Star Citizen Monthly Report: November 2018
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Welcome to November’s monthly Star Citizen report from Cloud Imperium Games. Last month saw the Intergalactic Aerospace Exposition land on Hurston just in time for our annual Anniversary Special. Devs had fun bringing the expo to life, while continuing to forge ahead, sights set on the upcoming release of Alpha 3.4. Read on for Persistent Universe development updates from all of our global studios.
AI
Ship AI’s major focus throughout November was optimizing the Tactical Point System. They now have multiple queries bundled together in a batch from different threads, which allow more control over the cost of the overall system. Several optimizations for the character movement system were submitted, which now update all the components in a multithreaded batch approach and utilize the maximum the CPU resources during the game update. A pass for thread safety of several subsystems was performed, including the attention target component and communication system. This is required to eventually move the Subsumption component update to the multithreaded batch update step. In FPS Combat, the ‘Defend Area’ assignment was introduced; correctly achieving this behavior requires monitoring the mastergraph transitions to evaluate if the recipients of the Subsumption event can actually process it. In the Defend Area example, they might be executing any regular behavior when receiving the assignment. If the behavior can handle the request in a specific way, great. If not, then the mastergraph takes care of selecting one that can. Alongside this, they’re adding new behaviors to improve combat and patrol to respect this assignment. Support for stealth gameplay was implemented, with new audio and visual stimuli being added to allow players to draw the attention of guards, prepare traps, and open up otherwise blocked paths. Work also continued on the bartender for Lorville. To achieve several functionalities of his behavior they implemented the first pass of UseChannel routing and are continuing to expand the usable functionalities. The Usable Builder Tool received a new feature too: it’s now able to correctly preview different characters using different usables so that designers, animators, and programmers can easily test and verify the content as it’s delivered.
Animation
November saw Animation supporting the Feature Team to bring vault, mantle, and jumping functionality in-line with the game’s quality and play expectations. They’re currently testing a process to allow the efficient integration of different weapon classes, such as pistols and shotguns. The team is also implementing carry options for Zero-G EVA and working towards finalizing player interaction (carriables in particular). The US Animation Team cleaned and solved data from the amazing performance captures done at this year’s CitizenCon in Austin, Texas. Editing and final work will be completed soon. They continued work on the Ship Dealers that will populate the ‘verse and made sure the new mission givers are available as soon as their locations are ready, such as Wallace Klim in Levski, Tecia Pacheco in Area18, and Constantine Hurston in Lorville. Exploring the issues that result from re-targeting the male animations to the female skeleton, the team determined that the first step is to achieve 1:1 parity between them. This will allow for the replacement of assets with female-specific versions without hindering female player development. Finishing touches are being added to carriable tech, too.
Audio
The Audio department focused on the new flight model and the spaceship audio mix. They implemented tech to allow systemic mixing of NLPC ship bases on priority, size, and threat level, which gives a clearer and more focused mix. This, combined with the implementation of the new ship vibration component, has greatly improved the ship audio experience. During implementation, they made an optimization pass to ensure memory and voice limits remain healthy. Improvements to the weapon experience continued with the consolidation of assets and the simplification of element implementation to ensure improved translation of audio assets from the digital audio workstation (DAW) into the game. There have also been changes to the Foley system to improve the audio feedback of the player’s traversal on different terrain and surface types. On the music front, the team worked with the PU composer Pedro Camacho to develop and implement new musical cues to support the planet-side locations on Hurston, such as L19, and upcoming expansions. With Object Container Streaming (OCS) coming online, the Audio Code Team optimized and polished FOIP to ensure reliability.
Backend Services
Backend Services worked to bring the 2948 Anniversary Event to players. The first order of business was creating the service needed to bring forward the correct overlapped object containers for the different days at the convention center. This ensured a seamless transition between manufacturer days and prevented the need to publish a new build per expo day. Next, they worked to make sure the rental logic behind the expo correctly traded data between the server, client, and database to ensure players could enjoy the ships they rented. Finally, a login queue was created to help organize and throttle the unprecedented number of players attempting to enter the ‘verse and check-out the expo. Away from the Anniversary Event, work continued on the new architecture for the Persistence Cache to help increase the scalability of the backend as well as link important services to a new database architecture.
Character Art
Character Art’s focus throughout November was to make all armor and undersuits available for female avatars. They also worked on modeling two of our new mission givers to bring more life to the Persistent Universe. Additionally, they’re creating a new set of outlaw armor (designation ‘Shipjacker’) that will include armor, an undersuit, and subscriber items.
Community
“The Community Team started the month in the Halloween spirit with two spooky contests in anticipation of the holiday. Players joined the festivities and showcased their talent in a pumpkin carving contest and a FOIP screenshot contest depicting the most terrifying and terrified expressions they had to offer. Spooktacular! The Mustang Commercial Contest put the community’s filmmaking skills to the test. Our bold cinematographers embraced the maverick spirit of Consolidated Outland to create commercials that Silas Koerner himself would be proud of. During Thanksgiving, Citizens shared what they were thankful for and participated in two holiday contests in honor of Turkey Day. With these two contests, we are now up to 25 total contests run in 2018, and the team still has more planned to go live before the end of the year. As Alpha 3.3 made its way to the Persistent Universe, we welcomed the first fully-explorable planet and city with Hurston and Lorville respectively. While everyone was exploring the new environments, the bustling landing zone, and four new moons, the Star Citizen content creators outdid themselves, creating beautiful shots of sunsets on Hurston, days out on the beach next to Lorville, and joyrides to Aberdeen. We are proud and thankful for all the content the community shared on social media, Reddit, and the community hub, and are looking forward to seeing even more. Keep on sharing! The 2948 Anniversary special kicked off our most epic Free-Fly event to date with all flyable ships and vehicles to try out at no extra cost. The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo came a long way and made its in-game debut with their Hurston-based satellite branch. Exclusive reveals at the expo included Anvil’s ‘light fighter of the future’, the Hawk, and the next evolution of Xi’an tech and design innovation with the Aopoa San’tok.yāi. Lastly, we also reached a significant funding milestone and want to thank our amazing community who made this possible. The amount is the highest total for any project in the history of crowdfunding and is beyond anything we could have imagined. In a letter from the chairman, Chris Roberts shared his thoughts on the fantastic journey so far and the exciting future that lies ahead. Here’s to tomorrow!”
Design
Design got the Anniversary Event’s Convention Center up and running for all backers to enjoy. To help encourage players to browse the inventories at New Deal and Teach’s Ship Shop, the team began implementing a new type of NPC: the Ship Dealer. The aim is to provide a realistic and interesting ship purchasing experience to further liven up the process of acquiring a dream ship. “We sincerely hope you got a chance to try out and see the different ships at the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo on Hurston!” Tuning for the Economy continues, with work going into adjusting prices for various services and goods across Stanton. Work has also started towards the design and implementation of a robust and important Economic Editing Tool to help better visualize and tweak the Economy than ever before. They also tuned Arena Commander’s REC Reward.
DevOps
November is always one of the busiest months for DevOps due to the Anniversary Event, and this month was no exception, with the team scaling the servers to the highest capacity since the beginning of the project. To ease the overall DevOps workload, the Publishing Team expanded their internal tools, which allowed most of the team to enjoy a well-deserved break for Thanksgiving (even if they did stay very close to their laptops). Between PTU & Live, they successfully published 30 times throughout November, with some days seeing 3-4 builds.
Engineering
Engineering teams around the globe worked on OCS throughout November. The first iteration of client-side streaming was released in Alpha 3.3, with an ongoing focus on improving asynchronous entity loading and unloading. The core OCS and network and backend teams had the Object Container Server Streaming summit this month to plan the next iteration of OCS, which will focus on server-side streaming and full persistent servers. LA-based Engineering collaborated with the Austin Backend Team to build the tech required for in-game ship rentals. It was premiered during the anniversary promotion and forms the foundation for all in-game rentals. Development on backend tech moved forward towards allowing persistent EZ Habs and enable players to customize and persist their start location. The Vehicle Team continued to work on Ping & Scanning gameplay, this month focusing on ship scanning. Work has also begun on the new DNA component to integrate the R&D technology into the character pipeline. Turbulent worked closely with the LA Gamecode Team to further improve the group system, spectrum integration, and FOIP & VOIP.
Engine Tools
The Engine Team spent time supporting the Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 releases, bug fixing, profiling, and optimizing code (especially for Object Container Streaming). Work continued on GPU skinning, adding vertex velocity support (for motion blur, etc.), completed several optimizations to skip zero weights (which improved throughput), prepared background data, and made the first pass on memory layout and LOD support. For physics optimizations, the execution of ray collision checks and the defragmentation of grids run were made to run concurrently. This achieved a 30-50% speedup for physics planet terrain computation, reduced the number of cell queries on planets, and improved proxy mesh generation of terrain ground volumes. Terrain rendering improvements were made (glow forward pass) as well as fixes for water volume and ocean rendering. The existing hair shader was improved, and a new depth of field algorithm was created, improving quality, performance, and fixing halos around silhouettes. They completed additional culling refinements in the zone system to submit fewer objects to the renderer, as well as various low-level optimizations to reduce the load on the render thread. Further enhancements were made to engine-side support for the public telemetry page to allow user-specific optimization hints to be displayed to improve the gameplay experience, and a new tool was developed to easily analyze core dumps of Linux dedicated game servers.
Environment Art
The UK team focused on bug fixing and optimization for the Alpha 3.3 release, mainly for Lorville and Hurston. A focused sprint was completed for the Anniversary Event convention halls, with the aim to provide a versatile and time-economic environment to show off the ships in their best light. Additional Underground Facility interior exteriors and a new Alpha 3.3 splash screen were also made and implemented. The DE Location Team made great progress on Lorville’s Central Business District (CBD). Here, players can access the Hurston Dynamics Showcase, the flagship store for all weaponry produced by the brand, as well as the Transfers store where players can engage in various trading activities. The CBD has a very different feel to the rest of Lorville and clearly services a different type of clientele. Luxurious materials and modern design set the ambiance for this experience. The Organics and Planet Team are making great progress on upcoming locations and are currently working on ArcCorp and exploring microTech. Both locations need additional features to be added to the planet tech to make them truly unique, so while it’s still early days, things are steadily moving on.
Facial Animation
The team is actively working on upcoming mission-givers, including Klim, along with ship dealers, bar patrons, and bartenders. They’re also testing the results of the player’s facial animation recordings on the default loadout.
Graphics
This month, the Graphics Team firmly focussed on the release of Alpha 3.3.5 and improving both stability and performance. The PTU was plagued by some quite frequent GPU crashes, but Evocati testing helped them track down the cause and remedy it. With the release of Lorville, QA saw high video memory usage due to the scale of the environment and number of ships and characters. Due to some bugs, this resulted in serious performance issues as the video driver began to page memory, resulting in noticeable stutters. Fixes were made to the worst offending video memory bugs in Alpha 3.3.5. Looking forward, the team continues to reduce memory usage and optimize the game for the next release.
Issue Council
The Issue Council deployed version 1.1.5 in October. Several issues were fixed including editable fields of the different forms not displaying correctly, versions not ordered from the latest to the oldest, and display names with special characters not showing properly.
Level Design
The Live Team placed and marked-up locations on and around Hurston for mission use. Big improvements to the delivery missions were made – players can now take contracts from companies who operate specific routes and require the player to have a certain level of reputation. The Downed Relay mission (as seen in CitizenCon) now has multiple outcomes, including having other players tasked with destroying the stolen blade before its data is uploaded. Now that the base work for Lorville is finished, the Level Design Team are focusing on the CBD. The whitebox is already done, with most of the remaining work involving connecting the trains and ensuring all the logistics work. New Underground Facilities components were added to the procedural tech. These are built with modularity in mind and can be generated in the same way as Rest Stops. Once the modular library has enough content (rooms, connectors, POIs), it will become much easier to provide more variety. They also continued working on the procedural tech to make sure that it provides everything needed from a design perspective. This can be difficult at times, as compromises are required; what is the most fun to play is not necessarily what looks the best. Finally, most of the combat missions found at Crusader are now available at Hurston. Work has begun to define the contractors and progression for them, too.
Lighting
This month, the Lighting Team worked on improving the headlights across almost all ships available in the PU. Due to plenty of issues regarding visibility while flying ships in dark environments, the headlights were improved to provide more visible light from greater distances. There’s still room for improvement, but in the meantime, it’s a positive change that makes the planetary flying experience more enjoyable. Additionally, the team focused on bug fixing and optimizing the lighting in Lorville to maintain a high degree of quality while improving framerates and lowering drawcall costs. They also worked on the lighting for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo to help show off all the amazing ships being featured in the various halls.
Narrative
The Narrative Team pushed heavily on Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 tasks to knock out remaining mission text and standardize in-game descriptions for ship components on the terminals. They also continued working on editorial selects for the lower priority lines for NPCs that were captured back in September. To cover the new convention center and other contexts, they ran a pickup recording session to add additional Lorville announcement lines. The team also worked closely with Marketing to support the recent IAE expansion event in Lorville. Not only providing written copy but joining some of the roundtable discussions to provide fictional backstory for the various manufacturers. Lastly, they worked to schedule tasks for the PU and undertook overall team planning for the upcoming year.
Player Relations
Player Relations busily plugged away at the Alpha 3.3 and the Anniversary Event, working alongside the Evocati on several builds to make sure key components were properly tested. “As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has over 100 articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.”
Props
The Props Team focused on the stands, booths, and branding for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo and the Anniversary Event. They recently shifted onto closing out the CBD props in Lorville and are currently creating bespoke furniture to help sell the wealth and decadence of the Hurston Central building.
QA
On the publishing side, QA busily tested the Alpha 3.3.0 and 3.3.5 builds for publishing to Evocati and Live. On the game side, the focus was on testing Hurston, its four moons, and city Lorville. They also completed a number of QATRs relating to FOIP & VOIP, ship purchasing in the PU, ship rental in Arena Commander, and improvements to Object Container Streaming. It was business as usual on the leadership side, with coordinated testing priorities between the UK, LA, and DE. Two new recruits were welcomed to QA; a dedicated tester in Frankfurt to support the AI Team and an additional tester in the UK. They will be primarily focused on providing day-to-day updates on the state of AI and will report all issues directly to the team to be investigated. QA also made the decision to do away with the general design tests and instead focus on specific sanity/smoke tests for AI and another test suite specifically for the Transit System and locations. The previous design tests were too broad and covered areas that were not always prevalent to the in-house design teams. Refocusing towards specific in-house feature teams has proven that the testing and information provided is much more valuable. A fair amount of time was spent on major QA test requests for new animation update optimizations, physics terrain patch optimization changes, and general optimization that will further improve performance in the PU. Frankfurt’s QA branch supported the Planetary Tech Team in investigating an issue on one of Hurston’s moons. Something in its setup was causing the normals on the moon surface to be very intense. This was tracked down to a lighting issue and further steps were taken (with the assistance of the Graphics Team) to enable the surface to get back to, well, normal.
Services
At CitizenCon, the team was present on the show floor to prepare local environments to run the game backend for both the FOIP LAN demonstration area and the main stage demonstration. This local setup included the entire game backend allowing for the demonstration to represent exactly what is being played in the PTU and the Live environment, including the network of social services that power groups, chat, and FOIP. With the release of Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5, the team mostly focused on observing and scaling the voice and face transmission solution to the increase of backers in the game. DevOp teams mainly worked to ensure that voice channels created by players during one-to-one calls, group channels, and global server channels were properly sharded to new voice servers, as the number of connected players increased. With the addition of global chat auto-connect in Alpha 3.3.5, the team also added new systems to monitor and move voice channels between servers when the supported load on a given voice server instance is too high. “The team has been ecstatic about the use of the technology by players and we hope to keep growing its use with gameplay connected features.” In order to help with the above tasks, the social game services were moved to a Kubernetes-based orchestration solution that allows easier management of voice and service containers. This new backplane supports continuous integration of service changes and will greatly improve the team velocity when deploying updates and builds. Working in conjunction with the universe team, Game Services began the development of a web-based administration tool to help manage the runtime state of the game world from a macro level. This is still in the very early stages of development but, using this tool, the designers will ultimately have the ability to inspect social objects like groups and their life cycles, ban, chase, and player controls. Integrating the WebGL Starmap engine will also allow the viewing of commodities, player locations, gameplay analytics, and much more.
Ships
This month, the UK Vehicle Team returned to the Origin 890 Jump after wrapping up the Valkyrie. What will undoubtedly be well-received news amongst the community is that, after long hiatus, work continues on the greatly-anticipated Anvil Carrack. Since the ship was last worked on around 18 months ago, there have been significant improvements to the ship pipeline and workflow. So, when re-reviewing the previous state, the team decided to undertake a second whitebox pass of the interior to bring it closer to its original concept. In addition to next year’s larger vehicles, progress was made to the Alpha 3.4 ships, including the Origin 600i Touring. The Freelancer DUR, MAX, and MIS are all receiving the final touches by art.
Ship Art
Lead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith made great progress on the greybox model, interior, and exterior of the 300i rework and began implementing different paint jobs and modeled the modified components for the other three variants. Next, he will move onto an alternative interior to be used in one of them. 3D Modeler Josh Coons recently completed the whitebox model for the Banu Defender and has now moved onto testing some of the modified workflow using Zbrush models, which will be baked down to create the type of detail we are looking for in this ship. He is continually creating new textures and also starting to build up the greybox model with the alternative workflow.
System Design
The System Design Team worked on integrating updated flight mechanics into enemy ship AI, ensuring that with all the changes, they are still engaging to fight against and don’t become unbalanced. They noticed that the updated flight model currently causes too much unwanted ‘jousting behavior’, so are currently looking into ways to modify it. Work was done on restructuring dialogue wildlines for the ship/FPS/social AI to unify them within the same overall structure. A large amount of work has been done with the audio & writing teams to ensure the system works properly for all systemic dialogue in the game. They are also working to develop tools to automate the setup of dialogue lines. More work was completed on designing stealth gameplay elements, which in turn requires the AI perception to be upgraded to cater for peripheral vision, as well as various audio events and stimuli from environmental sources, such as throwing a pebble to distract enemies.
Telemetry
Shortly after CitizenCon, the Public Telemetry page was launched. The data presented here reflects the data CIG receives from clients while playing the game. This data is used to assess and improve performance across a variety of hardware. If logged in while on the telemetry page, players will see their stats, including their computer’s GPU and CPU score and average FPS. The heatmap displays other user’s average FPS and the most popular hardware for each GPU and CPU score. On launch, the telemetry page showed a massive improvement between Alpha 3.2 and 3.3 thanks to OCS.
Turbulent
Throughout November, Turbulent supported CitizenCon, the Alpha 3.3. Flyable Ships, the new Anvil Valkyrie, the release of the Drake Kraken, and preparations for the Anniversary Event. CitizenCon: CitizenCon 2948 was an amazing event, with Turbulent supporting many components such as the livestream, merchandise, badges, microsite, and the release of new ships from Drake and Anvil!
The Drake Kraken: In October, Turbulent supported the unveiling of Drake’s first capital ship, the Kraken. The Kraken has two multi-purpose hangars, five manned turrets, four remote turrets, a massive cargo capacity, comfortable habs for a full crew, a Dragonfly Bay, and six landing pads. The website showed multiple features such as an interactive cross-section of the ship and a registry for those interested in obtaining one.
The Anvil Valkyrie: Turbulent supported the release of the Valkyrie, the new flyable drop ship from Anvil. The Valkyrie contains multiple side guns and turrets and can deploy up to twenty troops as well as a vehicle into combat. The website displayed features such as in-game footage of the Valkyrie and a CitizenCon-exclusive edition called the Valkyrie Liberator. This was also released on October 10th.
The 3.3 Flyable: With the release of Alpha 3.3, Turbulent supported the availability of the flyable ships on the website. The ships include the Aegis Hammerhead, Tumbril Cyclone, RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the CO Mustang. An exclusive CitizenCon Mustang was also available, called the Mustang Alpha Vindicator.
The 2948 Anniversary Special: The Anniversary Special was launched on Friday, November 23rd. Over the course of the week, a different manufacturer was released each day. On the first day, the Arrow was released, along with the rest of the Anvil ships. RSI day was on the 24th, Origin Jumpworks the 25th, Aegis Dynamics the 26th, Drake Interplanetary the 27th, and the alien ships on the 28th. The new San’tok’yai ship was unveiled by Aopoa too. MISC had its featured day on the 29th, and the new manufacturers on the 30th, including Tumbril, Crusader, CO, Argo, and Kruger. The last days of the Anniversary Special featured discount starter packs.
The Anniversary Quiz: With the help of Player Relations, Turbulent executed a quiz featuring three questions for each manufacturer. A passing score awarded a ‘Ship Master’ Spectrum badge and certificate. By passing the quiz, players were entered into a draw to win an Anvil Arrow.
The IAE Free-Fly Promotion: For the week of November 23rd until December 1st, five different flyable ships were featured each day of the week according to the featured manufacturer. The page contained information about the Desmond Memorial Convention Center in Lorville and linked to the Knowledge Base, which provided detailed instructions on how to get started. The IAE Free-Fly page also instructed new players on how to make an account and get into the ‘verse.
The Aopoa Santok’yāi: Turbulent supported the release of the Santok’yāi, a new Xi’an ship from Aopoa. The Santok’yāi features Yeng’tu Laser Repeaters and the latest Xi’an technology in a light-to-medium fighter chassis.
UI
The UI Team worked on adding the ability to rent items in Arena Commander, as well as supporting the needs of the Environment Team working on Lorville’s CBD.
