Letter from the Chairman
Transmission General From the ChairmanContent
Letter from the Chairman
05/18/2022 - 1:00 PM
Year in Review
“Don’t drive Angry!”
Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day 1993
In some ways last year felt like we were stuck just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day repeating the same cycles as 2020; just when we thought we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants emerged to send cases skyrocketing again and communities back into lockdown and other safety measures. The world grew increasingly weary and fatigued from the toll of both the pandemic and the necessary measures to keep people as safe as possible. And even as a large part of the world is starting to return to normal, the specter of a new potential variant that can evade the vaccines and is more transmissible haunts us. Hopefully with readily available vaccines in most countries and a certain degree of built-in protection from prior infections, COVID will continue to transition to an endemic disease, something that certainly is not great, but not nearly as deadly as before, a virus that we can get on with our lives and live with just like the common Flu or Cold.
Because of the ups and downs of last year, we are only just starting to get back to the office. The first studio where it became possible to start working together in person, at any scale, was our UK studio in Manchester, where I have been spending a lot of time since last fall. I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure. Our offices in Frankfurt, Austin, and Los Angeles are only just starting to return to the office now that the local authorities have deemed it safe enough to lift various requirements. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we were proud of how we transitioned seamlessly to a work-from-home environment, but as the situation dragged on, it became clear that we were missing the benefits of spontaneous collaboration and team building that come from working in person, near each other. The time I have spent with the Squadron team in the UK has only reinforced this, as the ability to walk over to someone’s desk and see the issue or having a conversation in passing about a problem or a creative thought, makes an enormous difference to progress. When everyone is working remotely it becomes more of a slog to problem solve on the fly, or easily get or give feedback, and you end up with far more meetings / video calls. In our internal tracking we found that we had six times as many meetings when everyone was working from home than when we were in the office. I personally felt the difference in our release cadence; it took us a little longer to get each patch out than before, and it became harder to solve or fix bugs which hung around longer than previously. I have also seen the trend in the industry as a whole, with pretty much any large title being delayed, or in some unfortunate cases released before they should have been. For this reason, despite our ability to work fully remote, we are focused on getting people back together, working with each other side by side for extended periods. Going back to the office does not mean a return to the old work patterns and policies, as the extended lockdowns, combined with working remotely for two years has given us new insights into work life balance for our staff. We have altered our global work policy to allow for flexi-hours and a hybrid of in person and work from home, depending on both an employee’s and manager’s needs, with emphasis on being cognizant of our employees’ life situations.
Despite the challenges of the last year, I am proud of how much we accomplished in 2021. In fact, looking back at the year in review, I am amazed at the amount of content and features we delivered to our players. In January of last year, the community was able to play the first iteration of the XenoThreat Incursion, our first dynamic event that players praised for bringing together the pieces of Star Citizen for a thrilling server-wide encounter. While only our first iteration, this event already showed glimpses of the full promise of the Persistent Universe. In April of 2021, we released Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy and delivered drive-in caves and sinkholes, planet tech improvements, ship-to-station docking, and more. With Invictus Launch Week, we opened the doors of the Javelin for the first time to let people take a walking tour of the mighty UEE destroyer, and brought the Bengal into orbit to showcase our biggest capital ship yet in the ’verse.
However, we really started to hit our stride in the second half of 2021 with the release of Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, when we finished the Stanton system by launching the gas giant Crusader and the landing zone of Orison. Accompanying that were a host of Quality of Life improvements and our first iteration of Volumetric Clouds.
Then, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences, we introduced v0 of our Medical Gameplay, Looting, Bombing, and Personal Inventory, just to name a few new features. Coupled with our continuing improvements in performance and stability, and the drastic reduction in server crashes (which usually manifest themselves to a user as the infamous 30K error; connection lost to the server), Star Citizen the game was finally starting to come together in a way it had never done before.
And as great as our 2020 year was in terms of engagement and sentiment, the back half of 2021 was at another level. We saw more people than ever before flocking to Star Citizen, carried in on waves of good will and excitement from current players asking their friends to join, and from complete newcomers awed by the spectacle of Crusader, the gameplay of XenoThreat, and the opportunities from new features like Personal Inventory and Looting. And to cap off the year, when we launched Alpha 3.16: Return to Jumptown, veteran players returned to see our fresh, new take on the classic Jumptown emergent battlegrounds and were amazed at just how far the game had progressed.
Our wins in 2021 set us up for an absolutely historic start to 2022. So far, we have blown past all our projections on new players joining the ‘verse. In fact, this year, we have more than doubled our rate of New User acquisition, and with the recent launch of Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, we are seeing over two thousand new players a day joining the ‘verse. Our DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by over 50% since the numbers I shared in my last Letter from the Chairman in December 2020, and with this latest patch, we are enjoying double the daily login traffic of our last April patch launch. We are enjoying MAU (Monthly Active Users) which is well beyond the highs of 2020. And we have had nearly 1 million New Accounts created since then, and more than half a million New Pledging Players join the game. And this week, we had our 2 millionth unique player log in to play Star Citizen. We are on track this year to break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins this year, and more than 0 million in lifetime revenue.
All of this is due to the incredible support we receive from you combined with the progress we have been making in Star Citizen, which brings new curious gamers into the ‘verse. It is heartening to see the feedback and impressions from newer members of the community when they first start playing Star Citizen.
For all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance… that becomes another planet, that you can enter it’s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.
Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.
Many that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.
THANK YOU!
Road to 4.0
Back in December 2017, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 was published to the live servers after a unified push from our developers around the globe. This monumental patch introduced our brand new procedural planetary technology and the first planetary bodies you could land on and go anywhere across the surface of the three moons of Crusader. It also included a new mission system, improved shopping, new cargo mechanics, and doubled our server player cap. To date Star Citizen 3.0 was probably the biggest incremental jump in gameplay and content, which is why we incremented the Alpha designation from 2.X to 3.X, and it was a whole eight months between 2.6.3 and 3.0.
This year, we find ourselves on a similar path with three huge technology initiatives that will fundamentally change the experience and immersion into Star Citizen. The first of these is what we are calling Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) which is the foundational tech that enables Server Meshing (SM). PES is the hardest part of the work needed for SM and is the one that has required the most engineering. It fundamentally changes how we record state in the Universe and delivers a level of persistence that you just don’t see in other games, whether they are MMOs or even single-player experiences. Up until now, all persistence in the game has been tied to a player’s inventory; ships you own or items you hold physically or in the virtual inventories of items you own. If you’ve physically attached an item inside your vehicle, say a rifle to a weapons rack, when you log out or stow the vehicle it will remember all the attached items and anything in that vehicle’s virtual inventory. However, if you drop or place something loosely, even inside a ship you own, it won’t be associated with any player inventory. So, when you log out (or if the server crashes), the item will not be there when logging on or re-joining. With PES we are recording the state of every dynamic object in the game, irrelevant of whether it is “owned” or held by a player. That means that you could drop a gun or a med pen in a forested area on Microtech and return several days later after logging out to find the gun or med pen still there (assuming another player didn’t grab them!).
The technology to do this at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering. We have been working towards this since 2019 when we debuted Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS), which allows a server to only stream in and simulate only a portion of our universe, which is necessary if you are going to have multiple servers simulate different parts of the universe.
The development has not been without road bumps; we had to change our plans for how we would persist the state of the universe when we realized that the backend relational database we were planning on using with a host of services, which we had collectively dubbed “iCache” would likely not be able to have low latency at the scale we needed for the number of concurrent players we will need to support in the future. We pivoted to using a Graph database at the start of 2021, taking a different approach to the services and cache which we outlined in a virtual presentation during last year’s CitizenCon. The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe. The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players. For PES to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services. For Server Meshing, only 4 more services are currently planned, so you can see just how much foundational tech for SM is in PES. As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication. The nice aspect of using tech like this is that it is designed to scale (just imagine how many concurrent users Google must handle) and there are lots of available third-party tools and code, compared to creating an internal custom protocol.
All this means that getting Persistent Entity Streaming to work would require the bulk of the tech we need to make Server Meshing viable. I am happy to report after 16 months of extremely focused work by 18 engineers, 3 dedicated QA, and 4 producers spread between CIG and Turbulent (who are managing the back-end data base in the cloud and its related services) that the team were able to demonstrate Persistent Entity Streaming working last week in our weekly internal Persistent Universe Update meeting.
Paul Reindell, Our Director of Engineering for Online Tech, spun up a server, populated the Entity Graph to its initial state along with the Replication Layer (which is essentially an in memory cache for the universe state/backend database that exists in the cloud to make sure read/writes to the database do not bottleneck servers and clients), then connected a client, placed down a series of small objects like cans on the surface of Aberdeen, along with an 890 Jump and an Anvil Arrow. He then killed the server and the client. The server was restarted, we did not populate the Entity Graph (as it had been previously seeded on the initial startup), and then connected a client, warped to Aberdeen and everything was there as he placed it. This was a huge milestone as the state of the universe was recorded to the backend database and then when he restarted the server it just connected to the Replication Layer, which had initialized itself from the database (the Entity Graph) and continued with the universe at the state he left it.
That may not sound revolutionary to some of you, but I can tell you it was akin to Neil Armstrong taking “one small step.” Once Persistent Entity Streaming comes online, Star Citizen will be a different universe. Full persistence will provide over the coming years an experience in gaming that most other online games do not provide; a universe you can escape to, that is affected by your and other players’ actions, with the state being dynamic and persistent. Crash land on a planet, and your shipwreck will persist, while you forage for food and water to survive, and perhaps wood to make a fire to keep warm. log off and come back to what you built. Or, perhaps once you have been rescued, another player will stumble on the wreck of your old ship and the long-extinguished campfire. Find a corner of the galaxy to make your own, collect resources and import material to build your outpost, decorate or arrange your hangar or home how you like.
With this tech in place, Server Meshing becomes possible, as the Replication Layer/Entity Graph is the universe state that clients and servers write and read from. Because we have decoupled state from simulation, this allows us to have many Server Nodes all communicating with the Replication Layer, responsible for simulation of focused areas in the Universe, which allows us to scale our ability to simulate the overall universe, as a server is no longer responsible for every non-player entity, regardless of location or number. This means that instead of a server dropping to five frames per second due to simulation load, we can just spin up another, and then another to spread the simulation load and keep the update tick rate high. This is the ultimate goal of Dynamic Server Meshing and what we are working towards.
Now, a fundamental change to how state is recorded, especially one that affects every dynamic object, not just a select few, is going to have a lot of edge cases and issues we have not come across yet or foreseen.
2022 TESTING AND RELEASE CADENCE
Because of this, we are going to be approaching 3.18 differently than our previous releases. We are anticipating that 3.18 will require a much longer time in the Evocati/PTU phase than our previous releases, due to the fundamental change in how the game tracks state. We know we will also need testing at scale, as in our experience we see different issues when we go from internal testing to Evocati to PTU wave 1, then wave 2 and so on. Players do crazy things, and lots of players creates lots of crazy cases we had not considered, which expose bugs and edge cases. Our guess is that it may be as long as three months in the PTU stage, but it is hard to predict. For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage’s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!
As it did not make much sense to engineer the revamped physical Cargo system and Salvage for the old system, these two features have been engineered for PES (you want wrecks from player battles to stick around so you can salvage!) and will arrive with 3.18.
However, we do not want engagement and content to stall because of PES requiring longer testing, so we are planning to release a content-rich Alpha 3.17.2 patch with known stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay in late June. The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.
The goal will then be to get 2-3 months of testing on 3.18 in PTU for an Alpha 3.18 release to LIVE in late Q3. I know many of you have been waiting for Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, and Persistent Entity Streaming for a long time, and I am excited to see us in the home stretch to finally bring it to you. I think 3.18 will be an amazing update that is an even bigger game-changer than 3.15 was, but we want to make sure we give it the proper time to test so we can deliver it to you at the best quality possible.
Alongside our Persistent Streaming work the Engine and Graphic teams have been making great progress on the second big technical initiative we’ve been working on the past two years; a complete replacement of our graphics engine with what we call “Gen 12”, which is multithreaded and much more efficient approach to rendering which gets the most out of modern graphics APIs like Vulkan. This allows us to utilize the modern graphics power of PCs more efficiently and not tie up the main game update loop with waiting around for draw call submissions and the like. We are looking at getting the bulk of this functionality in for the Live release of 3.18 with the release of the Vulkan functionality a little later, but hopefully by the end of the year.
This leaves us with our third large technical initiative, Server Meshing.
As you might have guessed, we will approach Server Meshing in much the same way that we are rolling out Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be a truly new era in Star Citizen. It will mean our final tech building block – Server Meshing – will have been delivered. The first implementation will be what we call Static Server Meshing (SSM), where each server is given a defined area to simulate, but as soon as SSM is stable we will move towards Dynamic Server Meshing with subsequent releases which will allow much more scalability as servers will not be bound by location, but instead will be distributed by load, allowing for much better simulation performance in any given area of the universe.
With 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the ‘verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.
Our current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well / easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.
This special 2022 release cadence will not be particularly unusual to most players, if you pull back and look at it in a broad sense. We will still have 4 big end-of-quarter releases, as well as 2 big mid-quarter releases for Fleet Week in May and IAE in November. Players who are not steeped in our development process will still enjoy and experience rapid content releases every quarter, and as we get into the second half of 2022, you will see a lot more meaningful gameplay making its way into the ‘verse. With another run of XenoThreat, updates to Jumptown, new Dynamic Events, additional locations and points of interest to explore, and more patch updates, there will be no shortage of gameplay and content to experience. And by year’s end, players will be able to enjoy Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo refactor, and Bounty Hunter v2 gameplay on Live.
Meanwhile, those who are following our development closest, and providing the critical service of helping us test our biggest tech, will be able to get their hands on Persistent Streaming and Server Meshing this year, as we put them into test in 3.18 and 4.0 in PTU during the summer and winter, respectively. Sometimes, the wait can be the hardest when we are closest to the finish line, but this year, I am so excited to share our release plans for our key tech building blocks, and I know many of you cannot wait to jump into PTU and start testing later this year.
Building for Longevity
It is easy to only focus on our development progress and the work we have ahead in building Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but there is another very important element of our journey that is often overlooked. Not only are we building two hugely ambitious games to rival anything released by the biggest AAA studios, but we’ve had to build the company to build the technology and make the games from scratch at the same time.
The day I stepped out on the stage at GDC, we had no formal employees, three founders in Ortwin, Sandi and myself, and a handful of people that had helped like Forrest Stephan, David Haddock and David Swofford, sometimes moonlighting from their day job (with permission of course) like Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy and Paul Reindell and a few friends from my old Origin and Digital Anvil days like Sergio Rosas and his CGBot art outsourcing company, to create the demo and build the website.
Today we have 780 people on staff, plus an extended family of over 130 working closely with us at Turbulent in Montreal, with many more that will join us in the coming months. We have a seven-person Global Talent Acquisition team that focuses exclusively on trying to hire the best talent possible for CIG. To give you an idea of the scale of TA work, they helped us hire 168 people in 2021, and so far, this year have helped us recruit 128 people already.
In 2022, we will continue to grow in all departments, increasing our headcount to approximately 840 and bring us closer to release for Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
One challenge we have been facing is that we have nowhere near enough room at several of our studios for new hires that joined us during the pandemic. Because of this, we signed long-term leases on two offices in brand new and state of the art buildings in Manchester and Frankfurt last year.
We are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion / performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42’s launch.
In Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.
We’re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too.
We are building long-term homes that will provide the facilities to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.
CitizenCon
Shows such as CitizenCon are huge undertakings that require lots of planning, and although life is slowly returning to normal, restrictions are only now just lifting. And as cases are still largely unpredictable, we see that planning big shows may still be a bit premature. The uncertainty surrounding resumed normality has impacted our ability to plan a physical show. Traditionally, we would already be deep in planning and execution for a CitizenCon today, if we were going to hold an event this October; however, we have not been able to do so yet. It does seem many of our peers in the industry are encountering similar conundrums, as E3 only recently canceled their physical show. In addition, Los Angeles, where we would hold this year’s show tends to be very cautious and is more apt to impose restrictions on large in-person gatherings in the event of a new variant blowing up.
Because of this, combined with the huge amount of work the company is trying to deliver this year, not to mention moving 70% of the company into two new offices, we have decided not to hold a physical CitizenCon this year. We very much hope that next year we will be able to commit to an in-person event as we miss the opportunity to mix in person with all of you and be invigorated by your enthusiasm and excitement.
At the same time though, we know we could not have come this far without our community, and we are grateful for each and every one of you that has supported us along this journey. It being our 10th anniversary as a company and a community, we are going to be celebrating virtually with a virtual CitizenCon, like we did last year.
One difference to last year is that there will be no keynote gameplay demo to headline this event as this would pull valuable resources away from our game development teams that are working hard to get Persistent Streaming, Gen 12/Vulkan and Server Meshing in your hands, not to mention also delivering more of the content and gameplay that has proven so successful in bringing in new players and retaining old and new users alike.
Instead, CitizenCon will be a celebration of you, the community, with presentations and panels from our developers, to share with you the progress we are making and the near future of what you can expect from Star Citizen in the year ahead. And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we’re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.
Bar Citizen World Tour
It has been more than 2 years since we have had the opportunity to spend time with all of you in person, and while we will not be together for CitizenCon, we cannot hold out another year! For that reason, we plan to kick off a robust “Bar Citizen World Tour” this Summer, perfectly coinciding with the in-lore holiday, First Contact Day (Definitely read up on the backstory to see why this fits so nicely!). We would also like to take this perfect opportunity to coin a new out-of-game annual holiday: International Bar Citizen Day. We will celebrate this inaugural new holiday by hosting Bar Citizen events simultaneously near all our development studios in mid-June, details on the when/where coming very soon.
After that, we plan to branch out and bring the fun to events that may not be as close to our studios. Our Community Team is planning to embrace Bar Citizens around the globe with renewed vigor, bringing goodies and developers with them to greet and mingle with all of you as part of the celebration of our 10th anniversary.
Keep a close eye on Spectrum in the weeks to come, as the team will begin exploring which Bar Citizen events to attend. So, if you are hosting your own event, we want to hear from you.
Final Thoughts
While some of you will no doubt be disappointed to hear the news about no physical show and no keynote demo at CitizenCon, the team and I felt it was much more important that we focus on making development progress so that we could maintain the pace of delivery we have been hitting since Alpha 3.14.
This year is a big one for all of us on Star Citizen: You can expect to see Invictus Launch Week moving into the clouds of Crusader, the promise of Persistent Entity Streaming making its way to the ‘verse, as well as big game-changing features like Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, new events and missions, enhancements to Jumptown, ships I know you’re waiting on like the Corsair, Vulture, and Hull C; as well as more Quality of Life and New Player Onboarding improvements to make Star Citizen even more playable and welcoming than it is today. And that is without mentioning Pyro and Server Meshing, which we are aggressively working towards letting you test by end of year, pending how difficult it is to get Persistent Entity Streaming stable. We think you would all rather be playing this new content than hearing about it. So, we will use our time this year to focus on development and delivering to you the tech, features, and content you are waiting for.
The developers at CIG tend to get a lot of attention, which is well deserved as it is the most talented development team I have ever worked with. But there are a lot more people beyond development at CIG - as they say, “it takes a village”!
Without our Publishing and Live-Ops team the servers would not be up 24/7 in the cloud, and you would not be able to download or play Star Citizen. Without our Quality Assurance teams tireless testing and feedback Star Citizen would be unplayable. Without the backend and web teams at Turbulent, you would not be able to log on, have a website to read news and information or a forum to participate in healthy debate on, pledge or launch Star Citizen. Without our Studio Experience Team looking after the health of our organization, there would not be a creative environment as ambitious as Star Citizen. Without our Finance and Legal teams, we could not have built a company as unique and groundbreaking as CIG. Without our Marketing and Community teams, there would not be any communication about our plans, no dazzling trailers to tease and excite about future content, and no real back and forth between the Community and CIG. Without our Customer Support and Player Experience Teams, you would not get the help you need, nor have the ability to give feedback on gameplay in a way it can be quantified. Without our IT department we would not be able to work together, whether in the office or from home, nor would we be able to compile code or create beautiful assets. Without our People department, there would be nobody that is there to hire, listen, guide and help our staff.
And without all of you, with your enthusiasm and patience, there would be no Star Citizen, Squadron 42 or Cloud Imperium Games.
As we move closer to achieving the critical milestones outlined above, we cannot help but feel an immense amount of appreciation for each and every one of you who shares in the collective dream of Star Citizen. The path ahead is more vibrant than ever, but in some ways the collective journey together, the moments and fun that people have along the way as we build Star Citizen together is as rewarding as the ultimate destination.
And that is what makes this game and community special.
From all of us at Cloud Imperium, we will see you at Bar Citizen, Digital CitizenCon and in the PTU!
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05/18/2022 - 1:00 PM
Year in Review
“Don’t drive Angry!”
Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day 1993
In some ways last year felt like we were stuck just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day repeating the same cycles as 2020; just when we thought we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants emerged to send cases skyrocketing again and communities back into lockdown and other safety measures. The world grew increasingly weary and fatigued from the toll of both the pandemic and the necessary measures to keep people as safe as possible. And even as a large part of the world is starting to return to normal, the specter of a new potential variant that can evade the vaccines and is more transmissible haunts us. Hopefully with readily available vaccines in most countries and a certain degree of built-in protection from prior infections, COVID will continue to transition to an endemic disease, something that certainly is not great, but not nearly as deadly as before, a virus that we can get on with our lives and live with just like the common Flu or Cold.
