkehrt, verfolgt uns das Schreckgespenst einer neuen potenziellen Variante, die sich den Impfstoffen entziehen kann und leichter \u00fcbertragbar ist. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass sich COVID dank der in den meisten L\u00e4ndern leicht verf\u00fcgbaren Impfstoffe und eines gewissen Schutzes vor fr\u00fcheren Infektionen zu einer endemischen Krankheit entwickelt, die zwar nicht toll, aber auch nicht mehr so t\u00f6dlich ist wie fr\u00fcher - ein Virus, mit dem wir weiterleben k\u00f6nnen wie mit einer gew\u00f6hnlichen Grippe oder Erk\u00e4ltung.\n\nWegen der H\u00f6hen und Tiefen des letzten Jahres fangen wir gerade erst an, wieder ins B\u00fcro zu gehen. Das erste Studio, in dem es m\u00f6glich wurde, pers\u00f6nlich zusammenzuarbeiten, war unser britisches Studio in Manchester, wo ich seit letztem Herbst viel Zeit verbracht habe. Ich habe mit dem Team von Squadron 42 Seite an Seite im B\u00fcro gearbeitet, w\u00e4hrend wir uns auf die Fertigstellung und den Feinschliff der Inhalte und Funktionen dieses epischen erz\u00e4hlerischen Abenteuers konzentrieren. Unsere B\u00fcros in Frankfurt, Austin und Los Angeles kehren gerade erst ins B\u00fcro zur\u00fcck, nachdem die \u00f6rtlichen Beh\u00f6rden es f\u00fcr sicher genug befunden haben, verschiedene Auflagen aufzuheben. Zu Beginn der Pandemie waren wir stolz darauf, dass wir nahtlos von zu Hause aus arbeiten konnten, aber als sich die Situation hinzog, wurde uns klar, dass wir die Vorteile der spontanen Zusammenarbeit und der Teambildung vermissen, die sich aus der Arbeit in der N\u00e4he ergeben. Die Zeit, die ich mit dem Squadron-Team in Gro\u00dfbritannien verbracht habe, hat dies nur noch verst\u00e4rkt, denn die M\u00f6glichkeit, zum Schreibtisch von jemandem zu gehen und das Problem zu sehen oder ein Gespr\u00e4ch im Vorbeigehen \u00fcber ein Problem oder einen kreativen Gedanken zu f\u00fchren, macht einen enormen Unterschied f\u00fcr den Fortschritt. Wenn alle Mitarbeiter\/innen aus der Ferne arbeiten, wird es immer schwieriger, Probleme spontan zu l\u00f6sen oder Feedback zu erhalten oder zu geben, und es gibt viel mehr Meetings und Videogespr\u00e4che. Wir haben festgestellt, dass wir sechsmal so viele Meetings hatten, wenn alle von zu Hause aus arbeiteten, als wenn wir im B\u00fcro waren. Ich pers\u00f6nlich habe den Unterschied in unserer Release-Kadenz gesp\u00fcrt; wir brauchten etwas l\u00e4nger, um jeden Patch herauszubringen, und es wurde schwieriger, Fehler zu l\u00f6sen oder zu beheben, die l\u00e4nger als fr\u00fcher herumstanden. Ich habe auch den Trend in der gesamten Branche beobachtet, dass so ziemlich jeder gro\u00dfe Titel versp\u00e4tet oder in einigen ungl\u00fccklichen F\u00e4llen sogar fr\u00fcher als geplant ver\u00f6ffentlicht wird. Aus diesem Grund konzentrieren wir uns trotz der M\u00f6glichkeit, vollst\u00e4ndig remote zu arbeiten, darauf, die Leute wieder zusammenzubringen und f\u00fcr l\u00e4ngere Zeit Seite an Seite zu arbeiten. Die R\u00fcckkehr ins B\u00fcro bedeutet nicht, dass wir zu den alten Arbeitsmustern und -richtlinien zur\u00fcckkehren, denn die verl\u00e4ngerten Schlie\u00dfungen in Kombination mit der zweij\u00e4hrigen Fernarbeit haben uns neue Erkenntnisse \u00fcber die Work-Life-Balance unserer Mitarbeiter\/innen gebracht. Wir haben unsere globalen Arbeitsrichtlinien dahingehend ge\u00e4ndert, dass wir flexible Arbeitszeiten und eine Mischung aus pers\u00f6nlicher Anwesenheit und Arbeit von zu Hause aus zulassen, je nach den Bed\u00fcrfnissen des Mitarbeiters und des Vorgesetzten, wobei wir die Lebenssituationen unserer Mitarbeiter ber\u00fccksichtigen.\n\nTrotz der Herausforderungen des letzten Jahres bin ich stolz darauf, wie viel wir im Jahr 2021 erreicht haben. Wenn ich auf das vergangene Jahr zur\u00fcckblicke, bin ich erstaunt \u00fcber die Menge an Inhalten und Funktionen, die wir f\u00fcr unsere Spieler\/innen bereitgestellt haben. Im Januar letzten Jahres konnte die Community die erste Iteration des XenoThreat Incursion spielen, unser erstes dynamisches Event, das von den Spielern daf\u00fcr gelobt wurde, dass es die Teile von Star Citizen zu einer spannenden serverweiten Begegnung zusammenf\u00fchrt. Obwohl es nur die erste Version war, zeigte dieses Event bereits, was das Persistent Universe alles zu bieten hat. Im April 2021 haben wir Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy ver\u00f6ffentlicht und damit H\u00f6hlen und Dolinen, Verbesserungen der Planetentechnologie, Andocken von Schiffen an Stationen und vieles mehr eingef\u00fchrt. In der Invictus Launch Week \u00f6ffneten wir zum ersten Mal die T\u00fcren der Javelin, um den m\u00e4chtigen UEE-Zerst\u00f6rer zu besichtigen, und brachten die Bengal in den Orbit, um unser bisher gr\u00f6\u00dftes Raumschiff im Universum zu pr\u00e4sentieren.\n\nSo richtig in Fahrt kamen wir aber erst in der zweiten H\u00e4lfte des Jahres 2021 mit der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Alpha 3.14: Willkommen in Orison, als wir das Stanton-System mit dem Start des Gasriesen Crusader und der Landezone von Orison abschlossen. Damit einher gingen eine Reihe von Verbesserungen der Lebensqualit\u00e4t und unsere erste Version der volumetrischen Wolken.\n\nMit der Alpha 3.15: T\u00f6dliche Konsequenzen haben wir dann die Version 0 unseres medizinischen Gameplays, des Pl\u00fcnderns, des Bombardierens und des pers\u00f6nlichen Inventars eingef\u00fchrt, um nur einige der neuen Funktionen zu nennen. Zusammen mit den kontinuierlichen Verbesserungen bei Leistung und Stabilit\u00e4t und dem drastischen R\u00fcckgang der Serverabst\u00fcrze (die sich normalerweise als der ber\u00fcchtigte 30K-Fehler \u00e4u\u00dfern, d.h. die Verbindung zum Server wurde unterbrochen), begann das Spiel Star Citizen endlich auf eine Weise zusammenzuwachsen, wie es noch nie zuvor der Fall war.\n\nUnd so gro\u00dfartig unser Jahr 2020 in Bezug auf Engagement und Stimmung auch war, die zweite H\u00e4lfte des Jahres 2021 war auf einem anderen Niveau. Wir sahen, wie mehr Leute als je zuvor zu Star Citizen str\u00f6mten, getragen von einer Welle des guten Willens und der Begeisterung von aktuellen Spielern, die ihre Freunde zum Mitmachen aufforderten, und von Neulingen, die von dem Spektakel von Crusader, dem Gameplay von XenoThreat und den M\u00f6glichkeiten der neuen Features wie Personal Inventory und Looting begeistert waren. Und zum Abschluss des Jahres, als wir die Alpha 3.16: R\u00fcckkehr nach Jumptown starteten, kehrten altgediente Spieler zur\u00fcck, um unsere frische, neue Version der klassischen Jumptown-Schlachtfelder zu sehen und waren erstaunt, wie weit sich das Spiel entwickelt hatte.\n\nUnsere Siege im Jahr 2021 haben uns einen absolut historischen Start ins Jahr 2022 beschert. Bis jetzt haben wir alle unsere Prognosen \u00fcber neue Spieler, die dem Verse beitreten, \u00fcbertroffen. In diesem Jahr haben wir die Zahl der neuen Spieler sogar mehr als verdoppelt und mit der k\u00fcrzlich ver\u00f6ffentlichten Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes kommen t\u00e4glich \u00fcber zweitausend neue Spieler ins Spiel. Unsere DAU (Daily Active Users) ist seit den Zahlen, die ich in meinem letzten Brief des Vorsitzenden im Dezember 2020 genannt habe, um mehr als 50 % gestiegen, und mit dem neuesten Patch haben wir doppelt so viele t\u00e4gliche Logins wie bei der Einf\u00fchrung des letzten Patches im April. Die Anzahl der monatlich aktiven Nutzer\/innen (MAU) liegt weit \u00fcber den H\u00f6chstwerten von 2020. Seitdem haben wir fast 1 Million neue Accounts erstellt und mehr als eine halbe Million neue Spieler\/innen haben sich dem Spiel angeschlossen. Und diese Woche hat sich der 2-millionste Spieler bei Star Citizen angemeldet. Wir sind auf dem besten Weg, in diesem Jahr die Marke von 4 Millionen Gesamtkonten, \u00fcber 1 Million Logins und mehr als 500 Millionen Dollar Umsatz zu erreichen.\n\nAll das verdanken wir der unglaublichen Unterst\u00fctzung, die wir von euch erhalten, und den Fortschritten, die wir in Star Citizen gemacht haben und die neue neugierige Spieler in das Verse bringen. Es ist ermutigend, das Feedback und die Eindr\u00fccke von neueren Mitgliedern der Community zu sehen, wenn sie zum ersten Mal Star Citizen spielen.\n\nF\u00fcr all diejenigen unter uns, die von Anfang an dabei sind, ist es leicht, viele der Funktionen von Star Citizen als selbstverst\u00e4ndlich anzusehen, die kein anderes Spiel hat. Schlie\u00dflich kennen wir alle alle Funktionen, ihre Fehler und vor allem, was nicht gemacht wird, so dass es leicht sein kann, sich auf die halb leere Tasse zu konzentrieren, anstatt auf die volle. Aber welches andere Spiel hat die Kombination aus Umfang und Detailreichtum; die F\u00e4higkeit, nahtlos von einem Fu\u00dfmarsch zu einem vollst\u00e4ndig realisierten Schiff zu wechseln, mit funktionierenden Komponenten und einem bewohnbaren Innenraum, in dem du dich bewegen kannst, zu einem funkelnden Lichtpunkt am Himmel zu starten, durch die Wolken in die Schw\u00e4rze des Weltraums aufzusteigen, nur um von einer Gruppe von Piraten abgefangen zu werden, die deine Fracht von dir befreien wollen, sie in einem heftigen Luftkampf zu besiegen und deine Reise zu dem funkelnden Licht in der Ferne fortzusetzen... das sich in einen anderen Planeten verwandelt, auf dem du in die Atmosph\u00e4re eindringen und landen kannst, deine Rampe herunterl\u00e4sst und in eine belebte Stadt oder an ein wundersch\u00f6nes, von B\u00e4umen umgebenes Flussufer fliegst, um eine au\u00dferirdische Frucht zu ernten? Und das alles ohne Ladebildschirm und in unglaublicher Detailtreue in der ersten oder dritten Person? Es gibt andere Spiele, die einige dieser Elemente haben, aber keines, das alles so detailgetreu darstellt, wie Star Citizen es tut.