Vehicle Features
Based on recent feedback from both internal and external sources, turret improvements have continued throughout November. In addition to bug fixes, there were multiple improvements to turrets including making multi-axis turrets controllable at min/max pitch, fixing the gyro pip offset, and improved aiming methods from a variety of input devices. The foundational mechanics to allow ships to aim at the engines on target ships has also been completed, and the feature itself is nearly ready to be rolled out to the PU, as is scanning nav points for destination info. The rest of the month was rounded out with a clean-up of debris network flow and a variety of vehicle-related crash bugs.
Vehicle Content
Art, Systems Design, and Tech Art worked together to release the Anvil Arrow as part of the November Anniversary Event as well as continuing to work on ships for upcoming releases: The Anvil Hawk is in the release-prep stage with both the Art and System Design Teams, the 300 Series is in greybox with Systems Design, and the Freelancers had entered release-prep with Tech Art. Additionally, Systems Design and Tech Art worked with the animators on character animation sequencing for vehicles, and Tech Art worked on a thruster pass for the new flight model.
VFX
The VFX Team continued to polish and optimize the many environmental effects of Hurston and implemented general improvements to the various moons throughout the ‘verse. They also finalized VFX for the Anvil Arrow and Anvil Hawk. The VFX Team spent time optimizing existing assets to help with the overall performance of Alpha 3.3.5. They also cleaned out all unused VFX texture assets in hopes of reducing the amount of memory required to load all the particle textures.
Weapons
The Weapon Art Team worked on the Multi-Tool rework, Kastak Arms Ravager-212, and the level two and three upgrades for the Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeaters. They also made minor adjustments to the iron sights on a handful of weapons to improve the sight picture and to make them more user-friendly when no optics are attached. WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
AI
Ship AI’s major focus throughout November was optimizing the Tactical Point System. They now have multiple queries bundled together in a batch from different threads, which allow more control over the cost of the overall system. Several optimizations for the character movement system were submitted, which now update all the components in a multithreaded batch approach and utilize the maximum the CPU resources during the game update. A pass for thread safety of several subsystems was performed, including the attention target component and communication system. This is required to eventually move the Subsumption component update to the multithreaded batch update step. In FPS Combat, the ‘Defend Area’ assignment was introduced; correctly achieving this behavior requires monitoring the mastergraph transitions to evaluate if the recipients of the Subsumption event can actually process it. In the Defend Area example, they might be executing any regular behavior when receiving the assignment. If the behavior can handle the request in a specific way, great. If not, then the mastergraph takes care of selecting one that can. Alongside this, they’re adding new behaviors to improve combat and patrol to respect this assignment. Support for stealth gameplay was implemented, with new audio and visual stimuli being added to allow players to draw the attention of guards, prepare traps, and open up otherwise blocked paths. Work also continued on the bartender for Lorville. To achieve several functionalities of his behavior they implemented the first pass of UseChannel routing and are continuing to expand the usable functionalities. The Usable Builder Tool received a new feature too: it’s now able to correctly preview different characters using different usables so that designers, animators, and programmers can easily test and verify the content as it’s delivered.
Animation
November saw Animation supporting the Feature Team to bring vault, mantle, and jumping functionality in-line with the game’s quality and play expectations. They’re currently testing a process to allow the efficient integration of different weapon classes, such as pistols and shotguns. The team is also implementing carry options for Zero-G EVA and working towards finalizing player interaction (carriables in particular). The US Animation Team cleaned and solved data from the amazing performance captures done at this year’s CitizenCon in Austin, Texas. Editing and final work will be completed soon. They continued work on the Ship Dealers that will populate the ‘verse and made sure the new mission givers are available as soon as their locations are ready, such as Wallace Klim in Levski, Tecia Pacheco in Area18, and Constantine Hurston in Lorville. Exploring the issues that result from re-targeting the male animations to the female skeleton, the team determined that the first step is to achieve 1:1 parity between them. This will allow for the replacement of assets with female-specific versions without hindering female player development. Finishing touches are being added to carriable tech, too.
Audio
The Audio department focused on the new flight model and the spaceship audio mix. They implemented tech to allow systemic mixing of NLPC ship bases on priority, size, and threat level, which gives a clearer and more focused mix. This, combined with the implementation of the new ship vibration component, has greatly improved the ship audio experience. During implementation, they made an optimization pass to ensure memory and voice limits remain healthy. Improvements to the weapon experience continued with the consolidation of assets and the simplification of element implementation to ensure improved translation of audio assets from the digital audio workstation (DAW) into the game. There have also been changes to the Foley system to improve the audio feedback of the player’s traversal on different terrain and surface types. On the music front, the team worked with the PU composer Pedro Camacho to develop and implement new musical cues to support the planet-side locations on Hurston, such as L19, and upcoming expansions. With Object Container Streaming (OCS) coming online, the Audio Code Team optimized and polished FOIP to ensure reliability.
Backend Services
Backend Services worked to bring the 2948 Anniversary Event to players. The first order of business was creating the service needed to bring forward the correct overlapped object containers for the different days at the convention center. This ensured a seamless transition between manufacturer days and prevented the need to publish a new build per expo day. Next, they worked to make sure the rental logic behind the expo correctly traded data between the server, client, and database to ensure players could enjoy the ships they rented. Finally, a login queue was created to help organize and throttle the unprecedented number of players attempting to enter the ‘verse and check-out the expo. Away from the Anniversary Event, work continued on the new architecture for the Persistence Cache to help increase the scalability of the backend as well as link important services to a new database architecture.
Character Art
Character Art’s focus throughout November was to make all armor and undersuits available for female avatars. They also worked on modeling two of our new mission givers to bring more life to the Persistent Universe. Additionally, they’re creating a new set of outlaw armor (designation ‘Shipjacker’) that will include armor, an undersuit, and subscriber items.
Community
“The Community Team started the month in the Halloween spirit with two spooky contests in anticipation of the holiday. Players joined the festivities and showcased their talent in a pumpkin carving contest and a FOIP screenshot contest depicting the most terrifying and terrified expressions they had to offer. Spooktacular! The Mustang Commercial Contest put the community’s filmmaking skills to the test. Our bold cinematographers embraced the maverick spirit of Consolidated Outland to create commercials that Silas Koerner himself would be proud of. During Thanksgiving, Citizens shared what they were thankful for and participated in two holiday contests in honor of Turkey Day. With these two contests, we are now up to 25 total contests run in 2018, and the team still has more planned to go live before the end of the year. As Alpha 3.3 made its way to the Persistent Universe, we welcomed the first fully-explorable planet and city with Hurston and Lorville respectively. While everyone was exploring the new environments, the bustling landing zone, and four new moons, the Star Citizen content creators outdid themselves, creating beautiful shots of sunsets on Hurston, days out on the beach next to Lorville, and joyrides to Aberdeen. We are proud and thankful for all the content the community shared on social media, Reddit, and the community hub, and are looking forward to seeing even more. Keep on sharing! The 2948 Anniversary special kicked off our most epic Free-Fly event to date with all flyable ships and vehicles to try out at no extra cost. The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo came a long way and made its in-game debut with their Hurston-based satellite branch. Exclusive reveals at the expo included Anvil’s ‘light fighter of the future’, the Hawk, and the next evolution of Xi’an tech and design innovation with the Aopoa San’tok.yāi. Lastly, we also reached a significant funding milestone and want to thank our amazing community who made this possible. The amount is the highest total for any project in the history of crowdfunding and is beyond anything we could have imagined. In a letter from the chairman, Chris Roberts shared his thoughts on the fantastic journey so far and the exciting future that lies ahead. Here’s to tomorrow!”
Design
Design got the Anniversary Event’s Convention Center up and running for all backers to enjoy. To help encourage players to browse the inventories at New Deal and Teach’s Ship Shop, the team began implementing a new type of NPC: the Ship Dealer. The aim is to provide a realistic and interesting ship purchasing experience to further liven up the process of acquiring a dream ship. “We sincerely hope you got a chance to try out and see the different ships at the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo on Hurston!” Tuning for the Economy continues, with work going into adjusting prices for various services and goods across Stanton. Work has also started towards the design and implementation of a robust and important Economic Editing Tool to help better visualize and tweak the Economy than ever before. They also tuned Arena Commander’s REC Reward.
DevOps
November is always one of the busiest months for DevOps due to the Anniversary Event, and this month was no exception, with the team scaling the servers to the highest capacity since the beginning of the project. To ease the overall DevOps workload, the Publishing Team expanded their internal tools, which allowed most of the team to enjoy a well-deserved break for Thanksgiving (even if they did stay very close to their laptops). Between PTU & Live, they successfully published 30 times throughout November, with some days seeing 3-4 builds.
Engineering
Engineering teams around the globe worked on OCS throughout November. The first iteration of client-side streaming was released in Alpha 3.3, with an ongoing focus on improving asynchronous entity loading and unloading. The core OCS and network and backend teams had the Object Container Server Streaming summit this month to plan the next iteration of OCS, which will focus on server-side streaming and full persistent servers. LA-based Engineering collaborated with the Austin Backend Team to build the tech required for in-game ship rentals. It was premiered during the anniversary promotion and forms the foundation for all in-game rentals. Development on backend tech moved forward towards allowing persistent EZ Habs and enable players to customize and persist their start location. The Vehicle Team continued to work on Ping & Scanning gameplay, this month focusing on ship scanning. Work has also begun on the new DNA component to integrate the R&D technology into the character pipeline. Turbulent worked closely with the LA Gamecode Team to further improve the group system, spectrum integration, and FOIP & VOIP.
Engine Tools
The Engine Team spent time supporting the Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 releases, bug fixing, profiling, and optimizing code (especially for Object Container Streaming). Work continued on GPU skinning, adding vertex velocity support (for motion blur, etc.), completed several optimizations to skip zero weights (which improved throughput), prepared background data, and made the first pass on memory layout and LOD support. For physics optimizations, the execution of ray collision checks and the defragmentation of grids run were made to run concurrently. This achieved a 30-50% speedup for physics planet terrain computation, reduced the number of cell queries on planets, and improved proxy mesh generation of terrain ground volumes. Terrain rendering improvements were made (glow forward pass) as well as fixes for water volume and ocean rendering. The existing hair shader was improved, and a new depth of field algorithm was created, improving quality, performance, and fixing halos around silhouettes. They completed additional culling refinements in the zone system to submit fewer objects to the renderer, as well as various low-level optimizations to reduce the load on the render thread. Further enhancements were made to engine-side support for the public telemetry page to allow user-specific optimization hints to be displayed to improve the gameplay experience, and a new tool was developed to easily analyze core dumps of Linux dedicated game servers.
Environment Art
The UK team focused on bug fixing and optimization for the Alpha 3.3 release, mainly for Lorville and Hurston. A focused sprint was completed for the Anniversary Event convention halls, with the aim to provide a versatile and time-economic environment to show off the ships in their best light. Additional Underground Facility interior exteriors and a new Alpha 3.3 splash screen were also made and implemented. The DE Location Team made great progress on Lorville’s Central Business District (CBD). Here, players can access the Hurston Dynamics Showcase, the flagship store for all weaponry produced by the brand, as well as the Transfers store where players can engage in various trading activities. The CBD has a very different feel to the rest of Lorville and clearly services a different type of clientele. Luxurious materials and modern design set the ambiance for this experience. The Organics and Planet Team are making great progress on upcoming locations and are currently working on ArcCorp and exploring microTech. Both locations need additional features to be added to the planet tech to make them truly unique, so while it’s still early days, things are steadily moving on.
Facial Animation
The team is actively working on upcoming mission-givers, including Klim, along with ship dealers, bar patrons, and bartenders. They’re also testing the results of the player’s facial animation recordings on the default loadout.
Graphics
This month, the Graphics Team firmly focussed on the release of Alpha 3.3.5 and improving both stability and performance. The PTU was plagued by some quite frequent GPU crashes, but Evocati testing helped them track down the cause and remedy it. With the release of Lorville, QA saw high video memory usage due to the scale of the environment and number of ships and characters. Due to some bugs, this resulted in serious performance issues as the video driver began to page memory, resulting in noticeable stutters. Fixes were made to the worst offending video memory bugs in Alpha 3.3.5. Looking forward, the team continues to reduce memory usage and optimize the game for the next release.
Issue Council
The Issue Council deployed version 1.1.5 in October. Several issues were fixed including editable fields of the different forms not displaying correctly, versions not ordered from the latest to the oldest, and display names with special characters not showing properly.
Level Design
The Live Team placed and marked-up locations on and around Hurston for mission use. Big improvements to the delivery missions were made – players can now take contracts from companies who operate specific routes and require the player to have a certain level of reputation. The Downed Relay mission (as seen in CitizenCon) now has multiple outcomes, including having other players tasked with destroying the stolen blade before its data is uploaded. Now that the base work for Lorville is finished, the Level Design Team are focusing on the CBD. The whitebox is already done, with most of the remaining work involving connecting the trains and ensuring all the logistics work. New Underground Facilities components were added to the procedural tech. These are built with modularity in mind and can be generated in the same way as Rest Stops. Once the modular library has enough content (rooms, connectors, POIs), it will become much easier to provide more variety. They also continued working on the procedural tech to make sure that it provides everything needed from a design perspective. This can be difficult at times, as compromises are required; what is the most fun to play is not necessarily what looks the best. Finally, most of the combat missions found at Crusader are now available at Hurston. Work has begun to define the contractors and progression for them, too.
Lighting
This month, the Lighting Team worked on improving the headlights across almost all ships available in the PU. Due to plenty of issues regarding visibility while flying ships in dark environments, the headlights were improved to provide more visible light from greater distances. There’s still room for improvement, but in the meantime, it’s a positive change that makes the planetary flying experience more enjoyable. Additionally, the team focused on bug fixing and optimizing the lighting in Lorville to maintain a high degree of quality while improving framerates and lowering drawcall costs. They also worked on the lighting for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo to help show off all the amazing ships being featured in the various halls.
Narrative
The Narrative Team pushed heavily on Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 tasks to knock out remaining mission text and standardize in-game descriptions for ship components on the terminals. They also continued working on editorial selects for the lower priority lines for NPCs that were captured back in September. To cover the new convention center and other contexts, they ran a pickup recording session to add additional Lorville announcement lines. The team also worked closely with Marketing to support the recent IAE expansion event in Lorville. Not only providing written copy but joining some of the roundtable discussions to provide fictional backstory for the various manufacturers. Lastly, they worked to schedule tasks for the PU and undertook overall team planning for the upcoming year.
Player Relations
Player Relations busily plugged away at the Alpha 3.3 and the Anniversary Event, working alongside the Evocati on several builds to make sure key components were properly tested. “As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has over 100 articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.”
Props
The Props Team focused on the stands, booths, and branding for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo and the Anniversary Event. They recently shifted onto closing out the CBD props in Lorville and are currently creating bespoke furniture to help sell the wealth and decadence of the Hurston Central building.
QA
On the publishing side, QA busily tested the Alpha 3.3.0 and 3.3.5 builds for publishing to Evocati and Live. On the game side, the focus was on testing Hurston, its four moons, and city Lorville. They also completed a number of QATRs relating to FOIP & VOIP, ship purchasing in the PU, ship rental in Arena Commander, and improvements to Object Container Streaming. It was business as usual on the leadership side, with coordinated testing priorities between the UK, LA, and DE. Two new recruits were welcomed to QA; a dedicated tester in Frankfurt to support the AI Team and an additional tester in the UK. They will be primarily focused on providing day-to-day updates on the state of AI and will report all issues directly to the team to be investigated. QA also made the decision to do away with the general design tests and instead focus on specific sanity/smoke tests for AI and another test suite specifically for the Transit System and locations. The previous design tests were too broad and covered areas that were not always prevalent to the in-house design teams. Refocusing towards specific in-house feature teams has proven that the testing and information provided is much more valuable. A fair amount of time was spent on major QA test requests for new animation update optimizations, physics terrain patch optimization changes, and general optimization that will further improve performance in the PU. Frankfurt’s QA branch supported the Planetary Tech Team in investigating an issue on one of Hurston’s moons. Something in its setup was causing the normals on the moon surface to be very intense. This was tracked down to a lighting issue and further steps were taken (with the assistance of the Graphics Team) to enable the surface to get back to, well, normal.
Services
At CitizenCon, the team was present on the show floor to prepare local environments to run the game backend for both the FOIP LAN demonstration area and the main stage demonstration. This local setup included the entire game backend allowing for the demonstration to represent exactly what is being played in the PTU and the Live environment, including the network of social services that power groups, chat, and FOIP. With the release of Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5, the team mostly focused on observing and scaling the voice and face transmission solution to the increase of backers in the game. DevOp teams mainly worked to ensure that voice channels created by players during one-to-one calls, group channels, and global server channels were properly sharded to new voice servers, as the number of connected players increased. With the addition of global chat auto-connect in Alpha 3.3.5, the team also added new systems to monitor and move voice channels between servers when the supported load on a given voice server instance is too high. “The team has been ecstatic about the use of the technology by players and we hope to keep growing its use with gameplay connected features.” In order to help with the above tasks, the social game services were moved to a Kubernetes-based orchestration solution that allows easier management of voice and service containers. This new backplane supports continuous integration of service changes and will greatly improve the team velocity when deploying updates and builds. Working in conjunction with the universe team, Game Services began the development of a web-based administration tool to help manage the runtime state of the game world from a macro level. This is still in the very early stages of development but, using this tool, the designers will ultimately have the ability to inspect social objects like groups and their life cycles, ban, chase, and player controls. Integrating the WebGL Starmap engine will also allow the viewing of commodities, player locations, gameplay analytics, and much more.
Ships
This month, the UK Vehicle Team returned to the Origin 890 Jump after wrapping up the Valkyrie. What will undoubtedly be well-received news amongst the community is that, after long hiatus, work continues on the greatly-anticipated Anvil Carrack. Since the ship was last worked on around 18 months ago, there have been significant improvements to the ship pipeline and workflow. So, when re-reviewing the previous state, the team decided to undertake a second whitebox pass of the interior to bring it closer to its original concept. In addition to next year’s larger vehicles, progress was made to the Alpha 3.4 ships, including the Origin 600i Touring. The Freelancer DUR, MAX, and MIS are all receiving the final touches by art.
Ship Art
Lead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith made great progress on the greybox model, interior, and exterior of the 300i rework and began implementing different paint jobs and modeled the modified components for the other three variants. Next, he will move onto an alternative interior to be used in one of them. 3D Modeler Josh Coons recently completed the whitebox model for the Banu Defender and has now moved onto testing some of the modified workflow using Zbrush models, which will be baked down to create the type of detail we are looking for in this ship. He is continually creating new textures and also starting to build up the greybox model with the alternative workflow.
System Design
The System Design Team worked on integrating updated flight mechanics into enemy ship AI, ensuring that with all the changes, they are still engaging to fight against and don’t become unbalanced. They noticed that the updated flight model currently causes too much unwanted ‘jousting behavior’, so are currently looking into ways to modify it. Work was done on restructuring dialogue wildlines for the ship/FPS/social AI to unify them within the same overall structure. A large amount of work has been done with the audio & writing teams to ensure the system works properly for all systemic dialogue in the game. They are also working to develop tools to automate the setup of dialogue lines. More work was completed on designing stealth gameplay elements, which in turn requires the AI perception to be upgraded to cater for peripheral vision, as well as various audio events and stimuli from environmental sources, such as throwing a pebble to distract enemies.
Telemetry
Shortly after CitizenCon, the Public Telemetry page was launched. The data presented here reflects the data CIG receives from clients while playing the game. This data is used to assess and improve performance across a variety of hardware. If logged in while on the telemetry page, players will see their stats, including their computer’s GPU and CPU score and average FPS. The heatmap displays other user’s average FPS and the most popular hardware for each GPU and CPU score. On launch, the telemetry page showed a massive improvement between Alpha 3.2 and 3.3 thanks to OCS.
Turbulent
Throughout November, Turbulent supported CitizenCon, the Alpha 3.3. Flyable Ships, the new Anvil Valkyrie, the release of the Drake Kraken, and preparations for the Anniversary Event. CitizenCon: CitizenCon 2948 was an amazing event, with Turbulent supporting many components such as the livestream, merchandise, badges, microsite, and the release of new ships from Drake and Anvil!
The Drake Kraken: In October, Turbulent supported the unveiling of Drake’s first capital ship, the Kraken. The Kraken has two multi-purpose hangars, five manned turrets, four remote turrets, a massive cargo capacity, comfortable habs for a full crew, a Dragonfly Bay, and six landing pads. The website showed multiple features such as an interactive cross-section of the ship and a registry for those interested in obtaining one.
The Anvil Valkyrie: Turbulent supported the release of the Valkyrie, the new flyable drop ship from Anvil. The Valkyrie contains multiple side guns and turrets and can deploy up to twenty troops as well as a vehicle into combat. The website displayed features such as in-game footage of the Valkyrie and a CitizenCon-exclusive edition called the Valkyrie Liberator. This was also released on October 10th.
The 3.3 Flyable: With the release of Alpha 3.3, Turbulent supported the availability of the flyable ships on the website. The ships include the Aegis Hammerhead, Tumbril Cyclone, RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the CO Mustang. An exclusive CitizenCon Mustang was also available, called the Mustang Alpha Vindicator.