Because of the ups and downs of last year, we are only just starting to get back to the office. The first studio where it became possible to start working together in person, at any scale, was our UK studio in Manchester, where I have been spending a lot of time since last fall. I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure. Our offices in Frankfurt, Austin, and Los Angeles are only just starting to return to the office now that the local authorities have deemed it safe enough to lift various requirements. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we were proud of how we transitioned seamlessly to a work-from-home environment, but as the situation dragged on, it became clear that we were missing the benefits of spontaneous collaboration and team building that come from working in person, near each other. The time I have spent with the Squadron team in the UK has only reinforced this, as the ability to walk over to someone’s desk and see the issue or having a conversation in passing about a problem or a creative thought, makes an enormous difference to progress. When everyone is working remotely it becomes more of a slog to problem solve on the fly, or easily get or give feedback, and you end up with far more meetings / video calls. In our internal tracking we found that we had six times as many meetings when everyone was working from home than when we were in the office. I personally felt the difference in our release cadence; it took us a little longer to get each patch out than before, and it became harder to solve or fix bugs which hung around longer than previously. I have also seen the trend in the industry as a whole, with pretty much any large title being delayed, or in some unfortunate cases released before they should have been. For this reason, despite our ability to work fully remote, we are focused on getting people back together, working with each other side by side for extended periods. Going back to the office does not mean a return to the old work patterns and policies, as the extended lockdowns, combined with working remotely for two years has given us new insights into work life balance for our staff. We have altered our global work policy to allow for flexi-hours and a hybrid of in person and work from home, depending on both an employee’s and manager’s needs, with emphasis on being cognizant of our employees’ life situations.
Despite the challenges of the last year, I am proud of how much we accomplished in 2021. In fact, looking back at the year in review, I am amazed at the amount of content and features we delivered to our players. In January of last year, the community was able to play the first iteration of the XenoThreat Incursion, our first dynamic event that players praised for bringing together the pieces of Star Citizen for a thrilling server-wide encounter. While only our first iteration, this event already showed glimpses of the full promise of the Persistent Universe. In April of 2021, we released Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy and delivered drive-in caves and sinkholes, planet tech improvements, ship-to-station docking, and more. With Invictus Launch Week, we opened the doors of the Javelin for the first time to let people take a walking tour of the mighty UEE destroyer, and brought the Bengal into orbit to showcase our biggest capital ship yet in the ’verse.
However, we really started to hit our stride in the second half of 2021 with the release of Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, when we finished the Stanton system by launching the gas giant Crusader and the landing zone of Orison. Accompanying that were a host of Quality of Life improvements and our first iteration of Volumetric Clouds.
Then, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences, we introduced v0 of our Medical Gameplay, Looting, Bombing, and Personal Inventory, just to name a few new features. Coupled with our continuing improvements in performance and stability, and the drastic reduction in server crashes (which usually manifest themselves to a user as the infamous 30K error; connection lost to the server), Star Citizen the game was finally starting to come together in a way it had never done before.
And as great as our 2020 year was in terms of engagement and sentiment, the back half of 2021 was at another level. We saw more people than ever before flocking to Star Citizen, carried in on waves of good will and excitement from current players asking their friends to join, and from complete newcomers awed by the spectacle of Crusader, the gameplay of XenoThreat, and the opportunities from new features like Personal Inventory and Looting. And to cap off the year, when we launched Alpha 3.16: Return to Jumptown, veteran players returned to see our fresh, new take on the classic Jumptown emergent battlegrounds and were amazed at just how far the game had progressed.
Our wins in 2021 set us up for an absolutely historic start to 2022. So far, we have blown past all our projections on new players joining the ‘verse. In fact, this year, we have more than doubled our rate of New User acquisition, and with the recent launch of Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, we are seeing over two thousand new players a day joining the ‘verse. Our DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by over 50% since the numbers I shared in my last Letter from the Chairman in December 2020, and with this latest patch, we are enjoying double the daily login traffic of our last April patch launch. We are enjoying MAU (Monthly Active Users) which is well beyond the highs of 2020. And we have had nearly 1 million New Accounts created since then, and more than half a million New Pledging Players join the game. And this week, we had our 2 millionth unique player log in to play Star Citizen. We are on track this year to break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins this year, and more than 0 million in lifetime revenue.
All of this is due to the incredible support we receive from you combined with the progress we have been making in Star Citizen, which brings new curious gamers into the ‘verse. It is heartening to see the feedback and impressions from newer members of the community when they first start playing Star Citizen.
For all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance… that becomes another planet, that you can enter it’s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.
Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.
Many that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.
THANK YOU!
Road to 4.0
Back in December 2017, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 was published to the live servers after a unified push from our developers around the globe. This monumental patch introduced our brand new procedural planetary technology and the first planetary bodies you could land on and go anywhere across the surface of the three moons of Crusader. It also included a new mission system, improved shopping, new cargo mechanics, and doubled our server player cap. To date Star Citizen 3.0 was probably the biggest incremental jump in gameplay and content, which is why we incremented the Alpha designation from 2.X to 3.X, and it was a whole eight months between 2.6.3 and 3.0.
This year, we find ourselves on a similar path with three huge technology initiatives that will fundamentally change the experience and immersion into Star Citizen. The first of these is what we are calling Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) which is the foundational tech that enables Server Meshing (SM). PES is the hardest part of the work needed for SM and is the one that has required the most engineering. It fundamentally changes how we record state in the Universe and delivers a level of persistence that you just don’t see in other games, whether they are MMOs or even single-player experiences. Up until now, all persistence in the game has been tied to a player’s inventory; ships you own or items you hold physically or in the virtual inventories of items you own. If you’ve physically attached an item inside your vehicle, say a rifle to a weapons rack, when you log out or stow the vehicle it will remember all the attached items and anything in that vehicle’s virtual inventory. However, if you drop or place something loosely, even inside a ship you own, it won’t be associated with any player inventory. So, when you log out (or if the server crashes), the item will not be there when logging on or re-joining. With PES we are recording the state of every dynamic object in the game, irrelevant of whether it is “owned” or held by a player. That means that you could drop a gun or a med pen in a forested area on Microtech and return several days later after logging out to find the gun or med pen still there (assuming another player didn’t grab them!).
The technology to do this at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering. We have been working towards this since 2019 when we debuted Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS), which allows a server to only stream in and simulate only a portion of our universe, which is necessary if you are going to have multiple servers simulate different parts of the universe.
The development has not been without road bumps; we had to change our plans for how we would persist the state of the universe when we realized that the backend relational database we were planning on using with a host of services, which we had collectively dubbed “iCache” would likely not be able to have low latency at the scale we needed for the number of concurrent players we will need to support in the future. We pivoted to using a Graph database at the start of 2021, taking a different approach to the services and cache which we outlined in a virtual presentation during last year’s CitizenCon. The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe. The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players. For PES to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services. For Server Meshing, only 4 more services are currently planned, so you can see just how much foundational tech for SM is in PES. As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication. The nice aspect of using tech like this is that it is designed to scale (just imagine how many concurrent users Google must handle) and there are lots of available third-party tools and code, compared to creating an internal custom protocol.
All this means that getting Persistent Entity Streaming to work would require the bulk of the tech we need to make Server Meshing viable. I am happy to report after 16 months of extremely focused work by 18 engineers, 3 dedicated QA, and 4 producers spread between CIG and Turbulent (who are managing the back-end data base in the cloud and its related services) that the team were able to demonstrate Persistent Entity Streaming working last week in our weekly internal Persistent Universe Update meeting.
Paul Reindell, Our Director of Engineering for Online Tech, spun up a server, populated the Entity Graph to its initial state along with the Replication Layer (which is essentially an in memory cache for the universe state/backend database that exists in the cloud to make sure read/writes to the database do not bottleneck servers and clients), then connected a client, placed down a series of small objects like cans on the surface of Aberdeen, along with an 890 Jump and an Anvil Arrow. He then killed the server and the client. The server was restarted, we did not populate the Entity Graph (as it had been previously seeded on the initial startup), and then connected a client, warped to Aberdeen and everything was there as he placed it. This was a huge milestone as the state of the universe was recorded to the backend database and then when he restarted the server it just connected to the Replication Layer, which had initialized itself from the database (the Entity Graph) and continued with the universe at the state he left it.
That may not sound revolutionary to some of you, but I can tell you it was akin to Neil Armstrong taking “one small step.” Once Persistent Entity Streaming comes online, Star Citizen will be a different universe. Full persistence will provide over the coming years an experience in gaming that most other online games do not provide; a universe you can escape to, that is affected by your and other players’ actions, with the state being dynamic and persistent. Crash land on a planet, and your shipwreck will persist, while you forage for food and water to survive, and perhaps wood to make a fire to keep warm. log off and come back to what you built. Or, perhaps once you have been rescued, another player will stumble on the wreck of your old ship and the long-extinguished campfire. Find a corner of the galaxy to make your own, collect resources and import material to build your outpost, decorate or arrange your hangar or home how you like.
With this tech in place, Server Meshing becomes possible, as the Replication Layer/Entity Graph is the universe state that clients and servers write and read from. Because we have decoupled state from simulation, this allows us to have many Server Nodes all communicating with the Replication Layer, responsible for simulation of focused areas in the Universe, which allows us to scale our ability to simulate the overall universe, as a server is no longer responsible for every non-player entity, regardless of location or number. This means that instead of a server dropping to five frames per second due to simulation load, we can just spin up another, and then another to spread the simulation load and keep the update tick rate high. This is the ultimate goal of Dynamic Server Meshing and what we are working towards.
Now, a fundamental change to how state is recorded, especially one that affects every dynamic object, not just a select few, is going to have a lot of edge cases and issues we have not come across yet or foreseen.
2022 TESTING AND RELEASE CADENCE
Because of this, we are going to be approaching 3.18 differently than our previous releases. We are anticipating that 3.18 will require a much longer time in the Evocati/PTU phase than our previous releases, due to the fundamental change in how the game tracks state. We know we will also need testing at scale, as in our experience we see different issues when we go from internal testing to Evocati to PTU wave 1, then wave 2 and so on. Players do crazy things, and lots of players creates lots of crazy cases we had not considered, which expose bugs and edge cases. Our guess is that it may be as long as three months in the PTU stage, but it is hard to predict. For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage’s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!
As it did not make much sense to engineer the revamped physical Cargo system and Salvage for the old system, these two features have been engineered for PES (you want wrecks from player battles to stick around so you can salvage!) and will arrive with 3.18.
However, we do not want engagement and content to stall because of PES requiring longer testing, so we are planning to release a content-rich Alpha 3.17.2 patch with known stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay in late June. The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.
The goal will then be to get 2-3 months of testing on 3.18 in PTU for an Alpha 3.18 release to LIVE in late Q3. I know many of you have been waiting for Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, and Persistent Entity Streaming for a long time, and I am excited to see us in the home stretch to finally bring it to you. I think 3.18 will be an amazing update that is an even bigger game-changer than 3.15 was, but we want to make sure we give it the proper time to test so we can deliver it to you at the best quality possible.
Alongside our Persistent Streaming work the Engine and Graphic teams have been making great progress on the second big technical initiative we’ve been working on the past two years; a complete replacement of our graphics engine with what we call “Gen 12”, which is multithreaded and much more efficient approach to rendering which gets the most out of modern graphics APIs like Vulkan. This allows us to utilize the modern graphics power of PCs more efficiently and not tie up the main game update loop with waiting around for draw call submissions and the like. We are looking at getting the bulk of this functionality in for the Live release of 3.18 with the release of the Vulkan functionality a little later, but hopefully by the end of the year.
This leaves us with our third large technical initiative, Server Meshing.
As you might have guessed, we will approach Server Meshing in much the same way that we are rolling out Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be a truly new era in Star Citizen. It will mean our final tech building block – Server Meshing – will have been delivered. The first implementation will be what we call Static Server Meshing (SSM), where each server is given a defined area to simulate, but as soon as SSM is stable we will move towards Dynamic Server Meshing with subsequent releases which will allow much more scalability as servers will not be bound by location, but instead will be distributed by load, allowing for much better simulation performance in any given area of the universe.
With 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the ‘verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.
Our current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well / easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.
This special 2022 release cadence will not be particularly unusual to most players, if you pull back and look at it in a broad sense. We will still have 4 big end-of-quarter releases, as well as 2 big mid-quarter releases for Fleet Week in May and IAE in November. Players who are not steeped in our development process will still enjoy and experience rapid content releases every quarter, and as we get into the second half of 2022, you will see a lot more meaningful gameplay making its way into the ‘verse. With another run of XenoThreat, updates to Jumptown, new Dynamic Events, additional locations and points of interest to explore, and more patch updates, there will be no shortage of gameplay and content to experience. And by year’s end, players will be able to enjoy Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo refactor, and Bounty Hunter v2 gameplay on Live.
Meanwhile, those who are following our development closest, and providing the critical service of helping us test our biggest tech, will be able to get their hands on Persistent Streaming and Server Meshing this year, as we put them into test in 3.18 and 4.0 in PTU during the summer and winter, respectively. Sometimes, the wait can be the hardest when we are closest to the finish line, but this year, I am so excited to share our release plans for our key tech building blocks, and I know many of you cannot wait to jump into PTU and start testing later this year.
Building for Longevity
It is easy to only focus on our development progress and the work we have ahead in building Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but there is another very important element of our journey that is often overlooked. Not only are we building two hugely ambitious games to rival anything released by the biggest AAA studios, but we’ve had to build the company to build the technology and make the games from scratch at the same time.
The day I stepped out on the stage at GDC, we had no formal employees, three founders in Ortwin, Sandi and myself, and a handful of people that had helped like Forrest Stephan, David Haddock and David Swofford, sometimes moonlighting from their day job (with permission of course) like Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy and Paul Reindell and a few friends from my old Origin and Digital Anvil days like Sergio Rosas and his CGBot art outsourcing company, to create the demo and build the website.
Today we have 780 people on staff, plus an extended family of over 130 working closely with us at Turbulent in Montreal, with many more that will join us in the coming months. We have a seven-person Global Talent Acquisition team that focuses exclusively on trying to hire the best talent possible for CIG. To give you an idea of the scale of TA work, they helped us hire 168 people in 2021, and so far, this year have helped us recruit 128 people already.
In 2022, we will continue to grow in all departments, increasing our headcount to approximately 840 and bring us closer to release for Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
One challenge we have been facing is that we have nowhere near enough room at several of our studios for new hires that joined us during the pandemic. Because of this, we signed long-term leases on two offices in brand new and state of the art buildings in Manchester and Frankfurt last year.
We are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion / performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42’s launch.
In Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.
We’re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too.
We are building long-term homes that will provide the facilities to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.
CitizenCon
Shows such as CitizenCon are huge undertakings that require lots of planning, and although life is slowly returning to normal, restrictions are only now just lifting. And as cases are still largely unpredictable, we see that planning big shows may still be a bit premature. The uncertainty surrounding resumed normality has impacted our ability to plan a physical show. Traditionally, we would already be deep in planning and execution for a CitizenCon today, if we were going to hold an event this October; however, we have not been able to do so yet. It does seem many of our peers in the industry are encountering similar conundrums, as E3 only recently canceled their physical show. In addition, Los Angeles, where we would hold this year’s show tends to be very cautious and is more apt to impose restrictions on large in-person gatherings in the event of a new variant blowing up.
Because of this, combined with the huge amount of work the company is trying to deliver this year, not to mention moving 70% of the company into two new offices, we have decided not to hold a physical CitizenCon this year. We very much hope that next year we will be able to commit to an in-person event as we miss the opportunity to mix in person with all of you and be invigorated by your enthusiasm and excitement.
At the same time though, we know we could not have come this far without our community, and we are grateful for each and every one of you that has supported us along this journey. It being our 10th anniversary as a company and a community, we are going to be celebrating virtually with a virtual CitizenCon, like we did last year.
One difference to last year is that there will be no keynote gameplay demo to headline this event as this would pull valuable resources away from our game development teams that are working hard to get Persistent Streaming, Gen 12/Vulkan and Server Meshing in your hands, not to mention also delivering more of the content and gameplay that has proven so successful in bringing in new players and retaining old and new users alike.
Instead, CitizenCon will be a celebration of you, the community, with presentations and panels from our developers, to share with you the progress we are making and the near future of what you can expect from Star Citizen in the year ahead. And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we’re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.
Bar Citizen World Tour
It has been more than 2 years since we have had the opportunity to spend time with all of you in person, and while we will not be together for CitizenCon, we cannot hold out another year! For that reason, we plan to kick off a robust “Bar Citizen World Tour” this Summer, perfectly coinciding with the in-lore holiday, First Contact Day (Definitely read up on the backstory to see why this fits so nicely!). We would also like to take this perfect opportunity to coin a new out-of-game annual holiday: International Bar Citizen Day. We will celebrate this inaugural new holiday by hosting Bar Citizen events simultaneously near all our development studios in mid-June, details on the when/where coming very soon.
After that, we plan to branch out and bring the fun to events that may not be as close to our studios. Our Community Team is planning to embrace Bar Citizens around the globe with renewed vigor, bringing goodies and developers with them to greet and mingle with all of you as part of the celebration of our 10th anniversary.
Keep a close eye on Spectrum in the weeks to come, as the team will begin exploring which Bar Citizen events to attend. So, if you are hosting your own event, we want to hear from you.
Final Thoughts
While some of you will no doubt be disappointed to hear the news about no physical show and no keynote demo at CitizenCon, the team and I felt it was much more important that we focus on making development progress so that we could maintain the pace of delivery we have been hitting since Alpha 3.14.
This year is a big one for all of us on Star Citizen: You can expect to see Invictus Launch Week moving into the clouds of Crusader, the promise of Persistent Entity Streaming making its way to the ‘verse, as well as big game-changing features like Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, new events and missions, enhancements to Jumptown, ships I know you’re waiting on like the Corsair, Vulture, and Hull C; as well as more Quality of Life and New Player Onboarding improvements to make Star Citizen even more playable and welcoming than it is today. And that is without mentioning Pyro and Server Meshing, which we are aggressively working towards letting you test by end of year, pending how difficult it is to get Persistent Entity Streaming stable. We think you would all rather be playing this new content than hearing about it. So, we will use our time this year to focus on development and delivering to you the tech, features, and content you are waiting for.
The developers at CIG tend to get a lot of attention, which is well deserved as it is the most talented development team I have ever worked with. But there are a lot more people beyond development at CIG - as they say, “it takes a village”!
Without our Publishing and Live-Ops team the servers would not be up 24/7 in the cloud, and you would not be able to download or play Star Citizen. Without our Quality Assurance teams tireless testing and feedback Star Citizen would be unplayable. Without the backend and web teams at Turbulent, you would not be able to log on, have a website to read news and information or a forum to participate in healthy debate on, pledge or launch Star Citizen. Without our Studio Experience Team looking after the health of our organization, there would not be a creative environment as ambitious as Star Citizen. Without our Finance and Legal teams, we could not have built a company as unique and groundbreaking as CIG. Without our Marketing and Community teams, there would not be any communication about our plans, no dazzling trailers to tease and excite about future content, and no real back and forth between the Community and CIG. Without our Customer Support and Player Experience Teams, you would not get the help you need, nor have the ability to give feedback on gameplay in a way it can be quantified. Without our IT department we would not be able to work together, whether in the office or from home, nor would we be able to compile code or create beautiful assets. Without our People department, there would be nobody that is there to hire, listen, guide and help our staff.
And without all of you, with your enthusiasm and patience, there would be no Star Citizen, Squadron 42 or Cloud Imperium Games.
As we move closer to achieving the critical milestones outlined above, we cannot help but feel an immense amount of appreciation for each and every one of you who shares in the collective dream of Star Citizen. The path ahead is more vibrant than ever, but in some ways the collective journey together, the moments and fun that people have along the way as we build Star Citizen together is as rewarding as the ultimate destination.
And that is what makes this game and community special.
From all of us at Cloud Imperium, we will see you at Bar Citizen, Digital CitizenCon and in the PTU!
5.0 explorersLong-rangeMaterialism cargo health devoid of selfOrdnanceClose-rangeEvolving greedOps bridge align us withMissionsSilicon Origin 300 develop gridPainInhabitedQuantum leap
Brief des Vorsitzenden
18.05.2022 - 13:00 UHR
Das Jahr im Rückblick
"Fahr nicht wütend!"
Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Murmeltiertag 1993
In gewisser Weise fühlte sich das vergangene Jahr so an, als würden wir wie Bill Murray in Murmeltiertag feststecken und dieselben Zyklen wie 2020 wiederholen. Gerade als wir dachten, wir sähen Licht am Ende des Tunnels mit der COVID-19-Pandemie, tauchten neue Varianten auf, die die Fälle wieder in die Höhe schnellen ließen und die Gemeinden wieder zu Abriegelungen und anderen Sicherheitsmaßnahmen zwangen. Die Welt wurde zunehmend müde und erschöpft von den Auswirkungen der Pandemie und den notwendigen Maßnahmen, um die Menschen so sicher wie möglich zu halten. Und selbst wenn ein großer Teil der Welt zur Normalität zurückkehrt, verfolgt uns das Schreckgespenst einer neuen potenziellen Variante, die sich den Impfstoffen entziehen kann und leichter übertragbar ist. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass sich COVID dank der in den meisten Ländern leicht verfügbaren Impfstoffe und eines gewissen Schutzes vor früheren Infektionen zu einer endemischen Krankheit entwickelt, die zwar nicht toll, aber auch nicht mehr so tödlich ist wie früher - ein Virus, mit dem wir weiterleben können wie mit einer gewöhnlichen Grippe oder Erkältung.