\n\nManchmal ist es gar nicht so schlecht, zur\u00fcckzublicken und zu erkennen, wie weit wir gekommen sind. Wir werden oft wegen unserer Zeitpl\u00e4ne kritisiert, vor allem, wenn es um die urspr\u00fcngliche Crowdfunding-Kampagne geht, aber das Spiel, das heute gebaut wird, ist ein ganz anderes, viel umfangreicheres und immersiveres Spiel als das, das ich vor fast zehn Jahren vorgeschlagen habe. Damals gab es noch keine vollst\u00e4ndig realisierten Planeten, die mit unglaublichen Details gerendert waren und auf denen du dich \u00fcberall hinbegeben konntest; Planeten waren nur besuchbar, wenn sie einen gebastelten Landeplatz hatten, und selbst dann gab es eine Debatte dar\u00fcber, ob sie in der Ego-Perspektive erkundet werden konnten oder ob sie eher wie die Landezonen in Freelancer und Privateer sein w\u00fcrden, wo du zwischen ein paar Orten hin- und herklicken konntest, um Waren zu kaufen oder zu verkaufen oder in einer Bar Missionen zu erledigen. Es gab keine Vorstellung von einem First-Person-System, das so taktil und vollst\u00e4ndig ist, wie wir es heute machen, und auch keine Fahrzeugsimulation mit physischen Komponenten und dem Grad an systemischer Funktionalit\u00e4t, den wir anstreben. Das Spiel, das wir heute entwickeln, ist ein Spiel, das vieles umfasst: Es ist ein Dogfighting-Spacesim, ein Ego-Shooter, ein Handelsspiel, ein Ressourcensammelspiel, ein Ressourcenmanagementspiel, ein Abenteuerspiel, ein \u00dcberlebensspiel und ein Gesellschaftsspiel. Star Citizen ist eine Weltraumsimulation. Es ist ein Spiel f\u00fcr alle, denn wie im richtigen Leben gibt es viele verschiedene Wege, die man gehen kann, und der Erfolg wird dadurch definiert, was dich gl\u00fccklich macht. Willst du deine F\u00e4higkeiten als furchterregender Kampfpilot unter Beweis stellen? Das Spiel bietet dir diese M\u00f6glichkeit, aber auch wenn du einfach nur in Ruhe Mineralien abbauen und dein Gl\u00fcck machen willst, in Landezonen abh\u00e4ngen oder eine Ecke der Galaxie finden willst, die noch niemand gefunden hat ... all das sind Optionen in der Sandbox, die Star Citizen ist. Um das richtig zu machen, in einem Umfang, der es Millionen von Menschen erm\u00f6glicht, gemeinsam zu spielen, braucht es Zeit und Geld. Mit deiner Unterst\u00fctzung und Geduld sind wir in der Lage, ein Spiel zu entwickeln, das sich meiner Meinung nach kein anderer Publisher leisten k\u00f6nnte oder verr\u00fcckt genug w\u00e4re, sich darauf einzulassen.\n\nViele, die Star Citizen finanziell unterst\u00fctzt haben, interessieren sich nicht f\u00fcr Gewinne oder Quartalszahlen, sie wollen einfach nur das beste und gr\u00f6\u00dfte Spiel, das ihre Erwartungen und Tr\u00e4ume erf\u00fcllt. Das ist zwar keine kleine Aufgabe, aber f\u00fcr mich und alle anderen bei CIG ist es viel einfacher, uns daf\u00fcr einzusetzen, denn es ist ein Privileg, auf diese Weise k\u00fcnstlerisch herausgefordert und finanziell unterst\u00fctzt zu werden, und ich bin unheimlich dankbar, dass so viele Menschen so viel Vertrauen in uns alle setzen.\n\nDANKE!\n\nDer Weg zu 4.0\nIm Dezember 2017 wurde die Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 auf den Live-Servern ver\u00f6ffentlicht, nachdem unsere Entwickler auf der ganzen Welt gemeinsam daran gearbeitet hatten. Dieser monumentale Patch f\u00fchrte unsere brandneue prozedurale Planetentechnologie und die ersten planetaren K\u00f6rper ein, auf denen du landen und dich \u00fcberall auf der Oberfl\u00e4che der drei Monde von Crusader bewegen konntest. Au\u00dferdem enthielt er ein neues Missionssystem, verbesserte Einkaufsm\u00f6glichkeiten, neue Frachtmechanismen und verdoppelte die Spielerzahl auf dem Server. Bis heute war Star Citizen 3.0 wahrscheinlich der gr\u00f6\u00dfte Sprung in Sachen Gameplay und Inhalt, weshalb wir die Alpha-Bezeichnung von 2.X auf 3.X erh\u00f6ht haben, und zwischen 2.6.3 und 3.0 lagen ganze acht Monate.\n\nDieses Jahr befinden wir uns auf einem \u00e4hnlichen Weg mit drei gro\u00dfen technologischen Initiativen, die das Erlebnis und die Immersion in Star Citizen grundlegend ver\u00e4ndern werden. Die erste davon ist das sogenannte Persistent Entity Streaming (PES), die grundlegende Technologie, die das Server Meshing (SM) erm\u00f6glicht. PES ist der schwierigste Teil der Arbeit, die f\u00fcr SM n\u00f6tig ist, und derjenige, der am meisten Entwicklungsarbeit erfordert. Es ver\u00e4ndert die Art und Weise, wie wir Zust\u00e4nde im Universum aufzeichnen, grundlegend und sorgt f\u00fcr einen Grad an Persistenz, den du in anderen Spielen, egal ob MMOs oder Einzelspieler-Erfahrungen, einfach nicht findest. Bisher war die gesamte Persistenz im Spiel an das Inventar des Spielers gebunden: an Schiffe, die du besitzt, an Gegenst\u00e4nde, die du physisch besitzt, oder an die virtuellen Inventare der Gegenst\u00e4nde, die du besitzt. Wenn du einen Gegenstand physisch in deinem Fahrzeug angebracht hast, z. B. ein Gewehr an einem Waffentr\u00e4ger, merkt sich das Fahrzeug alle angebrachten Gegenst\u00e4nde und alles, was sich im virtuellen Inventar des Fahrzeugs befindet, wenn du dich ausloggst oder das Fahrzeug verstaut hast. Wenn du jedoch etwas fallen l\u00e4sst oder lose platzierst, selbst in einem Schiff, das dir geh\u00f6rt, wird es nicht mit dem Spielerinventar verkn\u00fcpft. Wenn du dich also ausloggst (oder der Server abst\u00fcrzt), ist der Gegenstand nicht mehr da, wenn du dich einloggst oder wieder einsteigst. Bei PES zeichnen wir den Zustand jedes dynamischen Objekts im Spiel auf, unabh\u00e4ngig davon, ob es einem Spieler \"geh\u00f6rt\" oder von ihm gehalten wird. Das bedeutet, dass du ein Gewehr oder einen Medipen in einem Waldgebiet auf Microtech fallen lassen k\u00f6nntest und einige Tage sp\u00e4ter, nachdem du dich ausgeloggt hast, zur\u00fcckkehrst und das Gewehr oder den Medipen immer noch vorfindest (vorausgesetzt, ein anderer Spieler hat es sich nicht geschnappt!).\n\nDie Technologie, um dies in einem so gro\u00dfen und detaillierten Universum wie dem unseren f\u00fcr Millionen von Spielern zu erm\u00f6glichen, ist keine kleine technische Meisterleistung. Wir haben seit 2019 darauf hingearbeitet, als wir das Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS) eingef\u00fchrt haben, das es einem Server erm\u00f6glicht, nur einen Teil unseres Universums zu streamen und zu simulieren, was notwendig ist, wenn mehrere Server verschiedene Teile des Universums simulieren sollen.\n\nDie Entwicklung verlief nicht ohne Hindernisse. Wir mussten unsere Pl\u00e4ne f\u00fcr die Speicherung des Zustands des Universums \u00e4ndern, als wir feststellten, dass die relationale Datenbank, die wir mit einer Reihe von Diensten verwenden wollten und die wir \"iCache\" genannt hatten, wahrscheinlich nicht in der Lage sein w\u00fcrde, eine niedrige Latenzzeit in dem Umfang zu haben, wie wir sie f\u00fcr die Anzahl der gleichzeitigen Spieler, die wir in Zukunft unterst\u00fctzen m\u00fcssen, ben\u00f6tigen. Anfang 2021 sind wir auf eine Graph-Datenbank umgestiegen und haben einen anderen Ansatz f\u00fcr die Dienste und den Cache gew\u00e4hlt, den wir in einer virtuellen Pr\u00e4sentation auf der CitizenCon im letzten Jahr vorgestellt haben. Die aktuelle Architektur verwendet den sogenannten Replication Layer, einen skalierbaren Datencache, der den Zustand aller dynamischen Objekte im Universum verfolgt, in der Cloud l\u00e4uft und mit der cloudbasierten Graphdatenbank kommuniziert, die wir Entity Graph nennen. Sie ist letztlich die letzte Instanz f\u00fcr den Zustand aller dynamischen Objekte in unserem Universum. Der Replikations-Layer, ein separater Dienst, der in seiner endg\u00fcltigen Form mehrere Worker Nodes haben wird, die auf der Gleichzeitigkeit der Spieler basieren, erm\u00f6glicht es uns, den Zustand des Universums in Echtzeit zu verfolgen und zu kommunizieren. Dies ist besonders wichtig f\u00fcr die Skalierbarkeit, da die Kunden nicht auf die Simulation eines Servers warten m\u00fcssen, um zu sehen, wie sich der Zustand um sie herum \u00e4ndert, da sowohl die Kunden als auch die Server ihre Ergebnisse an die Replikationsschicht \u00fcbermitteln, die dann an alle Kunden weitergegeben wird. Da der Replication Layer Service nicht simulieren muss, kann er den Clients Zustands\u00e4nderungen in einer festen Frequenz mitteilen und ist nicht an die Simulationszeit gebunden, was zu einer besseren Erfahrung f\u00fcr die Spieler\/innen f\u00fchren sollte. Damit PES funktioniert, m\u00fcssen sowohl der Entity Graph als auch der Replication Layer funktionsf\u00e4hig sein. Dies war die gr\u00f6\u00dfte technische Herausforderung und erforderte eine grundlegende \u00dcberarbeitung der Art und Weise, wie das Spiel mit Befugnissen und Zustands\u00e4nderungen von Entit\u00e4ten umgeht. Dar\u00fcber hinaus wurden eine ganze Reihe neuer Online-Dienste ben\u00f6tigt, um den Replikations-Layer und den Entity Graph zu unterst\u00fctzen. Um PES zu unterst\u00fctzen, mussten wir 12 neue Dienste erstellen. F\u00fcr Server Meshing sind derzeit nur 4 weitere Dienste geplant, woran du siehst, wie viel grundlegende Technologie f\u00fcr SM in PES steckt. In diesem Zusammenhang sind wir auf gRPC umgestiegen, ein von Google gesponsertes, skalierbares Datenprotokoll f\u00fcr die Online-Kommunikation. Das Gute an dieser Technologie ist, dass sie skalierbar ist (stell dir vor, wie viele gleichzeitige Nutzerinnen und Nutzer Google bew\u00e4ltigen muss) und dass es viele verf\u00fcgbare Tools und Codes von Drittanbietern gibt, im Gegensatz zur Entwicklung eines eigenen Protokolls.