The 2948 Anniversary Special: The Anniversary Special was launched on Friday, November 23rd. Over the course of the week, a different manufacturer was released each day. On the first day, the Arrow was released, along with the rest of the Anvil ships. RSI day was on the 24th, Origin Jumpworks the 25th, Aegis Dynamics the 26th, Drake Interplanetary the 27th, and the alien ships on the 28th. The new San’tok’yai ship was unveiled by Aopoa too. MISC had its featured day on the 29th, and the new manufacturers on the 30th, including Tumbril, Crusader, CO, Argo, and Kruger. The last days of the Anniversary Special featured discount starter packs.
The Anniversary Quiz: With the help of Player Relations, Turbulent executed a quiz featuring three questions for each manufacturer. A passing score awarded a ‘Ship Master’ Spectrum badge and certificate. By passing the quiz, players were entered into a draw to win an Anvil Arrow.
The IAE Free-Fly Promotion: For the week of November 23rd until December 1st, five different flyable ships were featured each day of the week according to the featured manufacturer. The page contained information about the Desmond Memorial Convention Center in Lorville and linked to the Knowledge Base, which provided detailed instructions on how to get started. The IAE Free-Fly page also instructed new players on how to make an account and get into the ‘verse.
The Aopoa Santok’yāi: Turbulent supported the release of the Santok’yāi, a new Xi’an ship from Aopoa. The Santok’yāi features Yeng’tu Laser Repeaters and the latest Xi’an technology in a light-to-medium fighter chassis.
UI
The UI Team worked on adding the ability to rent items in Arena Commander, as well as supporting the needs of the Environment Team working on Lorville’s CBD.
Vehicle Features
Based on recent feedback from both internal and external sources, turret improvements have continued throughout November. In addition to bug fixes, there were multiple improvements to turrets including making multi-axis turrets controllable at min/max pitch, fixing the gyro pip offset, and improved aiming methods from a variety of input devices. The foundational mechanics to allow ships to aim at the engines on target ships has also been completed, and the feature itself is nearly ready to be rolled out to the PU, as is scanning nav points for destination info. The rest of the month was rounded out with a clean-up of debris network flow and a variety of vehicle-related crash bugs.
Vehicle Content
Art, Systems Design, and Tech Art worked together to release the Anvil Arrow as part of the November Anniversary Event as well as continuing to work on ships for upcoming releases: The Anvil Hawk is in the release-prep stage with both the Art and System Design Teams, the 300 Series is in greybox with Systems Design, and the Freelancers had entered release-prep with Tech Art. Additionally, Systems Design and Tech Art worked with the animators on character animation sequencing for vehicles, and Tech Art worked on a thruster pass for the new flight model.
VFX
The VFX Team continued to polish and optimize the many environmental effects of Hurston and implemented general improvements to the various moons throughout the ‘verse. They also finalized VFX for the Anvil Arrow and Anvil Hawk. The VFX Team spent time optimizing existing assets to help with the overall performance of Alpha 3.3.5. They also cleaned out all unused VFX texture assets in hopes of reducing the amount of memory required to load all the particle textures.
Weapons
The Weapon Art Team worked on the Multi-Tool rework, Kastak Arms Ravager-212, and the level two and three upgrades for the Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeaters. They also made minor adjustments to the iron sights on a handful of weapons to improve the sight picture and to make them more user-friendly when no optics are attached. WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
Willkommen zum monatlichen Star Citizen-Bericht von Cloud Imperium Games vom November. Im vergangenen Monat landete die Intergalactic Aerospace Exposition pünktlich zu unserem jährlichen Jubiläums-Special auf Hurston. Die Entwickler hatten Spaß daran, die Expo zum Leben zu erwecken, während sie weiter voranschreiten, wobei sie sich auf das bevorstehende Release von Alpha 3.4 konzentrierten. Lesen Sie weiter für die Entwicklungs-Updates von Persistent Universe aus allen unseren globalen Studios.
KI
Der Schwerpunkt der SchiffskI lag im November auf der Optimierung des taktischen Punktesystems. Sie haben nun mehrere Abfragen, die in einem Stapel aus verschiedenen Threads gebündelt sind, was eine bessere Kontrolle über die Kosten des Gesamtsystems ermöglicht. Es wurden mehrere Optimierungen für das Charakterbewegungssystem eingereicht, die nun alle Komponenten in einem multithreaded Batch-Ansatz aktualisieren und die CPU-Ressourcen während des Spiel-Updates maximal ausschöpfen. Es wurde ein Durchgang zur Fadensicherheit mehrerer Subsysteme durchgeführt, einschließlich der Aufmerksamkeitszielkomponente und des Kommunikationssystems. Dies ist erforderlich, um das Update der Subsumption-Komponente schließlich in den Schritt Multithreaded Batch Update zu verschieben. In FPS Combat wurde die Zuweisung'Verteidigungsbereich' eingeführt; um dieses Verhalten zu erreichen, müssen die Übergänge der Mastergraphen überwacht werden, um zu beurteilen, ob die Empfänger des Submissionsereignisses es tatsächlich verarbeiten können. Im Beispiel des Verteidigungsbereichs können sie beim Empfangen der Zuweisung ein normales Verhalten ausführen. Wenn das Verhalten die Anfrage auf eine bestimmte Weise bearbeiten kann, ist das großartig. Wenn nicht, dann kümmert sich der Mastergraph darum, eine auszuwählen, die es kann. Parallel dazu fügen sie neue Verhaltensweisen hinzu, um den Kampf zu verbessern und patrouillieren, um diese Aufgabe zu erfüllen. Die Unterstützung für getarntes Gameplay wurde implementiert, mit neuen akustischen und visuellen Reizen, die es den Spielern ermöglichen, die Aufmerksamkeit der Wachen auf sich zu ziehen, Fallen vorzubereiten und sonst blockierte Wege zu öffnen. Auch am Barkeeper für Lorville wurde weiter gearbeitet. Um mehrere Funktionalitäten seines Verhaltens zu erreichen, implementierten sie den ersten Durchgang des UseChannel-Routings und erweitern die nutzbaren Funktionalitäten weiter. Das Usable Builder Tool hat ebenfalls eine neue Funktion erhalten: Es ist nun in der Lage, verschiedene Charaktere mit unterschiedlichen Benutzeroberflächen korrekt anzuzeigen, so dass Designer, Animatoren und Programmierer den Inhalt bei der Auslieferung problemlos testen und überprüfen können.
Animation
Im November unterstützte Animation das Feature-Team dabei, die Sprung-, Mantel- und Sprungfunktionalität mit den Qualitäts- und Spielerwartungen des Spiels in Einklang zu bringen. Sie testen derzeit einen Prozess, der die effiziente Integration verschiedener Waffenklassen wie Pistolen und Schrotflinten ermöglicht. Das Team implementiert auch Carry-Optionen für Zero-G EVA und arbeitet an der Fertigstellung der Spielerinteraktion (insbesondere der Carrier). Das US-Animationsteam bereinigte und löste Daten aus den erstaunlichen Performance-Aufnahmen der diesjährigen CitizenCon in Austin, Texas. Die Bearbeitung und die abschließenden Arbeiten werden in Kürze abgeschlossen sein. Sie setzten die Arbeit an den Schiffshändlern fort, die den Vers füllen werden, und sorgten dafür, dass die neuen Missionsgeber verfügbar waren, sobald ihre Standorte fertig waren, wie Wallace Klim in Levski, Tecia Pacheco in Area18 und Constantine Hurston in Lorville. Das Team untersuchte die Probleme, die sich aus der Neuausrichtung der männlichen Animationen auf das weibliche Skelett ergeben, und stellte fest, dass der erste Schritt darin besteht, eine 1:1-Parität zwischen ihnen zu erreichen. Dies ermöglicht den Austausch von Assets durch weiblichkeitsspezifische Versionen, ohne die Entwicklung weiblicher Spieler zu behindern. Auch der mobilen Technik wird ein letzter Schliff verpasst.
Audio
Die Audioabteilung konzentrierte sich auf das neue Flugmodell und den Raumschiff-Audiomix. Sie implementierten Technologien, um eine systemische Mischung von NLPC-Schiffen basierend auf Priorität, Größe und Bedrohungsstufe zu ermöglichen, was eine klarere und gezieltere Mischung ermöglicht. Dies, kombiniert mit der Implementierung der neuen Schiffsschwingungskomponente, hat das Audioerlebnis im Schiff erheblich verbessert. Während der Implementierung führten sie einen Optimierungspass durch, um sicherzustellen, dass die Speicher- und Sprachgrenzen gesund bleiben. Die Verbesserungen der Waffenerfahrung wurden mit der Konsolidierung der Assets und der Vereinfachung der Elementimplementierung fortgesetzt, um eine verbesserte Übersetzung der Audio Assets von der Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) in das Spiel zu gewährleisten. Es gab auch Änderungen am Foley-System, um die akustische Rückmeldung der Traversale des Spielers auf verschiedenen Geländen und Oberflächen zu verbessern. Im Musikbereich arbeitete das Team mit dem PU-Komponisten Pedro Camacho zusammen, um neue musikalische Cues zu entwickeln und umzusetzen, die die planetarischen Standorte auf Hurston, wie L19, und bevorstehende Erweiterungen unterstützen. Mit Object Container Streaming (OCS), das online geht, hat das Audio Code Team FOIP optimiert und ausgefeilt, um die Zuverlässigkeit zu gewährleisten.
Backend Services
Backend Services arbeitete daran, den Spielern das Jubiläumsevent 2948 näher zu bringen. Die erste Aufgabe bestand darin, den Service zu schaffen, der erforderlich ist, um die korrekten überlappenden Objektcontainer für die verschiedenen Tage im Kongresszentrum vorzuziehen. Dies gewährleistete einen nahtlosen Übergang zwischen den Herstellertagen und verhinderte die Notwendigkeit, einen neuen Build pro Messetag zu veröffentlichen. Als nächstes arbeiteten sie daran, die Mietlogik hinter der Messe sicherzustellen, die korrekt gehandelten Daten zwischen Server, Client und Datenbank, um sicherzustellen, dass die Spieler die von ihnen gemieteten Schiffe genießen konnten. Schließlich wurde eine Login-Warteschlange erstellt, um die beispiellose Anzahl von Spielern zu organisieren und zu drosseln, die versuchen, in den Vers einzutreten und die Ausstellung zu besuchen. Abseits der Jubiläumsveranstaltung wurde die Arbeit an der neuen Architektur für den Persistence Cache fortgesetzt, um die Skalierbarkeit des Backends zu erhöhen und wichtige Dienste mit einer neuen Datenbankarchitektur zu verbinden.
Charakter-Kunst
Der Fokus der Character Art lag im November darauf, alle Rüstungen und Unterwäsche für weibliche Avatare verfügbar zu machen. Sie arbeiteten auch an der Modellierung von zwei unserer neuen Missionsgeber, um dem persistenten Universum mehr Leben einzuhauchen. Zusätzlich erstellen sie eine neue Reihe von verbotenen Rüstungen (Bezeichnung "Schiffsräuber"), die Rüstungen, einen Unteranzug und Abonnentenartikel beinhalten.
Community
"Das Community-Team startete den Monat im Geiste von Halloween mit zwei gruseligen Wettbewerben im Vorfeld des Festes. Die Spieler nahmen an den Feierlichkeiten teil und präsentierten ihr Talent in einem Kürbisschnitzwettbewerb und einem FOIP Screenshot-Wettbewerb, der die schrecklichsten und verängstigtsten Ausdrücke zeigte, die sie zu bieten hatten. Spukgespenstisch! Der Mustang Commercial Contest stellte die Fähigkeiten der Community im Filmemachen auf die Probe. Unsere mutigen Kameramänner umarmten den eigenwilligen Geist der Consolidated Outland, um Werbespots zu kreieren, auf die Silas Koerner selbst stolz wäre. An Thanksgiving teilten die Bürger, wofür sie dankbar waren, und nahmen an zwei Ferienwettbewerben zu Ehren des Türkei-Tages teil. Mit diesen beiden Wettbewerben sind wir nun bei bis zu 25 Gesamtwettbewerben im Jahr 2018 angelangt, und das Team hat noch weitere geplant, noch vor Ende des Jahres live zu gehen. Als Alpha 3.3 den Weg in das Persistente Universum fand, begrüßten wir den ersten vollständig erforschbaren Planeten und die erste Stadt mit Hurston bzw. Lorville. Während alle die neuen Umgebungen, die geschäftige Landezone und vier neue Monde erkundeten, übertrafen die Inhaltsschöpfer von Star Citizen sich selbst und schufen schöne Aufnahmen von Sonnenuntergängen auf Hurston, Tage am Strand neben Lorville und Spritztouren nach Aberdeen. Wir sind stolz und dankbar für all die Inhalte, die die Community auf Social Media, Reddit und dem Community Hub geteilt hat, und freuen uns auf noch mehr. Teilen Sie weiter! Das 2948 Jubiläums-Special war der Auftakt zu unserem bisher epischsten Free-Fly-Event mit allen fliegenden Schiffen und Fahrzeugen, die ohne Mehrkosten ausprobiert werden konnten. Die Intergalactic Aerospace Expo kam einen langen Weg und feierte ihr Debüt im Spiel mit ihrer in Hurston ansässigen Satellitenabteilung. Exklusive Enthüllungen auf der Expo waren Anvils "leichter Kämpfer der Zukunft", der Falke und die nächste Evolution von Xi'an Technologie- und Designinnovationen mit dem Aopoa San'tok.yāi. Schließlich haben wir auch einen wichtigen Meilenstein in der Finanzierung erreicht und möchten uns bei unserer großartigen Community bedanken, die dies ermöglicht hat. Der Betrag ist die höchste Summe für jedes Projekt in der Geschichte der Crowdfunding und liegt über allem, was wir uns vorstellen konnten. In einem Brief des Vorsitzenden teilte Chris Roberts seine Gedanken über die bisherige fantastische Reise und die spannende Zukunft mit. Auf morgen!"
Design
Design hat das Convention Center des Jubiläumsevents für alle Geldgeber in Betrieb genommen. Um die Spieler zu ermutigen, die Bestände im New Deal and Teach's Ship Shop zu durchsuchen, begann das Team mit der Implementierung einer neuen Art von NSC: dem Ship Dealer. Ziel ist es, ein realistisches und interessantes Einkaufserlebnis zu bieten, um den Prozess des Erwerbs eines Traumschiffes weiter zu beleben. "Wir hoffen aufrichtig, dass Sie die Gelegenheit hatten, die verschiedenen Schiffe auf der Intergalactic Aerospace Expo auf Hurston auszuprobieren und zu sehen!" Das Tuning für die Wirtschaft geht weiter, wobei an der Anpassung der Preise für verschiedene Dienstleistungen und Waren in ganz Stanton gearbeitet wird. Außerdem wurde mit der Entwicklung und Implementierung eines robusten und wichtigen Economic Editing Tools begonnen, das dazu beitragen soll, die Wirtschaft besser zu visualisieren und zu optimieren als je zuvor. Sie stimmten auch die REC-Belohnung des Arena Commander ab.
DevOps
November ist aufgrund des Jubiläumsevents immer einer der arbeitsreichsten Monate für DevOps, und dieser Monat war keine Ausnahme, da das Team die Server auf die höchste Kapazität seit Beginn des Projekts skalierte. Um die Arbeit von DevOps zu erleichtern, erweiterte das Publishing Team seine internen Tools, so dass der größte Teil des Teams eine wohlverdiente Pause an Thanksgiving genießen konnte (auch wenn sie sehr nah an ihren Laptops blieben). Zwischen PTU und Live veröffentlichten sie im November 30 Mal erfolgreich, wobei einige Tage lang 3-4 Builds zu sehen waren.
Ingenieurwesen
Engineering-Teams auf der ganzen Welt arbeiteten im November an OCS. Die erste Iteration des clientseitigen Streamings wurde in Alpha 3.3 veröffentlicht, wobei der Schwerpunkt weiterhin auf der Verbesserung des asynchronen Be- und Entladens von Einheiten liegt. Die wichtigsten OCS-, Netzwerk- und Backend-Teams hatten diesen Monat den Object Container Server Streaming Summit, um die nächste Iteration von OCS zu planen, die sich auf serverseitiges Streaming und vollpersistente Server konzentrieren wird. Das in LA ansässige Ingenieurbüro arbeitete mit dem Austin Backend Team zusammen, um die Technologie für die Vermietung von In-Game-Schiffen zu entwickeln. Es wurde während der Jubiläumsaktion uraufgeführt und bildet die Grundlage für alle In-Game-Verleiher. Die Entwicklung der Backend-Technologie ging weiter in Richtung persistenter EZ Habs und ermöglicht es den Spielern, ihren Startort anzupassen und zu erhalten. Das Fahrzeugteam arbeitete weiter an Ping & Scanning Gameplay, das sich in diesem Monat auf das Scannen von Schiffen konzentrierte. Auch an der neuen DNA-Komponente zur Integration der F&E-Technologie in die Charakterpipeline wurde gearbeitet. Turbulent arbeitete eng mit dem LA Gamecode Team zusammen, um das Gruppensystem, die Spektrumintegration sowie FOIP & VOIP weiter zu verbessern.
Motorwerkzeuge
Das Engine Team verbrachte Zeit damit, die Alpha 3.3 und 3.3.5 Releases zu unterstützen, Fehler zu beheben, Profile zu erstellen und Code zu optimieren (insbesondere für Object Container Streaming). Die Arbeiten an der GPU-Skinning, der Hinzufügung von Vertex-Geschwindigkeitsunterstützung (für Bewegungsunschärfe, etc.), der Durchführung mehrerer Optimierungen zum Überspringen von Nullgewichten (was den Durchsatz verbesserte), der Vorbereitung von Hintergrunddaten und der ersten Weitergabe von Speicherlayout und LOD-Unterstützung wurden fortgesetzt. Für physikalische Optimierungen wurden die Durchführung von Ray Collision Checks und die Defragmentierung von Grids Runs parallel durchgeführt. Dadurch wurde eine Beschleunigung von 30-50% für die Berechnung des physikalischen Planetengeländes erreicht, die Anzahl der Zellabfragen auf Planeten reduziert und die Generierung von Proxy-Netzen für die Bodenvolumen des Geländes verbessert. Verbesserungen im Terrain-Rendering (Glow-Forward-Pass) sowie Korrekturen für Wasservolumen und Ocean-Rendering wurden vorgenommen. Der bestehende Hair Shader wurde verbessert, und es wurde ein neuer Tiefenschärfenalgorithmus entwickelt, der die Qualität, Leistung und die Korrektur von Halos um Silhouetten herum verbessert. Sie vervollständigten zusätzliche Culling-Verfeinerungen im Zonensystem, um weniger Objekte an den Renderer zu übergeben, sowie verschiedene Low-Level-Optimierungen, um die Belastung des Render-Threads zu reduzieren. Weitere Verbesserungen wurden an der motorseitigen Unterstützung für die öffentliche Telemetrie-Seite vorgenommen, um die Anzeige benutzerspezifischer Optimierungshinweise zur Verbesserung des Gameplay-Erlebnisses zu ermöglichen, und ein neues Tool wurde entwickelt, um Kernspeicherauszüge von Linux-eigenen Spielservern einfach zu analysieren.
Umwelt Kunst
Das britische Team konzentrierte sich auf die Fehlerbehebung und -optimierung für das Alpha 3.3-Release, hauptsächlich für Lorville und Hurston. Ein fokussierter Sprint wurde für die Kongresshallen der Jubiläumsveranstaltung durchgeführt, mit dem Ziel, ein vielseitiges und zeitökonomisches Umfeld zu schaffen, um die Schiffe im besten Licht darzustellen. Zusätzliche Innenräume der Underground Facility und ein neuer Alpha 3.3 Splash Screen wurden ebenfalls erstellt und implementiert. Das DE Location Team hat große Fortschritte im Central Business District (CBD) von Lorville gemacht. Hier können die Spieler auf das Hurston Dynamics Showcase, den Flagship Store für alle von der Marke hergestellten Waffen, sowie auf den Transfers Store zugreifen, wo die Spieler an verschiedenen Handelsaktivitäten teilnehmen können. Die CBD hat eine ganz andere Ausstrahlung als der Rest von Lorville und bedient eindeutig eine andere Art von Kundenkreis. Luxuriöse Materialien und modernes Design bilden das Ambiente für dieses Erlebnis. Das Organics and Planet Team macht große Fortschritte bei den kommenden Standorten und arbeitet derzeit an ArcCorp und der Erforschung von MicroTech. Beide Standorte benötigen zusätzliche Funktionen, die die Planetentechnologie ergänzen, um sie wirklich einzigartig zu machen, so dass die Dinge noch am Anfang stehen und sich ständig weiterentwickeln.
Gesichtsanimation
Das Team arbeitet aktiv an zukünftigen Missiongebern, darunter Klim, sowie an Schiffshändlern, Barpatronen und Barkeepern. Sie testen auch die Ergebnisse der Gesichtsanimationsaufnahmen des Players mit der Standardauslastung.
Grafiken
In diesem Monat konzentrierte sich das Grafik-Team fest auf die Veröffentlichung von Alpha 3.3.5 und die Verbesserung von Stabilität und Leistung. Die PTU wurde von einigen recht häufigen GPU-Abstürzen heimgesucht, aber Evocati-Tests halfen ihnen, die Ursache zu finden und zu beheben. Mit der Veröffentlichung von Lorville sah QA eine hohe Nutzung des Videospeichers aufgrund der Größe der Umgebung und der Anzahl der Schiffe und Charaktere. Aufgrund einiger Fehler führte dies zu ernsthaften Performance-Problemen, da der Videotreiber anfing, den Speicher zu paginieren, was zu spürbaren Stottern führte. Es wurden Korrekturen an den am schlimmsten beleidigenden Fehler im Videospeicher in Alpha 3.3.5 vorgenommen. In Zukunft wird das Team den Speicherverbrauch weiter reduzieren und das Spiel für die nächste Version optimieren.