Wegen der Höhen und Tiefen des letzten Jahres fangen wir gerade erst an, wieder ins Büro zu gehen. Das erste Studio, in dem es möglich wurde, persönlich zusammenzuarbeiten, war unser britisches Studio in Manchester, wo ich seit letztem Herbst viel Zeit verbracht habe. Ich habe mit dem Team von Squadron 42 Seite an Seite im Büro gearbeitet, während wir uns auf die Fertigstellung und den Feinschliff der Inhalte und Funktionen dieses epischen erzählerischen Abenteuers konzentrieren. Unsere Büros in Frankfurt, Austin und Los Angeles kehren gerade erst ins Büro zurück, nachdem die örtlichen Behörden es für sicher genug befunden haben, verschiedene Auflagen aufzuheben. Zu Beginn der Pandemie waren wir stolz darauf, dass wir nahtlos von zu Hause aus arbeiten konnten, aber als sich die Situation hinzog, wurde uns klar, dass wir die Vorteile der spontanen Zusammenarbeit und der Teambildung vermissen, die sich aus der Arbeit in der Nähe ergeben. Die Zeit, die ich mit dem Squadron-Team in Großbritannien verbracht habe, hat dies nur noch verstärkt, denn die Möglichkeit, zum Schreibtisch von jemandem zu gehen und das Problem zu sehen oder ein Gespräch im Vorbeigehen über ein Problem oder einen kreativen Gedanken zu führen, macht einen enormen Unterschied für den Fortschritt. Wenn alle Mitarbeiter/innen aus der Ferne arbeiten, wird es immer schwieriger, Probleme spontan zu lösen oder Feedback zu erhalten oder zu geben, und es gibt viel mehr Meetings und Videogespräche. Wir haben festgestellt, dass wir sechsmal so viele Meetings hatten, wenn alle von zu Hause aus arbeiteten, als wenn wir im Büro waren. Ich persönlich habe den Unterschied in unserer Release-Kadenz gespürt; wir brauchten etwas länger, um jeden Patch herauszubringen, und es wurde schwieriger, Fehler zu lösen oder zu beheben, die länger als früher herumstanden. Ich habe auch den Trend in der gesamten Branche beobachtet, dass so ziemlich jeder große Titel verspätet oder in einigen unglücklichen Fällen sogar früher als geplant veröffentlicht wird. Aus diesem Grund konzentrieren wir uns trotz der Möglichkeit, vollständig remote zu arbeiten, darauf, die Leute wieder zusammenzubringen und für längere Zeit Seite an Seite zu arbeiten. Die Rückkehr ins Büro bedeutet nicht, dass wir zu den alten Arbeitsmustern und -richtlinien zurückkehren, denn die verlängerten Schließungen in Kombination mit der zweijährigen Fernarbeit haben uns neue Erkenntnisse über die Work-Life-Balance unserer Mitarbeiter/innen gebracht. Wir haben unsere globalen Arbeitsrichtlinien dahingehend geändert, dass wir flexible Arbeitszeiten und eine Mischung aus persönlicher Anwesenheit und Arbeit von zu Hause aus zulassen, je nach den Bedürfnissen des Mitarbeiters und des Vorgesetzten, wobei wir die Lebenssituationen unserer Mitarbeiter berücksichtigen.
Trotz der Herausforderungen des letzten Jahres bin ich stolz darauf, wie viel wir im Jahr 2021 erreicht haben. Wenn ich auf das vergangene Jahr zurückblicke, bin ich erstaunt über die Menge an Inhalten und Funktionen, die wir für unsere Spieler/innen bereitgestellt haben. Im Januar letzten Jahres konnte die Community die erste Iteration des XenoThreat Incursion spielen, unser erstes dynamisches Event, das von den Spielern dafür gelobt wurde, dass es die Teile von Star Citizen zu einer spannenden serverweiten Begegnung zusammenführt. Obwohl es nur die erste Version war, zeigte dieses Event bereits, was das Persistent Universe alles zu bieten hat. Im April 2021 haben wir Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy veröffentlicht und damit Höhlen und Dolinen, Verbesserungen der Planetentechnologie, Andocken von Schiffen an Stationen und vieles mehr eingeführt. In der Invictus Launch Week öffneten wir zum ersten Mal die Türen der Javelin, um den mächtigen UEE-Zerstörer zu besichtigen, und brachten die Bengal in den Orbit, um unser bisher größtes Raumschiff im Universum zu präsentieren.
So richtig in Fahrt kamen wir aber erst in der zweiten Hälfte des Jahres 2021 mit der Veröffentlichung von Alpha 3.14: Willkommen in Orison, als wir das Stanton-System mit dem Start des Gasriesen Crusader und der Landezone von Orison abschlossen. Damit einher gingen eine Reihe von Verbesserungen der Lebensqualität und unsere erste Version der volumetrischen Wolken.
Mit der Alpha 3.15: Tödliche Konsequenzen haben wir dann die Version 0 unseres medizinischen Gameplays, des Plünderns, des Bombardierens und des persönlichen Inventars eingeführt, um nur einige der neuen Funktionen zu nennen. Zusammen mit den kontinuierlichen Verbesserungen bei Leistung und Stabilität und dem drastischen Rückgang der Serverabstürze (die sich normalerweise als der berüchtigte 30K-Fehler äußern, d.h. die Verbindung zum Server wurde unterbrochen), begann das Spiel Star Citizen endlich auf eine Weise zusammenzuwachsen, wie es noch nie zuvor der Fall war.
Und so großartig unser Jahr 2020 in Bezug auf Engagement und Stimmung auch war, die zweite Hälfte des Jahres 2021 war auf einem anderen Niveau. Wir sahen, wie mehr Leute als je zuvor zu Star Citizen strömten, getragen von einer Welle des guten Willens und der Begeisterung von aktuellen Spielern, die ihre Freunde zum Mitmachen aufforderten, und von Neulingen, die von dem Spektakel von Crusader, dem Gameplay von XenoThreat und den Möglichkeiten der neuen Features wie Personal Inventory und Looting begeistert waren. Und zum Abschluss des Jahres, als wir die Alpha 3.16: Rückkehr nach Jumptown starteten, kehrten altgediente Spieler zurück, um unsere frische, neue Version der klassischen Jumptown-Schlachtfelder zu sehen und waren erstaunt, wie weit sich das Spiel entwickelt hatte.
Unsere Siege im Jahr 2021 haben uns einen absolut historischen Start ins Jahr 2022 beschert. Bis jetzt haben wir alle unsere Prognosen über neue Spieler, die dem Verse beitreten, übertroffen. In diesem Jahr haben wir die Zahl der neuen Spieler sogar mehr als verdoppelt und mit der kürzlich veröffentlichten Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes kommen täglich über zweitausend neue Spieler ins Spiel. Unsere DAU (Daily Active Users) ist seit den Zahlen, die ich in meinem letzten Brief des Vorsitzenden im Dezember 2020 genannt habe, um mehr als 50 % gestiegen, und mit dem neuesten Patch haben wir doppelt so viele tägliche Logins wie bei der Einführung des letzten Patches im April. Die Anzahl der monatlich aktiven Nutzer/innen (MAU) liegt weit über den Höchstwerten von 2020. Seitdem haben wir fast 1 Million neue Accounts erstellt und mehr als eine halbe Million neue Spieler/innen haben sich dem Spiel angeschlossen. Und diese Woche hat sich der 2-millionste Spieler bei Star Citizen angemeldet. Wir sind auf dem besten Weg, in diesem Jahr die Marke von 4 Millionen Gesamtkonten, über 1 Million Logins und mehr als 500 Millionen Dollar Umsatz zu erreichen.
All das verdanken wir der unglaublichen Unterstützung, die wir von euch erhalten, und den Fortschritten, die wir in Star Citizen gemacht haben und die neue neugierige Spieler in das Verse bringen. Es ist ermutigend, das Feedback und die Eindrücke von neueren Mitgliedern der Community zu sehen, wenn sie zum ersten Mal Star Citizen spielen.
Für all diejenigen unter uns, die von Anfang an dabei sind, ist es leicht, viele der Funktionen von Star Citizen als selbstverständlich anzusehen, die kein anderes Spiel hat. Schließlich kennen wir alle alle Funktionen, ihre Fehler und vor allem, was nicht gemacht wird, so dass es leicht sein kann, sich auf die halb leere Tasse zu konzentrieren, anstatt auf die volle. Aber welches andere Spiel hat die Kombination aus Umfang und Detailreichtum; die Fähigkeit, nahtlos von einem Fußmarsch zu einem vollständig realisierten Schiff zu wechseln, mit funktionierenden Komponenten und einem bewohnbaren Innenraum, in dem du dich bewegen kannst, zu einem funkelnden Lichtpunkt am Himmel zu starten, durch die Wolken in die Schwärze des Weltraums aufzusteigen, nur um von einer Gruppe von Piraten abgefangen zu werden, die deine Fracht von dir befreien wollen, sie in einem heftigen Luftkampf zu besiegen und deine Reise zu dem funkelnden Licht in der Ferne fortzusetzen... das sich in einen anderen Planeten verwandelt, auf dem du in die Atmosphäre eindringen und landen kannst, deine Rampe herunterlässt und in eine belebte Stadt oder an ein wunderschönes, von Bäumen umgebenes Flussufer fliegst, um eine außerirdische Frucht zu ernten? Und das alles ohne Ladebildschirm und in unglaublicher Detailtreue in der ersten oder dritten Person? Es gibt andere Spiele, die einige dieser Elemente haben, aber keines, das alles so detailgetreu darstellt, wie Star Citizen es tut.
Manchmal ist es gar nicht so schlecht, zurückzublicken und zu erkennen, wie weit wir gekommen sind. Wir werden oft wegen unserer Zeitpläne kritisiert, vor allem, wenn es um die ursprüngliche Crowdfunding-Kampagne geht, aber das Spiel, das heute gebaut wird, ist ein ganz anderes, viel umfangreicheres und immersiveres Spiel als das, das ich vor fast zehn Jahren vorgeschlagen habe. Damals gab es noch keine vollständig realisierten Planeten, die mit unglaublichen Details gerendert waren und auf denen du dich überall hinbegeben konntest; Planeten waren nur besuchbar, wenn sie einen gebastelten Landeplatz hatten, und selbst dann gab es eine Debatte darüber, ob sie in der Ego-Perspektive erkundet werden konnten oder ob sie eher wie die Landezonen in Freelancer und Privateer sein würden, wo du zwischen ein paar Orten hin- und herklicken konntest, um Waren zu kaufen oder zu verkaufen oder in einer Bar Missionen zu erledigen. Es gab keine Vorstellung von einem First-Person-System, das so taktil und vollständig ist, wie wir es heute machen, und auch keine Fahrzeugsimulation mit physischen Komponenten und dem Grad an systemischer Funktionalität, den wir anstreben. Das Spiel, das wir heute entwickeln, ist ein Spiel, das vieles umfasst: Es ist ein Dogfighting-Spacesim, ein Ego-Shooter, ein Handelsspiel, ein Ressourcensammelspiel, ein Ressourcenmanagementspiel, ein Abenteuerspiel, ein Überlebensspiel und ein Gesellschaftsspiel. Star Citizen ist eine Weltraumsimulation. Es ist ein Spiel für alle, denn wie im richtigen Leben gibt es viele verschiedene Wege, die man gehen kann, und der Erfolg wird dadurch definiert, was dich glücklich macht. Willst du deine Fähigkeiten als furchterregender Kampfpilot unter Beweis stellen? Das Spiel bietet dir diese Möglichkeit, aber auch wenn du einfach nur in Ruhe Mineralien abbauen und dein Glück machen willst, in Landezonen abhängen oder eine Ecke der Galaxie finden willst, die noch niemand gefunden hat ... all das sind Optionen in der Sandbox, die Star Citizen ist. Um das richtig zu machen, in einem Umfang, der es Millionen von Menschen ermöglicht, gemeinsam zu spielen, braucht es Zeit und Geld. Mit deiner Unterstützung und Geduld sind wir in der Lage, ein Spiel zu entwickeln, das sich meiner Meinung nach kein anderer Publisher leisten könnte oder verrückt genug wäre, sich darauf einzulassen.
Viele, die Star Citizen finanziell unterstützt haben, interessieren sich nicht für Gewinne oder Quartalszahlen, sie wollen einfach nur das beste und größte Spiel, das ihre Erwartungen und Träume erfüllt. Das ist zwar keine kleine Aufgabe, aber für mich und alle anderen bei CIG ist es viel einfacher, uns dafür einzusetzen, denn es ist ein Privileg, auf diese Weise künstlerisch herausgefordert und finanziell unterstützt zu werden, und ich bin unheimlich dankbar, dass so viele Menschen so viel Vertrauen in uns alle setzen.
DANKE!
Der Weg zu 4.0
Im Dezember 2017 wurde die Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 auf den Live-Servern veröffentlicht, nachdem unsere Entwickler auf der ganzen Welt gemeinsam daran gearbeitet hatten. Dieser monumentale Patch führte unsere brandneue prozedurale Planetentechnologie und die ersten planetaren Körper ein, auf denen du landen und dich überall auf der Oberfläche der drei Monde von Crusader bewegen konntest. Außerdem enthielt er ein neues Missionssystem, verbesserte Einkaufsmöglichkeiten, neue Frachtmechanismen und verdoppelte die Spielerzahl auf dem Server. Bis heute war Star Citizen 3.0 wahrscheinlich der größte Sprung in Sachen Gameplay und Inhalt, weshalb wir die Alpha-Bezeichnung von 2.X auf 3.X erhöht haben, und zwischen 2.6.3 und 3.0 lagen ganze acht Monate.
Dieses Jahr befinden wir uns auf einem ähnlichen Weg mit drei großen technologischen Initiativen, die das Erlebnis und die Immersion in Star Citizen grundlegend verändern werden. Die erste davon ist das sogenannte Persistent Entity Streaming (PES), die grundlegende Technologie, die das Server Meshing (SM) ermöglicht. PES ist der schwierigste Teil der Arbeit, die für SM nötig ist, und derjenige, der am meisten Entwicklungsarbeit erfordert. Es verändert die Art und Weise, wie wir Zustände im Universum aufzeichnen, grundlegend und sorgt für einen Grad an Persistenz, den du in anderen Spielen, egal ob MMOs oder Einzelspieler-Erfahrungen, einfach nicht findest. Bisher war die gesamte Persistenz im Spiel an das Inventar des Spielers gebunden: an Schiffe, die du besitzt, an Gegenstände, die du physisch besitzt, oder an die virtuellen Inventare der Gegenstände, die du besitzt. Wenn du einen Gegenstand physisch in deinem Fahrzeug angebracht hast, z. B. ein Gewehr an einem Waffenträger, merkt sich das Fahrzeug alle angebrachten Gegenstände und alles, was sich im virtuellen Inventar des Fahrzeugs befindet, wenn du dich ausloggst oder das Fahrzeug verstaut hast. Wenn du jedoch etwas fallen lässt oder lose platzierst, selbst in einem Schiff, das dir gehört, wird es nicht mit dem Spielerinventar verknüpft. Wenn du dich also ausloggst (oder der Server abstürzt), ist der Gegenstand nicht mehr da, wenn du dich einloggst oder wieder einsteigst. Bei PES zeichnen wir den Zustand jedes dynamischen Objekts im Spiel auf, unabhängig davon, ob es einem Spieler "gehört" oder von ihm gehalten wird. Das bedeutet, dass du ein Gewehr oder einen Medipen in einem Waldgebiet auf Microtech fallen lassen könntest und einige Tage später, nachdem du dich ausgeloggt hast, zurückkehrst und das Gewehr oder den Medipen immer noch vorfindest (vorausgesetzt, ein anderer Spieler hat es sich nicht geschnappt!).
Die Technologie, um dies in einem so großen und detaillierten Universum wie dem unseren für Millionen von Spielern zu ermöglichen, ist keine kleine technische Meisterleistung. Wir haben seit 2019 darauf hingearbeitet, als wir das Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS) eingeführt haben, das es einem Server ermöglicht, nur einen Teil unseres Universums zu streamen und zu simulieren, was notwendig ist, wenn mehrere Server verschiedene Teile des Universums simulieren sollen.
Die Entwicklung verlief nicht ohne Hindernisse. Wir mussten unsere Pläne für die Speicherung des Zustands des Universums ändern, als wir feststellten, dass die relationale Datenbank, die wir mit einer Reihe von Diensten verwenden wollten und die wir "iCache" genannt hatten, wahrscheinlich nicht in der Lage sein würde, eine niedrige Latenzzeit in dem Umfang zu haben, wie wir sie für die Anzahl der gleichzeitigen Spieler, die wir in Zukunft unterstützen müssen, benötigen. Anfang 2021 sind wir auf eine Graph-Datenbank umgestiegen und haben einen anderen Ansatz für die Dienste und den Cache gewählt, den wir in einer virtuellen Präsentation auf der CitizenCon im letzten Jahr vorgestellt haben. Die aktuelle Architektur verwendet den sogenannten Replication Layer, einen skalierbaren Datencache, der den Zustand aller dynamischen Objekte im Universum verfolgt, in der Cloud läuft und mit der cloudbasierten Graphdatenbank kommuniziert, die wir Entity Graph nennen. Sie ist letztlich die letzte Instanz für den Zustand aller dynamischen Objekte in unserem Universum. Der Replikations-Layer, ein separater Dienst, der in seiner endgültigen Form mehrere Worker Nodes haben wird, die auf der Gleichzeitigkeit der Spieler basieren, ermöglicht es uns, den Zustand des Universums in Echtzeit zu verfolgen und zu kommunizieren. Dies ist besonders wichtig für die Skalierbarkeit, da die Kunden nicht auf die Simulation eines Servers warten müssen, um zu sehen, wie sich der Zustand um sie herum ändert, da sowohl die Kunden als auch die Server ihre Ergebnisse an die Replikationsschicht übermitteln, die dann an alle Kunden weitergegeben wird. Da der Replication Layer Service nicht simulieren muss, kann er den Clients Zustandsänderungen in einer festen Frequenz mitteilen und ist nicht an die Simulationszeit gebunden, was zu einer besseren Erfahrung für die Spieler/innen führen sollte. Damit PES funktioniert, müssen sowohl der Entity Graph als auch der Replication Layer funktionsfähig sein. Dies war die größte technische Herausforderung und erforderte eine grundlegende Überarbeitung der Art und Weise, wie das Spiel mit Befugnissen und Zustandsänderungen von Entitäten umgeht. Darüber hinaus wurden eine ganze Reihe neuer Online-Dienste benötigt, um den Replikations-Layer und den Entity Graph zu unterstützen. Um PES zu unterstützen, mussten wir 12 neue Dienste erstellen. Für Server Meshing sind derzeit nur 4 weitere Dienste geplant, woran du siehst, wie viel grundlegende Technologie für SM in PES steckt. In diesem Zusammenhang sind wir auf gRPC umgestiegen, ein von Google gesponsertes, skalierbares Datenprotokoll für die Online-Kommunikation. Das Gute an dieser Technologie ist, dass sie skalierbar ist (stell dir vor, wie viele gleichzeitige Nutzerinnen und Nutzer Google bewältigen muss) und dass es viele verfügbare Tools und Codes von Drittanbietern gibt, im Gegensatz zur Entwicklung eines eigenen Protokolls.
Damit Persistent Entity Streaming funktioniert, brauchen wir den Großteil der Technologie, die wir brauchen, um Server Meshing praktikabel zu machen. Ich freue mich, berichten zu können, dass das Team nach 16 Monaten extrem konzentrierter Arbeit von 18 Ingenieuren, 3 engagierten QA und 4 Produzenten, verteilt auf CIG und Turbulent (die die Backend-Datenbank in der Cloud und die dazugehörigen Dienste verwalten), letzte Woche in unserem wöchentlichen internen Persistent Universe Update Meeting zeigen konnte, dass Persistent Entity Streaming funktioniert.
Paul Reindell, unser Director of Engineering für Online Tech, startete einen Server, füllte den Entity Graph in seinen Anfangszustand und die Replikationsschicht (die im Wesentlichen ein Cache für den Zustand des Universums und der Backend-Datenbank in der Cloud ist, um sicherzustellen, dass Lese- und Schreibvorgänge in der Datenbank nicht zu Engpässen bei Servern und Clients führen), schloss einen Client an und platzierte eine Reihe von kleinen Objekten wie Dosen auf der Oberfläche von Aberdeen, zusammen mit einem 890 Jump und einem Anvil Arrow. Dann hat er den Server und den Client beendet. Der Server wurde neu gestartet, wir füllten den Entitätsgraphen nicht auf (da er beim ersten Start bereits gesetzt worden war), und dann schloss er einen Client an, warf einen Warp nach Aberdeen und alles war so, wie er es platziert hatte. Das war ein großer Meilenstein, denn der Zustand des Universums wurde in der Backend-Datenbank gespeichert. Als er dann den Server neu startete, verband er sich einfach mit dem Replication Layer, der sich selbst aus der Datenbank (dem Entity Graph) initialisiert hatte, und fuhr mit dem Universum in dem Zustand fort, in dem er es verlassen hatte.
Das mag für einige von euch nicht revolutionär klingen, aber ich kann euch sagen, dass es so war, als ob Neil Armstrong "einen kleinen Schritt" gemacht hätte. Sobald Persistent Entity Streaming online geht, wird Star Citizen ein anderes Universum sein. Die vollständige Persistenz wird in den kommenden Jahren eine Spielerfahrung ermöglichen, die die meisten anderen Online-Spiele nicht bieten: ein Universum, in das du flüchten kannst, das von deinen Handlungen und denen anderer Spieler beeinflusst wird und dessen Zustand dynamisch und persistent ist. Wenn du auf einem Planeten eine Bruchlandung hinlegst, bleibt dein Schiffswrack bestehen, während du nach Nahrung und Wasser suchst, um zu überleben, und vielleicht auch nach Holz, um ein Feuer zu machen, das dich wärmt. logge dich aus und komme zu dem zurück, was du gebaut hast. Oder vielleicht stolpert nach deiner Rettung ein anderer Spieler über das Wrack deines alten Schiffes und das längst erloschene Lagerfeuer. Finde eine Ecke der Galaxie, die du dir zu eigen machen kannst, sammle Ressourcen und importiere Material, um deinen Außenposten zu bauen, dekoriere oder richte deinen Hangar oder dein Haus ein, wie du willst.
Mit dieser Technologie wird Server Meshing möglich, denn der Replikationslayer/Entity Graph ist der Zustand des Universums, aus dem Clients und Server schreiben und lesen. Da wir den Zustand von der Simulation entkoppelt haben, können wir viele Serverknoten haben, die alle mit der Replikationsschicht kommunizieren und für die Simulation bestimmter Bereiche im Universum zuständig sind. Das bedeutet, dass wir, anstatt dass ein Server aufgrund der Simulationslast auf fünf Bilder pro Sekunde einbricht, einfach einen weiteren Server aufsetzen können, und dann noch einen, um die Simulationslast zu verteilen und die Aktualisierungsrate hoch zu halten. Das ist das ultimative Ziel von Dynamic Server Meshing, auf das wir hinarbeiten.