\n\nDamit Persistent Entity Streaming funktioniert, brauchen wir den Gro\u00dfteil der Technologie, die wir brauchen, um Server Meshing praktikabel zu machen. Ich freue mich, berichten zu k\u00f6nnen, dass das Team nach 16 Monaten extrem konzentrierter Arbeit von 18 Ingenieuren, 3 engagierten QA und 4 Produzenten, verteilt auf CIG und Turbulent (die die Backend-Datenbank in der Cloud und die dazugeh\u00f6rigen Dienste verwalten), letzte Woche in unserem w\u00f6chentlichen internen Persistent Universe Update Meeting zeigen konnte, dass Persistent Entity Streaming funktioniert.\n\nPaul Reindell, unser Director of Engineering f\u00fcr Online Tech, startete einen Server, f\u00fcllte den Entity Graph in seinen Anfangszustand und die Replikationsschicht (die im Wesentlichen ein Cache f\u00fcr den Zustand des Universums und der Backend-Datenbank in der Cloud ist, um sicherzustellen, dass Lese- und Schreibvorg\u00e4nge in der Datenbank nicht zu Engp\u00e4ssen bei Servern und Clients f\u00fchren), schloss einen Client an und platzierte eine Reihe von kleinen Objekten wie Dosen auf der Oberfl\u00e4che von Aberdeen, zusammen mit einem 890 Jump und einem Anvil Arrow. Dann hat er den Server und den Client beendet. Der Server wurde neu gestartet, wir f\u00fcllten den Entit\u00e4tsgraphen nicht auf (da er beim ersten Start bereits gesetzt worden war), und dann schloss er einen Client an, warf einen Warp nach Aberdeen und alles war so, wie er es platziert hatte. Das war ein gro\u00dfer Meilenstein, denn der Zustand des Universums wurde in der Backend-Datenbank gespeichert. Als er dann den Server neu startete, verband er sich einfach mit dem Replication Layer, der sich selbst aus der Datenbank (dem Entity Graph) initialisiert hatte, und fuhr mit dem Universum in dem Zustand fort, in dem er es verlassen hatte.\n\nDas mag f\u00fcr einige von euch nicht revolution\u00e4r klingen, aber ich kann euch sagen, dass es so war, als ob Neil Armstrong \"einen kleinen Schritt\" gemacht h\u00e4tte. Sobald Persistent Entity Streaming online geht, wird Star Citizen ein anderes Universum sein. Die vollst\u00e4ndige Persistenz wird in den kommenden Jahren eine Spielerfahrung erm\u00f6glichen, die die meisten anderen Online-Spiele nicht bieten: ein Universum, in das du fl\u00fcchten kannst, das von deinen Handlungen und denen anderer Spieler beeinflusst wird und dessen Zustand dynamisch und persistent ist. Wenn du auf einem Planeten eine Bruchlandung hinlegst, bleibt dein Schiffswrack bestehen, w\u00e4hrend du nach Nahrung und Wasser suchst, um zu \u00fcberleben, und vielleicht auch nach Holz, um ein Feuer zu machen, das dich w\u00e4rmt. logge dich aus und komme zu dem zur\u00fcck, was du gebaut hast. Oder vielleicht stolpert nach deiner Rettung ein anderer Spieler \u00fcber das Wrack deines alten Schiffes und das l\u00e4ngst erloschene Lagerfeuer. Finde eine Ecke der Galaxie, die du dir zu eigen machen kannst, sammle Ressourcen und importiere Material, um deinen Au\u00dfenposten zu bauen, dekoriere oder richte deinen Hangar oder dein Haus ein, wie du willst.\n\nMit dieser Technologie wird Server Meshing m\u00f6glich, denn der Replikationslayer\/Entity Graph ist der Zustand des Universums, aus dem Clients und Server schreiben und lesen. Da wir den Zustand von der Simulation entkoppelt haben, k\u00f6nnen wir viele Serverknoten haben, die alle mit der Replikationsschicht kommunizieren und f\u00fcr die Simulation bestimmter Bereiche im Universum zust\u00e4ndig sind. Das bedeutet, dass wir, anstatt dass ein Server aufgrund der Simulationslast auf f\u00fcnf Bilder pro Sekunde einbricht, einfach einen weiteren Server aufsetzen k\u00f6nnen, und dann noch einen, um die Simulationslast zu verteilen und die Aktualisierungsrate hoch zu halten. Das ist das ultimative Ziel von Dynamic Server Meshing, auf das wir hinarbeiten.\n\nBei einer grundlegenden \u00c4nderung der Zustandsaufzeichnung, die sich auf alle dynamischen Objekte auswirkt und nicht nur auf einige wenige, wird es eine Reihe von Problemen geben, auf die wir noch nicht gesto\u00dfen sind oder die wir nicht vorhergesehen haben.\n\n2022 TESTEN UND RELEASE-RHYTHMUS\nAus diesem Grund werden wir an 3.18 anders herangehen als an unsere vorherigen Versionen. Wir gehen davon aus, dass 3.18 aufgrund der grundlegenden \u00c4nderung der Zustandsverfolgung im Spiel eine viel l\u00e4ngere Zeit in der Evocati\/PTU-Phase ben\u00f6tigen wird als unsere vorherigen Versionen. Wir wissen, dass wir auch umfangreiche Tests ben\u00f6tigen, denn unserer Erfahrung nach treten unterschiedliche Probleme auf, wenn wir von internen Tests zu Evocati zu PTU Welle 1, dann Welle 2 und so weiter wechseln. Spieler\/innen machen verr\u00fcckte Dinge und viele Spieler\/innen schaffen viele verr\u00fcckte F\u00e4lle, die wir nicht bedacht haben und die Fehler und Randf\u00e4lle aufdecken. Wir sch\u00e4tzen, dass die PTU-Phase bis zu drei Monate dauern kann, aber das ist schwer vorherzusagen. Wird sich das Universum zum Beispiel in eine Albtraumversion von WALL-E verwandeln, weil jeder einfach leere Kisten auf den Boden wirft oder die 10 KI-K\u00f6rper, die er gepl\u00fcndert hat, in New Babbage's Commons entsorgt? Wir arbeiten an einem sogenannten Density Manager, der die Objekte verwaltet, die erfasst werden, und die Objekte mit geringerer Priorit\u00e4t (z. B. weggeworfene leere Flaschen oder Dosen) aufr\u00e4umt, wenn sich zu viele in einem Gebiet befinden. Aber ich vermute, dass wir auch KI-Hausmeister und vielleicht sogar Verbrechensstatistiken f\u00fcr Verm\u00fcllung in Landezonen wie New Babbage oder ArcCorp einf\u00fchren m\u00fcssen!\n\nDa es keinen Sinn machte, das \u00fcberarbeitete physische Ladungssystem und die Bergung f\u00fcr das alte System zu entwickeln, wurden diese beiden Funktionen f\u00fcr PES entwickelt (du willst ja, dass die Wracks aus den K\u00e4mpfen der Spieler liegen bleiben, damit du sie bergen kannst!\n\nWir wollen jedoch nicht, dass das Engagement und die Inhalte ins Stocken geraten, weil PES l\u00e4nger getestet werden muss. Deshalb planen wir, Ende Juni einen inhaltsreichen Alpha-Patch 3.17.2 mit bekanntem stabilen Code, neuen Missionen, neuen Orten und anderem Gameplay zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen. Die gro\u00dfe Mehrheit der Spielerinnen und Spieler, Hunderttausende von ihnen, sind hier, um einfach auf Live zu spielen, und f\u00fcr sie wollen wir weiterhin fesselndes neues Gameplay und Abenteuer bieten, w\u00e4hrend wir 3.18 in gro\u00dfem Umfang auf der PTU testen.\n\nUnser Ziel ist es, 3.18 in der PTU 2-3 Monate lang zu testen, damit wir Ende des dritten Quartals eine Alpha 3.18 auf LIVE ver\u00f6ffentlichen k\u00f6nnen. Ich wei\u00df, dass viele von euch schon lange auf Bergung, Physicalized Cargo und Persistent Entity Streaming gewartet haben, und ich freue mich, dass wir uns auf der Zielgeraden befinden, um sie euch endlich zu bringen. Ich glaube, dass 3.18 ein gro\u00dfartiges Update sein wird, das das Spiel noch mehr ver\u00e4ndern wird als 3.15, aber wir wollen sicherstellen, dass wir ihm die n\u00f6tige Zeit zum Testen geben, damit wir es euch in bestm\u00f6glicher Qualit\u00e4t liefern k\u00f6nnen.\n\nNeben der Arbeit an Persistent Streaming haben die Engine- und Grafikteams gro\u00dfe Fortschritte bei der zweiten gro\u00dfen technischen Initiative gemacht, an der wir in den letzten zwei Jahren gearbeitet haben: die komplette Erneuerung unserer Grafik-Engine durch das, was wir \"Gen 12\" nennen, ein Multithreading und ein viel effizienterer Ansatz f\u00fcr das Rendering, der das Beste aus modernen Grafik-APIs wie Vulkan macht. So k\u00f6nnen wir die moderne Grafikleistung von PCs effizienter nutzen und m\u00fcssen nicht mehr in der Hauptaktualisierungsschleife des Spiels auf Zeichenaufrufe und \u00c4hnliches warten. Wir planen, den Gro\u00dfteil dieser Funktionen mit der Live-Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von 3.18 einzubauen und die Vulkan-Funktionalit\u00e4t etwas sp\u00e4ter, aber hoffentlich bis Ende des Jahres, zu ver\u00f6ffentlichen.\n\nBleibt noch unsere dritte gro\u00dfe technische Initiative, das Server Meshing.\n\nWie du vielleicht schon vermutet hast, werden wir das Server Meshing auf die gleiche Weise angehen wie das Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 wird eine wirklich neue \u00c4ra in Star Citizen einl\u00e4uten. Sie bedeutet, dass unser letzter technischer Baustein - das Server Meshing - fertiggestellt sein wird. Die erste Implementierung wird das sogenannte Static Server Meshing (SSM) sein, bei dem jeder Server ein bestimmtes Gebiet simuliert. Sobald SSM jedoch stabil ist, werden wir in den folgendas Verseionen zum Dynamic Server Meshing \u00fcbergehen, das eine viel bessere Skalierbarkeit erm\u00f6glicht, da die Server nicht an einen bestimmten Ort gebunden sind, sondern nach der Auslastung verteilt werden, was eine viel bessere Simulationsleistung in jedem beliebigen Gebiet des Universums erm\u00f6glicht.