Monthly Report: September 2014 - [Comm-Links](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links) - Monthly Report: September 2014 Monthly Report: September 2014 ============================== Undefined Undefined Monthly Reports [Previous](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links/14190) [Next](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links/14192) Content ------- English Greetings Citizens, It has been a busy month for Star Citizen! In the past month, we’ve released Arena Commander .9 and then followed it up with a number of patches. Perfecting Star Citizen’s physics, flight model and multiplayer is an effort that studios around the world have come together for… but we’ve also been building deeper elements of the game! The September reports below will let you in on just what we’ve been spending our time developing. Greetings Citizens! September was very busy and productive for the Santa Monica studio. Much of our focus this month has been on completing features and fixing bugs for v0.9 of Arena Commander. We were very excited about this release, as it introduced the new Murray Cup racing mode to the game, along with the M50 and 350R racing ships. Hopefully you all watched our “Galactic Gear” commercial that introduced these new features. There was quite a bit of buzz about the commercial around the Internet, and we were even referenced on the official “Top Gear” website for our homage to their show! In addition to supporting Arena Commander’s development, we have also been improving our pipeline for creating new ships. Recently, the ship pipeline was moved from Austin to LA, and we have been hard at work refining our process and improving our workflow so that we can develop ships more quickly and more efficiently than we have ever done before. The creation of new ships for Star Citizen is an incredibly complex and detailed process, so it made sense to move it to LA where Chris can maintain oversight and provide direction to everyone involved. Part of our process improvements included sitting down and reevaluating every step of the pipeline and making necessary adjustments to the workflow. If you are curious about what that looks like, please see the attached diagram of what it takes to develop a new ship for the game. And beyond supporting Arena Commander and building new ships, we’re also preparing for Citizen Con and PAX Australia events coming up in October. A lot of work is happening around the company to put together a sneak peak of many of the new areas of the game that are currently in development. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we reveal more of our progress to you. We have also been busy this month interviewing a number of applicants for various positions around the company. We’ve been talking to prospective 3D artists, concept artists, lighting artists, technical animators, technical designers, programmers, outsource managers, and many more. As a result, we’ve identified some really talented people who are ready to join us at Cloud Imperium Games. We’re very excited to be bringing on board some amazing new people who will help us to execute on Chris’s vision of the best damn space sim ever! As we add more resources to the project, it increases our development capacity and provides us with the ability to do even more on this ambitious project. None of this would be possible without all of our backers, so we thank you for your continued support in our development efforts! Now onto the departmental updates! Engineering Our engineering team in Santa Monica has been working on all aspects of Arena Commander this month. On the HUD front Brandon has been working on code support for new features and targeting modes that we are prototyping for introduction in a future patch to improve the HUD functionality and the user experience. Similarly everyone’s favorite Bug Smasher, Mark Abent, has been working with our Physics Programmer John Pritchett to improve everyone’s ability to “stay on target” with improvements to the lead prediction as well as some new aiming functionality for both gimbaled and fixed weapons that interface with the IFCS and should be rolling out to you guys soon. We’ve also created a new system for handling ship variants that cleverly allows us to share identical parts across variants. This new technology allows us to save an amazing amount of time and effort throughout the whole ship pipeline by eliminating the duplicate work we used to have to do updating the same pieces of a ship on all the variants separately. Now we can fix the bug or make the improvement we wanted to on the base model of a ship and it automatically propagates to all the variants of that ship that share that part. On the Graphics programming side our Engineer Okka Kyaw has been diligently working on moving to a 32-bit depth buffer. This will help to eliminate a lot of the z-fighting throughout the game. Previously the precision of the depth buffer was lacking which would cause geometry that was very close to each other to begin z-fighting when viewed from far distances. These fixes will be in an upcoming patch. Okka didn’t stop there though, he’s also begun the process of researching a developing a new vehicle paint system so that we can more easily create custom paint jobs for ships and paves the way for eventual customization by you in the community. Last but not least we here in Santa Monica had a Networking Summit where we hosted all of the top network and backend programmers from CIG and our partner studios led by Chris to discuss topics ranging from short term improvements like improving movement prediction, bandwidth consumption, server CPU usage, chat system, lobby systems, matchmaking, and telemetry data gathering. We also covered a multitude of longer term initiatives that included how best to handle clients migrating from server to server, handling the scale of the persistent universe, unified player and object ID’s for use across multiple servers, and a number of other topics dealing with delivering the most seamless multiplayer experience for both SQ42 and the Persistent Universe. All in all a very productive week long summit that laid a solid foundation for continued development. Design Design this month has been working in close collaboration with the Engineering and HUD team to design, prototype, and implement improvements to the HUD and targeting systems. Calix Reneau has been prototyping out ways to improve the control of gimbaled weapons on the control systems that commonly don’t natively support smooth analog movement such as joysticks, HOTAS, and gamepad peripherals. We are confident that these new systems, once implemented, will significantly improve the functionality of gimbaled weapons on these controller types. This month we have also been spending a significant amount of time reviewing community feedback on the balance of ships and their flight characteristics. You’ve already seen some patches since the V0.9 to address some of this feedback but we’re also working on some more long term balance changes that you will see in future releases. As part of this we’ve also been designing new weapons and items that we feel will further diversify the strategies that we see players using online. Another big push for our Design team has been spec’ing out improvements to the nascent signature and emissions system with our teammates at Foundry 42. We’ve had numerous discussions with them as well as the Engineering team and have a solid plan for implementing Chris’ vision for this system. Alongside this the team has also been designing game modes for Arena Commander that will better focus on gameplay that isn’t purely about dogfighting and instead will highlight the advantages of ships like the Aurora and other yet to be introduced ships that are less capable dogfighters and maybe have a bit more cargo capacity… Art With the move of the Ship Pipeline to Santa Monica from Austin we’ve been building our Art team in Santa Monica with additional Concept and 3D resources. The team has hit the ground running and have been blazing away at all the new ships that we are concepting, adding the hangar, and adding into Arena Commander. We are also continuing to hire in order to increase our pipelines capacity for developing more ships simultaneously. Especially since as we move forward to the larger and larger ships they will occupy our Artists for longer periods of time than the single seat ships have. With regard to ship development, we have a number of new concepts we are working on this month, including the Hearald, Carrack, Reclaimer, Avenger variants, 890 Jump, as well as new concepts for various items and weapons. We’ve completed the models for the full Mustang lineup, the full Cutlass lineup, and beginning to dive-in on Avenger variants, the Herald, Redeemer, and a few others… Now that we have the new variant system from Engineering we’re also planning to tackle all the custom pieces, damage states, and LODs for the variants of the 300 series, Aurora series, and Hornet series to get all the variants dogfighting ready as quickly as possible from an Art perspective. The Art team has also been working closely with Production to flesh out the new and improved Ship Pipeline and helping to identify areas where we can improve quality, reduce time, and further parallelize the development of new ships. We’ve ended up with a new pipeline that we feel is much more streamlined and primed to deliver a higher level of quality much more efficiently. Of course pipelines are not set in stone and it will continue to evolve as we work with other disciplines to further improve and refine the process. The great thing is that everyone on this project is motivated by the same desire to achieve the best quality possible so modifying this pipeline has been a great collaborative effort with likeminded individuals. Cinematics Our huge Cinematics team in Santa Monica who are responsible for the most recent commercials that we do for our ships have been hard at work, all two of them… John Griffith and Chris Wolak who were most recently responsible for bringing the M50 Galactic Gear commercial to life have been pouring that same creative energy into a new Cinematic in-fiction commercial that will be revealed at Citizen Con on October 10th. We are quite excited to share it with everyone and look forward to reading the comments and reactions. The great thing about the Cinematics that we do is that we use all our game assets and our game engine to create them. With the level of quality that the Art, Animation, and VFX teams are putting into these assets we are able to accomplish these beautiful commercials with a team of just two, very talented, individuals working diligently to use all these game assets to create a piece that matches Chris’ vision. We are also lucky to have two very talented writers, David Haddock and William Weissbaum who, when they aren’t working on Squadron 42, pen the scripts for these commercials. At any rate, we are truly looking forward to sharing our next in engine cinematic piece with all of you in the community in seven days and hope everyone enjoys it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it! Well that about wraps up this month’s update for everyone and while we aren’t able to cover every little detail we feel like this touches on the most important and interesting developments of the past month without crossing the 2000 word mark. As always we’d like to reiterate to everyone that we sincerely appreciate your support in making this game with us. Without you guys none of this would be possible and we are grateful for the opportunity to develop and share