Bei einer grundlegenden Änderung der Zustandsaufzeichnung, die sich auf alle dynamischen Objekte auswirkt und nicht nur auf einige wenige, wird es eine Reihe von Problemen geben, auf die wir noch nicht gestoßen sind oder die wir nicht vorhergesehen haben.
2022 TESTEN UND RELEASE-RHYTHMUS
Aus diesem Grund werden wir an 3.18 anders herangehen als an unsere vorherigen Versionen. Wir gehen davon aus, dass 3.18 aufgrund der grundlegenden Änderung der Zustandsverfolgung im Spiel eine viel längere Zeit in der Evocati/PTU-Phase benötigen wird als unsere vorherigen Versionen. Wir wissen, dass wir auch umfangreiche Tests benötigen, denn unserer Erfahrung nach treten unterschiedliche Probleme auf, wenn wir von internen Tests zu Evocati zu PTU Welle 1, dann Welle 2 und so weiter wechseln. Spieler/innen machen verrückte Dinge und viele Spieler/innen schaffen viele verrückte Fälle, die wir nicht bedacht haben und die Fehler und Randfälle aufdecken. Wir schätzen, dass die PTU-Phase bis zu drei Monate dauern kann, aber das ist schwer vorherzusagen. Wird sich das Universum zum Beispiel in eine Albtraumversion von WALL-E verwandeln, weil jeder einfach leere Kisten auf den Boden wirft oder die 10 KI-Körper, die er geplündert hat, in New Babbage's Commons entsorgt? Wir arbeiten an einem sogenannten Density Manager, der die Objekte verwaltet, die erfasst werden, und die Objekte mit geringerer Priorität (z. B. weggeworfene leere Flaschen oder Dosen) aufräumt, wenn sich zu viele in einem Gebiet befinden. Aber ich vermute, dass wir auch KI-Hausmeister und vielleicht sogar Verbrechensstatistiken für Vermüllung in Landezonen wie New Babbage oder ArcCorp einführen müssen!
Da es keinen Sinn machte, das überarbeitete physische Ladungssystem und die Bergung für das alte System zu entwickeln, wurden diese beiden Funktionen für PES entwickelt (du willst ja, dass die Wracks aus den Kämpfen der Spieler liegen bleiben, damit du sie bergen kannst!
Wir wollen jedoch nicht, dass das Engagement und die Inhalte ins Stocken geraten, weil PES länger getestet werden muss. Deshalb planen wir, Ende Juni einen inhaltsreichen Alpha-Patch 3.17.2 mit bekanntem stabilen Code, neuen Missionen, neuen Orten und anderem Gameplay zu veröffentlichen. Die große Mehrheit der Spielerinnen und Spieler, Hunderttausende von ihnen, sind hier, um einfach auf Live zu spielen, und für sie wollen wir weiterhin fesselndes neues Gameplay und Abenteuer bieten, während wir 3.18 in großem Umfang auf der PTU testen.
Unser Ziel ist es, 3.18 in der PTU 2-3 Monate lang zu testen, damit wir Ende des dritten Quartals eine Alpha 3.18 auf LIVE veröffentlichen können. Ich weiß, dass viele von euch schon lange auf Bergung, Physicalized Cargo und Persistent Entity Streaming gewartet haben, und ich freue mich, dass wir uns auf der Zielgeraden befinden, um sie euch endlich zu bringen. Ich glaube, dass 3.18 ein großartiges Update sein wird, das das Spiel noch mehr verändern wird als 3.15, aber wir wollen sicherstellen, dass wir ihm die nötige Zeit zum Testen geben, damit wir es euch in bestmöglicher Qualität liefern können.
Neben der Arbeit an Persistent Streaming haben die Engine- und Grafikteams große Fortschritte bei der zweiten großen technischen Initiative gemacht, an der wir in den letzten zwei Jahren gearbeitet haben: die komplette Erneuerung unserer Grafik-Engine durch das, was wir "Gen 12" nennen, ein Multithreading und ein viel effizienterer Ansatz für das Rendering, der das Beste aus modernen Grafik-APIs wie Vulkan macht. So können wir die moderne Grafikleistung von PCs effizienter nutzen und müssen nicht mehr in der Hauptaktualisierungsschleife des Spiels auf Zeichenaufrufe und Ähnliches warten. Wir planen, den Großteil dieser Funktionen mit der Live-Veröffentlichung von 3.18 einzubauen und die Vulkan-Funktionalität etwas später, aber hoffentlich bis Ende des Jahres, zu veröffentlichen.
Bleibt noch unsere dritte große technische Initiative, das Server Meshing.
Wie du vielleicht schon vermutet hast, werden wir das Server Meshing auf die gleiche Weise angehen wie das Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 wird eine wirklich neue Ära in Star Citizen einläuten. Sie bedeutet, dass unser letzter technischer Baustein - das Server Meshing - fertiggestellt sein wird. Die erste Implementierung wird das sogenannte Static Server Meshing (SSM) sein, bei dem jeder Server ein bestimmtes Gebiet simuliert. Sobald SSM jedoch stabil ist, werden wir in den folgendas Verseionen zum Dynamic Server Meshing übergehen, das eine viel bessere Skalierbarkeit ermöglicht, da die Server nicht an einen bestimmten Ort gebunden sind, sondern nach der Auslastung verteilt werden, was eine viel bessere Simulationsleistung in jedem beliebigen Gebiet des Universums ermöglicht.
Mit 4.0 bekommen wir unser zweites Sternensystem, Pyro, und wir fangen an, mehr und mehr Inhalte, Gameplay und Feinschliff hinzuzufügen, um uns zur Beta zu bringen. Für uns alle bei CIG bedeuten Server Meshing und 4.0 den nächsten großen Schritt, um das Universum mit den versprochenen Inhalten und dem Gameplay zu bevölkern, die Star Citizen zu einem reichhaltigen, lebendigen Universum machen werden, das die Versprechen, die wir vor vielen Jahren gegeben haben, noch übertrifft.
Unser derzeitiges Ziel ist es, das Server Meshing und 4.0 als frühe technische Vorschau für Evocati-Tester in PTU Ende des vierten Quartals dieses Jahres einzuführen, damit unsere eifrigsten Spieler uns dabei helfen können, das Server Meshing zu testen, damit wir es für die Veröffentlichung verfeinern können. Dies hängt jedoch stark davon ab, wie gut/einfach die Einführung von Persistent Entity Streaming verläuft, also sei gewarnt, dass dies mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit in Q1 nächsten Jahres stattfinden wird. Sobald das Server Meshing mit Tausenden von Spielern in PTU getestet wird, können wir besser einschätzen, wie viel Zeit es in PTU braucht, bevor es auf LIVE gehen kann. Unser Ziel ist das Ende des 1. Quartals 2023, aber auch hier gilt, dass wir es erst dann mit Sicherheit wissen werden, wenn es getestet wird.
Für die meisten Spielerinnen und Spieler wird diese spezielle Veröffentlichungshäufigkeit im Jahr 2022 nicht sonderlich ungewöhnlich sein, wenn man sie etwas zurücknimmt und im Großen und Ganzen betrachtet. Wir werden immer noch 4 große Veröffentlichungen am Ende des Quartals sowie 2 große Veröffentlichungen in der Mitte des Quartals für die Flottenwoche im Mai und die IAE im November haben. Spieler, die nicht in unseren Entwicklungsprozess eingeweiht sind, werden weiterhin in jedem Quartal schnelle Inhaltsveröffentlichungen erleben, und in der zweiten Hälfte des Jahres 2022 werden wir noch viel mehr bedeutungsvolles Gameplay in die Welt bringen. Mit einer weiteren Ausgabe von XenoThreat, Updates für Jumptown, neuen dynamischen Ereignissen, zusätzlichen Orten und Sehenswürdigkeiten, die es zu erkunden gilt, und weiteren Patch-Updates wird es keinen Mangel an Gameplay und Inhalten geben, die du erleben kannst. Bis zum Jahresende können die Spieler/innen Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo Refactor und Bounty Hunter v2 Gameplay auf Live genießen.
In der Zwischenzeit werden diejenigen, die unsere Entwicklung aufmerksam verfolgen und uns beim Testen unserer wichtigsten Technologien helfen, in diesem Jahr Persistent Streaming und Server Meshing in die Hände bekommen, da wir sie in 3.18 und 4.0 in PTU im Sommer bzw. Winter testen werden. Manchmal ist das Warten am schwersten, wenn wir kurz vor der Ziellinie stehen, aber in diesem Jahr freue ich mich sehr darauf, unsere Pläne für die Veröffentlichung unserer wichtigsten Technologiebausteine mitzuteilen, und ich weiß, dass viele von euch es kaum erwarten können, in PTU einzusteigen und noch in diesem Jahr mit den Tests zu beginnen.
Bauen für die Langlebigkeit
Es ist leicht, sich nur auf unseren Entwicklungsfortschritt und die Arbeit zu konzentrieren, die wir mit Star Citizen und Squadron 42 vor uns haben, aber es gibt noch ein anderes sehr wichtiges Element unserer Reise, das oft übersehen wird. Wir entwickeln nicht nur zwei sehr ehrgeizige Spiele, die es mit denen der größten AAA-Studios aufnehmen können, sondern wir mussten auch das Unternehmen aufbauen, um die Technologie zu entwickeln und die Spiele von Grund auf neu zu entwickeln.
An dem Tag, an dem ich die Bühne auf der GDC betrat, hatten wir keine offiziellen Angestellten, sondern mit Ortwin, Sandi und mir drei Gründer und eine Handvoll Leute, die uns geholfen hatten, wie Forrest Stephan, David Haddock und David Swofford, die manchmal neben ihrem Hauptjob arbeiteten (natürlich mit Erlaubnis), wie Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy und Paul Reindell, und ein paar Freunde aus meiner alten Origin- und Digital Anvil-Zeit, wie Sergio Rosas und seine Kunst-Outsourcing-Firma CGBot, um die Demo zu erstellen und die Website aufzubauen.
Heute haben wir 780 Mitarbeiter und eine erweiterte Familie von über 130 Personen, die eng mit uns bei Turbulent in Montreal zusammenarbeiten, und viele weitere werden in den kommenden Monaten zu uns stoßen. Wir haben ein siebenköpfiges Global Talent Acquisition Team, das sich ausschließlich darauf konzentriert, die bestmöglichen Talente für CIG einzustellen. Um dir eine Vorstellung vom Umfang der TA-Arbeit zu geben: Im Jahr 2021 haben sie uns geholfen, 168 Leute einzustellen, und in diesem Jahr haben sie uns bereits bei der Einstellung von 128 Leuten geholfen.
Im Jahr 2022 werden wir in allen Abteilungen weiter wachsen und unsere Mitarbeiterzahl auf ca. 840 erhöhen, was uns der Veröffentlichung von Star Citizen und Squadron 42 näher bringt.
Eine Herausforderung, mit der wir konfrontiert sind, ist, dass wir in mehreren unserer Studios nicht annähernd genug Platz für die neuen Mitarbeiter/innen haben, die während der Pandemie zu uns gestoßen sind. Aus diesem Grund haben wir im letzten Jahr langfristige Mietverträge für zwei Büros in brandneuen und hochmodernen Gebäuden in Manchester und Frankfurt abgeschlossen.
Wir sind nur noch wenige Monate von der Eröffnung der beiden neuen Büros entfernt, die beide erstklassige Räume für die Zusammenarbeit schaffen und unser ständig wachsendes Team beherbergen werden. Unser neues Studio in Großbritannien wird auf den drei obersten Etagen des Manchester Goods Yard 90.000 m² hochmoderne, kreative Studioräume bieten, sowie zwei Bühnen im angrenzenden Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse Komplex: eine spezielle Motion-/Performance-Capture-Bühne mit einer Fläche von 4.500 m² mit Umkleideräumen, einem grünen Raum, einem Maschinenraum, einem Scan-Raum und einer Aussichtsgalerie sowie eine kleinere Bühne für die globale Videoproduktion, die über ein spezielles Set verfügt und für das Filmen einer Vielzahl von Inhalten für Star Citizen und später für den Start von Squadron 42 bestens gerüstet ist.
In Frankfurt werden wir im The One auf zwei Etagen 30.000 m² mit spektakulärem Blick über die Skyline der Stadt beziehen. Das ist doppelt so viel wie unsere derzeitige Fläche in Frankfurt und sollte uns eine gute Ausgangsposition für ein baldiges Wachstum bieten.
Wir schauen uns auch nach dem nächsten Standort für unser Studio in Austin um, wo wir Ende nächsten Jahres einziehen könnten, da wir auch dort mehr Platz brauchen. Danach werden wir auch das Studio in LA ausbauen.
Wir bauen ein langfristiges Zuhause, das uns die Möglichkeit bietet, das Universum für die nächsten Jahrzehnte am Leben zu erhalten und zu erweitern.
CitizenCon
Veranstaltungen wie die CitizenCon sind riesige Unternehmungen, die viel Planung erfordern, und obwohl das Leben langsam wieder zur Normalität zurückkehrt, werden die Einschränkungen gerade erst aufgehoben. Und da die Fälle immer noch weitgehend unvorhersehbar sind, sehen wir, dass die Planung großer Shows vielleicht noch etwas verfrüht ist. Die Ungewissheit über die wiederhergestellte Normalität hat sich auf unsere Fähigkeit ausgewirkt, eine physische Show zu planen. Normalerweise wären wir heute schon mitten in der Planung und Durchführung einer CitizenCon, wenn wir im Oktober eine Veranstaltung abhalten würden, aber dazu waren wir bisher nicht in der Lage. Es scheint, dass viele unserer Branchenkollegen mit ähnlichen Problemen zu kämpfen haben, denn erst kürzlich hat die E3 ihre physische Messe abgesagt. Außerdem ist Los Angeles, wo wir die diesjährige Messe abhalten würden, sehr vorsichtig und neigt eher dazu, große persönliche Versammlungen zu verbieten, wenn eine neue Variante auftaucht.
Aus diesem Grund und wegen des enormen Arbeitsaufwands, den das Unternehmen in diesem Jahr zu bewältigen hat, ganz zu schweigen vom Umzug von 70% des Unternehmens in zwei neue Büros, haben wir beschlossen, in diesem Jahr keine CitizenCon zu veranstalten. Wir hoffen sehr, dass wir im nächsten Jahr in der Lage sein werden, eine persönliche Veranstaltung zu organisieren, denn wir vermissen die Gelegenheit, uns persönlich mit euch allen auszutauschen und von eurem Enthusiasmus und eurer Begeisterung angespornt zu werden.
Gleichzeitig wissen wir aber auch, dass wir ohne unsere Gemeinschaft nicht so weit gekommen wären, und wir sind dankbar für jeden Einzelnen von euch, der uns auf diesem Weg unterstützt hat. Da wir unser 10-jähriges Bestehen als Unternehmen und als Gemeinschaft feiern, werden wir, wie schon im letzten Jahr, eine virtuelle CitizenCon veranstalten.
Ein Unterschied zum letzten Jahr besteht darin, dass es keine Gameplay-Demo geben wird, da dies wertvolle Ressourcen von unseren Spielentwicklungsteams abziehen würde, die hart daran arbeiten, Persistent Streaming, Gen 12/Vulkan und Server Meshing in eure Hände zu bekommen, ganz zu schweigen davon, dass wir noch mehr Inhalte und Gameplay liefern, die sich als so erfolgreich erwiesen haben, dass sie neue Spieler/innen anziehen und alte wie neue Nutzer/innen binden.
Stattdessen wird die CitizenCon eine Feier für euch, die Community, mit Präsentationen und Diskussionsrunden unserer Entwickler sein, um euch über die Fortschritte, die wir machen, und die nahe Zukunft dessen, was ihr im nächsten Jahr von Star Citizen erwarten könnt, zu informieren. Wie ich bereits in meinem Brief vom Dezember 2020 erwähnt habe, werden wir uns mit Squadron 42 noch zurückhalten, bis es an der Zeit ist, die Veröffentlichungskampagne zu starten. Und so weit sind wir noch nicht. Ihr solltet wissen, dass wir gut vorankommen, aber wir sind noch nicht bereit, den Vorhang für Squadron 42 zu schließen.
Bar Citizen Welttournee
Es ist mehr als 2 Jahre her, dass wir die Gelegenheit hatten, mit euch allen persönlich Zeit zu verbringen, und obwohl wir nicht auf der CitizenCon sein werden, können wir es nicht ein weiteres Jahr aushalten! Aus diesem Grund planen wir, diesen Sommer eine robuste "Bar Citizen World Tour" zu starten, die genau mit dem Feiertag des Ersten Kontakts zusammenfällt (Lies unbedingt die Hintergrundgeschichte, um zu sehen, warum das so gut passt!) Außerdem möchten wir diese Gelegenheit nutzen, um einen neuen Feiertag außerhalb des Spiels auszurufen: Den Internationalen Bar Citizen Day. Wir werden diesen ersten neuen Feiertag feiern, indem wir Mitte Juni in allen unseren Entwicklungsstudios gleichzeitig Bar Citizen Events veranstalten.
Danach planen wir, den Spaß auch auf Veranstaltungen zu bringen, die nicht so nah an unseren Studios liegen. Unser Community-Team plant, Bar Citizen rund um den Globus mit neuem Elan zu begrüßen und bringt Goodies und Entwickler mit, um sich zur Feier unseres 10-jährigen Jubiläums unter euch zu mischen und euch zu begrüßen.
Behalte Spectrum in den nächsten Wochen genau im Auge, denn das Team wird sich überlegen, welche Bar Citizen-Events wir besuchen wollen. Wenn du also eine eigene Veranstaltung ausrichtest, möchten wir von dir hören.
Schlussgedanken
Einige von euch werden sicher enttäuscht sein, dass es keine physische Show und keine Keynote-Demo auf der CitizenCon geben wird. Das Team und ich waren jedoch der Meinung, dass es viel wichtiger ist, dass wir uns auf den Fortschritt in der Entwicklung konzentrieren, damit wir das Tempo beibehalten können, das wir seit Alpha 3.14 vorgelegt haben.
Dieses Jahr ist ein großes Jahr für uns alle bei Star Citizen: Du kannst dich auf die Invictus Launch Week freuen, die in die Wolken von Crusader eindringt, auf das Versprechen von Persistent Entity Streaming, das seinen Weg ins Verse findet, sowie auf große spielverändernde Features wie Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, neue Events und Missionen, Verbesserungen für Jumptown, Schiffe, auf die du schon lange wartest, wie den Corsair, Vulture und Hull C, sowie weitere Verbesserungen der Lebensqualität und des New Player Onboarding, um Star Citizen noch spielbarer und einladender zu machen, als es heute ist. Ganz zu schweigen von Pyro und Server Meshing, die wir bis Ende des Jahres testen wollen, je nachdem, wie schwierig es ist, Persistent Entity Streaming stabil zu bekommen. Wir denken, dass ihr alle diese neuen Inhalte lieber spielen wollt, als davon zu hören. Deshalb werden wir die Zeit in diesem Jahr nutzen, um uns auf die Entwicklung zu konzentrieren und euch die Technik, die Funktionen und die Inhalte zu liefern, auf die ihr wartet.
Die Entwickler von CIG bekommen viel Aufmerksamkeit, und das ist auch gut so, denn es ist das talentierteste Entwicklerteam, mit dem ich je gearbeitet habe. Aber es gibt noch viel mehr Menschen bei CIG als nur die Entwickler - wie man so schön sagt: "It takes a village"!
Ohne unser Publishing- und Live-Ops-Team wären die Server nicht rund um die Uhr in der Cloud verfügbar, und du könntest Star Citizen nicht herunterladen oder spielen. Ohne das unermüdliche Testen und Feedback unseres Qualitätssicherungs-Teams wäre Star Citizen unspielbar. Ohne die Backend- und Web-Teams bei Turbulent könntest du dich nicht einloggen, hättest keine Website, auf der du Nachrichten und Informationen lesen kannst, und kein Forum, in dem du dich an gesunden Debatten beteiligen, ein Versprechen abgeben oder Star Citizen starten könntest. Ohne unser Studio Experience Team, das sich um das Wohlergehen unserer Organisation kümmert, gäbe es kein so ambitioniertes kreatives Umfeld wie Star Citizen. Ohne unsere Finanz- und Rechtsteams hätten wir kein so einzigartiges und bahnbrechendes Unternehmen wie CIG aufbauen können. Ohne unsere Marketing- und Community-Teams gäbe es keine Kommunikation über unsere Pläne, keine schillernden Trailer, die auf zukünftige Inhalte hinweisen, und kein echtes Hin und Her zwischen der Community und CIG. Ohne unsere Teams für Kundenbetreuung und Spielerfahrung würdest du nicht die Hilfe bekommen, die du brauchst, und hättest auch nicht die Möglichkeit, dein Feedback zum Spielgeschehen so zu formulieren, dass es quantifiziert werden kann. Ohne unsere IT-Abteilung könnten wir nicht zusammenarbeiten, weder im Büro noch von zu Hause aus, noch könnten wir Code kompilieren oder schöne Assets erstellen. Ohne unsere Personalabteilung gäbe es niemanden, der unsere Mitarbeiter/innen einstellt, ihnen zuhört, sie anleitet und ihnen hilft.
Und ohne euch alle, mit eurem Enthusiasmus und eurer Geduld, gäbe es weder Star Citizen, Squadron 42 noch Cloud Imperium Games.
Während wir uns dem Erreichen der oben genannten wichtigen Meilensteine nähern, können wir nicht anders, als jedem einzelnen von euch, der den gemeinsamen Traum von Star Citizen teilt, eine immense Wertschätzung entgegenzubringen. Der Weg, der vor uns liegt, ist spannender denn je, aber in gewisser Weise ist die gemeinsame Reise, die Momente und der Spaß, den die Menschen auf dem Weg haben, während wir Star Citizen gemeinsam aufbauen, genauso lohnend wie das endgültige Ziel.
Und das ist es, was dieses Spiel und diese Gemeinschaft so besonders macht.
Wir alle von Cloud Imperium sehen uns auf der Bar Citizen, der Digital CitizenCon und in der PTU!
18.05.2022 - 13:00 UHR
Das Jahr im Rückblick
"Fahr nicht wütend!"
Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Murmeltiertag 1993
In gewisser Weise fühlte sich das vergangene Jahr so an, als würden wir wie Bill Murray in Murmeltiertag feststecken und dieselben Zyklen wie 2020 wiederholen. Gerade als wir dachten, wir sähen Licht am Ende des Tunnels mit der COVID-19-Pandemie, tauchten neue Varianten auf, die die Fälle wieder in die Höhe schnellen ließen und die Gemeinden wieder zu Abriegelungen und anderen Sicherheitsmaßnahmen zwangen. Die Welt wurde zunehmend müde und erschöpft von den Auswirkungen der Pandemie und den notwendigen Maßnahmen, um die Menschen so sicher wie möglich zu halten. Und selbst wenn ein großer Teil der Welt zur Normalität zurückkehrt, verfolgt uns das Schreckgespenst einer neuen potenziellen Variante, die sich den Impfstoffen entziehen kann und leichter übertragbar ist. Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass sich COVID dank der in den meisten Ländern leicht verfügbaren Impfstoffe und eines gewissen Schutzes vor früheren Infektionen zu einer endemischen Krankheit entwickelt, die zwar nicht toll, aber auch nicht mehr so tödlich ist wie früher - ein Virus, mit dem wir weiterleben können wie mit einer gewöhnlichen Grippe oder Erkältung.
Wegen der Höhen und Tiefen des letzten Jahres fangen wir gerade erst an, wieder ins Büro zu gehen. Das erste Studio, in dem es möglich wurde, persönlich zusammenzuarbeiten, war unser britisches Studio in Manchester, wo ich seit letztem Herbst viel Zeit verbracht habe. Ich habe mit dem Team von Squadron 42 Seite an Seite im Büro gearbeitet, während wir uns auf die Fertigstellung und den Feinschliff der Inhalte und Funktionen dieses epischen erzählerischen Abenteuers konzentrieren. Unsere Büros in Frankfurt, Austin und Los Angeles kehren gerade erst ins Büro zurück, nachdem die örtlichen Behörden es für sicher genug befunden haben, verschiedene Auflagen aufzuheben. Zu Beginn der Pandemie waren wir stolz darauf, dass wir nahtlos von zu Hause aus arbeiten konnten, aber als sich die Situation hinzog, wurde uns klar, dass wir die Vorteile der spontanen Zusammenarbeit und der Teambildung vermissen, die sich aus der Arbeit in der Nähe ergeben. Die Zeit, die ich mit dem Squadron-Team in Großbritannien verbracht habe, hat dies nur noch verstärkt, denn die Möglichkeit, zum Schreibtisch von jemandem zu gehen und das Problem zu sehen oder ein Gespräch im Vorbeigehen über ein Problem oder einen kreativen Gedanken zu führen, macht einen enormen Unterschied für den Fortschritt. Wenn alle Mitarbeiter/innen aus der Ferne arbeiten, wird es immer schwieriger, Probleme spontan zu lösen oder Feedback zu erhalten oder zu geben, und es gibt viel mehr Meetings und Videogespräche. Wir haben festgestellt, dass wir sechsmal so viele Meetings hatten, wenn alle von zu Hause aus arbeiteten, als wenn wir im Büro waren. Ich persönlich habe den Unterschied in unserer Release-Kadenz gespürt; wir brauchten etwas länger, um jeden Patch herauszubringen, und es wurde schwieriger, Fehler zu lösen oder zu beheben, die länger als früher herumstanden. Ich habe auch den Trend in der gesamten Branche beobachtet, dass so ziemlich jeder große Titel verspätet oder in einigen unglücklichen Fällen sogar früher als geplant veröffentlicht wird. Aus diesem Grund konzentrieren wir uns trotz der Möglichkeit, vollständig remote zu arbeiten, darauf, die Leute wieder zusammenzubringen und für längere Zeit Seite an Seite zu arbeiten. Die Rückkehr ins Büro bedeutet nicht, dass wir zu den alten Arbeitsmustern und -richtlinien zurückkehren, denn die verlängerten Schließungen in Kombination mit der zweijährigen Fernarbeit haben uns neue Erkenntnisse über die Work-Life-Balance unserer Mitarbeiter/innen gebracht. Wir haben unsere globalen Arbeitsrichtlinien dahingehend geändert, dass wir flexible Arbeitszeiten und eine Mischung aus persönlicher Anwesenheit und Arbeit von zu Hause aus zulassen, je nach den Bedürfnissen des Mitarbeiters und des Vorgesetzten, wobei wir die Lebenssituationen unserer Mitarbeiter berücksichtigen.
Trotz der Herausforderungen des letzten Jahres bin ich stolz darauf, wie viel wir im Jahr 2021 erreicht haben. Wenn ich auf das vergangene Jahr zurückblicke, bin ich erstaunt über die Menge an Inhalten und Funktionen, die wir für unsere Spieler/innen bereitgestellt haben. Im Januar letzten Jahres konnte die Community die erste Iteration des XenoThreat Incursion spielen, unser erstes dynamisches Event, das von den Spielern dafür gelobt wurde, dass es die Teile von Star Citizen zu einer spannenden serverweiten Begegnung zusammenführt. Obwohl es nur die erste Version war, zeigte dieses Event bereits, was das Persistent Universe alles zu bieten hat. Im April 2021 haben wir Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy veröffentlicht und damit Höhlen und Dolinen, Verbesserungen der Planetentechnologie, Andocken von Schiffen an Stationen und vieles mehr eingeführt. In der Invictus Launch Week öffneten wir zum ersten Mal die Türen der Javelin, um den mächtigen UEE-Zerstörer zu besichtigen, und brachten die Bengal in den Orbit, um unser bisher größtes Raumschiff im Universum zu präsentieren.
So richtig in Fahrt kamen wir aber erst in der zweiten Hälfte des Jahres 2021 mit der Veröffentlichung von Alpha 3.14: Willkommen in Orison, als wir das Stanton-System mit dem Start des Gasriesen Crusader und der Landezone von Orison abschlossen. Damit einher gingen eine Reihe von Verbesserungen der Lebensqualität und unsere erste Version der volumetrischen Wolken.
Mit der Alpha 3.15: Tödliche Konsequenzen haben wir dann die Version 0 unseres medizinischen Gameplays, des Plünderns, des Bombardierens und des persönlichen Inventars eingeführt, um nur einige der neuen Funktionen zu nennen. Zusammen mit den kontinuierlichen Verbesserungen bei Leistung und Stabilität und dem drastischen Rückgang der Serverabstürze (die sich normalerweise als der berüchtigte 30K-Fehler äußern, d.h. die Verbindung zum Server wurde unterbrochen), begann das Spiel Star Citizen endlich auf eine Weise zusammenzuwachsen, wie es noch nie zuvor der Fall war.
Und so großartig unser Jahr 2020 in Bezug auf Engagement und Stimmung auch war, die zweite Hälfte des Jahres 2021 war auf einem anderen Niveau. Wir sahen, wie mehr Leute als je zuvor zu Star Citizen strömten, getragen von einer Welle des guten Willens und der Begeisterung von aktuellen Spielern, die ihre Freunde zum Mitmachen aufforderten, und von Neulingen, die von dem Spektakel von Crusader, dem Gameplay von XenoThreat und den Möglichkeiten der neuen Features wie Personal Inventory und Looting begeistert waren. Und zum Abschluss des Jahres, als wir die Alpha 3.16: Rückkehr nach Jumptown starteten, kehrten altgediente Spieler zurück, um unsere frische, neue Version der klassischen Jumptown-Schlachtfelder zu sehen und waren erstaunt, wie weit sich das Spiel entwickelt hatte.
Unsere Siege im Jahr 2021 haben uns einen absolut historischen Start ins Jahr 2022 beschert. Bis jetzt haben wir alle unsere Prognosen über neue Spieler, die dem Verse beitreten, übertroffen. In diesem Jahr haben wir die Zahl der neuen Spieler sogar mehr als verdoppelt und mit der kürzlich veröffentlichten Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes kommen täglich über zweitausend neue Spieler ins Spiel. Unsere DAU (Daily Active Users) ist seit den Zahlen, die ich in meinem letzten Brief des Vorsitzenden im Dezember 2020 genannt habe, um mehr als 50 % gestiegen, und mit dem neuesten Patch haben wir doppelt so viele tägliche Logins wie bei der Einführung des letzten Patches im April. Die Anzahl der monatlich aktiven Nutzer/innen (MAU) liegt weit über den Höchstwerten von 2020. Seitdem haben wir fast 1 Million neue Accounts erstellt und mehr als eine halbe Million neue Spieler/innen haben sich dem Spiel angeschlossen. Und diese Woche hat sich der 2-millionste Spieler bei Star Citizen angemeldet. Wir sind auf dem besten Weg, in diesem Jahr die Marke von 4 Millionen Gesamtkonten, über 1 Million Logins und mehr als 500 Millionen Dollar Umsatz zu erreichen.
All das verdanken wir der unglaublichen Unterstützung, die wir von euch erhalten, und den Fortschritten, die wir in Star Citizen gemacht haben und die neue neugierige Spieler in das Verse bringen. Es ist ermutigend, das Feedback und die Eindrücke von neueren Mitgliedern der Community zu sehen, wenn sie zum ersten Mal Star Citizen spielen.
Für all diejenigen unter uns, die von Anfang an dabei sind, ist es leicht, viele der Funktionen von Star Citizen als selbstverständlich anzusehen, die kein anderes Spiel hat. Schließlich kennen wir alle alle Funktionen, ihre Fehler und vor allem, was nicht gemacht wird, so dass es leicht sein kann, sich auf die halb leere Tasse zu konzentrieren, anstatt auf die volle. Aber welches andere Spiel hat die Kombination aus Umfang und Detailreichtum; die Fähigkeit, nahtlos von einem Fußmarsch zu einem vollständig realisierten Schiff zu wechseln, mit funktionierenden Komponenten und einem bewohnbaren Innenraum, in dem du dich bewegen kannst, zu einem funkelnden Lichtpunkt am Himmel zu starten, durch die Wolken in die Schwärze des Weltraums aufzusteigen, nur um von einer Gruppe von Piraten abgefangen zu werden, die deine Fracht von dir befreien wollen, sie in einem heftigen Luftkampf zu besiegen und deine Reise zu dem funkelnden Licht in der Ferne fortzusetzen... das sich in einen anderen Planeten verwandelt, auf dem du in die Atmosphäre eindringen und landen kannst, deine Rampe herunterlässt und in eine belebte Stadt oder an ein wunderschönes, von Bäumen umgebenes Flussufer fliegst, um eine außerirdische Frucht zu ernten? Und das alles ohne Ladebildschirm und in unglaublicher Detailtreue in der ersten oder dritten Person? Es gibt andere Spiele, die einige dieser Elemente haben, aber keines, das alles so detailgetreu darstellt, wie Star Citizen es tut.
Manchmal ist es gar nicht so schlecht, zurückzublicken und zu erkennen, wie weit wir gekommen sind. Wir werden oft wegen unserer Zeitpläne kritisiert, vor allem, wenn es um die ursprüngliche Crowdfunding-Kampagne geht, aber das Spiel, das heute gebaut wird, ist ein ganz anderes, viel umfangreicheres und immersiveres Spiel als das, das ich vor fast zehn Jahren vorgeschlagen habe. Damals gab es noch keine vollständig realisierten Planeten, die mit unglaublichen Details gerendert waren und auf denen du dich überall hinbegeben konntest; Planeten waren nur besuchbar, wenn sie einen gebastelten Landeplatz hatten, und selbst dann gab es eine Debatte darüber, ob sie in der Ego-Perspektive erkundet werden konnten oder ob sie eher wie die Landezonen in Freelancer und Privateer sein würden, wo du zwischen ein paar Orten hin- und herklicken konntest, um Waren zu kaufen oder zu verkaufen oder in einer Bar Missionen zu erledigen. Es gab keine Vorstellung von einem First-Person-System, das so taktil und vollständig ist, wie wir es heute machen, und auch keine Fahrzeugsimulation mit physischen Komponenten und dem Grad an systemischer Funktionalität, den wir anstreben. Das Spiel, das wir heute entwickeln, ist ein Spiel, das vieles umfasst: Es ist ein Dogfighting-Spacesim, ein Ego-Shooter, ein Handelsspiel, ein Ressourcensammelspiel, ein Ressourcenmanagementspiel, ein Abenteuerspiel, ein Überlebensspiel und ein Gesellschaftsspiel. Star Citizen ist eine Weltraumsimulation. Es ist ein Spiel für alle, denn wie im richtigen Leben gibt es viele verschiedene Wege, die man gehen kann, und der Erfolg wird dadurch definiert, was dich glücklich macht. Willst du deine Fähigkeiten als furchterregender Kampfpilot unter Beweis stellen? Das Spiel bietet dir diese Möglichkeit, aber auch wenn du einfach nur in Ruhe Mineralien abbauen und dein Glück machen willst, in Landezonen abhängen oder eine Ecke der Galaxie finden willst, die noch niemand gefunden hat ... all das sind Optionen in der Sandbox, die Star Citizen ist. Um das richtig zu machen, in einem Umfang, der es Millionen von Menschen ermöglicht, gemeinsam zu spielen, braucht es Zeit und Geld. Mit deiner Unterstützung und Geduld sind wir in der Lage, ein Spiel zu entwickeln, das sich meiner Meinung nach kein anderer Publisher leisten könnte oder verrückt genug wäre, sich darauf einzulassen.
Viele, die Star Citizen finanziell unterstützt haben, interessieren sich nicht für Gewinne oder Quartalszahlen, sie wollen einfach nur das beste und größte Spiel, das ihre Erwartungen und Träume erfüllt. Das ist zwar keine kleine Aufgabe, aber für mich und alle anderen bei CIG ist es viel einfacher, uns dafür einzusetzen, denn es ist ein Privileg, auf diese Weise künstlerisch herausgefordert und finanziell unterstützt zu werden, und ich bin unheimlich dankbar, dass so viele Menschen so viel Vertrauen in uns alle setzen.
DANKE!
Der Weg zu 4.0
Im Dezember 2017 wurde die Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 auf den Live-Servern veröffentlicht, nachdem unsere Entwickler auf der ganzen Welt gemeinsam daran gearbeitet hatten. Dieser monumentale Patch führte unsere brandneue prozedurale Planetentechnologie und die ersten planetaren Körper ein, auf denen du landen und dich überall auf der Oberfläche der drei Monde von Crusader bewegen konntest. Außerdem enthielt er ein neues Missionssystem, verbesserte Einkaufsmöglichkeiten, neue Frachtmechanismen und verdoppelte die Spielerzahl auf dem Server. Bis heute war Star Citizen 3.0 wahrscheinlich der größte Sprung in Sachen Gameplay und Inhalt, weshalb wir die Alpha-Bezeichnung von 2.X auf 3.X erhöht haben, und zwischen 2.6.3 und 3.0 lagen ganze acht Monate.
Dieses Jahr befinden wir uns auf einem ähnlichen Weg mit drei großen technologischen Initiativen, die das Erlebnis und die Immersion in Star Citizen grundlegend verändern werden. Die erste davon ist das sogenannte Persistent Entity Streaming (PES), die grundlegende Technologie, die das Server Meshing (SM) ermöglicht. PES ist der schwierigste Teil der Arbeit, die für SM nötig ist, und derjenige, der am meisten Entwicklungsarbeit erfordert. Es verändert die Art und Weise, wie wir Zustände im Universum aufzeichnen, grundlegend und sorgt für einen Grad an Persistenz, den du in anderen Spielen, egal ob MMOs oder Einzelspieler-Erfahrungen, einfach nicht findest. Bisher war die gesamte Persistenz im Spiel an das Inventar des Spielers gebunden: an Schiffe, die du besitzt, an Gegenstände, die du physisch besitzt, oder an die virtuellen Inventare der Gegenstände, die du besitzt. Wenn du einen Gegenstand physisch in deinem Fahrzeug angebracht hast, z. B. ein Gewehr an einem Waffenträger, merkt sich das Fahrzeug alle angebrachten Gegenstände und alles, was sich im virtuellen Inventar des Fahrzeugs befindet, wenn du dich ausloggst oder das Fahrzeug verstaut hast. Wenn du jedoch etwas fallen lässt oder lose platzierst, selbst in einem Schiff, das dir gehört, wird es nicht mit dem Spielerinventar verknüpft. Wenn du dich also ausloggst (oder der Server abstürzt), ist der Gegenstand nicht mehr da, wenn du dich einloggst oder wieder einsteigst. Bei PES zeichnen wir den Zustand jedes dynamischen Objekts im Spiel auf, unabhängig davon, ob es einem Spieler "gehört" oder von ihm gehalten wird. Das bedeutet, dass du ein Gewehr oder einen Medipen in einem Waldgebiet auf Microtech fallen lassen könntest und einige Tage später, nachdem du dich ausgeloggt hast, zurückkehrst und das Gewehr oder den Medipen immer noch vorfindest (vorausgesetzt, ein anderer Spieler hat es sich nicht geschnappt!).
Die Technologie, um dies in einem so großen und detaillierten Universum wie dem unseren für Millionen von Spielern zu ermöglichen, ist keine kleine technische Meisterleistung. Wir haben seit 2019 darauf hingearbeitet, als wir das Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS) eingeführt haben, das es einem Server ermöglicht, nur einen Teil unseres Universums zu streamen und zu simulieren, was notwendig ist, wenn mehrere Server verschiedene Teile des Universums simulieren sollen.
Die Entwicklung verlief nicht ohne Hindernisse. Wir mussten unsere Pläne für die Speicherung des Zustands des Universums ändern, als wir feststellten, dass die relationale Datenbank, die wir mit einer Reihe von Diensten verwenden wollten und die wir "iCache" genannt hatten, wahrscheinlich nicht in der Lage sein würde, eine niedrige Latenzzeit in dem Umfang zu haben, wie wir sie für die Anzahl der gleichzeitigen Spieler, die wir in Zukunft unterstützen müssen, benötigen. Anfang 2021 sind wir auf eine Graph-Datenbank umgestiegen und haben einen anderen Ansatz für die Dienste und den Cache gewählt, den wir in einer virtuellen Präsentation auf der CitizenCon im letzten Jahr vorgestellt haben. Die aktuelle Architektur verwendet den sogenannten Replication Layer, einen skalierbaren Datencache, der den Zustand aller dynamischen Objekte im Universum verfolgt, in der Cloud läuft und mit der cloudbasierten Graphdatenbank kommuniziert, die wir Entity Graph nennen. Sie ist letztlich die letzte Instanz für den Zustand aller dynamischen Objekte in unserem Universum. Der Replikations-Layer, ein separater Dienst, der in seiner endgültigen Form mehrere Worker Nodes haben wird, die auf der Gleichzeitigkeit der Spieler basieren, ermöglicht es uns, den Zustand des Universums in Echtzeit zu verfolgen und zu kommunizieren. Dies ist besonders wichtig für die Skalierbarkeit, da die Kunden nicht auf die Simulation eines Servers warten müssen, um zu sehen, wie sich der Zustand um sie herum ändert, da sowohl die Kunden als auch die Server ihre Ergebnisse an die Replikationsschicht übermitteln, die dann an alle Kunden weitergegeben wird. Da der Replication Layer Service nicht simulieren muss, kann er den Clients Zustandsänderungen in einer festen Frequenz mitteilen und ist nicht an die Simulationszeit gebunden, was zu einer besseren Erfahrung für die Spieler/innen führen sollte. Damit PES funktioniert, müssen sowohl der Entity Graph als auch der Replication Layer funktionsfähig sein. Dies war die größte technische Herausforderung und erforderte eine grundlegende Überarbeitung der Art und Weise, wie das Spiel mit Befugnissen und Zustandsänderungen von Entitäten umgeht. Darüber hinaus wurden eine ganze Reihe neuer Online-Dienste benötigt, um den Replikations-Layer und den Entity Graph zu unterstützen. Um PES zu unterstützen, mussten wir 12 neue Dienste erstellen. Für Server Meshing sind derzeit nur 4 weitere Dienste geplant, woran du siehst, wie viel grundlegende Technologie für SM in PES steckt. In diesem Zusammenhang sind wir auf gRPC umgestiegen, ein von Google gesponsertes, skalierbares Datenprotokoll für die Online-Kommunikation. Das Gute an dieser Technologie ist, dass sie skalierbar ist (stell dir vor, wie viele gleichzeitige Nutzerinnen und Nutzer Google bewältigen muss) und dass es viele verfügbare Tools und Codes von Drittanbietern gibt, im Gegensatz zur Entwicklung eines eigenen Protokolls.
Damit Persistent Entity Streaming funktioniert, brauchen wir den Großteil der Technologie, die wir brauchen, um Server Meshing praktikabel zu machen. Ich freue mich, berichten zu können, dass das Team nach 16 Monaten extrem konzentrierter Arbeit von 18 Ingenieuren, 3 engagierten QA und 4 Produzenten, verteilt auf CIG und Turbulent (die die Backend-Datenbank in der Cloud und die dazugehörigen Dienste verwalten), letzte Woche in unserem wöchentlichen internen Persistent Universe Update Meeting zeigen konnte, dass Persistent Entity Streaming funktioniert.
Paul Reindell, unser Director of Engineering für Online Tech, startete einen Server, füllte den Entity Graph in seinen Anfangszustand und die Replikationsschicht (die im Wesentlichen ein Cache für den Zustand des Universums und der Backend-Datenbank in der Cloud ist, um sicherzustellen, dass Lese- und Schreibvorgänge in der Datenbank nicht zu Engpässen bei Servern und Clients führen), schloss einen Client an und platzierte eine Reihe von kleinen Objekten wie Dosen auf der Oberfläche von Aberdeen, zusammen mit einem 890 Jump und einem Anvil Arrow. Dann hat er den Server und den Client beendet. Der Server wurde neu gestartet, wir füllten den Entitätsgraphen nicht auf (da er beim ersten Start bereits gesetzt worden war), und dann schloss er einen Client an, warf einen Warp nach Aberdeen und alles war so, wie er es platziert hatte. Das war ein großer Meilenstein, denn der Zustand des Universums wurde in der Backend-Datenbank gespeichert. Als er dann den Server neu startete, verband er sich einfach mit dem Replication Layer, der sich selbst aus der Datenbank (dem Entity Graph) initialisiert hatte, und fuhr mit dem Universum in dem Zustand fort, in dem er es verlassen hatte.