\n\nMit 4.0 bekommen wir unser zweites Sternensystem, Pyro, und wir fangen an, mehr und mehr Inhalte, Gameplay und Feinschliff hinzuzuf\u00fcgen, um uns zur Beta zu bringen. F\u00fcr uns alle bei CIG bedeuten Server Meshing und 4.0 den n\u00e4chsten gro\u00dfen Schritt, um das Universum mit den versprochenen Inhalten und dem Gameplay zu bev\u00f6lkern, die Star Citizen zu einem reichhaltigen, lebendigen Universum machen werden, das die Versprechen, die wir vor vielen Jahren gegeben haben, noch \u00fcbertrifft.\n\nUnser derzeitiges Ziel ist es, das Server Meshing und 4.0 als fr\u00fche technische Vorschau f\u00fcr Evocati-Tester in PTU Ende des vierten Quartals dieses Jahres einzuf\u00fchren, damit unsere eifrigsten Spieler uns dabei helfen k\u00f6nnen, das Server Meshing zu testen, damit wir es f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung verfeinern k\u00f6nnen. Dies h\u00e4ngt jedoch stark davon ab, wie gut\/einfach die Einf\u00fchrung von Persistent Entity Streaming verl\u00e4uft, also sei gewarnt, dass dies mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit in Q1 n\u00e4chsten Jahres stattfinden wird. Sobald das Server Meshing mit Tausenden von Spielern in PTU getestet wird, k\u00f6nnen wir besser einsch\u00e4tzen, wie viel Zeit es in PTU braucht, bevor es auf LIVE gehen kann. Unser Ziel ist das Ende des 1. Quartals 2023, aber auch hier gilt, dass wir es erst dann mit Sicherheit wissen werden, wenn es getestet wird.\n\nF\u00fcr die meisten Spielerinnen und Spieler wird diese spezielle Ver\u00f6ffentlichungsh\u00e4ufigkeit im Jahr 2022 nicht sonderlich ungew\u00f6hnlich sein, wenn man sie etwas zur\u00fccknimmt und im Gro\u00dfen und Ganzen betrachtet. Wir werden immer noch 4 gro\u00dfe Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen am Ende des Quartals sowie 2 gro\u00dfe Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen in der Mitte des Quartals f\u00fcr die Flottenwoche im Mai und die IAE im November haben. Spieler, die nicht in unseren Entwicklungsprozess eingeweiht sind, werden weiterhin in jedem Quartal schnelle Inhaltsver\u00f6ffentlichungen erleben, und in der zweiten H\u00e4lfte des Jahres 2022 werden wir noch viel mehr bedeutungsvolles Gameplay in die Welt bringen. Mit einer weiteren Ausgabe von XenoThreat, Updates f\u00fcr Jumptown, neuen dynamischen Ereignissen, zus\u00e4tzlichen Orten und Sehensw\u00fcrdigkeiten, die es zu erkunden gilt, und weiteren Patch-Updates wird es keinen Mangel an Gameplay und Inhalten geben, die du erleben kannst. Bis zum Jahresende k\u00f6nnen die Spieler\/innen Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo Refactor und Bounty Hunter v2 Gameplay auf Live genie\u00dfen.\n\nIn der Zwischenzeit werden diejenigen, die unsere Entwicklung aufmerksam verfolgen und uns beim Testen unserer wichtigsten Technologien helfen, in diesem Jahr Persistent Streaming und Server Meshing in die H\u00e4nde bekommen, da wir sie in 3.18 und 4.0 in PTU im Sommer bzw. Winter testen werden. Manchmal ist das Warten am schwersten, wenn wir kurz vor der Ziellinie stehen, aber in diesem Jahr freue ich mich sehr darauf, unsere Pl\u00e4ne f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung unserer wichtigsten Technologiebausteine mitzuteilen, und ich wei\u00df, dass viele von euch es kaum erwarten k\u00f6nnen, in PTU einzusteigen und noch in diesem Jahr mit den Tests zu beginnen.\n\nBauen f\u00fcr die Langlebigkeit\nEs ist leicht, sich nur auf unseren Entwicklungsfortschritt und die Arbeit zu konzentrieren, die wir mit Star Citizen und Squadron 42 vor uns haben, aber es gibt noch ein anderes sehr wichtiges Element unserer Reise, das oft \u00fcbersehen wird. Wir entwickeln nicht nur zwei sehr ehrgeizige Spiele, die es mit denen der gr\u00f6\u00dften AAA-Studios aufnehmen k\u00f6nnen, sondern wir mussten auch das Unternehmen aufbauen, um die Technologie zu entwickeln und die Spiele von Grund auf neu zu entwickeln.\n\nAn dem Tag, an dem ich die B\u00fchne auf der GDC betrat, hatten wir keine offiziellen Angestellten, sondern mit Ortwin, Sandi und mir drei Gr\u00fcnder und eine Handvoll Leute, die uns geholfen hatten, wie Forrest Stephan, David Haddock und David Swofford, die manchmal neben ihrem Hauptjob arbeiteten (nat\u00fcrlich mit Erlaubnis), wie Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy und Paul Reindell, und ein paar Freunde aus meiner alten Origin- und Digital Anvil-Zeit, wie Sergio Rosas und seine Kunst-Outsourcing-Firma CGBot, um die Demo zu erstellen und die Website aufzubauen.\n\nHeute haben wir 780 Mitarbeiter und eine erweiterte Familie von \u00fcber 130 Personen, die eng mit uns bei Turbulent in Montreal zusammenarbeiten, und viele weitere werden in den kommenden Monaten zu uns sto\u00dfen. Wir haben ein siebenk\u00f6pfiges Global Talent Acquisition Team, das sich ausschlie\u00dflich darauf konzentriert, die bestm\u00f6glichen Talente f\u00fcr CIG einzustellen. Um dir eine Vorstellung vom Umfang der TA-Arbeit zu geben: Im Jahr 2021 haben sie uns geholfen, 168 Leute einzustellen, und in diesem Jahr haben sie uns bereits bei der Einstellung von 128 Leuten geholfen.\n\n\nIm Jahr 2022 werden wir in allen Abteilungen weiter wachsen und unsere Mitarbeiterzahl auf ca. 840 erh\u00f6hen, was uns der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Star Citizen und Squadron 42 n\u00e4her bringt.\n\nEine Herausforderung, mit der wir konfrontiert sind, ist, dass wir in mehreren unserer Studios nicht ann\u00e4hernd genug Platz f\u00fcr die neuen Mitarbeiter\/innen haben, die w\u00e4hrend der Pandemie zu uns gesto\u00dfen sind. Aus diesem Grund haben wir im letzten Jahr langfristige Mietvertr\u00e4ge f\u00fcr zwei B\u00fcros in brandneuen und hochmodernen Geb\u00e4uden in Manchester und Frankfurt abgeschlossen.\n\nWir sind nur noch wenige Monate von der Er\u00f6ffnung der beiden neuen B\u00fcros entfernt, die beide erstklassige R\u00e4ume f\u00fcr die Zusammenarbeit schaffen und unser st\u00e4ndig wachsendes Team beherbergen werden. Unser neues Studio in Gro\u00dfbritannien wird auf den drei obersten Etagen des Manchester Goods Yard 90.000 m\u00b2 hochmoderne, kreative Studior\u00e4ume bieten, sowie zwei B\u00fchnen im angrenzenden Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse Komplex: eine spezielle Motion-\/Performance-Capture-B\u00fchne mit einer Fl\u00e4che von 4.500 m\u00b2 mit Umkleider\u00e4umen, einem gr\u00fcnen Raum, einem Maschinenraum, einem Scan-Raum und einer Aussichtsgalerie sowie eine kleinere B\u00fchne f\u00fcr die globale Videoproduktion, die \u00fcber ein spezielles Set verf\u00fcgt und f\u00fcr das Filmen einer Vielzahl von Inhalten f\u00fcr Star Citizen und sp\u00e4ter f\u00fcr den Start von Squadron 42 bestens ger\u00fcstet ist.\n\nIn Frankfurt werden wir im The One auf zwei Etagen 30.000 m\u00b2 mit spektakul\u00e4rem Blick \u00fcber die Skyline der Stadt beziehen. Das ist doppelt so viel wie unsere derzeitige Fl\u00e4che in Frankfurt und sollte uns eine gute Ausgangsposition f\u00fcr ein baldiges Wachstum bieten.\n\nWir schauen uns auch nach dem n\u00e4chsten Standort f\u00fcr unser Studio in Austin um, wo wir Ende n\u00e4chsten Jahres einziehen k\u00f6nnten, da wir auch dort mehr Platz brauchen. Danach werden wir auch das Studio in LA ausbauen.\n\nWir bauen ein langfristiges Zuhause, das uns die M\u00f6glichkeit bietet, das Universum f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chsten Jahrzehnte am Leben zu erhalten und zu erweitern.\n\nCitizenCon\nVeranstaltungen wie die CitizenCon sind riesige Unternehmungen, die viel Planung erfordern, und obwohl das Leben langsam wieder zur Normalit\u00e4t zur\u00fcckkehrt, werden die Einschr\u00e4nkungen gerade erst aufgehoben. Und da die F\u00e4lle immer noch weitgehend unvorhersehbar sind, sehen wir, dass die Planung gro\u00dfer Shows vielleicht noch etwas verfr\u00fcht ist. Die Ungewissheit \u00fcber die wiederhergestellte Normalit\u00e4t hat sich auf unsere F\u00e4higkeit ausgewirkt, eine physische Show zu planen. Normalerweise w\u00e4ren wir heute schon mitten in der Planung und Durchf\u00fchrung einer CitizenCon, wenn wir im Oktober eine Veranstaltung abhalten w\u00fcrden, aber dazu waren wir bisher nicht in der Lage. Es scheint, dass viele unserer Branchenkollegen mit \u00e4hnlichen Problemen zu k\u00e4mpfen haben, denn erst k\u00fcrzlich hat die E3 ihre physische Messe abgesagt. Au\u00dferdem ist Los Angeles, wo wir die diesj\u00e4hrige Messe abhalten w\u00fcrden, sehr vorsichtig und neigt eher dazu, gro\u00dfe pers\u00f6nliche Versammlungen zu verbieten, wenn eine neue Variante auftaucht.\n\nAus diesem Grund und wegen des enormen Arbeitsaufwands, den das Unternehmen in diesem Jahr zu bew\u00e4ltigen hat, ganz zu schweigen vom Umzug von 70% des Unternehmens in zwei neue B\u00fcros, haben wir beschlossen, in diesem Jahr keine CitizenCon zu veranstalten. Wir hoffen sehr, dass wir im n\u00e4chsten Jahr in der Lage sein werden, eine pers\u00f6nliche Veranstaltung zu organisieren, denn wir vermissen die Gelegenheit, uns pers\u00f6nlich mit euch allen auszutauschen und von eurem Enthusiasmus und eurer Begeisterung angespornt zu werden.\n\nGleichzeitig wissen wir aber auch, dass wir ohne unsere Gemeinschaft nicht so weit gekommen w\u00e4ren, und wir sind dankbar f\u00fcr jeden Einzelnen von euch, der uns auf diesem Weg unterst\u00fctzt hat. Da wir unser 10-j\u00e4hriges Bestehen als Unternehmen und als Gemeinschaft feiern, werden wir, wie schon im letzten Jahr, eine virtuelle CitizenCon veranstalten.