Issue Council
Der Issue Council hat im Oktober die Version 1.1.5 eingeführt. Mehrere Probleme wurden behoben, darunter bearbeitbare Felder der verschiedenen Formulare, die nicht korrekt angezeigt werden, Versionen, die nicht von der neuesten bis zur ältesten Version bestellt wurden, und Anzeigenamen mit Sonderzeichen, die nicht richtig angezeigt werden.
Leveldesign
Das Live-Team platzierte und markierte Standorte in und um Hurston für Einsätze. Die Liefertermine wurden stark verbessert - die Spieler können nun Aufträge von Unternehmen erhalten, die bestimmte Strecken betreiben und von denen ein gewisses Maß an Reputation verlangt wird. Die Mission Downed Relay (wie in CitizenCon zu sehen) hat nun mehrere Ergebnisse, darunter auch die Aufgabe anderer Spieler, das gestohlene Blatt zu zerstören, bevor seine Daten hochgeladen werden. Nachdem die Basisarbeiten für Lorville abgeschlossen sind, konzentriert sich das Level Design Team auf die CBD. Die Whitebox ist bereits fertig, wobei der größte Teil der restlichen Arbeiten in der Verbindung der Züge und der Sicherstellung der gesamten Logistik liegt. Die Verfahrenstechnik wurde um neue Komponenten für Untertageanlagen erweitert. Diese sind modular aufgebaut und können wie Rastplätze generiert werden. Sobald die modulare Bibliothek über genügend Inhalte (Räume, Anschlüsse, POIs) verfügt, wird es viel einfacher, mehr Vielfalt zu bieten. Sie arbeiteten auch weiter an der Verfahrenstechnik, um sicherzustellen, dass sie aus gestalterischer Sicht alles Notwendige bietet. Dies kann manchmal schwierig sein, da Kompromisse erforderlich sind; was am meisten Spaß macht, ist nicht unbedingt, was am besten aussieht. Schließlich sind die meisten Kampfeinsätze, die bei Crusader gefunden wurden, jetzt in Hurston verfügbar. Die Arbeit hat begonnen, die Auftragnehmer und den Fortschritt auch für sie zu definieren.
Beleuchtung
In diesem Monat arbeitete das Beleuchtungsteam an der Verbesserung der Scheinwerfer für fast alle in der PU verfügbaren Schiffe. Aufgrund vieler Probleme mit der Sichtbarkeit beim Fliegen von Schiffen in dunkler Umgebung wurden die Scheinwerfer verbessert, um aus größerer Entfernung mehr sichtbares Licht zu liefern. Es gibt noch Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten, aber in der Zwischenzeit ist es eine positive Veränderung, die das Flugerlebnis auf dem Planeten angenehmer macht. Darüber hinaus konzentrierte sich das Team auf die Fehlerbehebung und Optimierung der Beleuchtung in Lorville, um ein hohes Maß an Qualität bei gleichzeitiger Verbesserung der Frameraten und Senkung der Anrufkosten zu gewährleisten. Sie arbeiteten auch an der Beleuchtung der Intergalactic Aerospace Expo, um all die erstaunlichen Schiffe zu präsentieren, die in den verschiedenen Hallen zu sehen sind.
Narrativ
Das Narrative Team hat die Aufgaben von Alpha 3.3 und 3.3.5 stark vorangetrieben, um den verbleibenden Missionstext zu eliminieren und die Beschreibungen im Spiel für Schiffskomponenten auf den Terminals zu standardisieren. Sie arbeiteten auch weiter an der redaktionellen Auswahl der Linien mit niedrigerer Priorität für NSCs, die bereits im September erfasst wurden. Um das neue Kongresszentrum und andere Zusammenhänge abzudecken, führten sie eine Aufnahmesitzung durch, um zusätzliche Lorville-Ankündigungslinien hinzuzufügen. Das Team arbeitete auch eng mit dem Marketing zusammen, um die jüngste IAE-Expansionsveranstaltung in Lorville zu unterstützen. Nicht nur die Bereitstellung schriftlicher Texte, sondern auch die Teilnahme an einigen Diskussionen am Runden Tisch, um den verschiedenen Herstellern eine fiktive Hintergrundgeschichte zu liefern. Schließlich arbeiteten sie an der Planung der Aufgaben für die PU und übernahmen die Gesamtteamplanung für das kommende Jahr.
Spielerbeziehungen
Die Spielerbeziehungen wurden am Alpha 3.3 und am Jubiläumsevent eifrig ausgebaut und arbeiteten zusammen mit der Evocati an mehreren Builds, um sicherzustellen, dass die Schlüsselkomponenten ordnungsgemäß getestet wurden. "Wie immer möchten wir alle Spieler auf unsere wachsende Knowledge Base hinweisen, die mittlerweile über 100 Artikel hat und in diesem Monat fast 450.000 Besucher verzeichnete! Wir werden dies weiter ausbauen, indem wir neue "How To"-Artikel, Patch-Notizen und Live-Benachrichtigungen hinzufügen.
Requisiten
Das Requisitenteam konzentrierte sich auf die Stände, Stände und das Branding für die Intergalactic Aerospace Expo und das Jubiläumsevent. Sie haben sich kürzlich darauf verlagert, die CBD-Stützen in Lorville zu schließen und kreieren derzeit maßgeschneiderte Möbel, um den Reichtum und die Dekadenz des Hurston Central Gebäudes zu verkaufen.
QA
Auf der Publishing-Seite testete QA fleißig die Alpha 3.3.0 und 3.3.5 Builds für die Veröffentlichung in Evocati und Live. Auf der Spielseite lag der Schwerpunkt auf dem Testen von Hurston, seinen vier Monden und der Stadt Lorville. Sie haben auch eine Reihe von QATRs in Bezug auf FOIP & VOIP, Schiffskauf in der PU, Schiffsmiete in Arena Commander und Verbesserungen beim Object Container Streaming abgeschlossen. Es war Business as usual auf der Führungsseite, mit koordinierten Testprioritäten zwischen Großbritannien, LA und DE. Zwei neue Mitarbeiter wurden bei QA begrüßt; ein engagierter Tester in Frankfurt zur Unterstützung des KI-Teams und ein weiterer Tester in Großbritannien. Sie konzentrieren sich in erster Linie auf die tägliche Information über den Stand der KI und berichten alle Fragen direkt an das zu untersuchende Team. QA entschied sich auch, auf die allgemeinen Designtests zu verzichten und sich stattdessen auf spezifische Sanity/Smoke-Tests für KI und eine weitere Testsuite speziell für das Transit-System und die Standorte zu konzentrieren. Die vorangegangenen Designtests waren zu breit angelegt und deckten Bereiche ab, die für die internen Designteams nicht immer vorherrschend waren. Die Neuausrichtung auf spezifische interne Merkmalsteams hat gezeigt, dass die bereitgestellten Tests und Informationen viel wertvoller sind. Es wurde viel Zeit mit großen QA-Testanfragen für neue Optimierungen von Animationen, Änderungen an der Optimierung von Geländepflastern und allgemeinen Optimierungen verbracht, die die Leistung der PU weiter verbessern werden. Die Frankfurter QS-Niederlassung unterstützte das Planetary Tech Team bei der Untersuchung eines Problems an einem von Hurstons Monden. Etwas in seinem Aufbau führte dazu, dass die Normalen auf der Mondoberfläche sehr intensiv waren. Dies wurde auf ein Beleuchtungsproblem zurückgeführt und weitere Schritte (mit Hilfe des Grafikteams) unternommen, damit die Oberfläche wieder zur Normalität zurückkehren kann.
Dienstleistungen
Auf der CitizenCon war das Team auf der Ausstellungsfläche anwesend, um lokale Umgebungen vorzubereiten und das Spiel-Backend sowohl für den FOIP LAN-Demonstrationsbereich als auch für die Demonstration der Hauptbühne zu betreiben. Diese lokale Konfiguration beinhaltete das gesamte Spiel-Backend, so dass die Demonstration genau das darstellen konnte, was in der PTU und der Live-Umgebung gespielt wird, einschließlich des Netzwerks der sozialen Dienste, die Gruppen, Chat und FOIP betreiben. Mit der Veröffentlichung von Alpha 3.3 und 3.3.5 konzentrierte sich das Team hauptsächlich auf die Beobachtung und Skalierung der Sprach- und Gesichtsübertragungslösung, um die Zahl der Geldgeber im Spiel zu erhöhen. Die DevOp-Teams arbeiteten hauptsächlich daran, sicherzustellen, dass Sprachkanäle, die von Spielern bei Einzelgesprächen erstellt wurden, Gruppenkanäle und globale Serverkanäle ordnungsgemäß auf neue Sprachserver übertragen wurden, da die Anzahl der verbundenen Spieler zunahm. Mit der Hinzufügung der globalen Chat-Autoverbindung in Alpha 3.3.5 hat das Team auch neue Systeme hinzugefügt, um Sprachkanäle zwischen Servern zu überwachen und zu verschieben, wenn die unterstützte Last auf einer bestimmten Sprachserverinstanz zu hoch ist. "Das Team war begeistert von der Nutzung der Technologie durch die Spieler und wir hoffen, dass wir ihre Nutzung mit den mit dem Gameplay verbundenen Funktionen weiter ausbauen können." Um bei den oben genannten Aufgaben zu helfen, wurden die Social-Game-Dienste auf eine Kubernetes-basierte Orchestrierungslösung umgestellt, die eine einfachere Verwaltung von Sprach- und Service-Containern ermöglicht. Diese neue Backplane unterstützt die kontinuierliche Integration von Serviceveränderungen und wird die Teamgeschwindigkeit bei der Bereitstellung von Updates und Builds deutlich verbessern. In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Universumsteam begann Game Services mit der Entwicklung eines webbasierten Verwaltungstools, das den Laufzeitzustand der Spielwelt von der Makroebene aus steuern soll. Dies befindet sich noch in den Anfängen der Entwicklung, aber mit diesem Tool werden die Designer letztendlich in der Lage sein, soziale Objekte wie Gruppen und ihre Lebenszyklen, Bann-, Chase- und Spielerkontrollen zu inspizieren. Die Integration der WebGL Starmap Engine ermöglicht auch die Anzeige von Waren, Spielerstandorten, Gameplay-Analysen und vielem mehr.
Schiffe
In diesem Monat kehrte das britische Fahrzeugteam nach dem Abschluss der Walküre zum Origin 890 Jump zurück. Was zweifellos eine gute Nachricht für die Community sein wird, ist, dass die Arbeit an dem mit Spannung erwarteten Anvil Carrack nach langer Pause fortgesetzt wird. Seit der letzten Bearbeitung des Schiffes vor rund 18 Monaten hat sich die Schiffspipeline und der Arbeitsablauf deutlich verbessert. Bei der Überprüfung des vorherigen Zustandes entschied sich das Team also, einen zweiten Whitebox-Pass des Innenraums vorzunehmen, um ihn seinem ursprünglichen Konzept näher zu bringen. Zusätzlich zu den größeren Fahrzeugen des nächsten Jahres wurden Fortschritte bei den Alpha 3.4-Schiffen erzielt, darunter auch bei der Origin 600i Touring. Die Freelancer DUR, MAX und MIS erhalten alle den letzten Schliff durch Kunst.
Schiffskunst
Der leitende Fahrzeugkünstler Chris Smith machte große Fortschritte beim Greybox-Modell, Interieur und Exterieur des 300i-Reworks und begann mit der Umsetzung verschiedener Lackierungen und modellierte die modifizierten Komponenten für die anderen drei Varianten. Als nächstes wird er sich auf ein alternatives Interieur begeben, das in einem von ihnen verwendet wird. Der 3D-Modellierer Josh Coons hat kürzlich das Whitebox-Modell für den Banu Defender fertiggestellt und ist nun damit beschäftigt, einige der modifizierten Arbeitsabläufe mit Zbrush-Modellen zu testen, die ausgebacken werden, um die Art von Detail zu erzeugen, nach der wir in diesem Schiff suchen. Er erstellt ständig neue Texturen und beginnt auch, das Greybox-Modell mit dem alternativen Workflow aufzubauen.
Systemdesign
Das System Design Team arbeitete daran, aktualisierte Flugmechaniken in die gegnerische SchiffskI zu integrieren, um sicherzustellen, dass sie bei all den Änderungen immer noch im Kampf gegen das Ungleichgewicht stehen und nicht aus dem Gleichgewicht geraten. Sie stellten fest, dass das aktualisierte Flugmodell derzeit zu viel unerwünschtes "Kampfverhalten" verursacht, und suchen daher nach Möglichkeiten, es zu modifizieren. Es wurde an der Umstrukturierung der Dialog-Wildlines für die Schiff/FPS/Sozial-KI gearbeitet, um sie innerhalb derselben Gesamtstruktur zu vereinen. Es wurde viel Arbeit mit den Audio- und Autorenteams geleistet, um sicherzustellen, dass das System für alle systemischen Dialoge im Spiel ordnungsgemäß funktioniert. Sie arbeiten auch an der Entwicklung von Tools zur Automatisierung des Aufbaus von Dialogleitungen. Weitere Arbeiten wurden an der Entwicklung getarnter Gameplay-Elemente durchgeführt, was wiederum erfordert, dass die Wahrnehmung der KI verbessert wird, um dem peripheren Sehen gerecht zu werden, sowie verschiedene Audioereignisse und Reize aus Umweltquellen, wie das Werfen eines Kieselsteins, um Feinde abzulenken.
Telemetrie
Kurz nach der CitizenCon wurde die Seite Public Telemetry gestartet. Die hier vorgestellten Daten spiegeln die Daten wider, die CIG von Kunden während des Spielens erhält. Diese Daten werden verwendet, um die Leistung einer Vielzahl von Geräten zu bewerten und zu verbessern. Wenn Sie sich auf der Telemetrie-Seite einloggen, sehen die Spieler ihre Statistiken, einschließlich der GPU- und CPU-Werte ihres Computers und der durchschnittlichen FPS. Die Heatmap zeigt die durchschnittlichen FPS eines anderen Benutzers und die beliebteste Hardware für jeden GPU- und CPU-Wert an. Beim Start zeigte die Telemetrie-Seite dank OCS eine massive Verbesserung zwischen Alpha 3.2 und 3.3.
Turbulent
Den ganzen November über unterstützte Turbulent CitizenCon, die Alpha 3.3. Flyable Ships, die neue Anvil Valkyrie, die Veröffentlichung der Drake Kraken und die Vorbereitungen für das Jubiläumsevent.
CitizenCon: CitizenCon 2948 war ein erstaunliches Ereignis, wobei Turbulent viele Komponenten wie den Livestream, Merchandise, Badges, Microsite und die Freigabe neuer Schiffe von Drake und Anvil unterstützte! Der Drake Kraken: Im Oktober unterstützte Turbulent die Enthüllung von Drakes erstem Großschiff, dem Kraken. Der Kraken verfügt über zwei Mehrzweckhallen, fünf bemannte Türme, vier ferngesteuerte Türme, eine riesige Ladekapazität, komfortable Gewohnheiten für eine volle Besatzung, eine Libelle und sechs Landeplätze. Die Website zeigte mehrere Funktionen wie einen interaktiven Querschnitt durch das Schiff und ein Register für diejenigen, die daran interessiert sind, eines zu erhalten. The Anvil Valkyrie: Turbulent unterstützte die Freilassung der Valkyrie, dem neuen fliegbaren Drop-Ship von Anvil. Die Walküre enthält mehrere Seitengeschütze und Türme und kann bis zu zwanzig Truppen sowie ein Fahrzeug in den Kampf schicken. Die Website zeigte Features wie In-Game-Material über die Walküre und eine CitizenCon-Exklusivausgabe, den Walküre-Liberator. Dies wurde auch am 10. Oktober veröffentlicht. Der 3.3 Flyable: Mit dem Release von Alpha 3.3 unterstützte Turbulent die Verfügbarkeit der fliegenden Schiffe auf der Website. Zu den Schiffen gehören die Aegis Hammerhead, Tumbril Cyclone, RSI Constellation Phoenix und der CO Mustang. Ein exklusiver CitizenCon Mustang war ebenfalls erhältlich, der Mustang Alpha Vindicator. Das 2948 Jubiläums-Special: Das Jubiläums-Special wurde am Freitag, den 23. November, gestartet. Im Laufe der Woche wurde jeden Tag ein anderer Hersteller veröffentlicht. Am ersten Tag wurde der Pfeil zusammen mit dem Rest der Anvil-Schiffe freigegeben. Der RSI-Tag war am 24., Origin Jumpworks am 25., Aegis Dynamics am 26., Drake Interplanetary am 27. und die außerirdischen Schiffe am 28. Juni. Das neue Schiff San'tok'yai wurde auch von Aopoa enthüllt. MISC hatte seinen ersten Tag am 29. und die neuen Hersteller am 30., darunter Tumbril, Crusader, CO, Argo und Kruger. In den letzten Tagen des Jubiläums-Specials gab es Discount-Starterpakete. Das Jubiläumsquiz: Mit Hilfe von Player Relations führte Turbulent ein Quiz mit drei Fragen für jeden Hersteller durch. Eine bestandene Punktzahl, die mit einem'Ship Master' Spectrum Badge und Zertifikat ausgezeichnet wurde. Durch das Bestehen des Quiz wurden die Spieler zu einem Unentschieden mit einem Ambosspfeil eingeladen. Die IAE Free-Fly Promotion: Für die Woche vom 23. November bis 1. Dezember wurden laut dem vorgestellten Hersteller jeden Tag der Woche fünf verschiedene fliegende Schiffe vorgestellt. Die Seite enthielt Informationen über das Desmond Memorial Convention Center in Lorville und war mit der Knowledge Base verlinkt, die detaillierte Anweisungen für den Einstieg enthielt. Die IAE Free-Fly-Seite wies auch neue Spieler an, wie man ein Konto eröffnet und in den Vers eintritt. Der Aopoa Santok'yāi: Turbulent unterstützte die Veröffentlichung der Santok'yāi, einem neuen Xi'an-Schiff aus Aopoa. Der Santok'yāi verfügt über Yeng'tu Laser Repeater und die neueste Xi'an-Technologie in einem leichten bis mittleren Jägerchassis.
UI
Das UI-Team arbeitete daran, die Möglichkeit hinzuzufügen, Gegenstände in Arena Commander zu mieten, und unterstützte die Bedürfnisse des Umweltteams, das an Lorvilles CBD arbeitet.
Fahrzeugmerkmale
Basierend auf den jüngsten Rückmeldungen aus internen und externen Quellen haben sich die Verbesserungen an den Revolvern im November fortgesetzt. Zusätzlich zu den Bugfixes gab es mehrere Verbesserungen an den Revolvern, darunter die Möglichkeit, mehrachsige Revolver bei min/max Neigung steuerbar zu machen, die Fixierung des Gyro Pip Offsets und verbesserte Zielmethoden von einer Vielzahl von Eingabegeräten. Die grundlegende Mechanik, die es Schiffen ermöglicht, auf die Motoren der Zielschiffe zu zielen, wurde ebenfalls fertiggestellt, und das Feature selbst steht kurz vor der Einführung in die PU, ebenso wie das Scannen von Navigationspunkten nach Zielinformationen. Der Rest des Monats wurde durch eine Bereinigung des Trümmernetzflusses und eine Vielzahl von fahrzeugbezogenen Crash-Bugs abgerundet.
Fahrzeuginhalt
Art, Systems Design und Tech Art arbeiteten zusammen, um den Anvil Arrow als Teil des November-Jubiläums-Events zu veröffentlichen und weiter an Schiffen für kommende Veröffentlichungen zu arbeiten: The Anvil Hawk ist in der Release-Vorbereitungsphase mit den beiden Teams Art und System Design, die 300er Serie ist in der Graybox mit Systems Design, und die Freelancer hatten die Release-Vorbereitung mit Tech Art begonnen. Darüber hinaus arbeiteten Systems Design und Tech Art mit den Animatoren an der Sequenzierung der Charakteranimation für Fahrzeuge, und Tech Art arbeitete an einem Thruster Pass für das neue Flugmodell.
VFX
Das VFX-Team hat die vielen Umweltauswirkungen von Hurston weiter verbessert und optimiert und allgemeine Verbesserungen an den verschiedenen Monden vorgenommen. im ganzen Vers. Sie finalisierten auch VFX für den Amboss-Pfeil und den Amboss-Falken. Das VFX-Team verbrachte Zeit damit, bestehende Assets zu optimieren, um bei der Gesamtleistung von Alpha 3.3.5 zu helfen. Sie haben auch alle ungenutzten VFX-Textur-Assets entfernt, in der Hoffnung, den Speicherbedarf zum Laden aller Partikeltexturen zu reduzieren.
Waffen
Das Weapon Art Team arbeitete an der Überarbeitung des Multi-Tool, Kastak Arms Ravager-212, und an den Upgrades der Level zwei und drei für die Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeater. Sie haben auch kleinere Anpassungen an den Eisenvisieren an einer Handvoll Waffen vorgenommen, um das Visierbild zu verbessern und es benutzerfreundlicher zu gestalten, wenn keine Optik angebracht ist. WIR SEHEN UNS NÄCHSTEN MONAT.....