Das mag für einige von euch nicht revolutionär klingen, aber ich kann euch sagen, dass es so war, als ob Neil Armstrong "einen kleinen Schritt" gemacht hätte. Sobald Persistent Entity Streaming online geht, wird Star Citizen ein anderes Universum sein. Die vollständige Persistenz wird in den kommenden Jahren eine Spielerfahrung ermöglichen, die die meisten anderen Online-Spiele nicht bieten: ein Universum, in das du flüchten kannst, das von deinen Handlungen und denen anderer Spieler beeinflusst wird und dessen Zustand dynamisch und persistent ist. Wenn du auf einem Planeten eine Bruchlandung hinlegst, bleibt dein Schiffswrack bestehen, während du nach Nahrung und Wasser suchst, um zu überleben, und vielleicht auch nach Holz, um ein Feuer zu machen, das dich wärmt. logge dich aus und komme zu dem zurück, was du gebaut hast. Oder vielleicht stolpert nach deiner Rettung ein anderer Spieler über das Wrack deines alten Schiffes und das längst erloschene Lagerfeuer. Finde eine Ecke der Galaxie, die du dir zu eigen machen kannst, sammle Ressourcen und importiere Material, um deinen Außenposten zu bauen, dekoriere oder richte deinen Hangar oder dein Haus ein, wie du willst.
Mit dieser Technologie wird Server Meshing möglich, denn der Replikationslayer/Entity Graph ist der Zustand des Universums, aus dem Clients und Server schreiben und lesen. Da wir den Zustand von der Simulation entkoppelt haben, können wir viele Serverknoten haben, die alle mit der Replikationsschicht kommunizieren und für die Simulation bestimmter Bereiche im Universum zuständig sind. Das bedeutet, dass wir, anstatt dass ein Server aufgrund der Simulationslast auf fünf Bilder pro Sekunde einbricht, einfach einen weiteren Server aufsetzen können, und dann noch einen, um die Simulationslast zu verteilen und die Aktualisierungsrate hoch zu halten. Das ist das ultimative Ziel von Dynamic Server Meshing, auf das wir hinarbeiten.
Bei einer grundlegenden Änderung der Zustandsaufzeichnung, die sich auf alle dynamischen Objekte auswirkt und nicht nur auf einige wenige, wird es eine Reihe von Problemen geben, auf die wir noch nicht gestoßen sind oder die wir nicht vorhergesehen haben.
2022 TESTEN UND RELEASE-RHYTHMUS
Aus diesem Grund werden wir an 3.18 anders herangehen als an unsere vorherigen Versionen. Wir gehen davon aus, dass 3.18 aufgrund der grundlegenden Änderung der Zustandsverfolgung im Spiel eine viel längere Zeit in der Evocati/PTU-Phase benötigen wird als unsere vorherigen Versionen. Wir wissen, dass wir auch umfangreiche Tests benötigen, denn unserer Erfahrung nach treten unterschiedliche Probleme auf, wenn wir von internen Tests zu Evocati zu PTU Welle 1, dann Welle 2 und so weiter wechseln. Spieler/innen machen verrückte Dinge und viele Spieler/innen schaffen viele verrückte Fälle, die wir nicht bedacht haben und die Fehler und Randfälle aufdecken. Wir schätzen, dass die PTU-Phase bis zu drei Monate dauern kann, aber das ist schwer vorherzusagen. Wird sich das Universum zum Beispiel in eine Albtraumversion von WALL-E verwandeln, weil jeder einfach leere Kisten auf den Boden wirft oder die 10 KI-Körper, die er geplündert hat, in New Babbage's Commons entsorgt? Wir arbeiten an einem sogenannten Density Manager, der die Objekte verwaltet, die erfasst werden, und die Objekte mit geringerer Priorität (z. B. weggeworfene leere Flaschen oder Dosen) aufräumt, wenn sich zu viele in einem Gebiet befinden. Aber ich vermute, dass wir auch KI-Hausmeister und vielleicht sogar Verbrechensstatistiken für Vermüllung in Landezonen wie New Babbage oder ArcCorp einführen müssen!
Da es keinen Sinn machte, das überarbeitete physische Ladungssystem und die Bergung für das alte System zu entwickeln, wurden diese beiden Funktionen für PES entwickelt (du willst ja, dass die Wracks aus den Kämpfen der Spieler liegen bleiben, damit du sie bergen kannst!
Wir wollen jedoch nicht, dass das Engagement und die Inhalte ins Stocken geraten, weil PES länger getestet werden muss. Deshalb planen wir, Ende Juni einen inhaltsreichen Alpha-Patch 3.17.2 mit bekanntem stabilen Code, neuen Missionen, neuen Orten und anderem Gameplay zu veröffentlichen. Die große Mehrheit der Spielerinnen und Spieler, Hunderttausende von ihnen, sind hier, um einfach auf Live zu spielen, und für sie wollen wir weiterhin fesselndes neues Gameplay und Abenteuer bieten, während wir 3.18 in großem Umfang auf der PTU testen.
Unser Ziel ist es, 3.18 in der PTU 2-3 Monate lang zu testen, damit wir Ende des dritten Quartals eine Alpha 3.18 auf LIVE veröffentlichen können. Ich weiß, dass viele von euch schon lange auf Bergung, Physicalized Cargo und Persistent Entity Streaming gewartet haben, und ich freue mich, dass wir uns auf der Zielgeraden befinden, um sie euch endlich zu bringen. Ich glaube, dass 3.18 ein großartiges Update sein wird, das das Spiel noch mehr verändern wird als 3.15, aber wir wollen sicherstellen, dass wir ihm die nötige Zeit zum Testen geben, damit wir es euch in bestmöglicher Qualität liefern können.
Neben der Arbeit an Persistent Streaming haben die Engine- und Grafikteams große Fortschritte bei der zweiten großen technischen Initiative gemacht, an der wir in den letzten zwei Jahren gearbeitet haben: die komplette Erneuerung unserer Grafik-Engine durch das, was wir "Gen 12" nennen, ein Multithreading und ein viel effizienterer Ansatz für das Rendering, der das Beste aus modernen Grafik-APIs wie Vulkan macht. So können wir die moderne Grafikleistung von PCs effizienter nutzen und müssen nicht mehr in der Hauptaktualisierungsschleife des Spiels auf Zeichenaufrufe und Ähnliches warten. Wir planen, den Großteil dieser Funktionen mit der Live-Veröffentlichung von 3.18 einzubauen und die Vulkan-Funktionalität etwas später, aber hoffentlich bis Ende des Jahres, zu veröffentlichen.
Bleibt noch unsere dritte große technische Initiative, das Server Meshing.
Wie du vielleicht schon vermutet hast, werden wir das Server Meshing auf die gleiche Weise angehen wie das Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 wird eine wirklich neue Ära in Star Citizen einläuten. Sie bedeutet, dass unser letzter technischer Baustein - das Server Meshing - fertiggestellt sein wird. Die erste Implementierung wird das sogenannte Static Server Meshing (SSM) sein, bei dem jeder Server ein bestimmtes Gebiet simuliert. Sobald SSM jedoch stabil ist, werden wir in den folgendas Verseionen zum Dynamic Server Meshing übergehen, das eine viel bessere Skalierbarkeit ermöglicht, da die Server nicht an einen bestimmten Ort gebunden sind, sondern nach der Auslastung verteilt werden, was eine viel bessere Simulationsleistung in jedem beliebigen Gebiet des Universums ermöglicht.
Mit 4.0 bekommen wir unser zweites Sternensystem, Pyro, und wir fangen an, mehr und mehr Inhalte, Gameplay und Feinschliff hinzuzufügen, um uns zur Beta zu bringen. Für uns alle bei CIG bedeuten Server Meshing und 4.0 den nächsten großen Schritt, um das Universum mit den versprochenen Inhalten und dem Gameplay zu bevölkern, die Star Citizen zu einem reichhaltigen, lebendigen Universum machen werden, das die Versprechen, die wir vor vielen Jahren gegeben haben, noch übertrifft.
Unser derzeitiges Ziel ist es, das Server Meshing und 4.0 als frühe technische Vorschau für Evocati-Tester in PTU Ende des vierten Quartals dieses Jahres einzuführen, damit unsere eifrigsten Spieler uns dabei helfen können, das Server Meshing zu testen, damit wir es für die Veröffentlichung verfeinern können. Dies hängt jedoch stark davon ab, wie gut/einfach die Einführung von Persistent Entity Streaming verläuft, also sei gewarnt, dass dies mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit in Q1 nächsten Jahres stattfinden wird. Sobald das Server Meshing mit Tausenden von Spielern in PTU getestet wird, können wir besser einschätzen, wie viel Zeit es in PTU braucht, bevor es auf LIVE gehen kann. Unser Ziel ist das Ende des 1. Quartals 2023, aber auch hier gilt, dass wir es erst dann mit Sicherheit wissen werden, wenn es getestet wird.
Für die meisten Spielerinnen und Spieler wird diese spezielle Veröffentlichungshäufigkeit im Jahr 2022 nicht sonderlich ungewöhnlich sein, wenn man sie etwas zurücknimmt und im Großen und Ganzen betrachtet. Wir werden immer noch 4 große Veröffentlichungen am Ende des Quartals sowie 2 große Veröffentlichungen in der Mitte des Quartals für die Flottenwoche im Mai und die IAE im November haben. Spieler, die nicht in unseren Entwicklungsprozess eingeweiht sind, werden weiterhin in jedem Quartal schnelle Inhaltsveröffentlichungen erleben, und in der zweiten Hälfte des Jahres 2022 werden wir noch viel mehr bedeutungsvolles Gameplay in die Welt bringen. Mit einer weiteren Ausgabe von XenoThreat, Updates für Jumptown, neuen dynamischen Ereignissen, zusätzlichen Orten und Sehenswürdigkeiten, die es zu erkunden gilt, und weiteren Patch-Updates wird es keinen Mangel an Gameplay und Inhalten geben, die du erleben kannst. Bis zum Jahresende können die Spieler/innen Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo Refactor und Bounty Hunter v2 Gameplay auf Live genießen.
In der Zwischenzeit werden diejenigen, die unsere Entwicklung aufmerksam verfolgen und uns beim Testen unserer wichtigsten Technologien helfen, in diesem Jahr Persistent Streaming und Server Meshing in die Hände bekommen, da wir sie in 3.18 und 4.0 in PTU im Sommer bzw. Winter testen werden. Manchmal ist das Warten am schwersten, wenn wir kurz vor der Ziellinie stehen, aber in diesem Jahr freue ich mich sehr darauf, unsere Pläne für die Veröffentlichung unserer wichtigsten Technologiebausteine mitzuteilen, und ich weiß, dass viele von euch es kaum erwarten können, in PTU einzusteigen und noch in diesem Jahr mit den Tests zu beginnen.
Bauen für die Langlebigkeit
Es ist leicht, sich nur auf unseren Entwicklungsfortschritt und die Arbeit zu konzentrieren, die wir mit Star Citizen und Squadron 42 vor uns haben, aber es gibt noch ein anderes sehr wichtiges Element unserer Reise, das oft übersehen wird. Wir entwickeln nicht nur zwei sehr ehrgeizige Spiele, die es mit denen der größten AAA-Studios aufnehmen können, sondern wir mussten auch das Unternehmen aufbauen, um die Technologie zu entwickeln und die Spiele von Grund auf neu zu entwickeln.
An dem Tag, an dem ich die Bühne auf der GDC betrat, hatten wir keine offiziellen Angestellten, sondern mit Ortwin, Sandi und mir drei Gründer und eine Handvoll Leute, die uns geholfen hatten, wie Forrest Stephan, David Haddock und David Swofford, die manchmal neben ihrem Hauptjob arbeiteten (natürlich mit Erlaubnis), wie Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy und Paul Reindell, und ein paar Freunde aus meiner alten Origin- und Digital Anvil-Zeit, wie Sergio Rosas und seine Kunst-Outsourcing-Firma CGBot, um die Demo zu erstellen und die Website aufzubauen.
Heute haben wir 780 Mitarbeiter und eine erweiterte Familie von über 130 Personen, die eng mit uns bei Turbulent in Montreal zusammenarbeiten, und viele weitere werden in den kommenden Monaten zu uns stoßen. Wir haben ein siebenköpfiges Global Talent Acquisition Team, das sich ausschließlich darauf konzentriert, die bestmöglichen Talente für CIG einzustellen. Um dir eine Vorstellung vom Umfang der TA-Arbeit zu geben: Im Jahr 2021 haben sie uns geholfen, 168 Leute einzustellen, und in diesem Jahr haben sie uns bereits bei der Einstellung von 128 Leuten geholfen.
Im Jahr 2022 werden wir in allen Abteilungen weiter wachsen und unsere Mitarbeiterzahl auf ca. 840 erhöhen, was uns der Veröffentlichung von Star Citizen und Squadron 42 näher bringt.
Eine Herausforderung, mit der wir konfrontiert sind, ist, dass wir in mehreren unserer Studios nicht annähernd genug Platz für die neuen Mitarbeiter/innen haben, die während der Pandemie zu uns gestoßen sind. Aus diesem Grund haben wir im letzten Jahr langfristige Mietverträge für zwei Büros in brandneuen und hochmodernen Gebäuden in Manchester und Frankfurt abgeschlossen.
Wir sind nur noch wenige Monate von der Eröffnung der beiden neuen Büros entfernt, die beide erstklassige Räume für die Zusammenarbeit schaffen und unser ständig wachsendes Team beherbergen werden. Unser neues Studio in Großbritannien wird auf den drei obersten Etagen des Manchester Goods Yard 90.000 m² hochmoderne, kreative Studioräume bieten, sowie zwei Bühnen im angrenzenden Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse Komplex: eine spezielle Motion-/Performance-Capture-Bühne mit einer Fläche von 4.500 m² mit Umkleideräumen, einem grünen Raum, einem Maschinenraum, einem Scan-Raum und einer Aussichtsgalerie sowie eine kleinere Bühne für die globale Videoproduktion, die über ein spezielles Set verfügt und für das Filmen einer Vielzahl von Inhalten für Star Citizen und später für den Start von Squadron 42 bestens gerüstet ist.
In Frankfurt werden wir im The One auf zwei Etagen 30.000 m² mit spektakulärem Blick über die Skyline der Stadt beziehen. Das ist doppelt so viel wie unsere derzeitige Fläche in Frankfurt und sollte uns eine gute Ausgangsposition für ein baldiges Wachstum bieten.
Wir schauen uns auch nach dem nächsten Standort für unser Studio in Austin um, wo wir Ende nächsten Jahres einziehen könnten, da wir auch dort mehr Platz brauchen. Danach werden wir auch das Studio in LA ausbauen.
Wir bauen ein langfristiges Zuhause, das uns die Möglichkeit bietet, das Universum für die nächsten Jahrzehnte am Leben zu erhalten und zu erweitern.
CitizenCon
Veranstaltungen wie die CitizenCon sind riesige Unternehmungen, die viel Planung erfordern, und obwohl das Leben langsam wieder zur Normalität zurückkehrt, werden die Einschränkungen gerade erst aufgehoben. Und da die Fälle immer noch weitgehend unvorhersehbar sind, sehen wir, dass die Planung großer Shows vielleicht noch etwas verfrüht ist. Die Ungewissheit über die wiederhergestellte Normalität hat sich auf unsere Fähigkeit ausgewirkt, eine physische Show zu planen. Normalerweise wären wir heute schon mitten in der Planung und Durchführung einer CitizenCon, wenn wir im Oktober eine Veranstaltung abhalten würden, aber dazu waren wir bisher nicht in der Lage. Es scheint, dass viele unserer Branchenkollegen mit ähnlichen Problemen zu kämpfen haben, denn erst kürzlich hat die E3 ihre physische Messe abgesagt. Außerdem ist Los Angeles, wo wir die diesjährige Messe abhalten würden, sehr vorsichtig und neigt eher dazu, große persönliche Versammlungen zu verbieten, wenn eine neue Variante auftaucht.
Aus diesem Grund und wegen des enormen Arbeitsaufwands, den das Unternehmen in diesem Jahr zu bewältigen hat, ganz zu schweigen vom Umzug von 70% des Unternehmens in zwei neue Büros, haben wir beschlossen, in diesem Jahr keine CitizenCon zu veranstalten. Wir hoffen sehr, dass wir im nächsten Jahr in der Lage sein werden, eine persönliche Veranstaltung zu organisieren, denn wir vermissen die Gelegenheit, uns persönlich mit euch allen auszutauschen und von eurem Enthusiasmus und eurer Begeisterung angespornt zu werden.
Gleichzeitig wissen wir aber auch, dass wir ohne unsere Gemeinschaft nicht so weit gekommen wären, und wir sind dankbar für jeden Einzelnen von euch, der uns auf diesem Weg unterstützt hat. Da wir unser 10-jähriges Bestehen als Unternehmen und als Gemeinschaft feiern, werden wir, wie schon im letzten Jahr, eine virtuelle CitizenCon veranstalten.
Ein Unterschied zum letzten Jahr besteht darin, dass es keine Gameplay-Demo geben wird, da dies wertvolle Ressourcen von unseren Spielentwicklungsteams abziehen würde, die hart daran arbeiten, Persistent Streaming, Gen 12/Vulkan und Server Meshing in eure Hände zu bekommen, ganz zu schweigen davon, dass wir noch mehr Inhalte und Gameplay liefern, die sich als so erfolgreich erwiesen haben, dass sie neue Spieler/innen anziehen und alte wie neue Nutzer/innen binden.
Stattdessen wird die CitizenCon eine Feier für euch, die Community, mit Präsentationen und Diskussionsrunden unserer Entwickler sein, um euch über die Fortschritte, die wir machen, und die nahe Zukunft dessen, was ihr im nächsten Jahr von Star Citizen erwarten könnt, zu informieren. Wie ich bereits in meinem Brief vom Dezember 2020 erwähnt habe, werden wir uns mit Squadron 42 noch zurückhalten, bis es an der Zeit ist, die Veröffentlichungskampagne zu starten. Und so weit sind wir noch nicht. Ihr solltet wissen, dass wir gut vorankommen, aber wir sind noch nicht bereit, den Vorhang für Squadron 42 zu schließen.
Bar Citizen Welttournee
Es ist mehr als 2 Jahre her, dass wir die Gelegenheit hatten, mit euch allen persönlich Zeit zu verbringen, und obwohl wir nicht auf der CitizenCon sein werden, können wir es nicht ein weiteres Jahr aushalten! Aus diesem Grund planen wir, diesen Sommer eine robuste "Bar Citizen World Tour" zu starten, die genau mit dem Feiertag des Ersten Kontakts zusammenfällt (Lies unbedingt die Hintergrundgeschichte, um zu sehen, warum das so gut passt!) Außerdem möchten wir diese Gelegenheit nutzen, um einen neuen Feiertag außerhalb des Spiels auszurufen: Den Internationalen Bar Citizen Day. Wir werden diesen ersten neuen Feiertag feiern, indem wir Mitte Juni in allen unseren Entwicklungsstudios gleichzeitig Bar Citizen Events veranstalten.
Danach planen wir, den Spaß auch auf Veranstaltungen zu bringen, die nicht so nah an unseren Studios liegen. Unser Community-Team plant, Bar Citizen rund um den Globus mit neuem Elan zu begrüßen und bringt Goodies und Entwickler mit, um sich zur Feier unseres 10-jährigen Jubiläums unter euch zu mischen und euch zu begrüßen.
Behalte Spectrum in den nächsten Wochen genau im Auge, denn das Team wird sich überlegen, welche Bar Citizen-Events wir besuchen wollen. Wenn du also eine eigene Veranstaltung ausrichtest, möchten wir von dir hören.
Schlussgedanken
Einige von euch werden sicher enttäuscht sein, dass es keine physische Show und keine Keynote-Demo auf der CitizenCon geben wird. Das Team und ich waren jedoch der Meinung, dass es viel wichtiger ist, dass wir uns auf den Fortschritt in der Entwicklung konzentrieren, damit wir das Tempo beibehalten können, das wir seit Alpha 3.14 vorgelegt haben.
Dieses Jahr ist ein großes Jahr für uns alle bei Star Citizen: Du kannst dich auf die Invictus Launch Week freuen, die in die Wolken von Crusader eindringt, auf das Versprechen von Persistent Entity Streaming, das seinen Weg ins Verse findet, sowie auf große spielverändernde Features wie Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, neue Events und Missionen, Verbesserungen für Jumptown, Schiffe, auf die du schon lange wartest, wie den Corsair, Vulture und Hull C, sowie weitere Verbesserungen der Lebensqualität und des New Player Onboarding, um Star Citizen noch spielbarer und einladender zu machen, als es heute ist. Ganz zu schweigen von Pyro und Server Meshing, die wir bis Ende des Jahres testen wollen, je nachdem, wie schwierig es ist, Persistent Entity Streaming stabil zu bekommen. Wir denken, dass ihr alle diese neuen Inhalte lieber spielen wollt, als davon zu hören. Deshalb werden wir die Zeit in diesem Jahr nutzen, um uns auf die Entwicklung zu konzentrieren und euch die Technik, die Funktionen und die Inhalte zu liefern, auf die ihr wartet.
Die Entwickler von CIG bekommen viel Aufmerksamkeit, und das ist auch gut so, denn es ist das talentierteste Entwicklerteam, mit dem ich je gearbeitet habe. Aber es gibt noch viel mehr Menschen bei CIG als nur die Entwickler - wie man so schön sagt: "It takes a village"!