this game with all of you! Howdy folks, The Austin team has been hard at work this month on many different fronts. We’ve been a bit more quiet than usual, but we are very excited to be able to have something to demonstrate very soon. Our team has been working hard on Persistent Universe tasks and a multitude of Live Operations activities. Here’s a brief report from each team! Programming This month in Austin we have been hard at work on the Persistent Universe. We have made substantial progress on several of the core technologies critical to the Persistent Universe. Brian Mazza continues his work on server side persistence, which is essential to allow players to retain their inventory after they log out, among other things. James Wright and Allen Chen tag-teamed to wrap up Large World “Phase 1” this month as well, which is the first step to getting truly expansive galaxies in place that will literally take days to traverse without quantum travel. Tom Davies wrapped up development on the System Layout Tool, which our designers will be using to physically lay out our universe in-game as well as define properties and attributes of various planets and other objects within a solar system. Tony Zurovec completed the first design iteration of Subsumption, Star Citizen’s objective-oriented NPC AI system, and we’ve now moved into full production. Moon Collider – our AI partners in the UK – have started the long process of adding support for the multitude of specific features we’re going to need to their Kythera AI engine. Two of our Austin programmers – Jeff Uriarte and Tom Davies – have begun work on some of the numerous tools that will be required for the highly data-driven design, which will in turn eventually allow the constitution of the NPC population and even their daily schedules to be algorithmically determined based upon what’s occurring in the surrounding environment, and heavily contribute to providing the feeling of a living, breathing universe. Design Much groundwork was laid this month on laying out designs for some key elements to building our universe. We started looking into several different types of space phenomena and what types of interesting encounters they might make for our explorers out there. Each of these phenomena has different technical and artistic considerations, and we want to be sure to pick the most interesting and exciting to use as space exploration points of interest (POI). Some sensational examples we looked into this month include the Dark Nebula, Pulsar, and Ice Giant. Other things the design team have been doing are standardizing our props for environments, investigating how we might incorporate FPS into our planetside locations, and developing reputations for the various corporations within our universe. We’ve been working on other things we can’t reveal at the moment, but you will get to see a taste of it fairly soon. Art Persistent Universe art tasks have all been geared towards getting the first planetside location, ArcCorp, up and running. Our Art Director, Mark Skelton, has been constantly interfacing with the team at Behaviour to really push the visual envelope. Cort Soest further fleshed out the Tier Toolset which our designers and artists will use to quickly and efficiently build out planetside environments, space stations, and potentially even huge capital ships. Work on visual effects and props for ArcCorp as well as other planetside environments are being worked on here as well. Concept work for our next planetside environment – Terra Prime – is nearing completion, and full production will soon commence. Bryan Brewer and the animation team has been hard at work supporting [REDACTED] in getting the FPS characters in ship shape. We have been improving our character locomotion to look more realistic, making sure our characters have an awesome ragdoll effect for when they get blown off their feet, and moving over our existing animations to a brand new rig that will help raise our characters to next-gen quality. We have also been working on several NPC animations so that when peaceful NPC AI system comes online, our NPC’s will have something to do. Chris Smith and the ship team worked very hard to spruce up the new racing ships that were released this past month. They’ve been horsin’ around on other things we can’t tell you about just yet, but stay tuned and you’ll find out soon enough! Quality Assurance Star Citizen QA hit the ground running for the month of September rigorously testing the long awaited v0.9. After a lot of hard work we were happy to finally share all the new features with everyone with a successful release. Then we did it all again with a total of four releases! We also continually tested our internal tools to ensure that our developers have the most up to date and stable dev environment. Thanks to our resident QA engineer Keegan Standifer, significant progress was made with our development of automated testing. This will be important to leverage as the Persistent Universe expands. This month we added two new members to the QA team. Please welcome Melissa Estrada and Jeffrey Pease! Jeffrey joins us from Blizzard Entertainment where he specialized in growing an epic beard! Melissa joins us from NCSoft where she gained valuable MMO QA experience. As a solid team, we look forward to continuing our bug squashing efforts in order to provide the most enjoyable experience possible with each future release. Live Operations Work on the Publishing and Live Ops side continues at a frenetic pace. The QA Team led by Justin Binford has been burning the midnight oil on a regular basis to test latest build versions for our various development teams and for upcoming publishes to the public. Our Austin QA team works very closely with the QA team in the UK office so that we can provide testing on a virtually 24/7 basis. We’re looking forward to seeing this work on a live server in the very near future. We’ve been working on a ton of behind the scenes upgrades to our build and deploy systems so that we can decrease turnaround time on new builds and then test and deploy updates more quickly around the world. Every bit we save in this area helps us be more productive throughout our operations. It’s been a busy month and we’re very excited that much of our “behind the scenes” work is going to be more visible to the public over the coming days. Stay tuned for more updates! And in the meantime, here’s something fun: “Long before introducing the AMX-1 Repair Bot for personal craft, Saga Datasystems was known for its more industrial designs. The M3-A Multifunction Space Drone has been in service for more than 50 years, and is ideal for performing basic unmanned tasks in and around stations. While never fit with any advanced AI or communications capability, the M3-A is perfectly capable of performing any basic assigned task – from simple repairs to tug functions and the manipulation of heavy mining and cargo containers.” Hi all, Another really busy month here at Foundry 42. We’ve been heavily involved in pushing out new content for Arena Commander, working on the Character pipeline for S42 and the Persistent Universe, working through concept, design and full production on the huge amount of ships we need for Squadron 42, and of course moving forward on the design and implementation of the first missions. Lots of areas to update you guys below, and as always thanks for your support, it really makes a difference to the team, we are REALLY enjoying making this game with you guys. Creative Director September was a good “Housekeeping” month for us, having been full speed ahead for the last few months, we needed some time to catch up with ourselves and some of the fixes that have gone in. Arena Commander: We have increased the size of the maps now that the Z-Buffer issue has been fixed by the engineers, (which you guys will see soon) so now sorting issues will diminish. It’s quite an achievement actually, considering that some of our asteroids are bigger than most of the levels in Crysis. Again thanks to numerous code fixes, we also got to some of the polish tasks, such as getting the asteroids rotating and placing some more accurate physics objects. A lot more design time went into the first implementation of our missiles vs emissions gameplay, and that work is now underway, as well as breaking down the planned features for the 13 stream which will include HUD mode updates, and Leader-boards and of course continued improvements to the key bindings. At the same time we are progressing on branch 14 where we plan to introduce proper lobbies, a huge amount of polish to space flight mechanics and effects, ship / helmet HUD displays, and new ships systems. Matchmaking is now becoming a big consideration, to give the community a choice on what and who they play with. Ship Design: The StarFarer got a much needed design white-box pass, and came off slightly more heavily armed, with two extra rear belly turrets on either side. Stay tuned for updates on its progress as it gets built out. All the other ships including our huge capital ships are moving along nicely. Squadron 42: We are working through a bunch of new mechanics for Squadron 42, to give the community a really immersive experience. Our verticle slice is in good shape, and so the art department is really motoring through the grey boxing of our levels and we have also started white boxing a number of new levels so we are ready for the big motion capture shoot we will be performing after Christmas. Progress is continuing well on the script, with multiple updates as we refine the gameplay within levels and we have started white boxing the gameplay (sandbox) for the interstitials (Your base or home ship), so the player will feel like they are in a living HUB which they can interact in and explore. All in all, a good month of cleaning up, and progressing Star Citizen on all fronts. Programming Director One of the big pushes we’ve been making this month in getting the new controller customisation UI into Arena Commander. We know it’s something a lot of people have been clamouring for a long time (ever since the first Dogfighting module release!) and this will be the start of allowing you to set up your controller(s) just the way you like. We intend to keep developing it over future releases to give you full control of your setup. Our networking engineers have just come back from a very productive mini networking summit held over in Santa Monica, where all the networking engineers from all the studios spent a week going over the features required for Star Citizen. It’s been a really interesting week for all involved, discussing everything from player prediction on the client level, to the server architecture, databases, chat, security etc… It’s really good having these meetings for internal visibility, and make sure everything is moving forwards in the right direction. Other than that, we’ve been concentrating in the usual areas to keep Arena Commander, Squadron 42, and the PU moving forwards. Bug of the month: The Flashlight of Thor! So we were having this problem where if you flew your ship around for a period of time it would suddenly explode for no particular reason. To begin with we thought it was just the usual excuses for people’s bad flying, but when it was still happening in an empty level we did have to conclude there might be something else afoot. After much scratching of heads, and drinking of tea, we finally discovered that after an update a flashlight, which should have been attached to the player, had suddenly gone rogue. It was colliding with the interior of your ship and doing a tiny piece of damage every single frame, eventually