KI
Der Schwerpunkt der SchiffskI lag im November auf der Optimierung des taktischen Punktesystems. Sie haben nun mehrere Abfragen, die in einem Stapel aus verschiedenen Threads gebündelt sind, was eine bessere Kontrolle über die Kosten des Gesamtsystems ermöglicht. Es wurden mehrere Optimierungen für das Charakterbewegungssystem eingereicht, die nun alle Komponenten in einem multithreaded Batch-Ansatz aktualisieren und die CPU-Ressourcen während des Spiel-Updates maximal ausschöpfen. Es wurde ein Durchgang zur Fadensicherheit mehrerer Subsysteme durchgeführt, einschließlich der Aufmerksamkeitszielkomponente und des Kommunikationssystems. Dies ist erforderlich, um das Update der Subsumption-Komponente schließlich in den Schritt Multithreaded Batch Update zu verschieben. In FPS Combat wurde die Zuweisung'Verteidigungsbereich' eingeführt; um dieses Verhalten zu erreichen, müssen die Übergänge der Mastergraphen überwacht werden, um zu beurteilen, ob die Empfänger des Submissionsereignisses es tatsächlich verarbeiten können. Im Beispiel des Verteidigungsbereichs können sie beim Empfangen der Zuweisung ein normales Verhalten ausführen. Wenn das Verhalten die Anfrage auf eine bestimmte Weise bearbeiten kann, ist das großartig. Wenn nicht, dann kümmert sich der Mastergraph darum, eine auszuwählen, die es kann. Parallel dazu fügen sie neue Verhaltensweisen hinzu, um den Kampf zu verbessern und patrouillieren, um diese Aufgabe zu erfüllen. Die Unterstützung für getarntes Gameplay wurde implementiert, mit neuen akustischen und visuellen Reizen, die es den Spielern ermöglichen, die Aufmerksamkeit der Wachen auf sich zu ziehen, Fallen vorzubereiten und sonst blockierte Wege zu öffnen. Auch am Barkeeper für Lorville wurde weiter gearbeitet. Um mehrere Funktionalitäten seines Verhaltens zu erreichen, implementierten sie den ersten Durchgang des UseChannel-Routings und erweitern die nutzbaren Funktionalitäten weiter. Das Usable Builder Tool hat ebenfalls eine neue Funktion erhalten: Es ist nun in der Lage, verschiedene Charaktere mit unterschiedlichen Benutzeroberflächen korrekt anzuzeigen, so dass Designer, Animatoren und Programmierer den Inhalt bei der Auslieferung problemlos testen und überprüfen können.
Animation
Im November unterstützte Animation das Feature-Team dabei, die Sprung-, Mantel- und Sprungfunktionalität mit den Qualitäts- und Spielerwartungen des Spiels in Einklang zu bringen. Sie testen derzeit einen Prozess, der die effiziente Integration verschiedener Waffenklassen wie Pistolen und Schrotflinten ermöglicht. Das Team implementiert auch Carry-Optionen für Zero-G EVA und arbeitet an der Fertigstellung der Spielerinteraktion (insbesondere der Carrier). Das US-Animationsteam bereinigte und löste Daten aus den erstaunlichen Performance-Aufnahmen der diesjährigen CitizenCon in Austin, Texas. Die Bearbeitung und die abschließenden Arbeiten werden in Kürze abgeschlossen sein. Sie setzten die Arbeit an den Schiffshändlern fort, die den Vers füllen werden, und sorgten dafür, dass die neuen Missionsgeber verfügbar waren, sobald ihre Standorte fertig waren, wie Wallace Klim in Levski, Tecia Pacheco in Area18 und Constantine Hurston in Lorville. Das Team untersuchte die Probleme, die sich aus der Neuausrichtung der männlichen Animationen auf das weibliche Skelett ergeben, und stellte fest, dass der erste Schritt darin besteht, eine 1:1-Parität zwischen ihnen zu erreichen. Dies ermöglicht den Austausch von Assets durch weiblichkeitsspezifische Versionen, ohne die Entwicklung weiblicher Spieler zu behindern. Auch der mobilen Technik wird ein letzter Schliff verpasst.
Audio
Die Audioabteilung konzentrierte sich auf das neue Flugmodell und den Raumschiff-Audiomix. Sie implementierten Technologien, um eine systemische Mischung von NLPC-Schiffen basierend auf Priorität, Größe und Bedrohungsstufe zu ermöglichen, was eine klarere und gezieltere Mischung ermöglicht. Dies, kombiniert mit der Implementierung der neuen Schiffsschwingungskomponente, hat das Audioerlebnis im Schiff erheblich verbessert. Während der Implementierung führten sie einen Optimierungspass durch, um sicherzustellen, dass die Speicher- und Sprachgrenzen gesund bleiben. Die Verbesserungen der Waffenerfahrung wurden mit der Konsolidierung der Assets und der Vereinfachung der Elementimplementierung fortgesetzt, um eine verbesserte Übersetzung der Audio Assets von der Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) in das Spiel zu gewährleisten. Es gab auch Änderungen am Foley-System, um die akustische Rückmeldung der Traversale des Spielers auf verschiedenen Geländen und Oberflächen zu verbessern. Im Musikbereich arbeitete das Team mit dem PU-Komponisten Pedro Camacho zusammen, um neue musikalische Cues zu entwickeln und umzusetzen, die die planetarischen Standorte auf Hurston, wie L19, und bevorstehende Erweiterungen unterstützen. Mit Object Container Streaming (OCS), das online geht, hat das Audio Code Team FOIP optimiert und ausgefeilt, um die Zuverlässigkeit zu gewährleisten.
Backend Services
Backend Services arbeitete daran, den Spielern das Jubiläumsevent 2948 näher zu bringen. Die erste Aufgabe bestand darin, den Service zu schaffen, der erforderlich ist, um die korrekten überlappenden Objektcontainer für die verschiedenen Tage im Kongresszentrum vorzuziehen. Dies gewährleistete einen nahtlosen Übergang zwischen den Herstellertagen und verhinderte die Notwendigkeit, einen neuen Build pro Messetag zu veröffentlichen. Als nächstes arbeiteten sie daran, die Mietlogik hinter der Messe sicherzustellen, die korrekt gehandelten Daten zwischen Server, Client und Datenbank, um sicherzustellen, dass die Spieler die von ihnen gemieteten Schiffe genießen konnten. Schließlich wurde eine Login-Warteschlange erstellt, um die beispiellose Anzahl von Spielern zu organisieren und zu drosseln, die versuchen, in den Vers einzutreten und die Ausstellung zu besuchen. Abseits der Jubiläumsveranstaltung wurde die Arbeit an der neuen Architektur für den Persistence Cache fortgesetzt, um die Skalierbarkeit des Backends zu erhöhen und wichtige Dienste mit einer neuen Datenbankarchitektur zu verbinden.
Charakter-Kunst
Der Fokus der Character Art lag im November darauf, alle Rüstungen und Unterwäsche für weibliche Avatare verfügbar zu machen. Sie arbeiteten auch an der Modellierung von zwei unserer neuen Missionsgeber, um dem persistenten Universum mehr Leben einzuhauchen. Zusätzlich erstellen sie eine neue Reihe von verbotenen Rüstungen (Bezeichnung "Schiffsräuber"), die Rüstungen, einen Unteranzug und Abonnentenartikel beinhalten.
Community
"Das Community-Team startete den Monat im Geiste von Halloween mit zwei gruseligen Wettbewerben im Vorfeld des Festes. Die Spieler nahmen an den Feierlichkeiten teil und präsentierten ihr Talent in einem Kürbisschnitzwettbewerb und einem FOIP Screenshot-Wettbewerb, der die schrecklichsten und verängstigtsten Ausdrücke zeigte, die sie zu bieten hatten. Spukgespenstisch! Der Mustang Commercial Contest stellte die Fähigkeiten der Community im Filmemachen auf die Probe. Unsere mutigen Kameramänner umarmten den eigenwilligen Geist der Consolidated Outland, um Werbespots zu kreieren, auf die Silas Koerner selbst stolz wäre. An Thanksgiving teilten die Bürger, wofür sie dankbar waren, und nahmen an zwei Ferienwettbewerben zu Ehren des Türkei-Tages teil. Mit diesen beiden Wettbewerben sind wir nun bei bis zu 25 Gesamtwettbewerben im Jahr 2018 angelangt, und das Team hat noch weitere geplant, noch vor Ende des Jahres live zu gehen. Als Alpha 3.3 den Weg in das Persistente Universum fand, begrüßten wir den ersten vollständig erforschbaren Planeten und die erste Stadt mit Hurston bzw. Lorville. Während alle die neuen Umgebungen, die geschäftige Landezone und vier neue Monde erkundeten, übertrafen die Inhaltsschöpfer von Star Citizen sich selbst und schufen schöne Aufnahmen von Sonnenuntergängen auf Hurston, Tage am Strand neben Lorville und Spritztouren nach Aberdeen. Wir sind stolz und dankbar für all die Inhalte, die die Community auf Social Media, Reddit und dem Community Hub geteilt hat, und freuen uns auf noch mehr. Teilen Sie weiter! Das 2948 Jubiläums-Special war der Auftakt zu unserem bisher epischsten Free-Fly-Event mit allen fliegenden Schiffen und Fahrzeugen, die ohne Mehrkosten ausprobiert werden konnten. Die Intergalactic Aerospace Expo kam einen langen Weg und feierte ihr Debüt im Spiel mit ihrer in Hurston ansässigen Satellitenabteilung. Exklusive Enthüllungen auf der Expo waren Anvils "leichter Kämpfer der Zukunft", der Falke und die nächste Evolution von Xi'an Technologie- und Designinnovationen mit dem Aopoa San'tok.yāi. Schließlich haben wir auch einen wichtigen Meilenstein in der Finanzierung erreicht und möchten uns bei unserer großartigen Community bedanken, die dies ermöglicht hat. Der Betrag ist die höchste Summe für jedes Projekt in der Geschichte der Crowdfunding und liegt über allem, was wir uns vorstellen konnten. In einem Brief des Vorsitzenden teilte Chris Roberts seine Gedanken über die bisherige fantastische Reise und die spannende Zukunft mit. Auf morgen!"
Design
Design hat das Convention Center des Jubiläumsevents für alle Geldgeber in Betrieb genommen. Um die Spieler zu ermutigen, die Bestände im New Deal and Teach's Ship Shop zu durchsuchen, begann das Team mit der Implementierung einer neuen Art von NSC: dem Ship Dealer. Ziel ist es, ein realistisches und interessantes Einkaufserlebnis zu bieten, um den Prozess des Erwerbs eines Traumschiffes weiter zu beleben. "Wir hoffen aufrichtig, dass Sie die Gelegenheit hatten, die verschiedenen Schiffe auf der Intergalactic Aerospace Expo auf Hurston auszuprobieren und zu sehen!" Das Tuning für die Wirtschaft geht weiter, wobei an der Anpassung der Preise für verschiedene Dienstleistungen und Waren in ganz Stanton gearbeitet wird. Außerdem wurde mit der Entwicklung und Implementierung eines robusten und wichtigen Economic Editing Tools begonnen, das dazu beitragen soll, die Wirtschaft besser zu visualisieren und zu optimieren als je zuvor. Sie stimmten auch die REC-Belohnung des Arena Commander ab.
DevOps
November ist aufgrund des Jubiläumsevents immer einer der arbeitsreichsten Monate für DevOps, und dieser Monat war keine Ausnahme, da das Team die Server auf die höchste Kapazität seit Beginn des Projekts skalierte. Um die Arbeit von DevOps zu erleichtern, erweiterte das Publishing Team seine internen Tools, so dass der größte Teil des Teams eine wohlverdiente Pause an Thanksgiving genießen konnte (auch wenn sie sehr nah an ihren Laptops blieben). Zwischen PTU und Live veröffentlichten sie im November 30 Mal erfolgreich, wobei einige Tage lang 3-4 Builds zu sehen waren.
Ingenieurwesen
Engineering-Teams auf der ganzen Welt arbeiteten im November an OCS. Die erste Iteration des clientseitigen Streamings wurde in Alpha 3.3 veröffentlicht, wobei der Schwerpunkt weiterhin auf der Verbesserung des asynchronen Be- und Entladens von Einheiten liegt. Die wichtigsten OCS-, Netzwerk- und Backend-Teams hatten diesen Monat den Object Container Server Streaming Summit, um die nächste Iteration von OCS zu planen, die sich auf serverseitiges Streaming und vollpersistente Server konzentrieren wird. Das in LA ansässige Ingenieurbüro arbeitete mit dem Austin Backend Team zusammen, um die Technologie für die Vermietung von In-Game-Schiffen zu entwickeln. Es wurde während der Jubiläumsaktion uraufgeführt und bildet die Grundlage für alle In-Game-Verleiher. Die Entwicklung der Backend-Technologie ging weiter in Richtung persistenter EZ Habs und ermöglicht es den Spielern, ihren Startort anzupassen und zu erhalten. Das Fahrzeugteam arbeitete weiter an Ping & Scanning Gameplay, das sich in diesem Monat auf das Scannen von Schiffen konzentrierte. Auch an der neuen DNA-Komponente zur Integration der F&E-Technologie in die Charakterpipeline wurde gearbeitet. Turbulent arbeitete eng mit dem LA Gamecode Team zusammen, um das Gruppensystem, die Spektrumintegration sowie FOIP & VOIP weiter zu verbessern.
Motorwerkzeuge
Das Engine Team verbrachte Zeit damit, die Alpha 3.3 und 3.3.5 Releases zu unterstützen, Fehler zu beheben, Profile zu erstellen und Code zu optimieren (insbesondere für Object Container Streaming). Die Arbeiten an der GPU-Skinning, der Hinzufügung von Vertex-Geschwindigkeitsunterstützung (für Bewegungsunschärfe, etc.), der Durchführung mehrerer Optimierungen zum Überspringen von Nullgewichten (was den Durchsatz verbesserte), der Vorbereitung von Hintergrunddaten und der ersten Weitergabe von Speicherlayout und LOD-Unterstützung wurden fortgesetzt. Für physikalische Optimierungen wurden die Durchführung von Ray Collision Checks und die Defragmentierung von Grids Runs parallel durchgeführt. Dadurch wurde eine Beschleunigung von 30-50% für die Berechnung des physikalischen Planetengeländes erreicht, die Anzahl der Zellabfragen auf Planeten reduziert und die Generierung von Proxy-Netzen für die Bodenvolumen des Geländes verbessert. Verbesserungen im Terrain-Rendering (Glow-Forward-Pass) sowie Korrekturen für Wasservolumen und Ocean-Rendering wurden vorgenommen. Der bestehende Hair Shader wurde verbessert, und es wurde ein neuer Tiefenschärfenalgorithmus entwickelt, der die Qualität, Leistung und die Korrektur von Halos um Silhouetten herum verbessert. Sie vervollständigten zusätzliche Culling-Verfeinerungen im Zonensystem, um weniger Objekte an den Renderer zu übergeben, sowie verschiedene Low-Level-Optimierungen, um die Belastung des Render-Threads zu reduzieren. Weitere Verbesserungen wurden an der motorseitigen Unterstützung für die öffentliche Telemetrie-Seite vorgenommen, um die Anzeige benutzerspezifischer Optimierungshinweise zur Verbesserung des Gameplay-Erlebnisses zu ermöglichen, und ein neues Tool wurde entwickelt, um Kernspeicherauszüge von Linux-eigenen Spielservern einfach zu analysieren.
Umwelt Kunst
Das britische Team konzentrierte sich auf die Fehlerbehebung und -optimierung für das Alpha 3.3-Release, hauptsächlich für Lorville und Hurston. Ein fokussierter Sprint wurde für die Kongresshallen der Jubiläumsveranstaltung durchgeführt, mit dem Ziel, ein vielseitiges und zeitökonomisches Umfeld zu schaffen, um die Schiffe im besten Licht darzustellen. Zusätzliche Innenräume der Underground Facility und ein neuer Alpha 3.3 Splash Screen wurden ebenfalls erstellt und implementiert. Das DE Location Team hat große Fortschritte im Central Business District (CBD) von Lorville gemacht. Hier können die Spieler auf das Hurston Dynamics Showcase, den Flagship Store für alle von der Marke hergestellten Waffen, sowie auf den Transfers Store zugreifen, wo die Spieler an verschiedenen Handelsaktivitäten teilnehmen können. Die CBD hat eine ganz andere Ausstrahlung als der Rest von Lorville und bedient eindeutig eine andere Art von Kundenkreis. Luxuriöse Materialien und modernes Design bilden das Ambiente für dieses Erlebnis. Das Organics and Planet Team macht große Fortschritte bei den kommenden Standorten und arbeitet derzeit an ArcCorp und der Erforschung von MicroTech. Beide Standorte benötigen zusätzliche Funktionen, die die Planetentechnologie ergänzen, um sie wirklich einzigartig zu machen, so dass die Dinge noch am Anfang stehen und sich ständig weiterentwickeln.
Gesichtsanimation
Das Team arbeitet aktiv an zukünftigen Missiongebern, darunter Klim, sowie an Schiffshändlern, Barpatronen und Barkeepern. Sie testen auch die Ergebnisse der Gesichtsanimationsaufnahmen des Players mit der Standardauslastung.
Grafiken
In diesem Monat konzentrierte sich das Grafik-Team fest auf die Veröffentlichung von Alpha 3.3.5 und die Verbesserung von Stabilität und Leistung. Die PTU wurde von einigen recht häufigen GPU-Abstürzen heimgesucht, aber Evocati-Tests halfen ihnen, die Ursache zu finden und zu beheben. Mit der Veröffentlichung von Lorville sah QA eine hohe Nutzung des Videospeichers aufgrund der Größe der Umgebung und der Anzahl der Schiffe und Charaktere. Aufgrund einiger Fehler führte dies zu ernsthaften Performance-Problemen, da der Videotreiber anfing, den Speicher zu paginieren, was zu spürbaren Stottern führte. Es wurden Korrekturen an den am schlimmsten beleidigenden Fehler im Videospeicher in Alpha 3.3.5 vorgenommen. In Zukunft wird das Team den Speicherverbrauch weiter reduzieren und das Spiel für die nächste Version optimieren.
Issue Council
Der Issue Council hat im Oktober die Version 1.1.5 eingeführt. Mehrere Probleme wurden behoben, darunter bearbeitbare Felder der verschiedenen Formulare, die nicht korrekt angezeigt werden, Versionen, die nicht von der neuesten bis zur ältesten Version bestellt wurden, und Anzeigenamen mit Sonderzeichen, die nicht richtig angezeigt werden.
Leveldesign
Das Live-Team platzierte und markierte Standorte in und um Hurston für Einsätze. Die Liefertermine wurden stark verbessert - die Spieler können nun Aufträge von Unternehmen erhalten, die bestimmte Strecken betreiben und von denen ein gewisses Maß an Reputation verlangt wird. Die Mission Downed Relay (wie in CitizenCon zu sehen) hat nun mehrere Ergebnisse, darunter auch die Aufgabe anderer Spieler, das gestohlene Blatt zu zerstören, bevor seine Daten hochgeladen werden. Nachdem die Basisarbeiten für Lorville abgeschlossen sind, konzentriert sich das Level Design Team auf die CBD. Die Whitebox ist bereits fertig, wobei der größte Teil der restlichen Arbeiten in der Verbindung der Züge und der Sicherstellung der gesamten Logistik liegt. Die Verfahrenstechnik wurde um neue Komponenten für Untertageanlagen erweitert. Diese sind modular aufgebaut und können wie Rastplätze generiert werden. Sobald die modulare Bibliothek über genügend Inhalte (Räume, Anschlüsse, POIs) verfügt, wird es viel einfacher, mehr Vielfalt zu bieten. Sie arbeiteten auch weiter an der Verfahrenstechnik, um sicherzustellen, dass sie aus gestalterischer Sicht alles Notwendige bietet. Dies kann manchmal schwierig sein, da Kompromisse erforderlich sind; was am meisten Spaß macht, ist nicht unbedingt, was am besten aussieht. Schließlich sind die meisten Kampfeinsätze, die bei Crusader gefunden wurden, jetzt in Hurston verfügbar. Die Arbeit hat begonnen, die Auftragnehmer und den Fortschritt auch für sie zu definieren.
Beleuchtung
In diesem Monat arbeitete das Beleuchtungsteam an der Verbesserung der Scheinwerfer für fast alle in der PU verfügbaren Schiffe. Aufgrund vieler Probleme mit der Sichtbarkeit beim Fliegen von Schiffen in dunkler Umgebung wurden die Scheinwerfer verbessert, um aus größerer Entfernung mehr sichtbares Licht zu liefern. Es gibt noch Verbesserungsmöglichkeiten, aber in der Zwischenzeit ist es eine positive Veränderung, die das Flugerlebnis auf dem Planeten angenehmer macht. Darüber hinaus konzentrierte sich das Team auf die Fehlerbehebung und Optimierung der Beleuchtung in Lorville, um ein hohes Maß an Qualität bei gleichzeitiger Verbesserung der Frameraten und Senkung der Anrufkosten zu gewährleisten. Sie arbeiteten auch an der Beleuchtung der Intergalactic Aerospace Expo, um all die erstaunlichen Schiffe zu präsentieren, die in den verschiedenen Hallen zu sehen sind.