\n\nEin Unterschied zum letzten Jahr besteht darin, dass es keine Gameplay-Demo geben wird, da dies wertvolle Ressourcen von unseren Spielentwicklungsteams abziehen w\u00fcrde, die hart daran arbeiten, Persistent Streaming, Gen 12\/Vulkan und Server Meshing in eure H\u00e4nde zu bekommen, ganz zu schweigen davon, dass wir noch mehr Inhalte und Gameplay liefern, die sich als so erfolgreich erwiesen haben, dass sie neue Spieler\/innen anziehen und alte wie neue Nutzer\/innen binden.\n\nStattdessen wird die CitizenCon eine Feier f\u00fcr euch, die Community, mit Pr\u00e4sentationen und Diskussionsrunden unserer Entwickler sein, um euch \u00fcber die Fortschritte, die wir machen, und die nahe Zukunft dessen, was ihr im n\u00e4chsten Jahr von Star Citizen erwarten k\u00f6nnt, zu informieren. Wie ich bereits in meinem Brief vom Dezember 2020 erw\u00e4hnt habe, werden wir uns mit Squadron 42 noch zur\u00fcckhalten, bis es an der Zeit ist, die Ver\u00f6ffentlichungskampagne zu starten. Und so weit sind wir noch nicht. Ihr solltet wissen, dass wir gut vorankommen, aber wir sind noch nicht bereit, den Vorhang f\u00fcr Squadron 42 zu schlie\u00dfen.\n\nBar Citizen Welttournee\nEs ist mehr als 2 Jahre her, dass wir die Gelegenheit hatten, mit euch allen pers\u00f6nlich Zeit zu verbringen, und obwohl wir nicht auf der CitizenCon sein werden, k\u00f6nnen wir es nicht ein weiteres Jahr aushalten! Aus diesem Grund planen wir, diesen Sommer eine robuste \"Bar Citizen World Tour\" zu starten, die genau mit dem Feiertag des Ersten Kontakts zusammenf\u00e4llt (Lies unbedingt die Hintergrundgeschichte, um zu sehen, warum das so gut passt!) Au\u00dferdem m\u00f6chten wir diese Gelegenheit nutzen, um einen neuen Feiertag au\u00dferhalb des Spiels auszurufen: Den Internationalen Bar Citizen Day. Wir werden diesen ersten neuen Feiertag feiern, indem wir Mitte Juni in allen unseren Entwicklungsstudios gleichzeitig Bar Citizen Events veranstalten.\n\nDanach planen wir, den Spa\u00df auch auf Veranstaltungen zu bringen, die nicht so nah an unseren Studios liegen. Unser Community-Team plant, Bar Citizen rund um den Globus mit neuem Elan zu begr\u00fc\u00dfen und bringt Goodies und Entwickler mit, um sich zur Feier unseres 10-j\u00e4hrigen Jubil\u00e4ums unter euch zu mischen und euch zu begr\u00fc\u00dfen.\n\nBehalte Spectrum in den n\u00e4chsten Wochen genau im Auge, denn das Team wird sich \u00fcberlegen, welche Bar Citizen-Events wir besuchen wollen. Wenn du also eine eigene Veranstaltung ausrichtest, m\u00f6chten wir von dir h\u00f6ren.\n\nSchlussgedanken\nEinige von euch werden sicher entt\u00e4uscht sein, dass es keine physische Show und keine Keynote-Demo auf der CitizenCon geben wird. Das Team und ich waren jedoch der Meinung, dass es viel wichtiger ist, dass wir uns auf den Fortschritt in der Entwicklung konzentrieren, damit wir das Tempo beibehalten k\u00f6nnen, das wir seit Alpha 3.14 vorgelegt haben.\n\nDieses Jahr ist ein gro\u00dfes Jahr f\u00fcr uns alle bei Star Citizen: Du kannst dich auf die Invictus Launch Week freuen, die in die Wolken von Crusader eindringt, auf das Versprechen von Persistent Entity Streaming, das seinen Weg ins Verse findet, sowie auf gro\u00dfe spielver\u00e4ndernde Features wie Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, neue Events und Missionen, Verbesserungen f\u00fcr Jumptown, Schiffe, auf die du schon lange wartest, wie den Corsair, Vulture und Hull C, sowie weitere Verbesserungen der Lebensqualit\u00e4t und des New Player Onboarding, um Star Citizen noch spielbarer und einladender zu machen, als es heute ist. Ganz zu schweigen von Pyro und Server Meshing, die wir bis Ende des Jahres testen wollen, je nachdem, wie schwierig es ist, Persistent Entity Streaming stabil zu bekommen. Wir denken, dass ihr alle diese neuen Inhalte lieber spielen wollt, als davon zu h\u00f6ren. Deshalb werden wir die Zeit in diesem Jahr nutzen, um uns auf die Entwicklung zu konzentrieren und euch die Technik, die Funktionen und die Inhalte zu liefern, auf die ihr wartet.\n\nDie Entwickler von CIG bekommen viel Aufmerksamkeit, und das ist auch gut so, denn es ist das talentierteste Entwicklerteam, mit dem ich je gearbeitet habe. Aber es gibt noch viel mehr Menschen bei CIG als nur die Entwickler - wie man so sch\u00f6n sagt: \"It takes a village\"!\n\nOhne unser Publishing- und Live-Ops-Team w\u00e4ren die Server nicht rund um die Uhr in der Cloud verf\u00fcgbar, und du k\u00f6nntest Star Citizen nicht herunterladen oder spielen. Ohne das unerm\u00fcdliche Testen und Feedback unseres Qualit\u00e4tssicherungs-Teams w\u00e4re Star Citizen unspielbar. Ohne die Backend- und Web-Teams bei Turbulent k\u00f6nntest du dich nicht einloggen, h\u00e4ttest keine Website, auf der du Nachrichten und Informationen lesen kannst, und kein Forum, in dem du dich an gesunden Debatten beteiligen, ein Versprechen abgeben oder Star Citizen starten k\u00f6nntest. Ohne unser Studio Experience Team, das sich um das Wohlergehen unserer Organisation k\u00fcmmert, g\u00e4be es kein so ambitioniertes kreatives Umfeld wie Star Citizen. Ohne unsere Finanz- und Rechtsteams h\u00e4tten wir kein so einzigartiges und bahnbrechendes Unternehmen wie CIG aufbauen k\u00f6nnen. Ohne unsere Marketing- und Community-Teams g\u00e4be es keine Kommunikation \u00fcber unsere Pl\u00e4ne, keine schillernden Trailer, die auf zuk\u00fcnftige Inhalte hinweisen, und kein echtes Hin und Her zwischen der Community und CIG. Ohne unsere Teams f\u00fcr Kundenbetreuung und Spielerfahrung w\u00fcrdest du nicht die Hilfe bekommen, die du brauchst, und h\u00e4ttest auch nicht die M\u00f6glichkeit, dein Feedback zum Spielgeschehen so zu formulieren, dass es quantifiziert werden kann. Ohne unsere IT-Abteilung k\u00f6nnten wir nicht zusammenarbeiten, weder im B\u00fcro noch von zu Hause aus, noch k\u00f6nnten wir Code kompilieren oder sch\u00f6ne Assets erstellen. Ohne unsere Personalabteilung g\u00e4be es niemanden, der unsere Mitarbeiter\/innen einstellt, ihnen zuh\u00f6rt, sie anleitet und ihnen hilft.\n\nUnd ohne euch alle, mit eurem Enthusiasmus und eurer Geduld, g\u00e4be es weder Star Citizen, Squadron 42 noch Cloud Imperium Games.\n\nW\u00e4hrend wir uns dem Erreichen der oben genannten wichtigen Meilensteine n\u00e4hern, k\u00f6nnen wir nicht anders, als jedem einzelnen von euch, der den gemeinsamen Traum von Star Citizen teilt, eine immense Wertsch\u00e4tzung entgegenzubringen. Der Weg, der vor uns liegt, ist spannender denn je, aber in gewisser Weise ist die gemeinsame Reise, die Momente und der Spa\u00df, den die Menschen auf dem Weg haben, w\u00e4hrend wir Star Citizen gemeinsam aufbauen, genauso lohnend wie das endg\u00fcltige Ziel.\n\nUnd das ist es, was dieses Spiel und diese Gemeinschaft so besonders macht.\n\n\nWir alle von Cloud Imperium sehen uns auf der Bar Citizen, der Digital CitizenCon und in der PTU!","zh_CN":"Letter from the Chairman\n05\/18\/2022 - 1:00 PM\n\nYear in Review\n\u201cDon\u2019t drive Angry!\u201d\n\nPhil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day 1993\n\nIn some ways last year felt like we were stuck just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day repeating the same cycles as 2020; just when we thought we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants emerged to send cases skyrocketing again and communities back into lockdown and other safety measures. The world grew increasingly weary and fatigued from the toll of both the pandemic and the necessary measures to keep people as safe as possible. And even as a large part of the world is starting to return to normal, the specter of a new potential variant that can evade the vaccines and is more transmissible haunts us. Hopefully with readily available vaccines in most countries and a certain degree of built-in protection from prior infections, COVID will continue to transition to an endemic disease, something that certainly is not great, but not nearly as deadly as before, a virus that we can get on with our lives and live with just like the common Flu or Cold.\n\nBecause of the ups and downs of last year, we are only just starting to get back to the office. The first studio where it became possible to start working together in person, at any scale, was our UK studio in Manchester, where I have been spending a lot of time since last fall. I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure. Our offices in Frankfurt, Austin, and Los Angeles are only just starting to return to the office now that the local authorities have deemed it safe enough to lift various requirements. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we were proud of how we transitioned seamlessly to a work-from-home environment, but as the situation dragged on, it became clear that we were missing the benefits of spontaneous collaboration and team building that come from working in person, near each other. The time I have spent with the Squadron team in the UK has only reinforced this, as the ability to walk over to someone\u2019s desk and see the issue or having a conversation in passing about a problem or a creative thought, makes an enormous difference to progress. When everyone is working remotely it becomes more of a slog to problem solve on the fly, or easily get or give feedback, and you end up with far more meetings \/ video calls. In our internal tracking we found that we had six times as many meetings when everyone was working from home than when we were in the office. I personally felt the difference in our release cadence; it took us a little longer to get each patch out than before, and it became harder to solve or fix bugs which hung around longer than previously. I have also seen the trend in the industry as a whole, with pretty much any large title being delayed, or in some unfortunate cases released before they should have been. For this reason, despite our ability to work fully remote, we are focused on getting people back together, working with each other side by side for extended periods. Going back to the office does not mean a return to the old work patterns and policies, as the extended lockdowns, combined with working remotely for two years has given us new insights into work life balance for our staff. We have altered our global work policy to allow for flexi-hours and a hybrid of in person and work from home, depending on both an employee\u2019s and manager\u2019s needs, with emphasis on being cognizant of our employees\u2019 life situations.\n\nDespite the challenges of the last year, I am proud of how much we accomplished in 2021. In fact, looking back at the year in review, I am amazed at the amount of content and features we delivered to our players. In January of last year, the community was able to play the first iteration of the XenoThreat Incursion, our first dynamic event that players praised for bringing together the pieces of Star Citizen for a thrilling server-wide encounter. While only our first iteration, this event already showed glimpses of the full promise of the Persistent Universe. In April of 2021, we released Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy and delivered drive-in caves and sinkholes, planet tech improvements, ship-to-station docking, and more. With Invictus Launch Week, we opened the doors of the Javelin for the first time to let people take a walking tour of the mighty UEE destroyer, and brought the Bengal into orbit to showcase our biggest capital ship yet in the \u2019verse.\n\nHowever, we really started to hit our stride in the second half of 2021 with the release of Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, when we finished the Stanton system by launching the gas giant Crusader and the landing zone of Orison. Accompanying that were a host of Quality of Life improvements and our first iteration of Volumetric Clouds.\n\nThen, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences, we introduced v0 of our Medical Gameplay, Looting, Bombing, and Personal Inventory, just to name a few new features. Coupled with our continuing improvements in performance and stability, and the drastic reduction in server crashes (which usually manifest themselves to a user as the infamous 30K error; connection lost to the server), Star Citizen the game was finally starting to come together in a way it had never done before.\n\nAnd as great as our 2020 year was in terms of engagement and sentiment, the back half of 2021 was at another level. We saw more people than ever before flocking to Star Citizen, carried in on waves of good will and excitement from current players asking their friends to join, and from complete newcomers awed by the spectacle of Crusader, the gameplay of XenoThreat, and the opportunities from new features like Personal Inventory and Looting. And to cap off the year, when we launched Alpha 3.16: Return to Jumptown, veteran players returned to see our fresh, new take on the classic Jumptown emergent battlegrounds and were amazed at just how far the game had progressed.\n\nOur wins in 2021 set us up for an absolutely historic start to 2022. So far, we have blown past all our projections on new players joining the \u2018verse. In fact, this year, we have more than doubled our rate of New User acquisition, and with the recent launch of Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, we are seeing over two thousand new players a day joining the \u2018verse. Our DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by over 50% since the numbers I shared in my last Letter from the Chairman in December 2020, and with this latest patch, we are enjoying double the daily login traffic of our last April patch launch. We are enjoying MAU (Monthly Active Users) which is well beyond the highs of 2020. And we have had nearly 1 million New Accounts created since then, and more than half a million New Pledging Players join the game. And this week, we had our 2 millionth unique player log in to play Star Citizen. We are on track this year to break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins this year, and more than 0 million in lifetime revenue.\n\nAll of this is due to the incredible support we receive from you combined with the progress we have been making in Star Citizen, which brings new curious gamers into the \u2018verse. It is heartening to see the feedback and impressions from newer members of the community when they first start playing Star Citizen.\n\nFor all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance\u2026 that becomes another planet, that you can enter it\u2019s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.\n\nSometimes it isn\u2019t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.\n\nMany that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.\n\nTHANK YOU!\n\nRoad to 4.0\nBack in December 2017, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 was published to the live servers after a unified push from our developers around the globe. This monumental patch introduced our brand new procedural planetary technology and the first planetary bodies you could land on and go anywhere across the surface of the three moons of Crusader. It also included a new mission system, improved shopping, new cargo mechanics, and doubled our server player cap. To date Star Citizen 3.0 was probably the biggest incremental jump in gameplay and content, which is why we incremented the Alpha designation from 2.X to 3.X, and it was a whole eight months between 2.6.3 and 3.0.\n\nThis year, we find ourselves on a similar path with three huge technology initiatives that will fundamentally change the experience and immersion into Star Citizen. The first of these is what we are calling Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) which is the foundational tech that enables Server Meshing (SM). PES is the hardest part of the work needed for SM and is the one that has required the most engineering. It fundamentally changes how we record state in the Universe and delivers a level of persistence that you just don\u2019t see in other games, whether they are MMOs or even single-player experiences. Up until now, all persistence in the game has been tied to a player\u2019s inventory; ships you own or items you hold physically or in the virtual inventories of items you own. If you\u2019ve physically attached an item inside your vehicle, say a rifle to a weapons rack, when you log out or stow the vehicle it will remember all the attached items and anything in that vehicle\u2019s virtual inventory. However, if you drop or place something loosely, even inside a ship you own, it won\u2019t be associated with any player inventory. So, when you log out (or if the server crashes), the item will not be there when logging on or re-joining. With PES we are recording the state of every dynamic object in the game, irrelevant of whether it is \u201cowned\u201d or held by a player. That means that you could drop a gun or a med pen in a forested area on Microtech and return several days later after logging out to find the gun or med pen still there (assuming another player didn\u2019t grab them!).\n\nThe technology to do this at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering. We have been working towards this since 2019 when we debuted Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS), which allows a server to only stream in and simulate only a portion of our universe, which is necessary if you are going to have multiple servers simulate different parts of the universe.\n\nThe development has not been without road bumps; we had to change our plans for how we would persist the state of the universe when we realized that the backend relational database we were planning on using with a host of services, which we had collectively dubbed \u201ciCache\u201d would likely not be able to have low latency at the scale we needed for the number of concurrent players we will need to support in the future. We pivoted to using a Graph database at the start of 2021, taking a different approach to the services and cache which we outlined in a virtual presentation during last year\u2019s CitizenCon. The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe. The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players. For PES to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services. For Server Meshing, only 4 more services are currently planned, so you can see just how much foundational tech for SM is in PES. As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication. The nice aspect of using tech like this is that it is designed to scale (just imagine how many concurrent users Google must handle) and there are lots of available third-party tools and code, compared to creating an internal custom protocol.