culminating in calamity. Yes, one flashlight could take down the mighty Hornet! Graphics Programming Director The graphics team have been working on some of the core tech to benefit each of the art pipelines (ships, characters, environments & vfx). For the ships we’ve been continuing work on the new damage shader that will give us fine grain location specific damage. This will be crucial for capital ships where the traditional method of cutting a ship into numerous meshes won’t be practical due to their immense scale, but this will also benefit smaller ships. We’ve also started work on the shader that will enable us to create custom paint jobs. This isn’t as simple as just swapping some textures because our paint jobs need to be sharper than is possible with traditional textures to maintain our high quality bar, but the paint also needs to degrade over time and respond correctly to the damage system (e.g. bending & burning). For the vfx team we’ve created a volumetric lighting shader for particles to approximate complex effects such as multiple-scattering of light and volumetric shadowing. To achieve this the vfx artists bake out 6 separate passes of an explosion or smoke from an offline fluid simulation, and the shader uses these to calculate how the in-game lights would bounce around inside the gas. The end result is smoke and explosion particles that are lit correctly with the in-game lights but approach the quality of an offline render. We’ve also been working on two general pieces of tech that should benefit the whole game, the first of which is 32 bit depth rendering. We’re moving towards 64 bit physics to handle enormous maps, however rendering doesn’t require such precision because from the cameras perspective everything is actually relatively nearby. However most games actually use just 24 bit depth buffers and this isn’t enough for large space scenes and so we’ve just completed the transition to 32 bit rendering. This has allowed us to enlarge the small dog-fighting maps which we desperately needed since the recent speed increase of the ships! The other general tech we’ve been developing is the ability to combine multiple textures at run-time to allow us to dynamically combine multiple objects into fewer large objects. This will significantly improve rendering performance while maintaining the flexibility and modularity of building the characters, ships and environments out of many smaller textures, which is crucial for the persistent universe (customisable ships, clothing & hangars etc). Art Director You want Characters? – you got it! We have taken a global view of the characters within the star citizen universe and are reviewing quality and pipeline going forward so they will not only cater for all aspects of the persistent universe but also stand out as world class AAA characters. Additional Documentation for outsource partners have been put together, we know the level of quality you the fans are expecting and we are placing the foundations for a strong versatile system. Along with an updated anatomically correct base male (and female to follow) we have taken possession of the camera scanning rig to help aid the development of photo real characters for Sq42 and the PU. Real focus is now being placed on answering the tough questions that could trip us up later down the line and working with talented folk like 3Lateral and Cubic motion is certainly making some areas easier (nothing is simple on SC though!) You want Ships? – you got it! The Gladius is now in the tech setup stage, making it suitable for the Hangar stage of release. The Retaliator is now 50% more awesome since you saw the video released recently (it was about a month old) along with the Gladiator which has most of its exterior given the PBS treatment with the complex dual cockpit/gunner interior next. The Idris and Javelin are still coming along and we are taking into account the Sq42 storyline, adding a few tweaks here and there to shapes and structure to create a more cohesive environment. The wait will be worth it, I promise. New and noteworthy, some of the Vanduul fleet is going into production which we need for the storyline too – tune in next month for more info – we are really excited about this as we can now really start dialing into who/what the Vanduul are and what their construction methods are. You want Environments? – you got it! Shubin mining facility – ‘Archon’ has reached the stage of Greybox complete, it’s a huge challenge but the visuals are matching its physical size, no shaders yet, just lots of geo, I mean lots! To give you an idea there are at least 26 landing pads located around the facility, each of them the player can land on, get out of their ship and walk around. All of these details will help make the Shubin Archon Facility feel like a living and breathing environment. You want concepts? – you got it! Concepts department has slowed a little this month (instead of 100mph its more like 90mph :P). Shubin interior wrapping up, Starfarer has been given the ‘Parry’ treatment and a full interior has been worked out along with some meddlesome functionality issues, this has now gone out to be fully visualised, it’s a pretty big ship so it won’t be done in a week if that’s what you think! Xi’an transport ship interior is also taking good shape, we’ve now dialled into a visual language that we are happy with, it makes developing the rest of the rooms a ton easier once you have a few key factors to launch from. Focus is also shifting to answering the niggling parts of the UEE crew costumes, we are taking a systemic approach of really defining how these designs will work, how they fit with the customization system and do they have the level of detail we need to keep Chris and you the fans happy. You want animations? – you got it! Animation department (who we are looking to grow) has started looking at Previz and prep work for some of the in game action sequences – I can’t give much away at this stage without giving out spoilers. We’ve also been supporting the design department working on specific game mechanic animations, it’s an important part of the process, early Previz for design often saves on wasted work further down the line. You want spice with your VFX? – you got it! Self shadowing lit particles, mmm, tasty – that’s what the VFX department has been developing with the tech department, we’re still trying to think of a name for this technique/texture format by the way, we’d love for it to be something snappy/media-friendly, but the current name is SSL (Self-shadowing lighting). Aside from that, we’re also starting to improve the vehicle damage effects starting with smoke and fire, trying to make a cleaner more efficient system that has greater long term effects for the project. That’s it – a full on man vs polygon serving of heart stopping griddle cooked CGI goodness. Signed, The Chef Audio Lead This month the audio team have split between Citizencon related tasks and the upcoming demo of the FPS module. The environment sounds for the demo level are starting to shape up. A lot of attention is being paid to the details in this area. All of the whirring, hums, and general ambiance comes from specific points in 3d space. We we’re never going to be satisfied with a faked 2d ambient soundscape! Computers will idly tick away, screens and lights will hum and buzz, air conditioners and fans will whoosh and whirr! This will all move around you as you move your player. We’ve also been working on R&D and generally testing the water with the FPS weapon firing. There’s a lot to consider with something like a gun sound! First person gun firing, iron sights gun firing, 3rd person gun firing, gun sounds over distance, environmental effects on gun sounds and this is just firing the guns!! Getting this right is a long process and will be ongoing long into the future. Even so, we are hoping that with the work we’ve done so far, it’ll be a great start to the FPS sound when it is demo’d for PAX. Other than that we’ve been working on a selection of the fps gadgets and trying to keep up with the unending (but awesome) onslaught of ship related sound tasks! Citizens! September was a month of great accomplishments for the Montreal team. We can’t wait to have you try out all of the new features we have been working on, and we are looking forward to hearing your feedback. As always, it is a great pleasure to be a part of creating this game for you guys. Meanwhile, here is the latest update from the team. Design On the level design side the guys have been hard at work debugging and working on the new hangars. We have also (re)started work on blocking out Planetside locations which we’ve been designing on paper quite a while now. Seeing them finally taking shape in-engine is “SC grade” fantasticness! More flair objects have been designed (we probably have enough flairs lined up for the next 18 months ;) Our goal is to incorporate as much lore as we can into the flair objects we design, which keeps them interesting and unique, so they don’t end up getting fed to the monster living in your hangar’s garbage compactor. On a related note, some special add-on rooms for the hangars are in the brainstorming phase. If all goes well, you’ll be able to add them to your hangar in the future. With Gamescom and the bulk of the work for the new hangar public releases now behind us, we’ve (re)kicked off mobiGlas development. Hand in hand with the fabulous UI team, we’ve refined our designs for various mG apps to get them ready for production: mG HOME, easyShop, Wear, skyLine and Scheduler, to name a few, are in the pipeline. mG Scheduler already has a version running in the engine and is coming along nicely. On a more technical note, we’ve been working closely with engineers to develop the TAG system tool which allows us to tag practically every object in the game world. It’s a bit like hashtags on Twitter or the use of keywords in search engines. With this powerful tool we will be able to add and query items dynamically in-engine for faster, more efficient development, and the real bonus for the design team: the ability to track and update the game seamlessly. Programming One of the main focuses for programming during the month of September has been to complete and deliver a first version of control customization to the public. There are still loads of features that we want to add to it and we’ll definitely be working on it for a few more months. We’ve also spent quite a bit of time polishing and debugging the new version of the pause menu that was released earlier this month. After a couple months of working on a few higher priority tasks, we’re finally getting back to mobiGlas development. Our new Tag Editor Tool has been receiving a lot of focus and attention internally and we’re eager to connect it with the next systems we are planning to implement. As usual, the hangars weren’t left behind as we reworked the ship spawning algorithm to support the feature where players will be able to customize their hangar ship layout through the RSI website. Finally, we’ve also added a few nifty flair items for our subscribers to enjoy. Art The art team has been very busy working on both interiors and exteriors for various planetside locations, as well as preparing a section of Arc Corp that will be shown soon! We have also started work on next month’s flair object, and have something cool in the works for Pax Australia. Our concept artists have been focusing on ArcCorp production, but have also started to get further into Terra concepts. We have also made a few 890 Jump concepts for the brochure. And last but not least… UI This month a lot of work has been going into developing