Ohne unser Publishing- und Live-Ops-Team wären die Server nicht rund um die Uhr in der Cloud verfügbar, und du könntest Star Citizen nicht herunterladen oder spielen. Ohne das unermüdliche Testen und Feedback unseres Qualitätssicherungs-Teams wäre Star Citizen unspielbar. Ohne die Backend- und Web-Teams bei Turbulent könntest du dich nicht einloggen, hättest keine Website, auf der du Nachrichten und Informationen lesen kannst, und kein Forum, in dem du dich an gesunden Debatten beteiligen, ein Versprechen abgeben oder Star Citizen starten könntest. Ohne unser Studio Experience Team, das sich um das Wohlergehen unserer Organisation kümmert, gäbe es kein so ambitioniertes kreatives Umfeld wie Star Citizen. Ohne unsere Finanz- und Rechtsteams hätten wir kein so einzigartiges und bahnbrechendes Unternehmen wie CIG aufbauen können. Ohne unsere Marketing- und Community-Teams gäbe es keine Kommunikation über unsere Pläne, keine schillernden Trailer, die auf zukünftige Inhalte hinweisen, und kein echtes Hin und Her zwischen der Community und CIG. Ohne unsere Teams für Kundenbetreuung und Spielerfahrung würdest du nicht die Hilfe bekommen, die du brauchst, und hättest auch nicht die Möglichkeit, dein Feedback zum Spielgeschehen so zu formulieren, dass es quantifiziert werden kann. Ohne unsere IT-Abteilung könnten wir nicht zusammenarbeiten, weder im Büro noch von zu Hause aus, noch könnten wir Code kompilieren oder schöne Assets erstellen. Ohne unsere Personalabteilung gäbe es niemanden, der unsere Mitarbeiter/innen einstellt, ihnen zuhört, sie anleitet und ihnen hilft.
Und ohne euch alle, mit eurem Enthusiasmus und eurer Geduld, gäbe es weder Star Citizen, Squadron 42 noch Cloud Imperium Games.
Während wir uns dem Erreichen der oben genannten wichtigen Meilensteine nähern, können wir nicht anders, als jedem einzelnen von euch, der den gemeinsamen Traum von Star Citizen teilt, eine immense Wertschätzung entgegenzubringen. Der Weg, der vor uns liegt, ist spannender denn je, aber in gewisser Weise ist die gemeinsame Reise, die Momente und der Spaß, den die Menschen auf dem Weg haben, während wir Star Citizen gemeinsam aufbauen, genauso lohnend wie das endgültige Ziel.
Und das ist es, was dieses Spiel und diese Gemeinschaft so besonders macht.
Wir alle von Cloud Imperium sehen uns auf der Bar Citizen, der Digital CitizenCon und in der PTU!
Letter from the Chairman
05/18/2022 - 1:00 PM
Year in Review
“Don’t drive Angry!”
Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day 1993
In some ways last year felt like we were stuck just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day repeating the same cycles as 2020; just when we thought we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants emerged to send cases skyrocketing again and communities back into lockdown and other safety measures. The world grew increasingly weary and fatigued from the toll of both the pandemic and the necessary measures to keep people as safe as possible. And even as a large part of the world is starting to return to normal, the specter of a new potential variant that can evade the vaccines and is more transmissible haunts us. Hopefully with readily available vaccines in most countries and a certain degree of built-in protection from prior infections, COVID will continue to transition to an endemic disease, something that certainly is not great, but not nearly as deadly as before, a virus that we can get on with our lives and live with just like the common Flu or Cold.
Because of the ups and downs of last year, we are only just starting to get back to the office. The first studio where it became possible to start working together in person, at any scale, was our UK studio in Manchester, where I have been spending a lot of time since last fall. I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure. Our offices in Frankfurt, Austin, and Los Angeles are only just starting to return to the office now that the local authorities have deemed it safe enough to lift various requirements. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we were proud of how we transitioned seamlessly to a work-from-home environment, but as the situation dragged on, it became clear that we were missing the benefits of spontaneous collaboration and team building that come from working in person, near each other. The time I have spent with the Squadron team in the UK has only reinforced this, as the ability to walk over to someone’s desk and see the issue or having a conversation in passing about a problem or a creative thought, makes an enormous difference to progress. When everyone is working remotely it becomes more of a slog to problem solve on the fly, or easily get or give feedback, and you end up with far more meetings / video calls. In our internal tracking we found that we had six times as many meetings when everyone was working from home than when we were in the office. I personally felt the difference in our release cadence; it took us a little longer to get each patch out than before, and it became harder to solve or fix bugs which hung around longer than previously. I have also seen the trend in the industry as a whole, with pretty much any large title being delayed, or in some unfortunate cases released before they should have been. For this reason, despite our ability to work fully remote, we are focused on getting people back together, working with each other side by side for extended periods. Going back to the office does not mean a return to the old work patterns and policies, as the extended lockdowns, combined with working remotely for two years has given us new insights into work life balance for our staff. We have altered our global work policy to allow for flexi-hours and a hybrid of in person and work from home, depending on both an employee’s and manager’s needs, with emphasis on being cognizant of our employees’ life situations.
Despite the challenges of the last year, I am proud of how much we accomplished in 2021. In fact, looking back at the year in review, I am amazed at the amount of content and features we delivered to our players. In January of last year, the community was able to play the first iteration of the XenoThreat Incursion, our first dynamic event that players praised for bringing together the pieces of Star Citizen for a thrilling server-wide encounter. While only our first iteration, this event already showed glimpses of the full promise of the Persistent Universe. In April of 2021, we released Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy and delivered drive-in caves and sinkholes, planet tech improvements, ship-to-station docking, and more. With Invictus Launch Week, we opened the doors of the Javelin for the first time to let people take a walking tour of the mighty UEE destroyer, and brought the Bengal into orbit to showcase our biggest capital ship yet in the ’verse.
However, we really started to hit our stride in the second half of 2021 with the release of Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, when we finished the Stanton system by launching the gas giant Crusader and the landing zone of Orison. Accompanying that were a host of Quality of Life improvements and our first iteration of Volumetric Clouds.
Then, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences, we introduced v0 of our Medical Gameplay, Looting, Bombing, and Personal Inventory, just to name a few new features. Coupled with our continuing improvements in performance and stability, and the drastic reduction in server crashes (which usually manifest themselves to a user as the infamous 30K error; connection lost to the server), Star Citizen the game was finally starting to come together in a way it had never done before.
And as great as our 2020 year was in terms of engagement and sentiment, the back half of 2021 was at another level. We saw more people than ever before flocking to Star Citizen, carried in on waves of good will and excitement from current players asking their friends to join, and from complete newcomers awed by the spectacle of Crusader, the gameplay of XenoThreat, and the opportunities from new features like Personal Inventory and Looting. And to cap off the year, when we launched Alpha 3.16: Return to Jumptown, veteran players returned to see our fresh, new take on the classic Jumptown emergent battlegrounds and were amazed at just how far the game had progressed.
Our wins in 2021 set us up for an absolutely historic start to 2022. So far, we have blown past all our projections on new players joining the ‘verse. In fact, this year, we have more than doubled our rate of New User acquisition, and with the recent launch of Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, we are seeing over two thousand new players a day joining the ‘verse. Our DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by over 50% since the numbers I shared in my last Letter from the Chairman in December 2020, and with this latest patch, we are enjoying double the daily login traffic of our last April patch launch. We are enjoying MAU (Monthly Active Users) which is well beyond the highs of 2020. And we have had nearly 1 million New Accounts created since then, and more than half a million New Pledging Players join the game. And this week, we had our 2 millionth unique player log in to play Star Citizen. We are on track this year to break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins this year, and more than 0 million in lifetime revenue.
All of this is due to the incredible support we receive from you combined with the progress we have been making in Star Citizen, which brings new curious gamers into the ‘verse. It is heartening to see the feedback and impressions from newer members of the community when they first start playing Star Citizen.
For all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance… that becomes another planet, that you can enter it’s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.
Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.
Many that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.
THANK YOU!
Road to 4.0
Back in December 2017, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 was published to the live servers after a unified push from our developers around the globe. This monumental patch introduced our brand new procedural planetary technology and the first planetary bodies you could land on and go anywhere across the surface of the three moons of Crusader. It also included a new mission system, improved shopping, new cargo mechanics, and doubled our server player cap. To date Star Citizen 3.0 was probably the biggest incremental jump in gameplay and content, which is why we incremented the Alpha designation from 2.X to 3.X, and it was a whole eight months between 2.6.3 and 3.0.
This year, we find ourselves on a similar path with three huge technology initiatives that will fundamentally change the experience and immersion into Star Citizen. The first of these is what we are calling Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) which is the foundational tech that enables Server Meshing (SM). PES is the hardest part of the work needed for SM and is the one that has required the most engineering. It fundamentally changes how we record state in the Universe and delivers a level of persistence that you just don’t see in other games, whether they are MMOs or even single-player experiences. Up until now, all persistence in the game has been tied to a player’s inventory; ships you own or items you hold physically or in the virtual inventories of items you own. If you’ve physically attached an item inside your vehicle, say a rifle to a weapons rack, when you log out or stow the vehicle it will remember all the attached items and anything in that vehicle’s virtual inventory. However, if you drop or place something loosely, even inside a ship you own, it won’t be associated with any player inventory. So, when you log out (or if the server crashes), the item will not be there when logging on or re-joining. With PES we are recording the state of every dynamic object in the game, irrelevant of whether it is “owned” or held by a player. That means that you could drop a gun or a med pen in a forested area on Microtech and return several days later after logging out to find the gun or med pen still there (assuming another player didn’t grab them!).
The technology to do this at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering. We have been working towards this since 2019 when we debuted Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS), which allows a server to only stream in and simulate only a portion of our universe, which is necessary if you are going to have multiple servers simulate different parts of the universe.
The development has not been without road bumps; we had to change our plans for how we would persist the state of the universe when we realized that the backend relational database we were planning on using with a host of services, which we had collectively dubbed “iCache” would likely not be able to have low latency at the scale we needed for the number of concurrent players we will need to support in the future. We pivoted to using a Graph database at the start of 2021, taking a different approach to the services and cache which we outlined in a virtual presentation during last year’s CitizenCon. The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe. The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players. For PES to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services. For Server Meshing, only 4 more services are currently planned, so you can see just how much foundational tech for SM is in PES. As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication. The nice aspect of using tech like this is that it is designed to scale (just imagine how many concurrent users Google must handle) and there are lots of available third-party tools and code, compared to creating an internal custom protocol.
All this means that getting Persistent Entity Streaming to work would require the bulk of the tech we need to make Server Meshing viable. I am happy to report after 16 months of extremely focused work by 18 engineers, 3 dedicated QA, and 4 producers spread between CIG and Turbulent (who are managing the back-end data base in the cloud and its related services) that the team were able to demonstrate Persistent Entity Streaming working last week in our weekly internal Persistent Universe Update meeting.
Paul Reindell, Our Director of Engineering for Online Tech, spun up a server, populated the Entity Graph to its initial state along with the Replication Layer (which is essentially an in memory cache for the universe state/backend database that exists in the cloud to make sure read/writes to the database do not bottleneck servers and clients), then connected a client, placed down a series of small objects like cans on the surface of Aberdeen, along with an 890 Jump and an Anvil Arrow. He then killed the server and the client. The server was restarted, we did not populate the Entity Graph (as it had been previously seeded on the initial startup), and then connected a client, warped to Aberdeen and everything was there as he placed it. This was a huge milestone as the state of the universe was recorded to the backend database and then when he restarted the server it just connected to the Replication Layer, which had initialized itself from the database (the Entity Graph) and continued with the universe at the state he left it.
That may not sound revolutionary to some of you, but I can tell you it was akin to Neil Armstrong taking “one small step.” Once Persistent Entity Streaming comes online, Star Citizen will be a different universe. Full persistence will provide over the coming years an experience in gaming that most other online games do not provide; a universe you can escape to, that is affected by your and other players’ actions, with the state being dynamic and persistent. Crash land on a planet, and your shipwreck will persist, while you forage for food and water to survive, and perhaps wood to make a fire to keep warm. log off and come back to what you built. Or, perhaps once you have been rescued, another player will stumble on the wreck of your old ship and the long-extinguished campfire. Find a corner of the galaxy to make your own, collect resources and import material to build your outpost, decorate or arrange your hangar or home how you like.
With this tech in place, Server Meshing becomes possible, as the Replication Layer/Entity Graph is the universe state that clients and servers write and read from. Because we have decoupled state from simulation, this allows us to have many Server Nodes all communicating with the Replication Layer, responsible for simulation of focused areas in the Universe, which allows us to scale our ability to simulate the overall universe, as a server is no longer responsible for every non-player entity, regardless of location or number. This means that instead of a server dropping to five frames per second due to simulation load, we can just spin up another, and then another to spread the simulation load and keep the update tick rate high. This is the ultimate goal of Dynamic Server Meshing and what we are working towards.
Now, a fundamental change to how state is recorded, especially one that affects every dynamic object, not just a select few, is going to have a lot of edge cases and issues we have not come across yet or foreseen.
2022 TESTING AND RELEASE CADENCE
Because of this, we are going to be approaching 3.18 differently than our previous releases. We are anticipating that 3.18 will require a much longer time in the Evocati/PTU phase than our previous releases, due to the fundamental change in how the game tracks state. We know we will also need testing at scale, as in our experience we see different issues when we go from internal testing to Evocati to PTU wave 1, then wave 2 and so on. Players do crazy things, and lots of players creates lots of crazy cases we had not considered, which expose bugs and edge cases. Our guess is that it may be as long as three months in the PTU stage, but it is hard to predict. For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage’s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!
As it did not make much sense to engineer the revamped physical Cargo system and Salvage for the old system, these two features have been engineered for PES (you want wrecks from player battles to stick around so you can salvage!) and will arrive with 3.18.
However, we do not want engagement and content to stall because of PES requiring longer testing, so we are planning to release a content-rich Alpha 3.17.2 patch with known stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay in late June. The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.
The goal will then be to get 2-3 months of testing on 3.18 in PTU for an Alpha 3.18 release to LIVE in late Q3. I know many of you have been waiting for Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, and Persistent Entity Streaming for a long time, and I am excited to see us in the home stretch to finally bring it to you. I think 3.18 will be an amazing update that is an even bigger game-changer than 3.15 was, but we want to make sure we give it the proper time to test so we can deliver it to you at the best quality possible.
Alongside our Persistent Streaming work the Engine and Graphic teams have been making great progress on the second big technical initiative we’ve been working on the past two years; a complete replacement of our graphics engine with what we call “Gen 12”, which is multithreaded and much more efficient approach to rendering which gets the most out of modern graphics APIs like Vulkan. This allows us to utilize the modern graphics power of PCs more efficiently and not tie up the main game update loop with waiting around for draw call submissions and the like. We are looking at getting the bulk of this functionality in for the Live release of 3.18 with the release of the Vulkan functionality a little later, but hopefully by the end of the year.
This leaves us with our third large technical initiative, Server Meshing.
As you might have guessed, we will approach Server Meshing in much the same way that we are rolling out Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be a truly new era in Star Citizen. It will mean our final tech building block – Server Meshing – will have been delivered. The first implementation will be what we call Static Server Meshing (SSM), where each server is given a defined area to simulate, but as soon as SSM is stable we will move towards Dynamic Server Meshing with subsequent releases which will allow much more scalability as servers will not be bound by location, but instead will be distributed by load, allowing for much better simulation performance in any given area of the universe.
With 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the ‘verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.
Our current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well / easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.
This special 2022 release cadence will not be particularly unusual to most players, if you pull back and look at it in a broad sense. We will still have 4 big end-of-quarter releases, as well as 2 big mid-quarter releases for Fleet Week in May and IAE in November. Players who are not steeped in our development process will still enjoy and experience rapid content releases every quarter, and as we get into the second half of 2022, you will see a lot more meaningful gameplay making its way into the ‘verse. With another run of XenoThreat, updates to Jumptown, new Dynamic Events, additional locations and points of interest to explore, and more patch updates, there will be no shortage of gameplay and content to experience. And by year’s end, players will be able to enjoy Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo refactor, and Bounty Hunter v2 gameplay on Live.
Meanwhile, those who are following our development closest, and providing the critical service of helping us test our biggest tech, will be able to get their hands on Persistent Streaming and Server Meshing this year, as we put them into test in 3.18 and 4.0 in PTU during the summer and winter, respectively. Sometimes, the wait can be the hardest when we are closest to the finish line, but this year, I am so excited to share our release plans for our key tech building blocks, and I know many of you cannot wait to jump into PTU and start testing later this year.
Building for Longevity
It is easy to only focus on our development progress and the work we have ahead in building Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but there is another very important element of our journey that is often overlooked. Not only are we building two hugely ambitious games to rival anything released by the biggest AAA studios, but we’ve had to build the company to build the technology and make the games from scratch at the same time.
The day I stepped out on the stage at GDC, we had no formal employees, three founders in Ortwin, Sandi and myself, and a handful of people that had helped like Forrest Stephan, David Haddock and David Swofford, sometimes moonlighting from their day job (with permission of course) like Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy and Paul Reindell and a few friends from my old Origin and Digital Anvil days like Sergio Rosas and his CGBot art outsourcing company, to create the demo and build the website.
Today we have 780 people on staff, plus an extended family of over 130 working closely with us at Turbulent in Montreal, with many more that will join us in the coming months. We have a seven-person Global Talent Acquisition team that focuses exclusively on trying to hire the best talent possible for CIG. To give you an idea of the scale of TA work, they helped us hire 168 people in 2021, and so far, this year have helped us recruit 128 people already.
In 2022, we will continue to grow in all departments, increasing our headcount to approximately 840 and bring us closer to release for Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
One challenge we have been facing is that we have nowhere near enough room at several of our studios for new hires that joined us during the pandemic. Because of this, we signed long-term leases on two offices in brand new and state of the art buildings in Manchester and Frankfurt last year.
We are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion / performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42’s launch.
In Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.
We’re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too.
We are building long-term homes that will provide the facilities to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.
CitizenCon
Shows such as CitizenCon are huge undertakings that require lots of planning, and although life is slowly returning to normal, restrictions are only now just lifting. And as cases are still largely unpredictable, we see that planning big shows may still be a bit premature. The uncertainty surrounding resumed normality has impacted our ability to plan a physical show. Traditionally, we would already be deep in planning and execution for a CitizenCon today, if we were going to hold an event this October; however, we have not been able to do so yet. It does seem many of our peers in the industry are encountering similar conundrums, as E3 only recently canceled their physical show. In addition, Los Angeles, where we would hold this year’s show tends to be very cautious and is more apt to impose restrictions on large in-person gatherings in the event of a new variant blowing up.
Because of this, combined with the huge amount of work the company is trying to deliver this year, not to mention moving 70% of the company into two new offices, we have decided not to hold a physical CitizenCon this year. We very much hope that next year we will be able to commit to an in-person event as we miss the opportunity to mix in person with all of you and be invigorated by your enthusiasm and excitement.
At the same time though, we know we could not have come this far without our community, and we are grateful for each and every one of you that has supported us along this journey. It being our 10th anniversary as a company and a community, we are going to be celebrating virtually with a virtual CitizenCon, like we did last year.
One difference to last year is that there will be no keynote gameplay demo to headline this event as this would pull valuable resources away from our game development teams that are working hard to get Persistent Streaming, Gen 12/Vulkan and Server Meshing in your hands, not to mention also delivering more of the content and gameplay that has proven so successful in bringing in new players and retaining old and new users alike.
Instead, CitizenCon will be a celebration of you, the community, with presentations and panels from our developers, to share with you the progress we are making and the near future of what you can expect from Star Citizen in the year ahead. And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we’re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.
Bar Citizen World Tour
It has been more than 2 years since we have had the opportunity to spend time with all of you in person, and while we will not be together for CitizenCon, we cannot hold out another year! For that reason, we plan to kick off a robust “Bar Citizen World Tour” this Summer, perfectly coinciding with the in-lore holiday, First Contact Day (Definitely read up on the backstory to see why this fits so nicely!). We would also like to take this perfect opportunity to coin a new out-of-game annual holiday: International Bar Citizen Day. We will celebrate this inaugural new holiday by hosting Bar Citizen events simultaneously near all our development studios in mid-June, details on the when/where coming very soon.
After that, we plan to branch out and bring the fun to events that may not be as close to our studios. Our Community Team is planning to embrace Bar Citizens around the globe with renewed vigor, bringing goodies and developers with them to greet and mingle with all of you as part of the celebration of our 10th anniversary.
Keep a close eye on Spectrum in the weeks to come, as the team will begin exploring which Bar Citizen events to attend. So, if you are hosting your own event, we want to hear from you.
Final Thoughts
While some of you will no doubt be disappointed to hear the news about no physical show and no keynote demo at CitizenCon, the team and I felt it was much more important that we focus on making development progress so that we could maintain the pace of delivery we have been hitting since Alpha 3.14.
This year is a big one for all of us on Star Citizen: You can expect to see Invictus Launch Week moving into the clouds of Crusader, the promise of Persistent Entity Streaming making its way to the ‘verse, as well as big game-changing features like Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, new events and missions, enhancements to Jumptown, ships I know you’re waiting on like the Corsair, Vulture, and Hull C; as well as more Quality of Life and New Player Onboarding improvements to make Star Citizen even more playable and welcoming than it is today. And that is without mentioning Pyro and Server Meshing, which we are aggressively working towards letting you test by end of year, pending how difficult it is to get Persistent Entity Streaming stable. We think you would all rather be playing this new content than hearing about it. So, we will use our time this year to focus on development and delivering to you the tech, features, and content you are waiting for.
The developers at CIG tend to get a lot of attention, which is well deserved as it is the most talented development team I have ever worked with. But there are a lot more people beyond development at CIG - as they say, “it takes a village”!
Without our Publishing and Live-Ops team the servers would not be up 24/7 in the cloud, and you would not be able to download or play Star Citizen. Without our Quality Assurance teams tireless testing and feedback Star Citizen would be unplayable. Without the backend and web teams at Turbulent, you would not be able to log on, have a website to read news and information or a forum to participate in healthy debate on, pledge or launch Star Citizen. Without our Studio Experience Team looking after the health of our organization, there would not be a creative environment as ambitious as Star Citizen. Without our Finance and Legal teams, we could not have built a company as unique and groundbreaking as CIG. Without our Marketing and Community teams, there would not be any communication about our plans, no dazzling trailers to tease and excite about future content, and no real back and forth between the Community and CIG. Without our Customer Support and Player Experience Teams, you would not get the help you need, nor have the ability to give feedback on gameplay in a way it can be quantified. Without our IT department we would not be able to work together, whether in the office or from home, nor would we be able to compile code or create beautiful assets. Without our People department, there would be nobody that is there to hire, listen, guide and help our staff.