Narrativ
Das Narrative Team hat die Aufgaben von Alpha 3.3 und 3.3.5 stark vorangetrieben, um den verbleibenden Missionstext zu eliminieren und die Beschreibungen im Spiel für Schiffskomponenten auf den Terminals zu standardisieren. Sie arbeiteten auch weiter an der redaktionellen Auswahl der Linien mit niedrigerer Priorität für NSCs, die bereits im September erfasst wurden. Um das neue Kongresszentrum und andere Zusammenhänge abzudecken, führten sie eine Aufnahmesitzung durch, um zusätzliche Lorville-Ankündigungslinien hinzuzufügen. Das Team arbeitete auch eng mit dem Marketing zusammen, um die jüngste IAE-Expansionsveranstaltung in Lorville zu unterstützen. Nicht nur die Bereitstellung schriftlicher Texte, sondern auch die Teilnahme an einigen Diskussionen am Runden Tisch, um den verschiedenen Herstellern eine fiktive Hintergrundgeschichte zu liefern. Schließlich arbeiteten sie an der Planung der Aufgaben für die PU und übernahmen die Gesamtteamplanung für das kommende Jahr.
Spielerbeziehungen
Die Spielerbeziehungen wurden am Alpha 3.3 und am Jubiläumsevent eifrig ausgebaut und arbeiteten zusammen mit der Evocati an mehreren Builds, um sicherzustellen, dass die Schlüsselkomponenten ordnungsgemäß getestet wurden. "Wie immer möchten wir alle Spieler auf unsere wachsende Knowledge Base hinweisen, die mittlerweile über 100 Artikel hat und in diesem Monat fast 450.000 Besucher verzeichnete! Wir werden dies weiter ausbauen, indem wir neue "How To"-Artikel, Patch-Notizen und Live-Benachrichtigungen hinzufügen.
Requisiten
Das Requisitenteam konzentrierte sich auf die Stände, Stände und das Branding für die Intergalactic Aerospace Expo und das Jubiläumsevent. Sie haben sich kürzlich darauf verlagert, die CBD-Stützen in Lorville zu schließen und kreieren derzeit maßgeschneiderte Möbel, um den Reichtum und die Dekadenz des Hurston Central Gebäudes zu verkaufen.
QA
Auf der Publishing-Seite testete QA fleißig die Alpha 3.3.0 und 3.3.5 Builds für die Veröffentlichung in Evocati und Live. Auf der Spielseite lag der Schwerpunkt auf dem Testen von Hurston, seinen vier Monden und der Stadt Lorville. Sie haben auch eine Reihe von QATRs in Bezug auf FOIP & VOIP, Schiffskauf in der PU, Schiffsmiete in Arena Commander und Verbesserungen beim Object Container Streaming abgeschlossen. Es war Business as usual auf der Führungsseite, mit koordinierten Testprioritäten zwischen Großbritannien, LA und DE. Zwei neue Mitarbeiter wurden bei QA begrüßt; ein engagierter Tester in Frankfurt zur Unterstützung des KI-Teams und ein weiterer Tester in Großbritannien. Sie konzentrieren sich in erster Linie auf die tägliche Information über den Stand der KI und berichten alle Fragen direkt an das zu untersuchende Team. QA entschied sich auch, auf die allgemeinen Designtests zu verzichten und sich stattdessen auf spezifische Sanity/Smoke-Tests für KI und eine weitere Testsuite speziell für das Transit-System und die Standorte zu konzentrieren. Die vorangegangenen Designtests waren zu breit angelegt und deckten Bereiche ab, die für die internen Designteams nicht immer vorherrschend waren. Die Neuausrichtung auf spezifische interne Merkmalsteams hat gezeigt, dass die bereitgestellten Tests und Informationen viel wertvoller sind. Es wurde viel Zeit mit großen QA-Testanfragen für neue Optimierungen von Animationen, Änderungen an der Optimierung von Geländepflastern und allgemeinen Optimierungen verbracht, die die Leistung der PU weiter verbessern werden. Die Frankfurter QS-Niederlassung unterstützte das Planetary Tech Team bei der Untersuchung eines Problems an einem von Hurstons Monden. Etwas in seinem Aufbau führte dazu, dass die Normalen auf der Mondoberfläche sehr intensiv waren. Dies wurde auf ein Beleuchtungsproblem zurückgeführt und weitere Schritte (mit Hilfe des Grafikteams) unternommen, damit die Oberfläche wieder zur Normalität zurückkehren kann.
Dienstleistungen
Auf der CitizenCon war das Team auf der Ausstellungsfläche anwesend, um lokale Umgebungen vorzubereiten und das Spiel-Backend sowohl für den FOIP LAN-Demonstrationsbereich als auch für die Demonstration der Hauptbühne zu betreiben. Diese lokale Konfiguration beinhaltete das gesamte Spiel-Backend, so dass die Demonstration genau das darstellen konnte, was in der PTU und der Live-Umgebung gespielt wird, einschließlich des Netzwerks der sozialen Dienste, die Gruppen, Chat und FOIP betreiben. Mit der Veröffentlichung von Alpha 3.3 und 3.3.5 konzentrierte sich das Team hauptsächlich auf die Beobachtung und Skalierung der Sprach- und Gesichtsübertragungslösung, um die Zahl der Geldgeber im Spiel zu erhöhen. Die DevOp-Teams arbeiteten hauptsächlich daran, sicherzustellen, dass Sprachkanäle, die von Spielern bei Einzelgesprächen erstellt wurden, Gruppenkanäle und globale Serverkanäle ordnungsgemäß auf neue Sprachserver übertragen wurden, da die Anzahl der verbundenen Spieler zunahm. Mit der Hinzufügung der globalen Chat-Autoverbindung in Alpha 3.3.5 hat das Team auch neue Systeme hinzugefügt, um Sprachkanäle zwischen Servern zu überwachen und zu verschieben, wenn die unterstützte Last auf einer bestimmten Sprachserverinstanz zu hoch ist. "Das Team war begeistert von der Nutzung der Technologie durch die Spieler und wir hoffen, dass wir ihre Nutzung mit den mit dem Gameplay verbundenen Funktionen weiter ausbauen können." Um bei den oben genannten Aufgaben zu helfen, wurden die Social-Game-Dienste auf eine Kubernetes-basierte Orchestrierungslösung umgestellt, die eine einfachere Verwaltung von Sprach- und Service-Containern ermöglicht. Diese neue Backplane unterstützt die kontinuierliche Integration von Serviceveränderungen und wird die Teamgeschwindigkeit bei der Bereitstellung von Updates und Builds deutlich verbessern. In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Universumsteam begann Game Services mit der Entwicklung eines webbasierten Verwaltungstools, das den Laufzeitzustand der Spielwelt von der Makroebene aus steuern soll. Dies befindet sich noch in den Anfängen der Entwicklung, aber mit diesem Tool werden die Designer letztendlich in der Lage sein, soziale Objekte wie Gruppen und ihre Lebenszyklen, Bann-, Chase- und Spielerkontrollen zu inspizieren. Die Integration der WebGL Starmap Engine ermöglicht auch die Anzeige von Waren, Spielerstandorten, Gameplay-Analysen und vielem mehr.
Schiffe
In diesem Monat kehrte das britische Fahrzeugteam nach dem Abschluss der Walküre zum Origin 890 Jump zurück. Was zweifellos eine gute Nachricht für die Community sein wird, ist, dass die Arbeit an dem mit Spannung erwarteten Anvil Carrack nach langer Pause fortgesetzt wird. Seit der letzten Bearbeitung des Schiffes vor rund 18 Monaten hat sich die Schiffspipeline und der Arbeitsablauf deutlich verbessert. Bei der Überprüfung des vorherigen Zustandes entschied sich das Team also, einen zweiten Whitebox-Pass des Innenraums vorzunehmen, um ihn seinem ursprünglichen Konzept näher zu bringen. Zusätzlich zu den größeren Fahrzeugen des nächsten Jahres wurden Fortschritte bei den Alpha 3.4-Schiffen erzielt, darunter auch bei der Origin 600i Touring. Die Freelancer DUR, MAX und MIS erhalten alle den letzten Schliff durch Kunst.
Schiffskunst
Der leitende Fahrzeugkünstler Chris Smith machte große Fortschritte beim Greybox-Modell, Interieur und Exterieur des 300i-Reworks und begann mit der Umsetzung verschiedener Lackierungen und modellierte die modifizierten Komponenten für die anderen drei Varianten. Als nächstes wird er sich auf ein alternatives Interieur begeben, das in einem von ihnen verwendet wird. Der 3D-Modellierer Josh Coons hat kürzlich das Whitebox-Modell für den Banu Defender fertiggestellt und ist nun damit beschäftigt, einige der modifizierten Arbeitsabläufe mit Zbrush-Modellen zu testen, die ausgebacken werden, um die Art von Detail zu erzeugen, nach der wir in diesem Schiff suchen. Er erstellt ständig neue Texturen und beginnt auch, das Greybox-Modell mit dem alternativen Workflow aufzubauen.
Systemdesign
Das System Design Team arbeitete daran, aktualisierte Flugmechaniken in die gegnerische SchiffskI zu integrieren, um sicherzustellen, dass sie bei all den Änderungen immer noch im Kampf gegen das Ungleichgewicht stehen und nicht aus dem Gleichgewicht geraten. Sie stellten fest, dass das aktualisierte Flugmodell derzeit zu viel unerwünschtes "Kampfverhalten" verursacht, und suchen daher nach Möglichkeiten, es zu modifizieren. Es wurde an der Umstrukturierung der Dialog-Wildlines für die Schiff/FPS/Sozial-KI gearbeitet, um sie innerhalb derselben Gesamtstruktur zu vereinen. Es wurde viel Arbeit mit den Audio- und Autorenteams geleistet, um sicherzustellen, dass das System für alle systemischen Dialoge im Spiel ordnungsgemäß funktioniert. Sie arbeiten auch an der Entwicklung von Tools zur Automatisierung des Aufbaus von Dialogleitungen. Weitere Arbeiten wurden an der Entwicklung getarnter Gameplay-Elemente durchgeführt, was wiederum erfordert, dass die Wahrnehmung der KI verbessert wird, um dem peripheren Sehen gerecht zu werden, sowie verschiedene Audioereignisse und Reize aus Umweltquellen, wie das Werfen eines Kieselsteins, um Feinde abzulenken.
Telemetrie
Kurz nach der CitizenCon wurde die Seite Public Telemetry gestartet. Die hier vorgestellten Daten spiegeln die Daten wider, die CIG von Kunden während des Spielens erhält. Diese Daten werden verwendet, um die Leistung einer Vielzahl von Geräten zu bewerten und zu verbessern. Wenn Sie sich auf der Telemetrie-Seite einloggen, sehen die Spieler ihre Statistiken, einschließlich der GPU- und CPU-Werte ihres Computers und der durchschnittlichen FPS. Die Heatmap zeigt die durchschnittlichen FPS eines anderen Benutzers und die beliebteste Hardware für jeden GPU- und CPU-Wert an. Beim Start zeigte die Telemetrie-Seite dank OCS eine massive Verbesserung zwischen Alpha 3.2 und 3.3.
Turbulent
Den ganzen November über unterstützte Turbulent CitizenCon, die Alpha 3.3. Flyable Ships, die neue Anvil Valkyrie, die Veröffentlichung der Drake Kraken und die Vorbereitungen für das Jubiläumsevent.
CitizenCon: CitizenCon 2948 war ein erstaunliches Ereignis, wobei Turbulent viele Komponenten wie den Livestream, Merchandise, Badges, Microsite und die Freigabe neuer Schiffe von Drake und Anvil unterstützte! Der Drake Kraken: Im Oktober unterstützte Turbulent die Enthüllung von Drakes erstem Großschiff, dem Kraken. Der Kraken verfügt über zwei Mehrzweckhallen, fünf bemannte Türme, vier ferngesteuerte Türme, eine riesige Ladekapazität, komfortable Gewohnheiten für eine volle Besatzung, eine Libelle und sechs Landeplätze. Die Website zeigte mehrere Funktionen wie einen interaktiven Querschnitt durch das Schiff und ein Register für diejenigen, die daran interessiert sind, eines zu erhalten. The Anvil Valkyrie: Turbulent unterstützte die Freilassung der Valkyrie, dem neuen fliegbaren Drop-Ship von Anvil. Die Walküre enthält mehrere Seitengeschütze und Türme und kann bis zu zwanzig Truppen sowie ein Fahrzeug in den Kampf schicken. Die Website zeigte Features wie In-Game-Material über die Walküre und eine CitizenCon-Exklusivausgabe, den Walküre-Liberator. Dies wurde auch am 10. Oktober veröffentlicht. Der 3.3 Flyable: Mit dem Release von Alpha 3.3 unterstützte Turbulent die Verfügbarkeit der fliegenden Schiffe auf der Website. Zu den Schiffen gehören die Aegis Hammerhead, Tumbril Cyclone, RSI Constellation Phoenix und der CO Mustang. Ein exklusiver CitizenCon Mustang war ebenfalls erhältlich, der Mustang Alpha Vindicator. Das 2948 Jubiläums-Special: Das Jubiläums-Special wurde am Freitag, den 23. November, gestartet. Im Laufe der Woche wurde jeden Tag ein anderer Hersteller veröffentlicht. Am ersten Tag wurde der Pfeil zusammen mit dem Rest der Anvil-Schiffe freigegeben. Der RSI-Tag war am 24., Origin Jumpworks am 25., Aegis Dynamics am 26., Drake Interplanetary am 27. und die außerirdischen Schiffe am 28. Juni. Das neue Schiff San'tok'yai wurde auch von Aopoa enthüllt. MISC hatte seinen ersten Tag am 29. und die neuen Hersteller am 30., darunter Tumbril, Crusader, CO, Argo und Kruger. In den letzten Tagen des Jubiläums-Specials gab es Discount-Starterpakete. Das Jubiläumsquiz: Mit Hilfe von Player Relations führte Turbulent ein Quiz mit drei Fragen für jeden Hersteller durch. Eine bestandene Punktzahl, die mit einem'Ship Master' Spectrum Badge und Zertifikat ausgezeichnet wurde. Durch das Bestehen des Quiz wurden die Spieler zu einem Unentschieden mit einem Ambosspfeil eingeladen. Die IAE Free-Fly Promotion: Für die Woche vom 23. November bis 1. Dezember wurden laut dem vorgestellten Hersteller jeden Tag der Woche fünf verschiedene fliegende Schiffe vorgestellt. Die Seite enthielt Informationen über das Desmond Memorial Convention Center in Lorville und war mit der Knowledge Base verlinkt, die detaillierte Anweisungen für den Einstieg enthielt. Die IAE Free-Fly-Seite wies auch neue Spieler an, wie man ein Konto eröffnet und in den Vers eintritt. Der Aopoa Santok'yāi: Turbulent unterstützte die Veröffentlichung der Santok'yāi, einem neuen Xi'an-Schiff aus Aopoa. Der Santok'yāi verfügt über Yeng'tu Laser Repeater und die neueste Xi'an-Technologie in einem leichten bis mittleren Jägerchassis.
UI
Das UI-Team arbeitete daran, die Möglichkeit hinzuzufügen, Gegenstände in Arena Commander zu mieten, und unterstützte die Bedürfnisse des Umweltteams, das an Lorvilles CBD arbeitet.
Fahrzeugmerkmale
Basierend auf den jüngsten Rückmeldungen aus internen und externen Quellen haben sich die Verbesserungen an den Revolvern im November fortgesetzt. Zusätzlich zu den Bugfixes gab es mehrere Verbesserungen an den Revolvern, darunter die Möglichkeit, mehrachsige Revolver bei min/max Neigung steuerbar zu machen, die Fixierung des Gyro Pip Offsets und verbesserte Zielmethoden von einer Vielzahl von Eingabegeräten. Die grundlegende Mechanik, die es Schiffen ermöglicht, auf die Motoren der Zielschiffe zu zielen, wurde ebenfalls fertiggestellt, und das Feature selbst steht kurz vor der Einführung in die PU, ebenso wie das Scannen von Navigationspunkten nach Zielinformationen. Der Rest des Monats wurde durch eine Bereinigung des Trümmernetzflusses und eine Vielzahl von fahrzeugbezogenen Crash-Bugs abgerundet.
Fahrzeuginhalt
Art, Systems Design und Tech Art arbeiteten zusammen, um den Anvil Arrow als Teil des November-Jubiläums-Events zu veröffentlichen und weiter an Schiffen für kommende Veröffentlichungen zu arbeiten: The Anvil Hawk ist in der Release-Vorbereitungsphase mit den beiden Teams Art und System Design, die 300er Serie ist in der Graybox mit Systems Design, und die Freelancer hatten die Release-Vorbereitung mit Tech Art begonnen. Darüber hinaus arbeiteten Systems Design und Tech Art mit den Animatoren an der Sequenzierung der Charakteranimation für Fahrzeuge, und Tech Art arbeitete an einem Thruster Pass für das neue Flugmodell.
VFX
Das VFX-Team hat die vielen Umweltauswirkungen von Hurston weiter verbessert und optimiert und allgemeine Verbesserungen an den verschiedenen Monden vorgenommen. im ganzen Vers. Sie finalisierten auch VFX für den Amboss-Pfeil und den Amboss-Falken. Das VFX-Team verbrachte Zeit damit, bestehende Assets zu optimieren, um bei der Gesamtleistung von Alpha 3.3.5 zu helfen. Sie haben auch alle ungenutzten VFX-Textur-Assets entfernt, in der Hoffnung, den Speicherbedarf zum Laden aller Partikeltexturen zu reduzieren.
Waffen
Das Weapon Art Team arbeitete an der Überarbeitung des Multi-Tool, Kastak Arms Ravager-212, und an den Upgrades der Level zwei und drei für die Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeater. Sie haben auch kleinere Anpassungen an den Eisenvisieren an einer Handvoll Waffen vorgenommen, um das Visierbild zu verbessern und es benutzerfreundlicher zu gestalten, wenn keine Optik angebracht ist. WIR SEHEN UNS NÄCHSTEN MONAT.....
Welcome to November’s monthly Star Citizen report from Cloud Imperium Games. Last month saw the Intergalactic Aerospace Exposition land on Hurston just in time for our annual Anniversary Special. Devs had fun bringing the expo to life, while continuing to forge ahead, sights set on the upcoming release of Alpha 3.4. Read on for Persistent Universe development updates from all of our global studios.
AI
Ship AI’s major focus throughout November was optimizing the Tactical Point System. They now have multiple queries bundled together in a batch from different threads, which allow more control over the cost of the overall system. Several optimizations for the character movement system were submitted, which now update all the components in a multithreaded batch approach and utilize the maximum the CPU resources during the game update. A pass for thread safety of several subsystems was performed, including the attention target component and communication system. This is required to eventually move the Subsumption component update to the multithreaded batch update step. In FPS Combat, the ‘Defend Area’ assignment was introduced; correctly achieving this behavior requires monitoring the mastergraph transitions to evaluate if the recipients of the Subsumption event can actually process it. In the Defend Area example, they might be executing any regular behavior when receiving the assignment. If the behavior can handle the request in a specific way, great. If not, then the mastergraph takes care of selecting one that can. Alongside this, they’re adding new behaviors to improve combat and patrol to respect this assignment. Support for stealth gameplay was implemented, with new audio and visual stimuli being added to allow players to draw the attention of guards, prepare traps, and open up otherwise blocked paths. Work also continued on the bartender for Lorville. To achieve several functionalities of his behavior they implemented the first pass of UseChannel routing and are continuing to expand the usable functionalities. The Usable Builder Tool received a new feature too: it’s now able to correctly preview different characters using different usables so that designers, animators, and programmers can easily test and verify the content as it’s delivered.
Animation
November saw Animation supporting the Feature Team to bring vault, mantle, and jumping functionality in-line with the game’s quality and play expectations. They’re currently testing a process to allow the efficient integration of different weapon classes, such as pistols and shotguns. The team is also implementing carry options for Zero-G EVA and working towards finalizing player interaction (carriables in particular). The US Animation Team cleaned and solved data from the amazing performance captures done at this year’s CitizenCon in Austin, Texas. Editing and final work will be completed soon. They continued work on the Ship Dealers that will populate the ‘verse and made sure the new mission givers are available as soon as their locations are ready, such as Wallace Klim in Levski, Tecia Pacheco in Area18, and Constantine Hurston in Lorville. Exploring the issues that result from re-targeting the male animations to the female skeleton, the team determined that the first step is to achieve 1:1 parity between them. This will allow for the replacement of assets with female-specific versions without hindering female player development. Finishing touches are being added to carriable tech, too.
Audio
The Audio department focused on the new flight model and the spaceship audio mix. They implemented tech to allow systemic mixing of NLPC ship bases on priority, size, and threat level, which gives a clearer and more focused mix. This, combined with the implementation of the new ship vibration component, has greatly improved the ship audio experience. During implementation, they made an optimization pass to ensure memory and voice limits remain healthy. Improvements to the weapon experience continued with the consolidation of assets and the simplification of element implementation to ensure improved translation of audio assets from the digital audio workstation (DAW) into the game. There have also been changes to the Foley system to improve the audio feedback of the player’s traversal on different terrain and surface types. On the music front, the team worked with the PU composer Pedro Camacho to develop and implement new musical cues to support the planet-side locations on Hurston, such as L19, and upcoming expansions. With Object Container Streaming (OCS) coming online, the Audio Code Team optimized and polished FOIP to ensure reliability.