control customization, which we will be rolling out in several phases. Engineers and UI artists alike have been working hard to make sure that the user experience feels just right. As mentioned, we have also moved into asset development for various mobiGlas apps, specifically HOME and easyShop (for starters), as well as some of the core components that will be used across all mobiGlas apps. We have also been having a lot of fun creating decals, in-fiction billboards, and fake ui screens for the ArcCorp Citizencon environment. Hello Esteemed Citizens, Another month flies right on by faster than the Murray Cup leaders and PAX Australia is approaching quicker than a fully equipped M50! September has been a crazy month for the FPS team. We have been pushing hard to make sure everything is ready for the big event and we really, really want to knock all of your socks off. This past month we were focused on getting all the last pieces of the game we plan to show at PAX implemented and the month of October will be spent polishing and tweaking all those pieces leading up to the event. Design Our Creative Director, Lead Designer and Level Designers have been putting the final touches on the level we plan to show at PAX Australia. In addition to that work, they have also been creating paper designs and grey room levels for the FPS Module. Work continues on destructible objects as well and there is now a really good amount of things that shatter, fall to pieces and explode populating the FPS environments. All of this detail gives a real sense of power to the weapons. The design team has also been finalizing weapons balance, at least for the PAX event. As we’ve mentioned before, weapon balance is an ongoing task that will continue to be worked on up to the FPS Module release and beyond, especially once you Citizens have had a chance to dig your teeth into FPS and give us that invaluable feedback. Programming Throughout last month, the programming team has been focused on getting everything implemented and functional. There has also been lots of collaboration with the animation team to get everything looking and feeling right. This isn’t your standard FPS… and the approach we are taking relies very heavily on animation and code being perfectly in sync. I don’t want to say any more than that at this point, but feel free to speculate as much as you want! Other programming tasks over the last month have included some pretty major fixes in physics and networking. All of the weapons and gadgets are now working over the network properly so we can really start play-testing them and iterating as fast as possible on the mechanics. Lastly, there was a very productive Networking Summit that took place at CiG Santa Monica where all of the brightest coder brains from each studio gathered to discuss things that I won’t even pretend to understand. Animation Wow, the animation team here has been crazy busy… probably more so than anybody else at [REDACTED] (and that’s really saying something considering how busy everybody else has been!). They have been working on re-targeting animations to a new rig that fixes a whole slew of issues. In addition, they have been working with design and programming on a daily basis to make sure that Star Citizen FPS is something truly unique. We can’t wait for you Citizens to see what they have been putting together for PAX and we sincerely hope that you will notice the differences in what we are creating. I also want to mention that the team in Austin has been giving us a huge helping hand with animation in general. We couldn’t have done it without you guys, and we really appreciate the help. Audio Speaking of big helping hands, Foundry 42 has taken on the task of finishing out all of the sound effects for PAX and some big thanks are in order there as well. It really is amazing to be involved with such an ambitious game where everybody at all the studios involved are so willing to pitch in and help each other out where it’s needed. The guys over in the UK are putting together some amazing sound effects for the remaining weapons, gadgets and grenades as well as doing a huge amount of environmental sound effects that should make the FPS Module sound as good as it looks (and believe me… it looks amazing!). Art The art team here has really done a spectacular job over the last month. While finishing up modeling and textures for the last few gadgets that are needed for PAX, they have been adding an insane amount of detail to the environments. I have been in the industry for over 10 years, and I can honestly say that I have never seen this level of polish in visuals before (except the work coming from the rest of the Star Citizen team!). It is something truly amazing and my hat goes off to them. The visual FX team has been iterating and polishing the weapon and environmental FX, and that work will continue over the next few weeks. Impact decals and particles have also been going in, which looks amazing when combined with the destructible environments. That should about wrap it up for the [REDACTED] report this month (yes, I know I killed that joke for most of you last month and I apologize). Before I sign off here, I want to throw out a big thanks to High Admiral Tristram who sent us a care package with some Nerf guns in it. Thanks from all of us Tristram! Now back to work… see you in a month! Hi! Pushing hard into September, the team has been putting most of it’s effort in supporting the deployment of R13 and the leaderboards system that is used to rank players in the different game modes on the web platform. We’re really excited about this subsystem because not only is it a very awesome feature it’s also the first time the game servers are sending data back to your account. We plan on using that to give you more ways to access the different data points that you generate as you pilot your ship in Arena Commander. As always, seeing the reaction of the community to a launch is always the best part of working in the Star Citizen universe. Programming Most engineering time was spent supervising the deployment of the leaderboards system. As you play Spectrum Matches, definite statistics from the match are sent back to the platform for ranking and processing. The data pipeline created at this stage makes use of a durable and persistent messaging queue system that allows us to never lose a game and always compute the rankings and stats, very useful for the cloud environment we are in which can be unpredictable at times. Some interesting challenges were also tackled as to how we would persist actual player rankings in a way that would allow us to display a custom board for player who do not share a sequential rank. A good example of this would be a “per Organization” leaderboard. A very cool new feature that you technically should have in hands now is the hangar configuration utility. This new tool, accessible in your “My Hangar” allows you to pick which of your ship shows up in which bay of your chosen hangar. This new subsystem exposes the different hangar bays to the platform so that you can hand pick which of your ships you want to see, giving the players control over this process that used to be powered by an algorithm. The team finally had time to look at some of the chat system issues web users have been experiencing! With the deployment of a new set of connection managers(a process that handles HTTP to XMPP socket connections) it seems the disconnect issues that players were experiencing have been resolved. Coupled with a few web client bug fixes the chat experience should be greatly improved. Chat away! Onwards to the lobby system! UX & Design The UX and Art teams have been doing some headway on a new home page for Star Citizen as well as revamping the experience for new players. This includes new video content ; new website UX, new player guide, etc… This is the beginning of a long process to try to distill the Star Citizen universe for new players but we hope to bring this plan to fruition in bite size pieces as they get ready. We’ve been able to have a design review on the Organization Forums functionality that was designed earlier this month, a first step in validating our hypothesis before continuing the design process. UX also compiled a list of add-on features we want to develop for the Holo-Viewer on the site. Some examples are the addition of a “Scale HUD” (to show relative ship sizes with units), a global “Ship Explorer” not tied to the different store pages where you could swap between manufacturers and ship without leaving the viewer giving a more prominent place for the viewer in the site. Last but not least, the content and design effort for the Starmap are under way! Sorry, no more details yet! Greetings Citizens, This has been a really solid month of developing infrastructure and core features for our AI systems, with a particular focus on FPS combat and persistent universe AI. A lot of design and implementation work took place this month to get these systems feature-rich enough that the designers at the other studios can really start going to town and doing cool stuff with the AI. There’s still plenty more to do, but we’re really happy with the progress we’ve made so far. Design A large part of our recent work has been on a deep and significant refactoring of how designers give AI tasks to perform, trying to find a good balance between flexibility and robustness. We think the AI in Star Citizen will be much more interesting if designers can be specific with what they want the AI to do at certain times, but the rest of the time can rely on the AI to be smart and sensible. We’ve all played games where AI do crazy things, and designers work hard to stop this from happening, so we’ve been designing a system to streamline this as much as we can. Squadron 42, in particular, should see a real benefit from this. We’ve been working on this for a while, but this month we made some serious progress implementing it, and as part of this we spent a lot of time figuring out the details, from the high level tasks that the AI are assigned, through the mid-level behaviors that they run, right down to the low level actions. And a key part of this design is iterating over ideas with the designers to make sure what we’re coming up with is easy and intuitive for them to use. There was also a lot of design work this month fleshing out details of the persistent universe, with a particular focus on making sure our design is in step with the other teams doing persistent universe work. There are lots of little details to figure out, from the way AI do interesting and lifelike things in the world, through to what the tools should look like that designers will use to create this world. Engineering As mentioned above, we did a lot of work this month implementing core architecture for the way AI are controlled. This work affects all of the AI in Star Citizen, including the dogfighting AI you’re already using. We’ve been converting everything to a new behavior system that will allow us to create complex and interesting behaviors much more easily. There was a lot of work to be done here, but we were successful and as a result we look forward to doing some interesting things with AI next month, which will be revealed in due course, so keep an eye out for that! On the FPS AI front, we’ve had for a while now characters that can see, but it was finally time to give them the ability to hear as well. Gunfire, bullets whizzing past their heads, footsteps of a player trying unsuccessfully to be sneaky; these are all things that a good AI should be aware of, and now they are. And now that the AI know more about the world, we can give them more