\n\nAll this means that getting Persistent Entity Streaming to work would require the bulk of the tech we need to make Server Meshing viable. I am happy to report after 16 months of extremely focused work by 18 engineers, 3 dedicated QA, and 4 producers spread between CIG and Turbulent (who are managing the back-end data base in the cloud and its related services) that the team were able to demonstrate Persistent Entity Streaming working last week in our weekly internal Persistent Universe Update meeting.\n\nPaul Reindell, Our Director of Engineering for Online Tech, spun up a server, populated the Entity Graph to its initial state along with the Replication Layer (which is essentially an in memory cache for the universe state\/backend database that exists in the cloud to make sure read\/writes to the database do not bottleneck servers and clients), then connected a client, placed down a series of small objects like cans on the surface of Aberdeen, along with an 890 Jump and an Anvil Arrow. He then killed the server and the client. The server was restarted, we did not populate the Entity Graph (as it had been previously seeded on the initial startup), and then connected a client, warped to Aberdeen and everything was there as he placed it. This was a huge milestone as the state of the universe was recorded to the backend database and then when he restarted the server it just connected to the Replication Layer, which had initialized itself from the database (the Entity Graph) and continued with the universe at the state he left it.\n\nThat may not sound revolutionary to some of you, but I can tell you it was akin to Neil Armstrong taking \u201cone small step.\u201d Once Persistent Entity Streaming comes online, Star Citizen will be a different universe. Full persistence will provide over the coming years an experience in gaming that most other online games do not provide; a universe you can escape to, that is affected by your and other players\u2019 actions, with the state being dynamic and persistent. Crash land on a planet, and your shipwreck will persist, while you forage for food and water to survive, and perhaps wood to make a fire to keep warm. log off and come back to what you built. Or, perhaps once you have been rescued, another player will stumble on the wreck of your old ship and the long-extinguished campfire. Find a corner of the galaxy to make your own, collect resources and import material to build your outpost, decorate or arrange your hangar or home how you like.\n\nWith this tech in place, Server Meshing becomes possible, as the Replication Layer\/Entity Graph is the universe state that clients and servers write and read from. Because we have decoupled state from simulation, this allows us to have many Server Nodes all communicating with the Replication Layer, responsible for simulation of focused areas in the Universe, which allows us to scale our ability to simulate the overall universe, as a server is no longer responsible for every non-player entity, regardless of location or number. This means that instead of a server dropping to five frames per second due to simulation load, we can just spin up another, and then another to spread the simulation load and keep the update tick rate high. This is the ultimate goal of Dynamic Server Meshing and what we are working towards.\n\nNow, a fundamental change to how state is recorded, especially one that affects every dynamic object, not just a select few, is going to have a lot of edge cases and issues we have not come across yet or foreseen.\n\n2022 TESTING AND RELEASE CADENCE\nBecause of this, we are going to be approaching 3.18 differently than our previous releases. We are anticipating that 3.18 will require a much longer time in the Evocati\/PTU phase than our previous releases, due to the fundamental change in how the game tracks state. We know we will also need testing at scale, as in our experience we see different issues when we go from internal testing to Evocati to PTU wave 1, then wave 2 and so on. Players do crazy things, and lots of players creates lots of crazy cases we had not considered, which expose bugs and edge cases. Our guess is that it may be as long as three months in the PTU stage, but it is hard to predict. For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage\u2019s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!\n\nAs it did not make much sense to engineer the revamped physical Cargo system and Salvage for the old system, these two features have been engineered for PES (you want wrecks from player battles to stick around so you can salvage!) and will arrive with 3.18.\n\nHowever, we do not want engagement and content to stall because of PES requiring longer testing, so we are planning to release a content-rich Alpha 3.17.2 patch with known stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay in late June. The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.\n\nThe goal will then be to get 2-3 months of testing on 3.18 in PTU for an Alpha 3.18 release to LIVE in late Q3. I know many of you have been waiting for Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, and Persistent Entity Streaming for a long time, and I am excited to see us in the home stretch to finally bring it to you. I think 3.18 will be an amazing update that is an even bigger game-changer than 3.15 was, but we want to make sure we give it the proper time to test so we can deliver it to you at the best quality possible.\n\nAlongside our Persistent Streaming work the Engine and Graphic teams have been making great progress on the second big technical initiative we\u2019ve been working on the past two years; a complete replacement of our graphics engine with what we call \u201cGen 12\u201d, which is multithreaded and much more efficient approach to rendering which gets the most out of modern graphics APIs like Vulkan. This allows us to utilize the modern graphics power of PCs more efficiently and not tie up the main game update loop with waiting around for draw call submissions and the like. We are looking at getting the bulk of this functionality in for the Live release of 3.18 with the release of the Vulkan functionality a little later, but hopefully by the end of the year.\n\nThis leaves us with our third large technical initiative, Server Meshing.\n\nAs you might have guessed, we will approach Server Meshing in much the same way that we are rolling out Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be a truly new era in Star Citizen. It will mean our final tech building block \u2013 Server Meshing \u2013 will have been delivered. The first implementation will be what we call Static Server Meshing (SSM), where each server is given a defined area to simulate, but as soon as SSM is stable we will move towards Dynamic Server Meshing with subsequent releases which will allow much more scalability as servers will not be bound by location, but instead will be distributed by load, allowing for much better simulation performance in any given area of the universe.\n\nWith 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the \u2018verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.\n\nOur current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well \/ easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.\n\nThis special 2022 release cadence will not be particularly unusual to most players, if you pull back and look at it in a broad sense. We will still have 4 big end-of-quarter releases, as well as 2 big mid-quarter releases for Fleet Week in May and IAE in November. Players who are not steeped in our development process will still enjoy and experience rapid content releases every quarter, and as we get into the second half of 2022, you will see a lot more meaningful gameplay making its way into the \u2018verse. With another run of XenoThreat, updates to Jumptown, new Dynamic Events, additional locations and points of interest to explore, and more patch updates, there will be no shortage of gameplay and content to experience. And by year\u2019s end, players will be able to enjoy Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo refactor, and Bounty Hunter v2 gameplay on Live.\n\nMeanwhile, those who are following our development closest, and providing the critical service of helping us test our biggest tech, will be able to get their hands on Persistent Streaming and Server Meshing this year, as we put them into test in 3.18 and 4.0 in PTU during the summer and winter, respectively. Sometimes, the wait can be the hardest when we are closest to the finish line, but this year, I am so excited to share our release plans for our key tech building blocks, and I know many of you cannot wait to jump into PTU and start testing later this year.\n\nBuilding for Longevity\nIt is easy to only focus on our development progress and the work we have ahead in building Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but there is another very important element of our journey that is often overlooked. Not only are we building two hugely ambitious games to rival anything released by the biggest AAA studios, but we\u2019ve had to build the company to build the technology and make the games from scratch at the same time.\n\nThe day I stepped out on the stage at GDC, we had no formal employees, three founders in Ortwin, Sandi and myself, and a handful of people that had helped like Forrest Stephan, David Haddock and David Swofford, sometimes moonlighting from their day job (with permission of course) like Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy and Paul Reindell and a few friends from my old Origin and Digital Anvil days like Sergio Rosas and his CGBot art outsourcing company, to create the demo and build the website.