And without all of you, with your enthusiasm and patience, there would be no Star Citizen, Squadron 42 or Cloud Imperium Games.
As we move closer to achieving the critical milestones outlined above, we cannot help but feel an immense amount of appreciation for each and every one of you who shares in the collective dream of Star Citizen. The path ahead is more vibrant than ever, but in some ways the collective journey together, the moments and fun that people have along the way as we build Star Citizen together is as rewarding as the ultimate destination.
And that is what makes this game and community special.
From all of us at Cloud Imperium, we will see you at Bar Citizen, Digital CitizenCon and in the PTU!
5.0 explorersLong-rangeMaterialism cargo health devoid of selfOrdnanceClose-rangeEvolving greedOps bridge align us withMissionsSilicon Origin 300 develop gridPainInhabitedQuantum leap
05/18/2022 - 1:00 PM
Year in Review
“Don’t drive Angry!”
Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day 1993
In some ways last year felt like we were stuck just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day repeating the same cycles as 2020; just when we thought we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants emerged to send cases skyrocketing again and communities back into lockdown and other safety measures. The world grew increasingly weary and fatigued from the toll of both the pandemic and the necessary measures to keep people as safe as possible. And even as a large part of the world is starting to return to normal, the specter of a new potential variant that can evade the vaccines and is more transmissible haunts us. Hopefully with readily available vaccines in most countries and a certain degree of built-in protection from prior infections, COVID will continue to transition to an endemic disease, something that certainly is not great, but not nearly as deadly as before, a virus that we can get on with our lives and live with just like the common Flu or Cold.
Because of the ups and downs of last year, we are only just starting to get back to the office. The first studio where it became possible to start working together in person, at any scale, was our UK studio in Manchester, where I have been spending a lot of time since last fall. I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure. Our offices in Frankfurt, Austin, and Los Angeles are only just starting to return to the office now that the local authorities have deemed it safe enough to lift various requirements. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we were proud of how we transitioned seamlessly to a work-from-home environment, but as the situation dragged on, it became clear that we were missing the benefits of spontaneous collaboration and team building that come from working in person, near each other. The time I have spent with the Squadron team in the UK has only reinforced this, as the ability to walk over to someone’s desk and see the issue or having a conversation in passing about a problem or a creative thought, makes an enormous difference to progress. When everyone is working remotely it becomes more of a slog to problem solve on the fly, or easily get or give feedback, and you end up with far more meetings / video calls. In our internal tracking we found that we had six times as many meetings when everyone was working from home than when we were in the office. I personally felt the difference in our release cadence; it took us a little longer to get each patch out than before, and it became harder to solve or fix bugs which hung around longer than previously. I have also seen the trend in the industry as a whole, with pretty much any large title being delayed, or in some unfortunate cases released before they should have been. For this reason, despite our ability to work fully remote, we are focused on getting people back together, working with each other side by side for extended periods. Going back to the office does not mean a return to the old work patterns and policies, as the extended lockdowns, combined with working remotely for two years has given us new insights into work life balance for our staff. We have altered our global work policy to allow for flexi-hours and a hybrid of in person and work from home, depending on both an employee’s and manager’s needs, with emphasis on being cognizant of our employees’ life situations.
Despite the challenges of the last year, I am proud of how much we accomplished in 2021. In fact, looking back at the year in review, I am amazed at the amount of content and features we delivered to our players. In January of last year, the community was able to play the first iteration of the XenoThreat Incursion, our first dynamic event that players praised for bringing together the pieces of Star Citizen for a thrilling server-wide encounter. While only our first iteration, this event already showed glimpses of the full promise of the Persistent Universe. In April of 2021, we released Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy and delivered drive-in caves and sinkholes, planet tech improvements, ship-to-station docking, and more. With Invictus Launch Week, we opened the doors of the Javelin for the first time to let people take a walking tour of the mighty UEE destroyer, and brought the Bengal into orbit to showcase our biggest capital ship yet in the ’verse.
However, we really started to hit our stride in the second half of 2021 with the release of Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, when we finished the Stanton system by launching the gas giant Crusader and the landing zone of Orison. Accompanying that were a host of Quality of Life improvements and our first iteration of Volumetric Clouds.
Then, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences, we introduced v0 of our Medical Gameplay, Looting, Bombing, and Personal Inventory, just to name a few new features. Coupled with our continuing improvements in performance and stability, and the drastic reduction in server crashes (which usually manifest themselves to a user as the infamous 30K error; connection lost to the server), Star Citizen the game was finally starting to come together in a way it had never done before.
And as great as our 2020 year was in terms of engagement and sentiment, the back half of 2021 was at another level. We saw more people than ever before flocking to Star Citizen, carried in on waves of good will and excitement from current players asking their friends to join, and from complete newcomers awed by the spectacle of Crusader, the gameplay of XenoThreat, and the opportunities from new features like Personal Inventory and Looting. And to cap off the year, when we launched Alpha 3.16: Return to Jumptown, veteran players returned to see our fresh, new take on the classic Jumptown emergent battlegrounds and were amazed at just how far the game had progressed.
Our wins in 2021 set us up for an absolutely historic start to 2022. So far, we have blown past all our projections on new players joining the ‘verse. In fact, this year, we have more than doubled our rate of New User acquisition, and with the recent launch of Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, we are seeing over two thousand new players a day joining the ‘verse. Our DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by over 50% since the numbers I shared in my last Letter from the Chairman in December 2020, and with this latest patch, we are enjoying double the daily login traffic of our last April patch launch. We are enjoying MAU (Monthly Active Users) which is well beyond the highs of 2020. And we have had nearly 1 million New Accounts created since then, and more than half a million New Pledging Players join the game. And this week, we had our 2 millionth unique player log in to play Star Citizen. We are on track this year to break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins this year, and more than 0 million in lifetime revenue.
All of this is due to the incredible support we receive from you combined with the progress we have been making in Star Citizen, which brings new curious gamers into the ‘verse. It is heartening to see the feedback and impressions from newer members of the community when they first start playing Star Citizen.
For all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance… that becomes another planet, that you can enter it’s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.
Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.
Many that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.
THANK YOU!
Road to 4.0
Back in December 2017, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 was published to the live servers after a unified push from our developers around the globe. This monumental patch introduced our brand new procedural planetary technology and the first planetary bodies you could land on and go anywhere across the surface of the three moons of Crusader. It also included a new mission system, improved shopping, new cargo mechanics, and doubled our server player cap. To date Star Citizen 3.0 was probably the biggest incremental jump in gameplay and content, which is why we incremented the Alpha designation from 2.X to 3.X, and it was a whole eight months between 2.6.3 and 3.0.
This year, we find ourselves on a similar path with three huge technology initiatives that will fundamentally change the experience and immersion into Star Citizen. The first of these is what we are calling Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) which is the foundational tech that enables Server Meshing (SM). PES is the hardest part of the work needed for SM and is the one that has required the most engineering. It fundamentally changes how we record state in the Universe and delivers a level of persistence that you just don’t see in other games, whether they are MMOs or even single-player experiences. Up until now, all persistence in the game has been tied to a player’s inventory; ships you own or items you hold physically or in the virtual inventories of items you own. If you’ve physically attached an item inside your vehicle, say a rifle to a weapons rack, when you log out or stow the vehicle it will remember all the attached items and anything in that vehicle’s virtual inventory. However, if you drop or place something loosely, even inside a ship you own, it won’t be associated with any player inventory. So, when you log out (or if the server crashes), the item will not be there when logging on or re-joining. With PES we are recording the state of every dynamic object in the game, irrelevant of whether it is “owned” or held by a player. That means that you could drop a gun or a med pen in a forested area on Microtech and return several days later after logging out to find the gun or med pen still there (assuming another player didn’t grab them!).
The technology to do this at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering. We have been working towards this since 2019 when we debuted Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS), which allows a server to only stream in and simulate only a portion of our universe, which is necessary if you are going to have multiple servers simulate different parts of the universe.
The development has not been without road bumps; we had to change our plans for how we would persist the state of the universe when we realized that the backend relational database we were planning on using with a host of services, which we had collectively dubbed “iCache” would likely not be able to have low latency at the scale we needed for the number of concurrent players we will need to support in the future. We pivoted to using a Graph database at the start of 2021, taking a different approach to the services and cache which we outlined in a virtual presentation during last year’s CitizenCon. The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe. The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players. For PES to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services. For Server Meshing, only 4 more services are currently planned, so you can see just how much foundational tech for SM is in PES. As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication. The nice aspect of using tech like this is that it is designed to scale (just imagine how many concurrent users Google must handle) and there are lots of available third-party tools and code, compared to creating an internal custom protocol.
All this means that getting Persistent Entity Streaming to work would require the bulk of the tech we need to make Server Meshing viable. I am happy to report after 16 months of extremely focused work by 18 engineers, 3 dedicated QA, and 4 producers spread between CIG and Turbulent (who are managing the back-end data base in the cloud and its related services) that the team were able to demonstrate Persistent Entity Streaming working last week in our weekly internal Persistent Universe Update meeting.
Paul Reindell, Our Director of Engineering for Online Tech, spun up a server, populated the Entity Graph to its initial state along with the Replication Layer (which is essentially an in memory cache for the universe state/backend database that exists in the cloud to make sure read/writes to the database do not bottleneck servers and clients), then connected a client, placed down a series of small objects like cans on the surface of Aberdeen, along with an 890 Jump and an Anvil Arrow. He then killed the server and the client. The server was restarted, we did not populate the Entity Graph (as it had been previously seeded on the initial startup), and then connected a client, warped to Aberdeen and everything was there as he placed it. This was a huge milestone as the state of the universe was recorded to the backend database and then when he restarted the server it just connected to the Replication Layer, which had initialized itself from the database (the Entity Graph) and continued with the universe at the state he left it.
That may not sound revolutionary to some of you, but I can tell you it was akin to Neil Armstrong taking “one small step.” Once Persistent Entity Streaming comes online, Star Citizen will be a different universe. Full persistence will provide over the coming years an experience in gaming that most other online games do not provide; a universe you can escape to, that is affected by your and other players’ actions, with the state being dynamic and persistent. Crash land on a planet, and your shipwreck will persist, while you forage for food and water to survive, and perhaps wood to make a fire to keep warm. log off and come back to what you built. Or, perhaps once you have been rescued, another player will stumble on the wreck of your old ship and the long-extinguished campfire. Find a corner of the galaxy to make your own, collect resources and import material to build your outpost, decorate or arrange your hangar or home how you like.
With this tech in place, Server Meshing becomes possible, as the Replication Layer/Entity Graph is the universe state that clients and servers write and read from. Because we have decoupled state from simulation, this allows us to have many Server Nodes all communicating with the Replication Layer, responsible for simulation of focused areas in the Universe, which allows us to scale our ability to simulate the overall universe, as a server is no longer responsible for every non-player entity, regardless of location or number. This means that instead of a server dropping to five frames per second due to simulation load, we can just spin up another, and then another to spread the simulation load and keep the update tick rate high. This is the ultimate goal of Dynamic Server Meshing and what we are working towards.
Now, a fundamental change to how state is recorded, especially one that affects every dynamic object, not just a select few, is going to have a lot of edge cases and issues we have not come across yet or foreseen.
2022 TESTING AND RELEASE CADENCE
Because of this, we are going to be approaching 3.18 differently than our previous releases. We are anticipating that 3.18 will require a much longer time in the Evocati/PTU phase than our previous releases, due to the fundamental change in how the game tracks state. We know we will also need testing at scale, as in our experience we see different issues when we go from internal testing to Evocati to PTU wave 1, then wave 2 and so on. Players do crazy things, and lots of players creates lots of crazy cases we had not considered, which expose bugs and edge cases. Our guess is that it may be as long as three months in the PTU stage, but it is hard to predict. For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage’s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!
As it did not make much sense to engineer the revamped physical Cargo system and Salvage for the old system, these two features have been engineered for PES (you want wrecks from player battles to stick around so you can salvage!) and will arrive with 3.18.
However, we do not want engagement and content to stall because of PES requiring longer testing, so we are planning to release a content-rich Alpha 3.17.2 patch with known stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay in late June. The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.
The goal will then be to get 2-3 months of testing on 3.18 in PTU for an Alpha 3.18 release to LIVE in late Q3. I know many of you have been waiting for Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, and Persistent Entity Streaming for a long time, and I am excited to see us in the home stretch to finally bring it to you. I think 3.18 will be an amazing update that is an even bigger game-changer than 3.15 was, but we want to make sure we give it the proper time to test so we can deliver it to you at the best quality possible.
Alongside our Persistent Streaming work the Engine and Graphic teams have been making great progress on the second big technical initiative we’ve been working on the past two years; a complete replacement of our graphics engine with what we call “Gen 12”, which is multithreaded and much more efficient approach to rendering which gets the most out of modern graphics APIs like Vulkan. This allows us to utilize the modern graphics power of PCs more efficiently and not tie up the main game update loop with waiting around for draw call submissions and the like. We are looking at getting the bulk of this functionality in for the Live release of 3.18 with the release of the Vulkan functionality a little later, but hopefully by the end of the year.
This leaves us with our third large technical initiative, Server Meshing.
As you might have guessed, we will approach Server Meshing in much the same way that we are rolling out Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be a truly new era in Star Citizen. It will mean our final tech building block – Server Meshing – will have been delivered. The first implementation will be what we call Static Server Meshing (SSM), where each server is given a defined area to simulate, but as soon as SSM is stable we will move towards Dynamic Server Meshing with subsequent releases which will allow much more scalability as servers will not be bound by location, but instead will be distributed by load, allowing for much better simulation performance in any given area of the universe.
With 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the ‘verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.
Our current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well / easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.
This special 2022 release cadence will not be particularly unusual to most players, if you pull back and look at it in a broad sense. We will still have 4 big end-of-quarter releases, as well as 2 big mid-quarter releases for Fleet Week in May and IAE in November. Players who are not steeped in our development process will still enjoy and experience rapid content releases every quarter, and as we get into the second half of 2022, you will see a lot more meaningful gameplay making its way into the ‘verse. With another run of XenoThreat, updates to Jumptown, new Dynamic Events, additional locations and points of interest to explore, and more patch updates, there will be no shortage of gameplay and content to experience. And by year’s end, players will be able to enjoy Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo refactor, and Bounty Hunter v2 gameplay on Live.
Meanwhile, those who are following our development closest, and providing the critical service of helping us test our biggest tech, will be able to get their hands on Persistent Streaming and Server Meshing this year, as we put them into test in 3.18 and 4.0 in PTU during the summer and winter, respectively. Sometimes, the wait can be the hardest when we are closest to the finish line, but this year, I am so excited to share our release plans for our key tech building blocks, and I know many of you cannot wait to jump into PTU and start testing later this year.
Building for Longevity
It is easy to only focus on our development progress and the work we have ahead in building Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but there is another very important element of our journey that is often overlooked. Not only are we building two hugely ambitious games to rival anything released by the biggest AAA studios, but we’ve had to build the company to build the technology and make the games from scratch at the same time.
The day I stepped out on the stage at GDC, we had no formal employees, three founders in Ortwin, Sandi and myself, and a handful of people that had helped like Forrest Stephan, David Haddock and David Swofford, sometimes moonlighting from their day job (with permission of course) like Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy and Paul Reindell and a few friends from my old Origin and Digital Anvil days like Sergio Rosas and his CGBot art outsourcing company, to create the demo and build the website.
Today we have 780 people on staff, plus an extended family of over 130 working closely with us at Turbulent in Montreal, with many more that will join us in the coming months. We have a seven-person Global Talent Acquisition team that focuses exclusively on trying to hire the best talent possible for CIG. To give you an idea of the scale of TA work, they helped us hire 168 people in 2021, and so far, this year have helped us recruit 128 people already.
In 2022, we will continue to grow in all departments, increasing our headcount to approximately 840 and bring us closer to release for Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
One challenge we have been facing is that we have nowhere near enough room at several of our studios for new hires that joined us during the pandemic. Because of this, we signed long-term leases on two offices in brand new and state of the art buildings in Manchester and Frankfurt last year.
We are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion / performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42’s launch.
In Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.
We’re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too.
We are building long-term homes that will provide the facilities to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.
CitizenCon
Shows such as CitizenCon are huge undertakings that require lots of planning, and although life is slowly returning to normal, restrictions are only now just lifting. And as cases are still largely unpredictable, we see that planning big shows may still be a bit premature. The uncertainty surrounding resumed normality has impacted our ability to plan a physical show. Traditionally, we would already be deep in planning and execution for a CitizenCon today, if we were going to hold an event this October; however, we have not been able to do so yet. It does seem many of our peers in the industry are encountering similar conundrums, as E3 only recently canceled their physical show. In addition, Los Angeles, where we would hold this year’s show tends to be very cautious and is more apt to impose restrictions on large in-person gatherings in the event of a new variant blowing up.
Because of this, combined with the huge amount of work the company is trying to deliver this year, not to mention moving 70% of the company into two new offices, we have decided not to hold a physical CitizenCon this year. We very much hope that next year we will be able to commit to an in-person event as we miss the opportunity to mix in person with all of you and be invigorated by your enthusiasm and excitement.
At the same time though, we know we could not have come this far without our community, and we are grateful for each and every one of you that has supported us along this journey. It being our 10th anniversary as a company and a community, we are going to be celebrating virtually with a virtual CitizenCon, like we did last year.
One difference to last year is that there will be no keynote gameplay demo to headline this event as this would pull valuable resources away from our game development teams that are working hard to get Persistent Streaming, Gen 12/Vulkan and Server Meshing in your hands, not to mention also delivering more of the content and gameplay that has proven so successful in bringing in new players and retaining old and new users alike.
Instead, CitizenCon will be a celebration of you, the community, with presentations and panels from our developers, to share with you the progress we are making and the near future of what you can expect from Star Citizen in the year ahead. And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we’re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.
Bar Citizen World Tour
It has been more than 2 years since we have had the opportunity to spend time with all of you in person, and while we will not be together for CitizenCon, we cannot hold out another year! For that reason, we plan to kick off a robust “Bar Citizen World Tour” this Summer, perfectly coinciding with the in-lore holiday, First Contact Day (Definitely read up on the backstory to see why this fits so nicely!). We would also like to take this perfect opportunity to coin a new out-of-game annual holiday: International Bar Citizen Day. We will celebrate this inaugural new holiday by hosting Bar Citizen events simultaneously near all our development studios in mid-June, details on the when/where coming very soon.
After that, we plan to branch out and bring the fun to events that may not be as close to our studios. Our Community Team is planning to embrace Bar Citizens around the globe with renewed vigor, bringing goodies and developers with them to greet and mingle with all of you as part of the celebration of our 10th anniversary.
Keep a close eye on Spectrum in the weeks to come, as the team will begin exploring which Bar Citizen events to attend. So, if you are hosting your own event, we want to hear from you.
Final Thoughts
While some of you will no doubt be disappointed to hear the news about no physical show and no keynote demo at CitizenCon, the team and I felt it was much more important that we focus on making development progress so that we could maintain the pace of delivery we have been hitting since Alpha 3.14.
This year is a big one for all of us on Star Citizen: You can expect to see Invictus Launch Week moving into the clouds of Crusader, the promise of Persistent Entity Streaming making its way to the ‘verse, as well as big game-changing features like Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, new events and missions, enhancements to Jumptown, ships I know you’re waiting on like the Corsair, Vulture, and Hull C; as well as more Quality of Life and New Player Onboarding improvements to make Star Citizen even more playable and welcoming than it is today. And that is without mentioning Pyro and Server Meshing, which we are aggressively working towards letting you test by end of year, pending how difficult it is to get Persistent Entity Streaming stable. We think you would all rather be playing this new content than hearing about it. So, we will use our time this year to focus on development and delivering to you the tech, features, and content you are waiting for.
The developers at CIG tend to get a lot of attention, which is well deserved as it is the most talented development team I have ever worked with. But there are a lot more people beyond development at CIG - as they say, “it takes a village”!
Without our Publishing and Live-Ops team the servers would not be up 24/7 in the cloud, and you would not be able to download or play Star Citizen. Without our Quality Assurance teams tireless testing and feedback Star Citizen would be unplayable. Without the backend and web teams at Turbulent, you would not be able to log on, have a website to read news and information or a forum to participate in healthy debate on, pledge or launch Star Citizen. Without our Studio Experience Team looking after the health of our organization, there would not be a creative environment as ambitious as Star Citizen. Without our Finance and Legal teams, we could not have built a company as unique and groundbreaking as CIG. Without our Marketing and Community teams, there would not be any communication about our plans, no dazzling trailers to tease and excite about future content, and no real back and forth between the Community and CIG. Without our Customer Support and Player Experience Teams, you would not get the help you need, nor have the ability to give feedback on gameplay in a way it can be quantified. Without our IT department we would not be able to work together, whether in the office or from home, nor would we be able to compile code or create beautiful assets. Without our People department, there would be nobody that is there to hire, listen, guide and help our staff.
And without all of you, with your enthusiasm and patience, there would be no Star Citizen, Squadron 42 or Cloud Imperium Games.
As we move closer to achieving the critical milestones outlined above, we cannot help but feel an immense amount of appreciation for each and every one of you who shares in the collective dream of Star Citizen. The path ahead is more vibrant than ever, but in some ways the collective journey together, the moments and fun that people have along the way as we build Star Citizen together is as rewarding as the ultimate destination.
And that is what makes this game and community special.
From all of us at Cloud Imperium, we will see you at Bar Citizen, Digital CitizenCon and in the PTU!
5.0 explorersLong-rangeMaterialism cargo health devoid of selfOrdnanceClose-rangeEvolving greedOps bridge align us withMissionsSilicon Origin 300 develop gridPainInhabitedQuantum leap
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- CIG ID
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- From the Chairman
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- 3 years ago (2022-05-18T22:00:00+00:00)