interesting behaviors, which we’ve started doing using our new behavior systems. Finally, for the persistent universe, we’ve been doing some work on allowing AI to use items in the world. We implemented a system that allows designers to start setting up objects in the world and make the AI use them. There are more complex interactions to come, but already we can make the world feel more alive, and it will be exciting to see this develop further over the coming months. Grüße Bürger, Es war ein arbeitsreicher Monat für Star Citizen! Im letzten Monat haben wir Arena Commander .9 veröffentlicht und dann mit einer Reihe von Patches ergänzt. Die Perfektionierung der Physik, des Flugmodells und des Multiplayers von Star Citizen ist eine Leistung, für die sich Studios auf der ganzen Welt zusammengeschlossen haben.... aber wir haben auch tiefere Elemente des Spiels entwickelt! Die folgenden September-Berichte geben Ihnen einen Überblick darüber, was wir in unserer Zeit entwickelt haben. Grüße Bürger! Der September war sehr arbeitsreich und produktiv für das Studio Santa Monica. Ein Großteil unseres Fokus in diesem Monat lag auf der Fertigstellung der Funktionen und der Behebung von Fehlern für v0.9 von Arena Commander. Wir waren sehr begeistert von dieser Version, da sie den neuen Murray Cup Rennmodus sowie die Rennschiffe M50 und 350R in das Spiel einführte. Hoffentlich habt ihr alle unseren Werbespot "Galactic Gear" gesehen, der diese neuen Funktionen vorstellt. Es gab einiges an Begeisterung über den Werbespot im Internet, und wir wurden sogar auf der offiziellen "Top Gear"-Website für unsere Hommage an ihre Show erwähnt! Neben der Unterstützung der Entwicklung von Arena Commander haben wir auch unsere Pipeline für den Bau neuer Schiffe verbessert. Vor kurzem wurde die Schiffspipeline von Austin nach LA verlegt, und wir haben hart daran gearbeitet, unseren Prozess zu verfeinern und unseren Workflow zu verbessern, damit wir Schiffe schneller und effizienter entwickeln können als je zuvor. Die Konstruktion neuer Schiffe für Star Citizen ist ein unglaublich komplexer und detaillierter Prozess, daher war es sinnvoll, sie nach LA zu verlegen, wo Chris die Aufsicht behalten und allen Beteiligten die Richtung weisen kann. Zu unseren Prozessverbesserungen gehörten das Sitzen und Bewerten aller Schritte der Pipeline sowie die notwendigen Anpassungen des Workflows. Wenn Sie neugierig sind, wie das aussieht, lesen Sie bitte das beigefügte Diagramm, wie man ein neues Schiff für das Spiel entwickelt. Und neben der Unterstützung des Arena Commander und dem Bau neuer Schiffe bereiten wir uns auch auf die im Oktober stattfindenden Veranstaltungen Citizen Con und PAX Australia vor. Im gesamten Unternehmen wird viel Arbeit geleistet, um einen Einblick in viele der neuen Bereiche des Spiels zu erhalten, die sich derzeit in der Entwicklung befinden. Bleiben Sie in den kommenden Wochen auf dem Laufenden, wenn wir Ihnen mehr über unsere Fortschritte berichten. In diesem Monat waren wir auch damit beschäftigt, eine Reihe von Bewerbern für verschiedene Positionen im Unternehmen zu interviewen. Wir haben mit angehenden 3D-Künstlern, Konzeptkünstlern, Lichtkünstlern, technischen Animatoren, technischen Designern, Programmierern, Outsourcing-Managern und vielen anderen gesprochen. Aus diesem Grund haben wir einige wirklich talentierte Leute identifiziert, die bereit sind, mit uns bei Cloud Imperium Games zu spielen. Wir freuen uns sehr, einige erstaunliche neue Leute an Bord zu holen, die uns helfen werden, Chris' Vision von der besten verdammten Weltraumsimulation aller Zeiten umzusetzen! Wenn wir dem Projekt mehr Ressourcen hinzufügen, erhöht dies unsere Entwicklungskapazität und gibt uns die Möglichkeit, noch mehr für dieses ehrgeizige Projekt zu tun. Nichts davon wäre ohne alle unsere Geldgeber möglich, deshalb danken wir Ihnen für Ihre kontinuierliche Unterstützung bei unseren Entwicklungsarbeiten! Nun zu den Updates der Abteilung! Ingenieurwesen Unser Ingenieurteam in Santa Monica hat diesen Monat an allen Aspekten des Arena Commander gearbeitet. Auf der HUD-Front hat Brandon an der Code-Unterstützung für neue Funktionen und Targeting-Modi gearbeitet, die wir für die Einführung in einem zukünftigen Patch prototypisieren, um die HUD-Funktionalität und die Benutzerfreundlichkeit zu verbessern. Ebenso hat der beliebte Bug Smasher Mark Abent mit unserem Physik-Programmierer John Pritchett zusammengearbeitet, um die Fähigkeit aller zu verbessern, "auf Kurs zu bleiben", mit Verbesserungen bei der Lead-Prognose sowie einigen neuen Zielfunktionen für kardanische und feste Waffen, die mit dem IFCS verbunden sind und bald auf den Markt kommen sollten. Wir haben auch ein neues System für die Handhabung von Schiffsvarianten entwickelt, das es uns ermöglicht, gleiche Teile variantenübergreifend zu teilen. Diese neue Technologie ermöglicht es uns, eine erstaunliche Zeit- und Arbeitsersparnis in der gesamten Schiffspipeline zu erzielen, indem wir die doppelte Arbeit vermeiden, die wir bisher damit hatten, die gleichen Teile eines Schiffes bei allen Varianten separat zu aktualisieren. Jetzt können wir den Fehler beheben oder die Verbesserung vornehmen, die wir am Basismodell eines Schiffes vorgenommen haben, und es wird automatisch auf alle Varianten dieses Schiffes übertragen, die diesen Teil teilen. Auf der Seite der Grafikprogrammierung hat unsere Ingenieurin Okka Kyaw fleißig an der Umstellung auf einen 32-Bit-Tiefenpuffer gearbeitet. Dies wird dazu beitragen, einen Großteil des Z-Kampfes während des gesamten Spiels zu eliminieren. Bisher fehlte die Genauigkeit des Tiefenpuffers, so dass aus großer Entfernung eine sehr nahe beieinander liegende Geometrie mit dem Z-Kampf beginnt. Diese Korrekturen werden in einem kommenden Patch enthalten sein. Okka hat dort aber nicht aufgehört, er hat auch mit der Erforschung eines neuen Fahrzeuglacksystems begonnen, damit wir leichter kundenspezifische Lackierungen für Schiffe erstellen können und den Weg für eine eventuelle Anpassung durch Sie in der Community ebnen können. Last but not least hatten wir hier in Santa Monica einen Networking Summit, bei dem wir alle Top-Netzwerk- und Backend-Programmierer von CIG und unseren von Chris geführten Partnerstudios eingeladen haben, um Themen zu diskutieren, die von kurzfristigen Verbesserungen wie der Verbesserung der Bewegungsprognose, des Bandbreitenverbrauchs, der Server-CPU-Nutzung, des Chatsystems, der Lobbysysteme, des Matchmaking und der Telemetrie-Datenerfassung reichen. Wir haben auch eine Vielzahl von längerfristigen Initiativen behandelt, darunter die Frage, wie man am besten mit Clients umgeht, die von Server zu Server migrieren, die Größe des persistenten Universums, einheitliche Spieler- und Objekt-IDs für die Verwendung auf mehreren Servern und eine Reihe anderer Themen, die sich mit der Bereitstellung der nahtlosesten Multiplayer-Erfahrung sowohl für SQ42 als auch für das Persistent Universe befassen. Alles in allem ein sehr produktiver einwöchiger Gipfel, der eine solide Grundlage für die weitere Entwicklung legte. Design Design in diesem Monat hat in enger Zusammenarbeit mit dem Engineering und HUD-Team gearbeitet, um Verbesserungen an den HUD- und Zielsystemen zu entwerfen, zu prototypisieren und umzusetzen. Calix Reneau hat Wege zur Verbesserung der Kontrolle von kardanischen Waffen auf den Steuersystemen entwickelt, die normalerweise keine reibungslose analoge Bewegung unterstützen, wie Joysticks, HOTAS und Gamepad-Peripheriegeräte. Wir sind zuversichtlich, dass diese neuen Systeme, sobald sie implementiert sind, die Funktionalität von kardanischen Waffen auf diesen Controllertypen deutlich verbessern werden. In diesem Monat haben wir auch viel Zeit damit verbracht, das Feedback der Community zur Bilanz der Schiffe und deren Flugeigenschaften zu überprüfen. Sie haben bereits einige Patches seit der V0.9 gesehen, um einige dieser Rückmeldungen zu beantworten, aber wir arbeiten auch an einigen langfristigeren Änderungen der Balance, die Sie in zukünftigen Versionen sehen werden. In diesem Zusammenhang haben wir auch neue Waffen und Gegenstände entwickelt, von denen wir glauben, dass sie die Strategien, die Spieler online nutzen, weiter diversifizieren werden. Ein weiterer wichtiger Schritt für unser Designteam war die Entwicklung von Verbesserungen des aufkommenden Signatur- und Emissionssystems mit unseren Teamkollegen in der Gießerei 42. Wir haben zahlreiche Gespräche mit ihnen und dem Engineering-Team geführt und haben einen soliden Plan zur Umsetzung von Chris' Vision für dieses System. Daneben hat das Team auch Spielmodi für Arena Commander entwickelt, die sich besser auf das Gameplay konzentrieren, das nicht nur auf Luftkampf ausgerichtet ist, sondern auch die Vorteile von Schiffen wie der Aurora und anderen noch einzuführenden Schiffen, die weniger leistungsfähige Dogfighter sind und vielleicht etwas mehr Ladekapazität haben..... Kunst Mit dem Umzug der Schiffspipeline nach Santa Monica aus Austin haben wir unser Kunstteam in Santa Monica mit zusätzlichen Konzept- und 3D-Ressourcen aufgebaut. Das Team ist sofort einsatzbereit und hat all die neuen Schiffe, die wir konzipieren, in Brand gesteckt, den Hangar hinzugefügt und in den Arena Commander aufgenommen. Wir stellen auch weiterhin ein, um unsere Pipeline-Kapazität für die gleichzeitige Entwicklung weiterer Schiffe zu erhöhen. Zumal sie unsere Künstler für längere Zeit beschäftigen werden, als die einsitzigen Schiffe. Im Bereich der Schiffsentwicklung haben wir in diesem Monat eine Reihe neuer Konzepte, an denen wir arbeiten, darunter Hearald, Carrack, Reclaimer, Avenger-Varianten, 890 Jump sowie neue Konzepte für verschiedene Gegenstände und Waffen. Wir haben die Modelle für die komplette Mustang-Linie, die komplette Entermesser-Linie vervollständigt und beginnen mit dem Eintauchen in die Avenger-Varianten, den Herald, den Redeemer und einige andere.... Jetzt, da wir das neue Variantensystem von Engineering haben, planen wir auch, alle Custom-Stücke, Schadenszustände und LODs für die Varianten der 300er-Serie, der Aurora-Serie und der Hornet-Serie in Angriff zu nehmen, um alle Varianten des Luftkampfes aus Kunstsicht so schnell wie möglich vorzubereiten. Das Art-Team hat auch eng mit der Produktion zusammengearbeitet, um die neue und verbesserte Schiffspipeline zu vervollständigen und Bereiche zu identifizieren, in denen wir die Qualität verbessern, Zeit sparen und die Entwicklung neuer Schiffe weiter parallelisieren können. Wir haben eine neue Pipeline entwickelt, die unserer Meinung nach viel rationaler und besser vorbereitet ist, um ein höheres Qualitätsniveau viel effizienter zu liefern. Natürlich sind Pipelines nicht in Stein gemeißelt, und sie werden sich weiter entwickeln, wenn wir mit anderen Disziplinen zusammenarbeiten, um den Prozess weiter zu verbessern und zu verfeinern. Das Tolle daran ist, dass alle an diesem Projekt von dem gleichen Wunsch motiviert sind, die bestmögliche Qualität zu erreichen, so dass die Modifikation dieser Pipeline eine großartige Zusammenarbeit mit gleichgesinnten Personen war. Kinematiken Unser riesiges Cinematics-Team in Santa Monica, das für die neuesten Werbespots verantwortlich ist, die wir für unsere Schiffe machen, hat hart gearbeitet, alle zwei von ihnen.... John Griffith und Chris Wolak, die zuletzt für die Umsetzung des M50 Galactic Gear Werbespots verantwortlich waren, haben diese kreative Energie in einen neuen Cinematic In-Fiction Werbespot gesteckt, der am 10. Oktober auf der Citizen Con vorgestellt wird. Wir freuen uns sehr, es mit allen zu teilen und freuen uns darauf, die Kommentare und Reaktionen zu lesen. Das Tolle an den Cinematics, die wir