Backend Services
Backend Services worked to bring the 2948 Anniversary Event to players. The first order of business was creating the service needed to bring forward the correct overlapped object containers for the different days at the convention center. This ensured a seamless transition between manufacturer days and prevented the need to publish a new build per expo day. Next, they worked to make sure the rental logic behind the expo correctly traded data between the server, client, and database to ensure players could enjoy the ships they rented. Finally, a login queue was created to help organize and throttle the unprecedented number of players attempting to enter the ‘verse and check-out the expo. Away from the Anniversary Event, work continued on the new architecture for the Persistence Cache to help increase the scalability of the backend as well as link important services to a new database architecture.
Character Art
Character Art’s focus throughout November was to make all armor and undersuits available for female avatars. They also worked on modeling two of our new mission givers to bring more life to the Persistent Universe. Additionally, they’re creating a new set of outlaw armor (designation ‘Shipjacker’) that will include armor, an undersuit, and subscriber items.
Community
“The Community Team started the month in the Halloween spirit with two spooky contests in anticipation of the holiday. Players joined the festivities and showcased their talent in a pumpkin carving contest and a FOIP screenshot contest depicting the most terrifying and terrified expressions they had to offer. Spooktacular! The Mustang Commercial Contest put the community’s filmmaking skills to the test. Our bold cinematographers embraced the maverick spirit of Consolidated Outland to create commercials that Silas Koerner himself would be proud of. During Thanksgiving, Citizens shared what they were thankful for and participated in two holiday contests in honor of Turkey Day. With these two contests, we are now up to 25 total contests run in 2018, and the team still has more planned to go live before the end of the year. As Alpha 3.3 made its way to the Persistent Universe, we welcomed the first fully-explorable planet and city with Hurston and Lorville respectively. While everyone was exploring the new environments, the bustling landing zone, and four new moons, the Star Citizen content creators outdid themselves, creating beautiful shots of sunsets on Hurston, days out on the beach next to Lorville, and joyrides to Aberdeen. We are proud and thankful for all the content the community shared on social media, Reddit, and the community hub, and are looking forward to seeing even more. Keep on sharing! The 2948 Anniversary special kicked off our most epic Free-Fly event to date with all flyable ships and vehicles to try out at no extra cost. The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo came a long way and made its in-game debut with their Hurston-based satellite branch. Exclusive reveals at the expo included Anvil’s ‘light fighter of the future’, the Hawk, and the next evolution of Xi’an tech and design innovation with the Aopoa San’tok.yāi. Lastly, we also reached a significant funding milestone and want to thank our amazing community who made this possible. The amount is the highest total for any project in the history of crowdfunding and is beyond anything we could have imagined. In a letter from the chairman, Chris Roberts shared his thoughts on the fantastic journey so far and the exciting future that lies ahead. Here’s to tomorrow!”
Design
Design got the Anniversary Event’s Convention Center up and running for all backers to enjoy. To help encourage players to browse the inventories at New Deal and Teach’s Ship Shop, the team began implementing a new type of NPC: the Ship Dealer. The aim is to provide a realistic and interesting ship purchasing experience to further liven up the process of acquiring a dream ship. “We sincerely hope you got a chance to try out and see the different ships at the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo on Hurston!” Tuning for the Economy continues, with work going into adjusting prices for various services and goods across Stanton. Work has also started towards the design and implementation of a robust and important Economic Editing Tool to help better visualize and tweak the Economy than ever before. They also tuned Arena Commander’s REC Reward.
DevOps
November is always one of the busiest months for DevOps due to the Anniversary Event, and this month was no exception, with the team scaling the servers to the highest capacity since the beginning of the project. To ease the overall DevOps workload, the Publishing Team expanded their internal tools, which allowed most of the team to enjoy a well-deserved break for Thanksgiving (even if they did stay very close to their laptops). Between PTU & Live, they successfully published 30 times throughout November, with some days seeing 3-4 builds.
Engineering
Engineering teams around the globe worked on OCS throughout November. The first iteration of client-side streaming was released in Alpha 3.3, with an ongoing focus on improving asynchronous entity loading and unloading. The core OCS and network and backend teams had the Object Container Server Streaming summit this month to plan the next iteration of OCS, which will focus on server-side streaming and full persistent servers. LA-based Engineering collaborated with the Austin Backend Team to build the tech required for in-game ship rentals. It was premiered during the anniversary promotion and forms the foundation for all in-game rentals. Development on backend tech moved forward towards allowing persistent EZ Habs and enable players to customize and persist their start location. The Vehicle Team continued to work on Ping & Scanning gameplay, this month focusing on ship scanning. Work has also begun on the new DNA component to integrate the R&D technology into the character pipeline. Turbulent worked closely with the LA Gamecode Team to further improve the group system, spectrum integration, and FOIP & VOIP.
Engine Tools
The Engine Team spent time supporting the Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 releases, bug fixing, profiling, and optimizing code (especially for Object Container Streaming). Work continued on GPU skinning, adding vertex velocity support (for motion blur, etc.), completed several optimizations to skip zero weights (which improved throughput), prepared background data, and made the first pass on memory layout and LOD support. For physics optimizations, the execution of ray collision checks and the defragmentation of grids run were made to run concurrently. This achieved a 30-50% speedup for physics planet terrain computation, reduced the number of cell queries on planets, and improved proxy mesh generation of terrain ground volumes. Terrain rendering improvements were made (glow forward pass) as well as fixes for water volume and ocean rendering. The existing hair shader was improved, and a new depth of field algorithm was created, improving quality, performance, and fixing halos around silhouettes. They completed additional culling refinements in the zone system to submit fewer objects to the renderer, as well as various low-level optimizations to reduce the load on the render thread. Further enhancements were made to engine-side support for the public telemetry page to allow user-specific optimization hints to be displayed to improve the gameplay experience, and a new tool was developed to easily analyze core dumps of Linux dedicated game servers.
Environment Art
The UK team focused on bug fixing and optimization for the Alpha 3.3 release, mainly for Lorville and Hurston. A focused sprint was completed for the Anniversary Event convention halls, with the aim to provide a versatile and time-economic environment to show off the ships in their best light. Additional Underground Facility interior exteriors and a new Alpha 3.3 splash screen were also made and implemented. The DE Location Team made great progress on Lorville’s Central Business District (CBD). Here, players can access the Hurston Dynamics Showcase, the flagship store for all weaponry produced by the brand, as well as the Transfers store where players can engage in various trading activities. The CBD has a very different feel to the rest of Lorville and clearly services a different type of clientele. Luxurious materials and modern design set the ambiance for this experience. The Organics and Planet Team are making great progress on upcoming locations and are currently working on ArcCorp and exploring microTech. Both locations need additional features to be added to the planet tech to make them truly unique, so while it’s still early days, things are steadily moving on.
Facial Animation
The team is actively working on upcoming mission-givers, including Klim, along with ship dealers, bar patrons, and bartenders. They’re also testing the results of the player’s facial animation recordings on the default loadout.
Graphics
This month, the Graphics Team firmly focussed on the release of Alpha 3.3.5 and improving both stability and performance. The PTU was plagued by some quite frequent GPU crashes, but Evocati testing helped them track down the cause and remedy it. With the release of Lorville, QA saw high video memory usage due to the scale of the environment and number of ships and characters. Due to some bugs, this resulted in serious performance issues as the video driver began to page memory, resulting in noticeable stutters. Fixes were made to the worst offending video memory bugs in Alpha 3.3.5. Looking forward, the team continues to reduce memory usage and optimize the game for the next release.
Issue Council
The Issue Council deployed version 1.1.5 in October. Several issues were fixed including editable fields of the different forms not displaying correctly, versions not ordered from the latest to the oldest, and display names with special characters not showing properly.
Level Design
The Live Team placed and marked-up locations on and around Hurston for mission use. Big improvements to the delivery missions were made – players can now take contracts from companies who operate specific routes and require the player to have a certain level of reputation. The Downed Relay mission (as seen in CitizenCon) now has multiple outcomes, including having other players tasked with destroying the stolen blade before its data is uploaded. Now that the base work for Lorville is finished, the Level Design Team are focusing on the CBD. The whitebox is already done, with most of the remaining work involving connecting the trains and ensuring all the logistics work. New Underground Facilities components were added to the procedural tech. These are built with modularity in mind and can be generated in the same way as Rest Stops. Once the modular library has enough content (rooms, connectors, POIs), it will become much easier to provide more variety. They also continued working on the procedural tech to make sure that it provides everything needed from a design perspective. This can be difficult at times, as compromises are required; what is the most fun to play is not necessarily what looks the best. Finally, most of the combat missions found at Crusader are now available at Hurston. Work has begun to define the contractors and progression for them, too.
Lighting
This month, the Lighting Team worked on improving the headlights across almost all ships available in the PU. Due to plenty of issues regarding visibility while flying ships in dark environments, the headlights were improved to provide more visible light from greater distances. There’s still room for improvement, but in the meantime, it’s a positive change that makes the planetary flying experience more enjoyable. Additionally, the team focused on bug fixing and optimizing the lighting in Lorville to maintain a high degree of quality while improving framerates and lowering drawcall costs. They also worked on the lighting for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo to help show off all the amazing ships being featured in the various halls.
Narrative
The Narrative Team pushed heavily on Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 tasks to knock out remaining mission text and standardize in-game descriptions for ship components on the terminals. They also continued working on editorial selects for the lower priority lines for NPCs that were captured back in September. To cover the new convention center and other contexts, they ran a pickup recording session to add additional Lorville announcement lines. The team also worked closely with Marketing to support the recent IAE expansion event in Lorville. Not only providing written copy but joining some of the roundtable discussions to provide fictional backstory for the various manufacturers. Lastly, they worked to schedule tasks for the PU and undertook overall team planning for the upcoming year.
Player Relations
Player Relations busily plugged away at the Alpha 3.3 and the Anniversary Event, working alongside the Evocati on several builds to make sure key components were properly tested. “As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has over 100 articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.”
Props
The Props Team focused on the stands, booths, and branding for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo and the Anniversary Event. They recently shifted onto closing out the CBD props in Lorville and are currently creating bespoke furniture to help sell the wealth and decadence of the Hurston Central building.
QA
On the publishing side, QA busily tested the Alpha 3.3.0 and 3.3.5 builds for publishing to Evocati and Live. On the game side, the focus was on testing Hurston, its four moons, and city Lorville. They also completed a number of QATRs relating to FOIP & VOIP, ship purchasing in the PU, ship rental in Arena Commander, and improvements to Object Container Streaming. It was business as usual on the leadership side, with coordinated testing priorities between the UK, LA, and DE. Two new recruits were welcomed to QA; a dedicated tester in Frankfurt to support the AI Team and an additional tester in the UK. They will be primarily focused on providing day-to-day updates on the state of AI and will report all issues directly to the team to be investigated. QA also made the decision to do away with the general design tests and instead focus on specific sanity/smoke tests for AI and another test suite specifically for the Transit System and locations. The previous design tests were too broad and covered areas that were not always prevalent to the in-house design teams. Refocusing towards specific in-house feature teams has proven that the testing and information provided is much more valuable. A fair amount of time was spent on major QA test requests for new animation update optimizations, physics terrain patch optimization changes, and general optimization that will further improve performance in the PU. Frankfurt’s QA branch supported the Planetary Tech Team in investigating an issue on one of Hurston’s moons. Something in its setup was causing the normals on the moon surface to be very intense. This was tracked down to a lighting issue and further steps were taken (with the assistance of the Graphics Team) to enable the surface to get back to, well, normal.
Services
At CitizenCon, the team was present on the show floor to prepare local environments to run the game backend for both the FOIP LAN demonstration area and the main stage demonstration. This local setup included the entire game backend allowing for the demonstration to represent exactly what is being played in the PTU and the Live environment, including the network of social services that power groups, chat, and FOIP. With the release of Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5, the team mostly focused on observing and scaling the voice and face transmission solution to the increase of backers in the game. DevOp teams mainly worked to ensure that voice channels created by players during one-to-one calls, group channels, and global server channels were properly sharded to new voice servers, as the number of connected players increased. With the addition of global chat auto-connect in Alpha 3.3.5, the team also added new systems to monitor and move voice channels between servers when the supported load on a given voice server instance is too high. “The team has been ecstatic about the use of the technology by players and we hope to keep growing its use with gameplay connected features.” In order to help with the above tasks, the social game services were moved to a Kubernetes-based orchestration solution that allows easier management of voice and service containers. This new backplane supports continuous integration of service changes and will greatly improve the team velocity when deploying updates and builds. Working in conjunction with the universe team, Game Services began the development of a web-based administration tool to help manage the runtime state of the game world from a macro level. This is still in the very early stages of development but, using this tool, the designers will ultimately have the ability to inspect social objects like groups and their life cycles, ban, chase, and player controls. Integrating the WebGL Starmap engine will also allow the viewing of commodities, player locations, gameplay analytics, and much more.
Ships
This month, the UK Vehicle Team returned to the Origin 890 Jump after wrapping up the Valkyrie. What will undoubtedly be well-received news amongst the community is that, after long hiatus, work continues on the greatly-anticipated Anvil Carrack. Since the ship was last worked on around 18 months ago, there have been significant improvements to the ship pipeline and workflow. So, when re-reviewing the previous state, the team decided to undertake a second whitebox pass of the interior to bring it closer to its original concept. In addition to next year’s larger vehicles, progress was made to the Alpha 3.4 ships, including the Origin 600i Touring. The Freelancer DUR, MAX, and MIS are all receiving the final touches by art.
Ship Art
Lead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith made great progress on the greybox model, interior, and exterior of the 300i rework and began implementing different paint jobs and modeled the modified components for the other three variants. Next, he will move onto an alternative interior to be used in one of them. 3D Modeler Josh Coons recently completed the whitebox model for the Banu Defender and has now moved onto testing some of the modified workflow using Zbrush models, which will be baked down to create the type of detail we are looking for in this ship. He is continually creating new textures and also starting to build up the greybox model with the alternative workflow.
System Design
The System Design Team worked on integrating updated flight mechanics into enemy ship AI, ensuring that with all the changes, they are still engaging to fight against and don’t become unbalanced. They noticed that the updated flight model currently causes too much unwanted ‘jousting behavior’, so are currently looking into ways to modify it. Work was done on restructuring dialogue wildlines for the ship/FPS/social AI to unify them within the same overall structure. A large amount of work has been done with the audio & writing teams to ensure the system works properly for all systemic dialogue in the game. They are also working to develop tools to automate the setup of dialogue lines. More work was completed on designing stealth gameplay elements, which in turn requires the AI perception to be upgraded to cater for peripheral vision, as well as various audio events and stimuli from environmental sources, such as throwing a pebble to distract enemies.
Telemetry
Shortly after CitizenCon, the Public Telemetry page was launched. The data presented here reflects the data CIG receives from clients while playing the game. This data is used to assess and improve performance across a variety of hardware. If logged in while on the telemetry page, players will see their stats, including their computer’s GPU and CPU score and average FPS. The heatmap displays other user’s average FPS and the most popular hardware for each GPU and CPU score. On launch, the telemetry page showed a massive improvement between Alpha 3.2 and 3.3 thanks to OCS.
Turbulent
Throughout November, Turbulent supported CitizenCon, the Alpha 3.3. Flyable Ships, the new Anvil Valkyrie, the release of the Drake Kraken, and preparations for the Anniversary Event. CitizenCon: CitizenCon 2948 was an amazing event, with Turbulent supporting many components such as the livestream, merchandise, badges, microsite, and the release of new ships from Drake and Anvil!
The Drake Kraken: In October, Turbulent supported the unveiling of Drake’s first capital ship, the Kraken. The Kraken has two multi-purpose hangars, five manned turrets, four remote turrets, a massive cargo capacity, comfortable habs for a full crew, a Dragonfly Bay, and six landing pads. The website showed multiple features such as an interactive cross-section of the ship and a registry for those interested in obtaining one.
The Anvil Valkyrie: Turbulent supported the release of the Valkyrie, the new flyable drop ship from Anvil. The Valkyrie contains multiple side guns and turrets and can deploy up to twenty troops as well as a vehicle into combat. The website displayed features such as in-game footage of the Valkyrie and a CitizenCon-exclusive edition called the Valkyrie Liberator. This was also released on October 10th.
The 3.3 Flyable: With the release of Alpha 3.3, Turbulent supported the availability of the flyable ships on the website. The ships include the Aegis Hammerhead, Tumbril Cyclone, RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the CO Mustang. An exclusive CitizenCon Mustang was also available, called the Mustang Alpha Vindicator.
The 2948 Anniversary Special: The Anniversary Special was launched on Friday, November 23rd. Over the course of the week, a different manufacturer was released each day. On the first day, the Arrow was released, along with the rest of the Anvil ships. RSI day was on the 24th, Origin Jumpworks the 25th, Aegis Dynamics the 26th, Drake Interplanetary the 27th, and the alien ships on the 28th. The new San’tok’yai ship was unveiled by Aopoa too. MISC had its featured day on the 29th, and the new manufacturers on the 30th, including Tumbril, Crusader, CO, Argo, and Kruger. The last days of the Anniversary Special featured discount starter packs.
The Anniversary Quiz: With the help of Player Relations, Turbulent executed a quiz featuring three questions for each manufacturer. A passing score awarded a ‘Ship Master’ Spectrum badge and certificate. By passing the quiz, players were entered into a draw to win an Anvil Arrow.
The IAE Free-Fly Promotion: For the week of November 23rd until December 1st, five different flyable ships were featured each day of the week according to the featured manufacturer. The page contained information about the Desmond Memorial Convention Center in Lorville and linked to the Knowledge Base, which provided detailed instructions on how to get started. The IAE Free-Fly page also instructed new players on how to make an account and get into the ‘verse.
The Aopoa Santok’yāi: Turbulent supported the release of the Santok’yāi, a new Xi’an ship from Aopoa. The Santok’yāi features Yeng’tu Laser Repeaters and the latest Xi’an technology in a light-to-medium fighter chassis.
UI
The UI Team worked on adding the ability to rent items in Arena Commander, as well as supporting the needs of the Environment Team working on Lorville’s CBD.
Vehicle Features
Based on recent feedback from both internal and external sources, turret improvements have continued throughout November. In addition to bug fixes, there were multiple improvements to turrets including making multi-axis turrets controllable at min/max pitch, fixing the gyro pip offset, and improved aiming methods from a variety of input devices. The foundational mechanics to allow ships to aim at the engines on target ships has also been completed, and the feature itself is nearly ready to be rolled out to the PU, as is scanning nav points for destination info. The rest of the month was rounded out with a clean-up of debris network flow and a variety of vehicle-related crash bugs.
Vehicle Content
Art, Systems Design, and Tech Art worked together to release the Anvil Arrow as part of the November Anniversary Event as well as continuing to work on ships for upcoming releases: The Anvil Hawk is in the release-prep stage with both the Art and System Design Teams, the 300 Series is in greybox with Systems Design, and the Freelancers had entered release-prep with Tech Art. Additionally, Systems Design and Tech Art worked with the animators on character animation sequencing for vehicles, and Tech Art worked on a thruster pass for the new flight model.
VFX
The VFX Team continued to polish and optimize the many environmental effects of Hurston and implemented general improvements to the various moons throughout the ‘verse. They also finalized VFX for the Anvil Arrow and Anvil Hawk. The VFX Team spent time optimizing existing assets to help with the overall performance of Alpha 3.3.5. They also cleaned out all unused VFX texture assets in hopes of reducing the amount of memory required to load all the particle textures.
Weapons
The Weapon Art Team worked on the Multi-Tool rework, Kastak Arms Ravager-212, and the level two and three upgrades for the Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeaters. They also made minor adjustments to the iron sights on a handful of weapons to improve the sight picture and to make them more user-friendly when no optics are attached. WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
AI
Ship AI’s major focus throughout November was optimizing the Tactical Point System. They now have multiple queries bundled together in a batch from different threads, which allow more control over the cost of the overall system. Several optimizations for the character movement system were submitted, which now update all the components in a multithreaded batch approach and utilize the maximum the CPU resources during the game update. A pass for thread safety of several subsystems was performed, including the attention target component and communication system. This is required to eventually move the Subsumption component update to the multithreaded batch update step. In FPS Combat, the ‘Defend Area’ assignment was introduced; correctly achieving this behavior requires monitoring the mastergraph transitions to evaluate if the recipients of the Subsumption event can actually process it. In the Defend Area example, they might be executing any regular behavior when receiving the assignment. If the behavior can handle the request in a specific way, great. If not, then the mastergraph takes care of selecting one that can. Alongside this, they’re adding new behaviors to improve combat and patrol to respect this assignment. Support for stealth gameplay was implemented, with new audio and visual stimuli being added to allow players to draw the attention of guards, prepare traps, and open up otherwise blocked paths. Work also continued on the bartender for Lorville. To achieve several functionalities of his behavior they implemented the first pass of UseChannel routing and are continuing to expand the usable functionalities. The Usable Builder Tool received a new feature too: it’s now able to correctly preview different characters using different usables so that designers, animators, and programmers can easily test and verify the content as it’s delivered.
Animation
November saw Animation supporting the Feature Team to bring vault, mantle, and jumping functionality in-line with the game’s quality and play expectations. They’re currently testing a process to allow the efficient integration of different weapon classes, such as pistols and shotguns. The team is also implementing carry options for Zero-G EVA and working towards finalizing player interaction (carriables in particular). The US Animation Team cleaned and solved data from the amazing performance captures done at this year’s CitizenCon in Austin, Texas. Editing and final work will be completed soon. They continued work on the Ship Dealers that will populate the ‘verse and made sure the new mission givers are available as soon as their locations are ready, such as Wallace Klim in Levski, Tecia Pacheco in Area18, and Constantine Hurston in Lorville. Exploring the issues that result from re-targeting the male animations to the female skeleton, the team determined that the first step is to achieve 1:1 parity between them. This will allow for the replacement of assets with female-specific versions without hindering female player development. Finishing touches are being added to carriable tech, too.