\n\nToday we have 780 people on staff, plus an extended family of over 130 working closely with us at Turbulent in Montreal, with many more that will join us in the coming months. We have a seven-person Global Talent Acquisition team that focuses exclusively on trying to hire the best talent possible for CIG. To give you an idea of the scale of TA work, they helped us hire 168 people in 2021, and so far, this year have helped us recruit 128 people already.\n\n\nIn 2022, we will continue to grow in all departments, increasing our headcount to approximately 840 and bring us closer to release for Star Citizen and Squadron 42.\n\nOne challenge we have been facing is that we have nowhere near enough room at several of our studios for new hires that joined us during the pandemic. Because of this, we signed long-term leases on two offices in brand new and state of the art buildings in Manchester and Frankfurt last year.\n\nWe are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion \/ performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42\u2019s launch.\n\nIn Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.\n\nWe\u2019re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too.\n\nWe are building long-term homes that will provide the facilities to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.\n\nCitizenCon\nShows such as CitizenCon are huge undertakings that require lots of planning, and although life is slowly returning to normal, restrictions are only now just lifting. And as cases are still largely unpredictable, we see that planning big shows may still be a bit premature. The uncertainty surrounding resumed normality has impacted our ability to plan a physical show. Traditionally, we would already be deep in planning and execution for a CitizenCon today, if we were going to hold an event this October; however, we have not been able to do so yet. It does seem many of our peers in the industry are encountering similar conundrums, as E3 only recently canceled their physical show. In addition, Los Angeles, where we would hold this year\u2019s show tends to be very cautious and is more apt to impose restrictions on large in-person gatherings in the event of a new variant blowing up.\n\nBecause of this, combined with the huge amount of work the company is trying to deliver this year, not to mention moving 70% of the company into two new offices, we have decided not to hold a physical CitizenCon this year. We very much hope that next year we will be able to commit to an in-person event as we miss the opportunity to mix in person with all of you and be invigorated by your enthusiasm and excitement.\n\nAt the same time though, we know we could not have come this far without our community, and we are grateful for each and every one of you that has supported us along this journey. It being our 10th anniversary as a company and a community, we are going to be celebrating virtually with a virtual CitizenCon, like we did last year.\n\nOne difference to last year is that there will be no keynote gameplay demo to headline this event as this would pull valuable resources away from our game development teams that are working hard to get Persistent Streaming, Gen 12\/Vulkan and Server Meshing in your hands, not to mention also delivering more of the content and gameplay that has proven so successful in bringing in new players and retaining old and new users alike.\n\nInstead, CitizenCon will be a celebration of you, the community, with presentations and panels from our developers, to share with you the progress we are making and the near future of what you can expect from Star Citizen in the year ahead. And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we\u2019re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.\n\nBar Citizen World Tour\nIt has been more than 2 years since we have had the opportunity to spend time with all of you in person, and while we will not be together for CitizenCon, we cannot hold out another year! For that reason, we plan to kick off a robust \u201cBar Citizen World Tour\u201d this Summer, perfectly coinciding with the in-lore holiday, First Contact Day (Definitely read up on the backstory to see why this fits so nicely!). We would also like to take this perfect opportunity to coin a new out-of-game annual holiday: International Bar Citizen Day. We will celebrate this inaugural new holiday by hosting Bar Citizen events simultaneously near all our development studios in mid-June, details on the when\/where coming very soon.\n\nAfter that, we plan to branch out and bring the fun to events that may not be as close to our studios. Our Community Team is planning to embrace Bar Citizens around the globe with renewed vigor, bringing goodies and developers with them to greet and mingle with all of you as part of the celebration of our 10th anniversary.\n\nKeep a close eye on Spectrum in the weeks to come, as the team will begin exploring which Bar Citizen events to attend. So, if you are hosting your own event, we want to hear from you.\n\nFinal Thoughts\nWhile some of you will no doubt be disappointed to hear the news about no physical show and no keynote demo at CitizenCon, the team and I felt it was much more important that we focus on making development progress so that we could maintain the pace of delivery we have been hitting since Alpha 3.14.\n\nThis year is a big one for all of us on Star Citizen: You can expect to see Invictus Launch Week moving into the clouds of Crusader, the promise of Persistent Entity Streaming making its way to the \u2018verse, as well as big game-changing features like Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, new events and missions, enhancements to Jumptown, ships I know you\u2019re waiting on like the Corsair, Vulture, and Hull C; as well as more Quality of Life and New Player Onboarding improvements to make Star Citizen even more playable and welcoming than it is today. And that is without mentioning Pyro and Server Meshing, which we are aggressively working towards letting you test by end of year, pending how difficult it is to get Persistent Entity Streaming stable. We think you would all rather be playing this new content than hearing about it. So, we will use our time this year to focus on development and delivering to you the tech, features, and content you are waiting for.\n\nThe developers at CIG tend to get a lot of attention, which is well deserved as it is the most talented development team I have ever worked with. But there are a lot more people beyond development at CIG - as they say, \u201cit takes a village\u201d!\n\nWithout our Publishing and Live-Ops team the servers would not be up 24\/7 in the cloud, and you would not be able to download or play Star Citizen. Without our Quality Assurance teams tireless testing and feedback Star Citizen would be unplayable. Without the backend and web teams at Turbulent, you would not be able to log on, have a website to read news and information or a forum to participate in healthy debate on, pledge or launch Star Citizen. Without our Studio Experience Team looking after the health of our organization, there would not be a creative environment as ambitious as Star Citizen. Without our Finance and Legal teams, we could not have built a company as unique and groundbreaking as CIG. Without our Marketing and Community teams, there would not be any communication about our plans, no dazzling trailers to tease and excite about future content, and no real back and forth between the Community and CIG. Without our Customer Support and Player Experience Teams, you would not get the help you need, nor have the ability to give feedback on gameplay in a way it can be quantified. Without our IT department we would not be able to work together, whether in the office or from home, nor would we be able to compile code or create beautiful assets. Without our People department, there would be nobody that is there to hire, listen, guide and help our staff.\n\nAnd without all of you, with your enthusiasm and patience, there would be no Star Citizen, Squadron 42 or Cloud Imperium Games.\n\nAs we move closer to achieving the critical milestones outlined above, we cannot help but feel an immense amount of appreciation for each and every one of you who shares in the collective dream of Star Citizen. The path ahead is more vibrant than ever, but in some ways the collective journey together, the moments and fun that people have along the way as we build Star Citizen together is as rewarding as the ultimate destination.\n\nAnd that is what makes this game and community special.\n\n\nFrom all of us at Cloud Imperium, we will see you at Bar Citizen, Digital CitizenCon and in the PTU!\n\n5.0 explorersLong-rangeMaterialism cargo health devoid of selfOrdnanceClose-rangeEvolving greedOps bridge align us withMissionsSilicon Origin 300 develop gridPainInhabitedQuantum leap"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":0,"created_at":"2022-05-18T22:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"3 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 19:27:03","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":18694,"next_id":18697}}