machen, ist, dass wir alle unsere Spiele-Assets und unsere Game Engine nutzen, um sie zu erstellen. Mit dem Qualitätsniveau, das die Art, Animation und VFX Teams in diese Anlagen investieren, sind wir in der Lage, diese wunderschönen Werbespots mit einem Team von nur zwei sehr talentierten Einzelpersonen zu realisieren, die fleißig daran arbeiten, all diese Spiele zu nutzen, um ein Stück zu schaffen, das der Vision von Chris entspricht. Wir haben auch das Glück, zwei sehr talentierte Autoren zu haben, David Haddock und William Weissbaum, die, wenn sie nicht an Squadron 42 arbeiten, die Drehbücher für diese Werbespots schreiben. Auf jeden Fall freuen wir uns sehr darauf, unser nächstes motorfilmisches Stück in sieben Tagen mit euch allen in der Community zu teilen und hoffen, dass es allen so viel Spaß macht, wie wir es genossen haben! Nun, das schließt das Update dieses Monats für alle ab, und obwohl wir nicht in der Lage sind, jedes kleine Detail zu behandeln, haben wir das Gefühl, dass dies die wichtigsten und interessantesten Entwicklungen des letzten Monats berührt, ohne die 2000er Wortmarke zu überschreiten. Wie immer möchten wir allen gegenüber betonen, dass wir Ihre Unterstützung bei der Entwicklung dieses Spiels mit uns sehr schätzen. Ohne euch wäre all das nicht möglich und wir sind dankbar für die Möglichkeit, dieses Spiel zu entwickeln und mit euch allen zu teilen! Hallo Leute, Das Austin-Team hat diesen Monat an vielen verschiedenen Fronten hart gearbeitet. Wir waren etwas ruhiger als sonst, aber wir sind sehr aufgeregt, dass wir sehr bald etwas vorführen können. Unser Team hat hart an den Aufgaben des Persistent Universe und einer Vielzahl von Live Operations Aktivitäten gearbeitet. Hier ist ein kurzer Bericht von jedem Team! Programmierung Diesen Monat in Austin haben wir hart an der Arbeit am Persistent Universe gearbeitet. Wir haben bei einigen der für das Persistente Universum kritischen Kerntechnologien erhebliche Fortschritte erzielt. Brian Mazza setzt seine Arbeit an der serverseitigen Persistenz fort, die unter anderem dafür sorgt, dass die Spieler ihr Inventar auch nach dem Abmelden behalten können. James Wright und Allen Chen haben sich zusammengetan, um auch diesen Monat die Large World "Phase 1" abzuschließen, was der erste Schritt ist, um wirklich expansive Galaxien zu schaffen, die buchstäblich Tage brauchen, um ohne Quantenreisen zu durchqueren. Tom Davies beendete die Entwicklung mit dem System Layout Tool, mit dem unsere Designer unser Universum im Spiel physikalisch gestalten und Eigenschaften und Attribute verschiedener Planeten und anderer Objekte innerhalb eines Sonnensystems definieren werden. Tony Zurovec hat die erste Design-Iteration von Subsumption, dem zielorientierten NPC-KI-System von Star Citizen, abgeschlossen, und wir sind nun in die Vollproduktion gegangen. Moon Collider - unsere KI-Partner in Großbritannien - haben den langen Prozess begonnen, die Vielzahl der spezifischen Funktionen, die wir für ihre Kythera-KI-Engine benötigen, zu unterstützen. Zwei unserer Austin-Programmierer - Jeff Uriarte und Tom Davies - haben mit der Arbeit an einigen der zahlreichen Tools begonnen, die für das hochgradig datengesteuerte Design erforderlich sein werden, das es letztendlich ermöglichen wird, die Zusammensetzung der NSC-Population und sogar ihre Tagespläne algorithmisch basierend auf dem, was in der Umgebung passiert, zu bestimmen, und wesentlich dazu beitragen wird, das Gefühl eines lebendigen, atmenden Universums zu vermitteln. Design In diesem Monat wurde viel Vorarbeit geleistet, um Entwürfe für einige Schlüsselelemente zum Aufbau unseres Universums zu erstellen. Wir begannen, verschiedene Arten von Weltraumphänomenen zu untersuchen und welche Arten von interessanten Begegnungen sie für unsere Entdecker da draußen bieten könnten. Jedes dieser Phänomene hat unterschiedliche technische und künstlerische Überlegungen, und wir möchten sicher sein, dass wir die interessantesten und spannendsten auswählen, die als Orte der Weltraumforschung (POI) verwendet werden können. Einige sensationelle Beispiele, die wir uns in diesem Monat angesehen haben, sind der Dunkle Nebel, Pulsar und Eisriese. Andere Dinge, die das Designteam getan hat, sind die Standardisierung unserer Requisiten für Umgebungen, die Untersuchung, wie wir FPS in unsere Standorte auf dem Planeten integrieren könnten, und die Entwicklung von Ansehen für die verschiedenen Unternehmen in unserem Universum. Wir haben an anderen Dingen gearbeitet, die wir im Moment nicht verraten können, aber du wirst bald eine Kostprobe davon sehen. Kunst Persistent Universe Kunstaufgaben wurden alle darauf ausgerichtet, den ersten Standort am Planeten, ArcCorp, in Betrieb zu nehmen. Unser Art Director, Mark Skelton, hat sich ständig mit dem Team von Behaviour zusammengeschlossen, um die visuelle Grenze wirklich zu überschreiten. Cort Soest hat das Tier Toolset, mit dem unsere Designer und Künstler schnell und effizient planetarische Umgebungen, Raumstationen und möglicherweise sogar riesige Großraumschiffe aufbauen werden, weiter konkretisiert. Auch hier wird an visuellen Effekten und Requisiten für ArcCorp und andere planetarische Umgebungen gearbeitet. Die Konzeptarbeiten für unsere nächste planetarische Umgebung - Terra Prime - stehen kurz vor dem Abschluss, und die vollständige Produktion wird bald beginnen. Bryan Brewer und das Animationsteam haben[REDACTED] dabei unterstützt, die FPS-Charaktere in Schiffsform zu bringen. Wir haben unsere Charakterbewegung verbessert, um realistischer auszusehen, um sicherzustellen, dass unsere Charaktere einen tollen Ragdoll-Effekt haben, wenn sie von ihren Füßen geblasen werden, und um über unsere bestehenden Animationen zu einem brandneuen Rigg zu wechseln, das dazu beitragen wird, unsere Charaktere auf die Qualität der nächsten Generation anzuheben. Wir haben auch an mehreren NSC-Animationen gearbeitet, so dass, wenn das friedliche NPC-KI-System online geht, unsere NSCs etwas zu tun haben. Chris Smith und das Schiffsteam arbeiteten sehr hart daran, die neuen Rennschiffe, die im vergangenen Monat veröffentlicht wurden, auf Vordermann zu bringen. Sie haben mit anderen Dingen herumgealbert, von denen wir dir noch nichts sagen können, aber bleib dran und du wirst es früh genug herausfinden! Qualitätssicherung Star Citizen QA hat für den Monat September den ersten Schritt getan und die lang erwartete v0.9 rigoros getestet. Nach viel harter Arbeit waren wir froh, endlich alle neuen Features mit allen mit einem erfolgreichen Release zu teilen. Dann haben wir es mit insgesamt vier Veröffentlichungen noch einmal geschafft! Wir haben auch unsere internen Tools kontinuierlich getestet, um sicherzustellen, dass unsere Entwickler über die aktuellste und stabilste Entwicklungsumgebung verfügen. Dank unseres hauseigenen QS-Ingenieurs Keegan Standifer wurden bei der Entwicklung von automatisierten Tests bedeutende Fortschritte erzielt. Dies wird wichtig sein, um die Vorteile zu nutzen, wenn sich das Persistente Universum erweitert. Diesen Monat haben wir zwei neue Mitglieder in das QA-Team aufgenommen. Bitte begrüßen Sie Melissa Estrada und Jeffrey Pease! Jeffrey kommt von Blizzard Entertainment zu uns, wo er sich auf die Zucht eines epischen Bartes spezialisiert hat! Melissa kommt von NCSoft, wo sie wertvolle MMO-QA-Erfahrung gesammelt hat. Als solides Team freuen wir uns darauf, unsere Bemühungen zur Beseitigung von Fehlern fortzusetzen, um mit jeder zukünftigen Version ein so angenehmes Erlebnis wie möglich zu bieten. Live-Betrieb Die Arbeit auf der Verlags- und Live-Ops-Seite geht in rasantem Tempo weiter. Das QA-Team unter der Leitung von Justin Binford verbrennt regelmäßig das Mitternachtsöl, um die neuesten Build-Versionen für unsere verschiedenen Entwicklungsteams und für kommende Veröffentlichungen in der Öffentlichkeit zu testen. Unser Austin QA-Team arbeitet sehr eng mit dem QA-Team im britischen Büro zusammen, so dass wir Tests praktisch rund um die Uhr durchführen können. Wir freuen uns darauf, diese Arbeit in naher Zukunft auf einem Live-Server zu sehen. Wir haben an einer Vielzahl von Upgrades hinter den Kulissen für unsere Build und Deployment Systeme gearbeitet, so dass wir die Bearbeitungszeit bei neuen Builds verkürzen und Updates dann schneller auf der ganzen Welt testen und bereitstellen können. Jedes Bit, das wir in diesem Bereich einsparen, hilft uns, während unserer gesamten Geschäftstätigkeit produktiver zu sein. Es war ein arbeitsreicher Monat und wir freuen uns sehr, dass ein Großteil unserer "hinter den Kulissen" in den nächsten Tagen für die Öffentlichkeit sichtbarer werden wird. Bleiben Sie dran für weitere Updates! Und in der Zwischenzeit gibt es etwas Lustiges: "Lange vor der Einführung des AMX-1 Repair Bot für Privatfahrzeuge war Saga Datasystems für seine eher industriellen Designs bekannt. Die Multifunktionsraumdrohne M3-A ist seit mehr als 50 Jahren im Einsatz und eignet sich ideal für grundlegende unbemannte Aufgaben in und um Stationen. Obwohl der M3-A nie mit einer fortschrittlichen KI oder Kommunikationsfähigkeit ausgestattet ist, ist er in der Lage, jede grundlegende Aufgabe zu erfüllen - von einfachen Reparaturen über Schleppfunktionen bis hin zur Manipulation von Schwergut- und Frachtcontainern". Hallo zusammen, Ein weiterer sehr arbeitsreicher Monat hier in der Gießerei 42. Wir haben uns intensiv an der Verbreitung neuer Inhalte für Arena Commander, an der Character-Pipeline für S42 und das Persistente Universum, an der Konzeption, dem Design und der vollständigen Produktion auf der riesigen Anzahl von Schiffen, die wir für Staffel 42 benötigen, und natürlich an der Konzeption und Umsetzung der ersten Missionen beteiligt. Viele Bereiche, um euch unten zu aktualisieren, und wie immer danke für eure Unterstützung, es macht wirklich einen Unterschied für das Team, wir genießen es WIRKLICH, dieses Spiel mit euch zu machen. Kreativdirektor September war ein guter "Housekeeping"-Monat für uns, nachdem wir in den letzten Monaten mit voller Geschwindigkeit unterwegs waren, brauchten wir etwas Zeit, um uns selbst und einige der eingetretenen Probleme einzuholen. Arena Kommandant: Wir haben die Größe der Karten erhöht, nachdem das Z-Buffer-Problem von den Ingenieuren behoben wurde (das ihr bald sehen werdet), so dass nun das Sortieren von Problemen abnimmt. Es ist eigentlich eine ziemliche Leistung, wenn man bedenkt, dass einige unserer Asteroiden größer sind als die meisten Stufen in Crysis. Wiederum haben wir dank zahlreicher Code-Fixes auch einige der polnischen Aufgaben erledigt, wie z.B. die Asteroiden zu drehen und einige genauere physikalische Objekte zu platzieren. Viel mehr Designzeit floss in die erste Implementierung unseres Raketen-gegen-Emmissions-Gameplays, und diese Arbeit ist nun im Gange, ebenso wie die Aufteilung der geplanten Features für den 13-Stream, die Updates des HUD-Modus, Leaderboards und natürlich weitere Verbesserungen an den wichtigsten Bindungen beinhalten werden. Gleichzeitig machen wir Fortschritte in Niederlassung 14, wo wir planen, geeignete Lobbys einzuführen, eine große Menge an Feinschliff für Raumfahrtmechanik und -effekte, Schiffs-/Helm-HUD-Displays und neue Schiffssysteme. Matchmaking wird jetzt zu einem großen Thema, um der Community die Wahl zu lassen, was und mit wem sie spielt. Schiffsentwurf: Der StarFarer erhielt einen dringend benötigten Design-White-Box-Pass und kam etwas stärker bewaffnet daher, mit zwei zusätzlichen hinteren Bauchrevolvern auf beiden Seiten. Bleiben Sie auf dem Laufenden, wenn Sie über den Fortschritt des Projekts informiert werden. Alle anderen Schiffe, einschließlich unserer riesigen Großschiffe, kommen gut