Audio
The Audio department focused on the new flight model and the spaceship audio mix. They implemented tech to allow systemic mixing of NLPC ship bases on priority, size, and threat level, which gives a clearer and more focused mix. This, combined with the implementation of the new ship vibration component, has greatly improved the ship audio experience. During implementation, they made an optimization pass to ensure memory and voice limits remain healthy. Improvements to the weapon experience continued with the consolidation of assets and the simplification of element implementation to ensure improved translation of audio assets from the digital audio workstation (DAW) into the game. There have also been changes to the Foley system to improve the audio feedback of the player’s traversal on different terrain and surface types. On the music front, the team worked with the PU composer Pedro Camacho to develop and implement new musical cues to support the planet-side locations on Hurston, such as L19, and upcoming expansions. With Object Container Streaming (OCS) coming online, the Audio Code Team optimized and polished FOIP to ensure reliability.
Backend Services
Backend Services worked to bring the 2948 Anniversary Event to players. The first order of business was creating the service needed to bring forward the correct overlapped object containers for the different days at the convention center. This ensured a seamless transition between manufacturer days and prevented the need to publish a new build per expo day. Next, they worked to make sure the rental logic behind the expo correctly traded data between the server, client, and database to ensure players could enjoy the ships they rented. Finally, a login queue was created to help organize and throttle the unprecedented number of players attempting to enter the ‘verse and check-out the expo. Away from the Anniversary Event, work continued on the new architecture for the Persistence Cache to help increase the scalability of the backend as well as link important services to a new database architecture.
Character Art
Character Art’s focus throughout November was to make all armor and undersuits available for female avatars. They also worked on modeling two of our new mission givers to bring more life to the Persistent Universe. Additionally, they’re creating a new set of outlaw armor (designation ‘Shipjacker’) that will include armor, an undersuit, and subscriber items.
Community
“The Community Team started the month in the Halloween spirit with two spooky contests in anticipation of the holiday. Players joined the festivities and showcased their talent in a pumpkin carving contest and a FOIP screenshot contest depicting the most terrifying and terrified expressions they had to offer. Spooktacular! The Mustang Commercial Contest put the community’s filmmaking skills to the test. Our bold cinematographers embraced the maverick spirit of Consolidated Outland to create commercials that Silas Koerner himself would be proud of. During Thanksgiving, Citizens shared what they were thankful for and participated in two holiday contests in honor of Turkey Day. With these two contests, we are now up to 25 total contests run in 2018, and the team still has more planned to go live before the end of the year. As Alpha 3.3 made its way to the Persistent Universe, we welcomed the first fully-explorable planet and city with Hurston and Lorville respectively. While everyone was exploring the new environments, the bustling landing zone, and four new moons, the Star Citizen content creators outdid themselves, creating beautiful shots of sunsets on Hurston, days out on the beach next to Lorville, and joyrides to Aberdeen. We are proud and thankful for all the content the community shared on social media, Reddit, and the community hub, and are looking forward to seeing even more. Keep on sharing! The 2948 Anniversary special kicked off our most epic Free-Fly event to date with all flyable ships and vehicles to try out at no extra cost. The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo came a long way and made its in-game debut with their Hurston-based satellite branch. Exclusive reveals at the expo included Anvil’s ‘light fighter of the future’, the Hawk, and the next evolution of Xi’an tech and design innovation with the Aopoa San’tok.yāi. Lastly, we also reached a significant funding milestone and want to thank our amazing community who made this possible. The amount is the highest total for any project in the history of crowdfunding and is beyond anything we could have imagined. In a letter from the chairman, Chris Roberts shared his thoughts on the fantastic journey so far and the exciting future that lies ahead. Here’s to tomorrow!”
Design
Design got the Anniversary Event’s Convention Center up and running for all backers to enjoy. To help encourage players to browse the inventories at New Deal and Teach’s Ship Shop, the team began implementing a new type of NPC: the Ship Dealer. The aim is to provide a realistic and interesting ship purchasing experience to further liven up the process of acquiring a dream ship. “We sincerely hope you got a chance to try out and see the different ships at the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo on Hurston!” Tuning for the Economy continues, with work going into adjusting prices for various services and goods across Stanton. Work has also started towards the design and implementation of a robust and important Economic Editing Tool to help better visualize and tweak the Economy than ever before. They also tuned Arena Commander’s REC Reward.
DevOps
November is always one of the busiest months for DevOps due to the Anniversary Event, and this month was no exception, with the team scaling the servers to the highest capacity since the beginning of the project. To ease the overall DevOps workload, the Publishing Team expanded their internal tools, which allowed most of the team to enjoy a well-deserved break for Thanksgiving (even if they did stay very close to their laptops). Between PTU & Live, they successfully published 30 times throughout November, with some days seeing 3-4 builds.
Engineering
Engineering teams around the globe worked on OCS throughout November. The first iteration of client-side streaming was released in Alpha 3.3, with an ongoing focus on improving asynchronous entity loading and unloading. The core OCS and network and backend teams had the Object Container Server Streaming summit this month to plan the next iteration of OCS, which will focus on server-side streaming and full persistent servers. LA-based Engineering collaborated with the Austin Backend Team to build the tech required for in-game ship rentals. It was premiered during the anniversary promotion and forms the foundation for all in-game rentals. Development on backend tech moved forward towards allowing persistent EZ Habs and enable players to customize and persist their start location. The Vehicle Team continued to work on Ping & Scanning gameplay, this month focusing on ship scanning. Work has also begun on the new DNA component to integrate the R&D technology into the character pipeline. Turbulent worked closely with the LA Gamecode Team to further improve the group system, spectrum integration, and FOIP & VOIP.
Engine Tools
The Engine Team spent time supporting the Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 releases, bug fixing, profiling, and optimizing code (especially for Object Container Streaming). Work continued on GPU skinning, adding vertex velocity support (for motion blur, etc.), completed several optimizations to skip zero weights (which improved throughput), prepared background data, and made the first pass on memory layout and LOD support. For physics optimizations, the execution of ray collision checks and the defragmentation of grids run were made to run concurrently. This achieved a 30-50% speedup for physics planet terrain computation, reduced the number of cell queries on planets, and improved proxy mesh generation of terrain ground volumes. Terrain rendering improvements were made (glow forward pass) as well as fixes for water volume and ocean rendering. The existing hair shader was improved, and a new depth of field algorithm was created, improving quality, performance, and fixing halos around silhouettes. They completed additional culling refinements in the zone system to submit fewer objects to the renderer, as well as various low-level optimizations to reduce the load on the render thread. Further enhancements were made to engine-side support for the public telemetry page to allow user-specific optimization hints to be displayed to improve the gameplay experience, and a new tool was developed to easily analyze core dumps of Linux dedicated game servers.
Environment Art
The UK team focused on bug fixing and optimization for the Alpha 3.3 release, mainly for Lorville and Hurston. A focused sprint was completed for the Anniversary Event convention halls, with the aim to provide a versatile and time-economic environment to show off the ships in their best light. Additional Underground Facility interior exteriors and a new Alpha 3.3 splash screen were also made and implemented. The DE Location Team made great progress on Lorville’s Central Business District (CBD). Here, players can access the Hurston Dynamics Showcase, the flagship store for all weaponry produced by the brand, as well as the Transfers store where players can engage in various trading activities. The CBD has a very different feel to the rest of Lorville and clearly services a different type of clientele. Luxurious materials and modern design set the ambiance for this experience. The Organics and Planet Team are making great progress on upcoming locations and are currently working on ArcCorp and exploring microTech. Both locations need additional features to be added to the planet tech to make them truly unique, so while it’s still early days, things are steadily moving on.
Facial Animation
The team is actively working on upcoming mission-givers, including Klim, along with ship dealers, bar patrons, and bartenders. They’re also testing the results of the player’s facial animation recordings on the default loadout.
Graphics
This month, the Graphics Team firmly focussed on the release of Alpha 3.3.5 and improving both stability and performance. The PTU was plagued by some quite frequent GPU crashes, but Evocati testing helped them track down the cause and remedy it. With the release of Lorville, QA saw high video memory usage due to the scale of the environment and number of ships and characters. Due to some bugs, this resulted in serious performance issues as the video driver began to page memory, resulting in noticeable stutters. Fixes were made to the worst offending video memory bugs in Alpha 3.3.5. Looking forward, the team continues to reduce memory usage and optimize the game for the next release.
Issue Council
The Issue Council deployed version 1.1.5 in October. Several issues were fixed including editable fields of the different forms not displaying correctly, versions not ordered from the latest to the oldest, and display names with special characters not showing properly.
Level Design
The Live Team placed and marked-up locations on and around Hurston for mission use. Big improvements to the delivery missions were made – players can now take contracts from companies who operate specific routes and require the player to have a certain level of reputation. The Downed Relay mission (as seen in CitizenCon) now has multiple outcomes, including having other players tasked with destroying the stolen blade before its data is uploaded. Now that the base work for Lorville is finished, the Level Design Team are focusing on the CBD. The whitebox is already done, with most of the remaining work involving connecting the trains and ensuring all the logistics work. New Underground Facilities components were added to the procedural tech. These are built with modularity in mind and can be generated in the same way as Rest Stops. Once the modular library has enough content (rooms, connectors, POIs), it will become much easier to provide more variety. They also continued working on the procedural tech to make sure that it provides everything needed from a design perspective. This can be difficult at times, as compromises are required; what is the most fun to play is not necessarily what looks the best. Finally, most of the combat missions found at Crusader are now available at Hurston. Work has begun to define the contractors and progression for them, too.
Lighting
This month, the Lighting Team worked on improving the headlights across almost all ships available in the PU. Due to plenty of issues regarding visibility while flying ships in dark environments, the headlights were improved to provide more visible light from greater distances. There’s still room for improvement, but in the meantime, it’s a positive change that makes the planetary flying experience more enjoyable. Additionally, the team focused on bug fixing and optimizing the lighting in Lorville to maintain a high degree of quality while improving framerates and lowering drawcall costs. They also worked on the lighting for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo to help show off all the amazing ships being featured in the various halls.
Narrative
The Narrative Team pushed heavily on Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5 tasks to knock out remaining mission text and standardize in-game descriptions for ship components on the terminals. They also continued working on editorial selects for the lower priority lines for NPCs that were captured back in September. To cover the new convention center and other contexts, they ran a pickup recording session to add additional Lorville announcement lines. The team also worked closely with Marketing to support the recent IAE expansion event in Lorville. Not only providing written copy but joining some of the roundtable discussions to provide fictional backstory for the various manufacturers. Lastly, they worked to schedule tasks for the PU and undertook overall team planning for the upcoming year.
Player Relations
Player Relations busily plugged away at the Alpha 3.3 and the Anniversary Event, working alongside the Evocati on several builds to make sure key components were properly tested. “As always, we’d like to point all players to our growing Knowledge Base, which now has over 100 articles and saw almost 450,000 visitors this month! We will continue to grow this by adding new ‘How To’ articles, patch notes, and live service notifications.”
Props
The Props Team focused on the stands, booths, and branding for the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo and the Anniversary Event. They recently shifted onto closing out the CBD props in Lorville and are currently creating bespoke furniture to help sell the wealth and decadence of the Hurston Central building.
QA
On the publishing side, QA busily tested the Alpha 3.3.0 and 3.3.5 builds for publishing to Evocati and Live. On the game side, the focus was on testing Hurston, its four moons, and city Lorville. They also completed a number of QATRs relating to FOIP & VOIP, ship purchasing in the PU, ship rental in Arena Commander, and improvements to Object Container Streaming. It was business as usual on the leadership side, with coordinated testing priorities between the UK, LA, and DE. Two new recruits were welcomed to QA; a dedicated tester in Frankfurt to support the AI Team and an additional tester in the UK. They will be primarily focused on providing day-to-day updates on the state of AI and will report all issues directly to the team to be investigated. QA also made the decision to do away with the general design tests and instead focus on specific sanity/smoke tests for AI and another test suite specifically for the Transit System and locations. The previous design tests were too broad and covered areas that were not always prevalent to the in-house design teams. Refocusing towards specific in-house feature teams has proven that the testing and information provided is much more valuable. A fair amount of time was spent on major QA test requests for new animation update optimizations, physics terrain patch optimization changes, and general optimization that will further improve performance in the PU. Frankfurt’s QA branch supported the Planetary Tech Team in investigating an issue on one of Hurston’s moons. Something in its setup was causing the normals on the moon surface to be very intense. This was tracked down to a lighting issue and further steps were taken (with the assistance of the Graphics Team) to enable the surface to get back to, well, normal.
Services
At CitizenCon, the team was present on the show floor to prepare local environments to run the game backend for both the FOIP LAN demonstration area and the main stage demonstration. This local setup included the entire game backend allowing for the demonstration to represent exactly what is being played in the PTU and the Live environment, including the network of social services that power groups, chat, and FOIP. With the release of Alpha 3.3 and 3.3.5, the team mostly focused on observing and scaling the voice and face transmission solution to the increase of backers in the game. DevOp teams mainly worked to ensure that voice channels created by players during one-to-one calls, group channels, and global server channels were properly sharded to new voice servers, as the number of connected players increased. With the addition of global chat auto-connect in Alpha 3.3.5, the team also added new systems to monitor and move voice channels between servers when the supported load on a given voice server instance is too high. “The team has been ecstatic about the use of the technology by players and we hope to keep growing its use with gameplay connected features.” In order to help with the above tasks, the social game services were moved to a Kubernetes-based orchestration solution that allows easier management of voice and service containers. This new backplane supports continuous integration of service changes and will greatly improve the team velocity when deploying updates and builds. Working in conjunction with the universe team, Game Services began the development of a web-based administration tool to help manage the runtime state of the game world from a macro level. This is still in the very early stages of development but, using this tool, the designers will ultimately have the ability to inspect social objects like groups and their life cycles, ban, chase, and player controls. Integrating the WebGL Starmap engine will also allow the viewing of commodities, player locations, gameplay analytics, and much more.
Ships
This month, the UK Vehicle Team returned to the Origin 890 Jump after wrapping up the Valkyrie. What will undoubtedly be well-received news amongst the community is that, after long hiatus, work continues on the greatly-anticipated Anvil Carrack. Since the ship was last worked on around 18 months ago, there have been significant improvements to the ship pipeline and workflow. So, when re-reviewing the previous state, the team decided to undertake a second whitebox pass of the interior to bring it closer to its original concept. In addition to next year’s larger vehicles, progress was made to the Alpha 3.4 ships, including the Origin 600i Touring. The Freelancer DUR, MAX, and MIS are all receiving the final touches by art.
Ship Art
Lead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith made great progress on the greybox model, interior, and exterior of the 300i rework and began implementing different paint jobs and modeled the modified components for the other three variants. Next, he will move onto an alternative interior to be used in one of them. 3D Modeler Josh Coons recently completed the whitebox model for the Banu Defender and has now moved onto testing some of the modified workflow using Zbrush models, which will be baked down to create the type of detail we are looking for in this ship. He is continually creating new textures and also starting to build up the greybox model with the alternative workflow.
System Design
The System Design Team worked on integrating updated flight mechanics into enemy ship AI, ensuring that with all the changes, they are still engaging to fight against and don’t become unbalanced. They noticed that the updated flight model currently causes too much unwanted ‘jousting behavior’, so are currently looking into ways to modify it. Work was done on restructuring dialogue wildlines for the ship/FPS/social AI to unify them within the same overall structure. A large amount of work has been done with the audio & writing teams to ensure the system works properly for all systemic dialogue in the game. They are also working to develop tools to automate the setup of dialogue lines. More work was completed on designing stealth gameplay elements, which in turn requires the AI perception to be upgraded to cater for peripheral vision, as well as various audio events and stimuli from environmental sources, such as throwing a pebble to distract enemies.
Telemetry
Shortly after CitizenCon, the Public Telemetry page was launched. The data presented here reflects the data CIG receives from clients while playing the game. This data is used to assess and improve performance across a variety of hardware. If logged in while on the telemetry page, players will see their stats, including their computer’s GPU and CPU score and average FPS. The heatmap displays other user’s average FPS and the most popular hardware for each GPU and CPU score. On launch, the telemetry page showed a massive improvement between Alpha 3.2 and 3.3 thanks to OCS.
Turbulent
Throughout November, Turbulent supported CitizenCon, the Alpha 3.3. Flyable Ships, the new Anvil Valkyrie, the release of the Drake Kraken, and preparations for the Anniversary Event. CitizenCon: CitizenCon 2948 was an amazing event, with Turbulent supporting many components such as the livestream, merchandise, badges, microsite, and the release of new ships from Drake and Anvil!
The Drake Kraken: In October, Turbulent supported the unveiling of Drake’s first capital ship, the Kraken. The Kraken has two multi-purpose hangars, five manned turrets, four remote turrets, a massive cargo capacity, comfortable habs for a full crew, a Dragonfly Bay, and six landing pads. The website showed multiple features such as an interactive cross-section of the ship and a registry for those interested in obtaining one.
The Anvil Valkyrie: Turbulent supported the release of the Valkyrie, the new flyable drop ship from Anvil. The Valkyrie contains multiple side guns and turrets and can deploy up to twenty troops as well as a vehicle into combat. The website displayed features such as in-game footage of the Valkyrie and a CitizenCon-exclusive edition called the Valkyrie Liberator. This was also released on October 10th.
The 3.3 Flyable: With the release of Alpha 3.3, Turbulent supported the availability of the flyable ships on the website. The ships include the Aegis Hammerhead, Tumbril Cyclone, RSI Constellation Phoenix, and the CO Mustang. An exclusive CitizenCon Mustang was also available, called the Mustang Alpha Vindicator.
The 2948 Anniversary Special: The Anniversary Special was launched on Friday, November 23rd. Over the course of the week, a different manufacturer was released each day. On the first day, the Arrow was released, along with the rest of the Anvil ships. RSI day was on the 24th, Origin Jumpworks the 25th, Aegis Dynamics the 26th, Drake Interplanetary the 27th, and the alien ships on the 28th. The new San’tok’yai ship was unveiled by Aopoa too. MISC had its featured day on the 29th, and the new manufacturers on the 30th, including Tumbril, Crusader, CO, Argo, and Kruger. The last days of the Anniversary Special featured discount starter packs.
The Anniversary Quiz: With the help of Player Relations, Turbulent executed a quiz featuring three questions for each manufacturer. A passing score awarded a ‘Ship Master’ Spectrum badge and certificate. By passing the quiz, players were entered into a draw to win an Anvil Arrow.
The IAE Free-Fly Promotion: For the week of November 23rd until December 1st, five different flyable ships were featured each day of the week according to the featured manufacturer. The page contained information about the Desmond Memorial Convention Center in Lorville and linked to the Knowledge Base, which provided detailed instructions on how to get started. The IAE Free-Fly page also instructed new players on how to make an account and get into the ‘verse.
The Aopoa Santok’yāi: Turbulent supported the release of the Santok’yāi, a new Xi’an ship from Aopoa. The Santok’yāi features Yeng’tu Laser Repeaters and the latest Xi’an technology in a light-to-medium fighter chassis.
UI
The UI Team worked on adding the ability to rent items in Arena Commander, as well as supporting the needs of the Environment Team working on Lorville’s CBD.
Vehicle Features
Based on recent feedback from both internal and external sources, turret improvements have continued throughout November. In addition to bug fixes, there were multiple improvements to turrets including making multi-axis turrets controllable at min/max pitch, fixing the gyro pip offset, and improved aiming methods from a variety of input devices. The foundational mechanics to allow ships to aim at the engines on target ships has also been completed, and the feature itself is nearly ready to be rolled out to the PU, as is scanning nav points for destination info. The rest of the month was rounded out with a clean-up of debris network flow and a variety of vehicle-related crash bugs.
Vehicle Content
Art, Systems Design, and Tech Art worked together to release the Anvil Arrow as part of the November Anniversary Event as well as continuing to work on ships for upcoming releases: The Anvil Hawk is in the release-prep stage with both the Art and System Design Teams, the 300 Series is in greybox with Systems Design, and the Freelancers had entered release-prep with Tech Art. Additionally, Systems Design and Tech Art worked with the animators on character animation sequencing for vehicles, and Tech Art worked on a thruster pass for the new flight model.
VFX
The VFX Team continued to polish and optimize the many environmental effects of Hurston and implemented general improvements to the various moons throughout the ‘verse. They also finalized VFX for the Anvil Arrow and Anvil Hawk. The VFX Team spent time optimizing existing assets to help with the overall performance of Alpha 3.3.5. They also cleaned out all unused VFX texture assets in hopes of reducing the amount of memory required to load all the particle textures.
Weapons
The Weapon Art Team worked on the Multi-Tool rework, Kastak Arms Ravager-212, and the level two and three upgrades for the Hurston Dynamics Laser Repeaters. They also made minor adjustments to the iron sights on a handful of weapons to improve the sight picture and to make them more user-friendly when no optics are attached. WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
Links
| Text | URL |
|---|---|
| Knowledge Base | https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us |
| letter from the chairman | https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/16865-Letter-From-The-Chairman |
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Metadata
- CIG ID
- 16893
- Channel
- Undefined
- Category
- Undefined
- Series
- Monthly Reports
- Comments
- 75
- Published
- 7 years ago (2018-12-07T00:00:00+00:00)