voran. Geschwader 42: Wir arbeiten an einer Reihe neuer Mechaniken für Geschwader 42, um der Community eine wirklich fesselnde Erfahrung zu ermöglichen. Unser vertikaler Schnitt ist in guter Form, und so fährt die Kunstabteilung wirklich durch das graue Boxen unserer Levels und wir haben auch mit dem White Boxen einer Reihe neuer Levels begonnen, so dass wir bereit sind für das große Motion Capture Shooting, das wir nach Weihnachten durchführen werden. Der Fortschritt geht gut voran, mit mehreren Updates, während wir das Gameplay innerhalb von Levels verfeinern und wir mit dem White Boxing des Gameplays (Sandkasten) für die Interstitials (Ihre Basis oder Ihr Heimatschiff) begonnen haben, so dass sich der Spieler wie in einem lebenden HUB fühlen wird, in dem er interagieren und experimentieren kann. Alles in allem ein guter Monat, um aufzuräumen und den Star Citizen in jeder Hinsicht voranzubringen. Programmdirektor Einer der großen Schritte, die wir diesen Monat unternommen haben, um die neue Benutzeroberfläche zur Anpassung von Controllern in Arena Commander zu integrieren. Wir wissen, dass es etwas ist, das viele Leute schon lange schreien (seit dem ersten Dogfighting-Modul-Release!), und das wird der Anfang sein, um dir zu erlauben, deine Controller genau so einzurichten, wie du es willst. Wir beabsichtigen, es in zukünftigen Versionen weiterzuentwickeln, um Ihnen die volle Kontrolle über Ihr Setup zu geben. Unsere Netzwerkingenieure sind gerade von einem sehr produktiven Mini-Netzwerk-Gipfel in Santa Monica zurückgekehrt, bei dem alle Netzwerkingenieure aus allen Studios eine Woche lang die für Star Citizen erforderlichen Funktionen besprochen haben. Es war eine wirklich interessante Woche für alle Beteiligten, in der alles diskutiert wurde, von der Spielerprognose auf Clientebene über die Serverarchitektur, Datenbanken, Chat, Sicherheit usw.... Es ist wirklich gut, diese Meetings für die interne Sichtbarkeit zu haben und sicherzustellen, dass alles in die richtige Richtung geht. Ansonsten haben wir uns auf die üblichen Bereiche konzentriert, um Arena Commander, Squadron 42 und die PU vorwärts zu bringen. Käfer des Monats: Die Taschenlampe von Thor! Also hatten wir dieses Problem, bei dem, wenn du dein Schiff für eine gewisse Zeit herumfliegen würdest, es plötzlich ohne besonderen Grund explodieren würde. Zuerst dachten wir, es seien nur die üblichen Ausreden für das schlechte Fliegen der Leute, aber als es noch in einem leeren Level geschah, mussten wir feststellen, dass vielleicht etwas anderes im Gange ist. Nach langem Kratzen der Köpfe und Teetrinken entdeckten wir schließlich, dass nach einem Update eine Taschenlampe, die am Spieler hätte befestigt werden sollen, plötzlich abtrünnig geworden war. Es kollidierte mit dem Inneren deines Schiffes und verursachte bei jedem einzelnen Bild einen winzigen Schaden, der schließlich in einer Katastrophe gipfelte. Ja, eine Taschenlampe könnte die mächtige Hornisse niederreißen! Leiter der Grafikprogrammierung Das Grafikteam hat an einigen der Kerntechnologien gearbeitet, um jede der Kunstpipelines (Schiffe, Charaktere, Umgebungen & vfx) zu unterstützen. Für die Schiffe haben wir die Arbeit an dem neuen Schadenshader fortgesetzt, der uns einen feinkörnigen, ortsspezifischen Schaden zufügen wird. Dies wird für Großschiffe entscheidend sein, bei denen die traditionelle Methode, ein Schiff in zahlreiche Maschen zu schneiden, aufgrund ihrer immensen Größe nicht praktikabel ist, aber auch für kleinere Schiffe von Vorteil sein wird. Wir haben auch mit der Arbeit an dem Shader begonnen, der es uns ermöglicht, kundenspezifische Lackierungen zu erstellen. Dies ist nicht so einfach, wie nur einige Texturen auszutauschen, denn unsere Lackierungen müssen schärfer sein, als es mit herkömmlichen Texturen möglich ist, um unsere hohe Qualität zu erhalten, aber die Farbe muss auch mit der Zeit abnehmen und richtig auf das Schadenssystem reagieren (z.B. Biegen & Brennen). Für das vfx-Team haben wir einen volumetrischen Shader für Partikel entwickelt, um komplexe Effekte wie Mehrfachstreuung von Licht und volumetrische Abschattung zu approximieren. Um dies zu erreichen, backen die vfx-Künstler 6 separate Durchgänge einer Explosion oder eines Rauchs aus einer Offline-Fluidsimulation aus, und der Shader berechnet daraus, wie die Lichter im Spiel im Gas herumschlagen würden. Das Endergebnis sind Rauch- und Explosionspartikel, die mit den In-Game-Leuchten korrekt beleuchtet werden, aber die Qualität eines Offline-Renderings erreichen. Wir haben auch an zwei allgemeinen Technikelementen gearbeitet, die dem ganzen Spiel zugute kommen sollen, von denen das erste das 32-Bit-Tiefen-Rendering ist. Wir bewegen uns in Richtung 64-Bit-Physik, um riesige Karten zu verarbeiten, aber das Rendern erfordert keine solche Präzision, da aus Sicht der Kameras alles relativ nahe beieinander liegt. Die meisten Spiele verwenden jedoch nur 24-Bit-Tiefenpuffer und das ist nicht genug für Szenen mit großem Speicherplatz und so haben wir gerade den Übergang zum 32-Bit-Rendering abgeschlossen. Dies hat es uns ermöglicht, die kleinen Hundekampfkarten zu vergrößern, die wir seit der jüngsten Geschwindigkeitssteigerung der Schiffe dringend benötigten! Die andere allgemeine Technologie, die wir entwickelt haben, ist die Fähigkeit, mehrere Texturen zur Laufzeit zu kombinieren, um es uns zu ermöglichen, mehrere Objekte dynamisch in weniger große Objekte zu kombinieren. Dies wird die Rendering-Leistung deutlich verbessern und gleichzeitig die Flexibilität und Modularität beibehalten, mit der die Charaktere, Schiffe und Umgebungen aus vielen kleineren Texturen aufgebaut werden, was für das persistente Universum (anpassbare Schiffe, Kleidung und Hangars usw.) entscheidend ist. Art Director Du willst Charaktere? - Du hast es geschafft! Wir haben eine globale Sichtweise auf die Charaktere innerhalb des Sternenbürgeruniversums eingenommen und überprüfen Qualität und Pipeline, damit sie nicht nur alle Aspekte des persistenten Universums abdecken, sondern sich auch als Weltklasse-AAA-Charaktere auszeichnen. Zusätzliche Dokumentationen für Outsourcing-Partner wurden erstellt, wir wissen, welche Qualität Sie von den Ventilatoren erwarten und wir legen den Grundstein für ein starkes und vielseitiges System. Zusammen mit einer aktualisierten anatomisch korrekten Basis männlich (und weiblich zu folgen) haben wir das Kamera-Scanning-Rigg in Besitz genommen, um die Entwicklung von fotorealistischen Charakteren für Sq42 und die PU zu unterstützen. Der wirkliche Fokus liegt nun auf der Beantwortung der schwierigen Fragen, die uns später stolpern lassen könnten, und die Arbeit mit talentierten Leuten wie 3Lateral und Cubic Motion macht sicherlich einige Bereiche einfacher (allerdings ist bei SC nichts einfach!). Du willst Schiffe? - Du hast es geschafft! Die Gladius befindet sich nun in der technischen Einrichtungsphase und ist somit für die Phase der Veröffentlichung im Hangar geeignet. Der Vergelter ist jetzt 50% großartiger, seit Sie das kürzlich veröffentlichte Video (es war etwa einen Monat alt) zusammen mit dem Gladiator gesehen haben, der den größten Teil seines Äußeren angesichts der PBS-Behandlung mit dem komplexen Doppelcockpit/Schützeninnenraum als nächstes hat. Die Idris und der Speer kommen immer noch, und wir berücksichtigen die Sq42-Handlung, indem wir hier und da ein paar Optimierungen an Formen und Strukturen vornehmen, um eine zusammenhängendere Umgebung zu schaffen. Das Warten wird sich lohnen, versprochen. Neu und bemerkenswert, ein Teil der Vanduul-Flotte geht in Produktion, die wir auch für die Storyline benötigen - schalten Sie nächsten Monat ein, um weitere Informationen zu erhalten - wir sind wirklich begeistert, da wir jetzt wirklich anfangen können, uns einzuwählen, wer/was die Vanduul sind und wie ihre Bauweise ist. Du willst Umgebungen? - Du hast es geschafft! Shubin Mining Einrichtung -'Archon' hat das Stadium von Greybox komplett erreicht, es ist eine große Herausforderung, aber die Bilder passen zu seiner physischen Größe, noch keine Shader, nur viel Geo, ich meine viel! Um Ihnen eine Vorstellung davon zu geben, gibt es mindestens 26 Landeplätze rund um die Anlage, auf denen der Spieler landen, aus dem Schiff steigen und herumlaufen kann. Alle diese Details werden dazu beitragen, dass sich die Shubin Archon Facility wie eine Lebens- und Atemumgebung anfühlt. Du willst Konzepte? - Du hast es geschafft! Konzeptabteilung hat ein wenig diesen Monat verlangsamt (anstelle von 100mph sein eher wie 90mph :P). Shubin Innenausstattung, Starfarer wurde mit der'Parry'-Behandlung behandelt und ein komplettes Innenleben wurde zusammen mit einigen lästigen Funktionsproblemen ausgearbeitet, dies wurde nun vollständig visualisiert, es ist ein ziemlich großes Schiff, also wird es nicht in einer Woche fertig sein, wenn Sie das denken! Auch das Innere von Xi'an Transportschiffen nimmt eine gute Form an, wir haben uns nun in eine Bildsprache eingewählt, mit der wir zufrieden sind, es macht die Entwicklung der restlichen Räume um eine Tonne einfacher, sobald Sie ein paar Schlüsselfaktoren zum Start haben. Der Fokus verlagert sich auch auf die Beantwortung der nervösen Teile der UEE-Crew-Kostüme, wir verfolgen einen systemischen Ansatz, um wirklich zu definieren, wie diese Designs funktionieren werden, wie sie zum Anpassungssystem passen und ob sie den Detaillierungsgrad haben, den wir brauchen, um Chris und Sie, die Fans, glücklich zu machen. Du willst Animationen? - Du hast es geschafft! Die Animationsabteilung (die wir ausbauen wollen) hat begonnen, sich Previz anzusehen und Vorbereitungsarbeiten für einige der In-Game- Action-Sequenzen durchzuführen - ich kann in dieser Phase nicht viel verraten, ohne Spoiler zu verteilen. Wir haben auch die Designabteilung bei der Arbeit an spezifischen spielmechanischen Animationen unterstützt, es ist ein wichtiger Teil des Prozesses, denn frühes Previz für das Design spart oft verschwendeten Arbeitsaufwand im weiteren Verlauf. Du willst Würze mit deinem VFX? - Du hast es geschafft! Selbstschattende Lichtpartikel, mmm, lecker - das ist es, was die VFX-Abteilung mit der Technikabteilung entwickelt hat, wir versuchen immer noch, uns einen Namen für diese Technik/dieses Texturformat auszudenken, wir würden uns freuen, wenn es etwas Schnelles/Medienfreundliches wäre, aber der aktuelle Name ist SSL (Self Shadowing Lighting). Abgesehen davon beginnen wir auch damit, die Auswirkungen von Fahrzeugschäden zu verbessern, beginnend mit Rauch und Feuer, und versuchen, ein saubereres, effizienteres System zu schaffen, das größere langfristige Auswirkungen auf das Projekt hat. Das war's - eine volle Portion Mensch vs. Polygon, die das Herz aufhält und die gekochte CGI-Güte. Unterzeichnet, Der Chefkoch Audiokabel Diesen Monat hat sich das Audio-Team zwischen Citizencon-bezogenen Aufgaben und der bevorstehenden Demo des FPS-Moduls aufgeteilt. Die Umgebungsgeräusche für den Demo-Level beginnen sich zu entwickeln. Den Details in diesem Bereich wird viel Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt. Das gesamte Surren, Brummen und die allgemeine Atmosphäre kommt von bestimmten Punkten im 3D-Raum. Wir werden uns nie mit einer gefälschten 2d Ambient-Soundlandschaft zufrieden geben! Computer werden untätig ticken, Bildschirme und Lichter summen und summen, Klimaanlagen und Fans werden zischen und surren! Dies alles wird sich um dich herum bewegen, während du deinen Spieler bewegst. Wir haben auch an der Forschung und Entwicklung gearbeitet und das Wasser generell mit dem FPS-Waffenfeuer getestet. Es gibt viel zu beachten bei so etwas wie einem Gewehrgeräusch! First-Person-Geschützfeuer, Eisenvisier-Geschützfeuer, 3rd-Person-Geschützfeuer, Geschützgeräusche über die Entfernung, Umwelteffekte auf Geschützgeräusche und das ist nur das Feuern der Geschütze! Dies richtig zu machen, ist ein langer Prozess und wird auch in Zukunft andauern. Dennoch hoffen wir, dass es mit der Arbeit, die wir bisher geleistet haben, ein guter Start für den FPS-Sound sein wird, wenn es sich um eine Demo für PAX handelt. Ansonsten haben wir an einer Auswahl der fps-Gadgets gearbeitet und versucht, mit dem endlosen (aber fantastischen) Ansturm von schiffsbezogenen Sound-Aufgaben Schritt zu halten! Bürger! Der September war ein Monat voller großer Erfolge für das Montrealer Team. Wir können es kaum erwarten, dass Sie alle neuen Funktionen, an denen wir gearbeitet haben, ausprobieren, und wir freuen uns auf Ihr Feedback. Wie immer ist es ein großes Vergnügen, an der Entwicklung dieses Spiels für euch Jungs teilzunehmen. In der Zwischenzeit gibt es hier das neueste Update vom Team. Design Auf der Ebene des Designs haben die Jungs hart daran gearbeitet, Fehler zu beheben und an den neuen Hangars zu arbeiten. Wir haben auch (wieder) mit der Ausblendung von Planetenseiten begonnen, die wir schon seit geraumer Zeit auf Papier entworfen haben. Zu sehen, wie sie endlich im Motor Gestalt annehmen, ist "SC-gerecht" fantastisch! Es wurden weitere Flair-Objekte entworfen (wir haben wahrscheinlich genug Flairs für die nächsten 18 Monate aufgestellt;) Unser Ziel ist es, so viel Wissen wie möglich in die von uns entworfenen Flair-Objekte zu integrieren, was sie interessant und einzigartig macht, damit sie nicht an das Monster verfüttert werden, das in der Müllpresse Ihres Hangars lebt. In diesem Zusammenhang befinden sich einige spezielle Anbaugebiete für die Hangars in der Brainstorming-Phase. Wenn alles gut geht, kannst du sie in Zukunft zu deinem Hangar hinzufügen. Mit der Gamescom und dem Großteil der Arbeiten für die neuen öffentlichen Veröffentlichungen des Hangars hinter uns haben wir die Entwicklung von mobiGlas (wieder)aufgenommen. Hand in Hand mit dem fabelhaften UI-Team haben wir unsere Designs für verschiedene mG-Apps weiterentwickelt, um sie serienreif zu machen: mG HOME, easyShop, Wear, skyLine und Scheduler, um nur einige zu nennen, sind in Vorbereitung. mG Scheduler hat bereits eine Version, die im Motor läuft und kommt gut voran. Technisch gesehen haben wir eng mit Ingenieuren zusammengearbeitet, um das TAG-Systemtool zu entwickeln, mit dem wir praktisch jedes Objekt in der Spielwelt markieren können. Es ist ein bisschen wie Hashtags auf Twitter oder die Verwendung von Keywords in Suchmaschinen. Mit diesem leistungsstarken Tool können wir Elemente dynamisch in der Maschine hinzufügen und abfragen, um eine schnellere und effizientere Entwicklung zu ermöglichen, und der eigentliche Vorteil für das Designteam: die Fähigkeit, das Spiel nahtlos zu verfolgen und zu aktualisieren. Programmierung Einer der Schwerpunkte für die Programmierung im September war die Fertigstellung und Auslieferung einer ersten Version der Steuerungsanpassung an die Öffentlichkeit. Es gibt immer noch viele Funktionen, die wir hinzufügen wollen, und wir werden definitiv noch ein paar Monate daran arbeiten. Wir haben auch viel Zeit damit verbracht, die neue Version des Pausenmenüs, die Anfang dieses Monats veröffentlicht wurde, zu polieren und zu debuggen. Nach ein paar Monaten Arbeit an ein paar Aufgaben mit höherer Priorität kommen wir nun endlich wieder zur mobiGlas-Entwicklung. Unser neues Tag Editor Tool hat intern viel Aufmerksamkeit und Aufmerksamkeit erhalten und wir sind begierig darauf, es mit den nächsten Systemen zu verbinden, die wir planen zu implementieren. Wie üblich wurden die Hangars nicht zurückgelassen, als wir den Schiffslaichalgorithmus überarbeitet haben, um die Funktion zu unterstützen, mit der die Spieler ihr Hangarschiff-Layout über die RSI-Website anpassen können. Schließlich haben wir auch ein paar raffinierte Flairartikel hinzugefügt, die unsere Abonnenten genießen können. Kunst Das Kunstteam war sehr beschäftigt mit der Arbeit an Innen- und Außenräumen für verschiedene Standorte auf den Planeten sowie mit der Vorbereitung eines Abschnitts der Arc Corp, der bald gezeigt wird! Wir haben auch mit der Arbeit am Flairobjekt des nächsten Monats begonnen und haben etwas Cooles in den Arbeiten für Pax Australia. Unsere Konzeptkünstler haben sich auf die ArcCorp-Produktion konzentriert, haben aber auch begonnen, sich weiter mit Terra-Konzepten zu beschäftigen. Wir haben auch einige 890 Jump-Konzepte für die Broschüre erstellt. Und last but not least..... UI In diesem Monat wurde viel Arbeit in die Entwicklung der Steuerungsanpassung gesteckt, die wir in mehreren Phasen umsetzen werden. Ingenieure und UI-Künstler haben hart daran gearbeitet, sicherzustellen, dass sich die Benutzerfreundlichkeit genau richtig anfühlt. Wie bereits erwähnt, sind wir auch in die Asset-Entwicklung für verschiedene mobiGlas-Anwendungen eingestiegen, insbesondere HOME und easyShop (für den Anfang), sowie einige der Kernkomponenten, die in allen mobiGlas-Anwendungen eingesetzt werden. Wir hatten auch viel Spaß bei der Erstellung von Decals, fiktiven Plakaten und gefälschten Ui-Bildschirmen für die ArcCorp Citizencon-Umgebung. Hallo liebe Bürgerinnen und Bürger, Ein weiterer Monat vergeht schneller als die Murray Cup-Spitzenreiter und PAX Australia nähert sich schneller als ein voll ausgestatteter M50! Der September war ein verrückter Monat für das FPS-Team. Wir haben hart daran gearbeitet, dass alles bereit ist für das große Event und wir wollen dir wirklich, wirklich alle deine Socken ausziehen. Im vergangenen Monat konzentrierten wir uns darauf, alle letzten Teile des Spiels, die wir auf der PAX zeigen wollen, zu implementieren, und im Oktober werden wir damit verbringen, all diese Teile zu polieren und zu optimieren, die bis zum Event führen. Design Unser Creative Director, Lead Designer und Level Designer haben den letzten Schliff für das Niveau gegeben, das wir auf der PAX Australia zeigen wollen. Neben dieser Arbeit wurden auch Papierdesigns und Grauraumebenen für das FPS-Modul erstellt. Die Arbeit an zerstörbaren Objekten geht ebenfalls weiter, und es gibt jetzt eine wirklich große Anzahl von Dingen, die zerbrechen, zerfallen und die die FPS-Umgebungen füllen. All dieses Detail gibt den Waffen ein echtes Gefühl von Macht. Das Designteam hat auch die Waffenbilanz finalisiert, zumindest für das PAX-Event. Wie bereits erwähnt, ist das Waffengleichgewicht eine laufende Aufgabe, an der bis zur Veröffentlichung des FPS-Moduls und darüber hinaus weiter gearbeitet wird, insbesondere wenn Sie als Bürger die Möglichkeit hatten, Ihre Zähne in den FPS zu graben und uns dieses wertvolle Feedback zu geben. Programmierung Während des letzten Monats hat sich das Programmierteam darauf konzentriert, alles umzusetzen und funktionsfähig zu machen. Es gab auch viele Kooperationen mit dem Animationsteam, um alles in Ordnung zu bringen. Dies ist nicht Ihr Standard-FPS.... und der Ansatz, den wir verfolgen, beruht sehr stark darauf, dass Animation und Code perfekt synchronisiert sind. Ich möchte an dieser Stelle nicht mehr als das sagen, aber zögere nicht, so viel zu spekulieren, wie du willst! Andere Programmieraufgaben im letzten Monat umfassten einige ziemlich wichtige Korrekturen in Physik und Netzwerk. Alle Waffen und Gadgets funktionieren jetzt über das Netzwerk richtig, so dass wir wirklich anfangen können, sie zu testen und so schnell wie möglich an der Mechanik zu iterieren. Schließlich gab es einen sehr produktiven Networking Summit, der in der CiG Santa Monica stattfand, wo sich die besten Programmierer aus jedem Studio versammelten, um Dinge zu diskutieren, die ich nicht einmal vorgeben werde zu verstehen. Animation Wow, das Animationsteam hier war verrückt beschäftigt.... wahrscheinlich mehr als jeder andere bei [REDACTED] (und das sagt wirklich etwas aus, wenn man bedenkt, wie beschäftigt alle anderen waren!). Sie haben an der Neuausrichtung von Animationen für ein neues Rigg gearbeitet, das eine ganze Reihe von Problemen behebt. Darüber hinaus arbeiten sie täglich mit Design und Programmierung, um sicherzustellen, dass Star Citizen FPS etwas wirklich Einzigartiges ist. Wir können es kaum erwarten, dass ihr Bürger seht, was sie für PAX zusammengestellt haben, und wir hoffen aufrichtig, dass ihr die Unterschiede in dem, was wir schaffen, bemerken werdet. Ich möchte auch erwähnen, dass das Team in Austin uns bei der Animation im Allgemeinen eine große Hilfe geleistet hat. Wir hätten es ohne euch nicht geschafft, und wir schätzen die Hilfe sehr. Audio Apropos große helfende Hände, Foundry 42 hat es sich zur Aufgabe gemacht, alle Soundeffekte für PAX fertigzustellen, und auch dort ist ein großer Dank dafür angebracht. Es ist wirklich erstaunlich, an einem so ambitionierten Spiel beteiligt zu sein, bei dem alle beteiligten Studios so bereit sind, sich gegenseitig zu unterstützen und zu unterstützen, wo es nötig ist. Die Jungs in Großbritannien stellen einige erstaunliche Soundeffekte für die restlichen Waffen, Gadgets und Granaten zusammen und machen eine riesige Menge an Umweltsoundeffekten, die das FPS Module so gut klingen lassen, wie es aussieht (und glauben Sie mir.... es sieht fantastisch aus!). Kunst Das Kunstteam hier hat im letzten Monat wirklich eine spektakuläre Arbeit geleistet. Während sie die Modellierung und Texturen für die letzten Gadgets, die für PAX benötigt werden, fertig stellen, haben sie den Umgebungen eine wahnsinnige Menge an Details hinzugefügt. Ich bin seit über 10 Jahren in der Branche tätig, und ich kann ehrlich sagen, dass ich diesen Grad an Politur in der Grafik noch nie zuvor gesehen habe (außer der Arbeit des restlichen Star Citizen-Teams!). Es ist etwas wirklich Erstaunliches und mein Hut geht auf sie los. Das visuelle FX-Team hat die Waffe und den Umgebungseffekt wiederholt und poliert, und diese Arbeit wird in den nächsten Wochen fortgesetzt. Aufkleber und Partikel sind ebenfalls eingetroffen, was in Kombination mit den zerstörbaren Umgebungen erstaunlich aussieht. Das sollte über das Aufwickeln es für den[REDACTED] Report dieser Monat (ja, ich weiß, dass ich diesen Witz für die meisten von Ihnen letzten Monat beendet habe und ich entschuldige mich). Bevor ich hier unterschreibe, möchte ich einen großen Dank an High Admiral Tristram aussprechen, der uns ein Care-Paket mit einigen Nerf-Geschützen geschickt hat. Danke von uns allen Tristram! Jetzt zurück an die Arbeit.... wir sehen uns in einem Monat! Hi! Das Team hat den größten Teil seiner Bemühungen darauf verwendet, den Einsatz von R13 und dem Ranglistensystem zu unterstützen, mit dem Spieler in den verschiedenen Spielmodi auf der Webplattform platziert werden. Wir sind wirklich begeistert von diesem Subsystem, denn es ist nicht nur ein sehr tolles Feature, es ist auch das erste Mal, dass die Spielserver Daten an Ihr Konto zurücksenden. Wir planen, dies zu nutzen, um Ihnen mehr Möglichkeiten zu geben, auf die verschiedenen Datenpunkte zuzugreifen, die Sie erzeugen, während Sie Ihr Schiff im Arena Commander steuern. Wie immer ist es immer der beste Teil der Arbeit im Star Citizen-Universum, die Reaktion der Community auf einen Start zu sehen. Programmierung Die meiste Zeit des Engineerings wurde damit verbracht, die Bereitstellung des Leaderboardsystems zu überwachen. Während Sie Spectrum Matches spielen, werden definitive Statistiken aus dem Spiel zur Rangliste und Verarbeitung an die Plattform zurückgegeben. Die zu diesem Zeitpunkt geschaffene Datenpipeline nutzt ein langlebiges und dauerhaftes Messaging-Warteschlangensystem, das es uns ermöglicht, nie ein Spiel zu verlieren und immer die Ranglisten und Statistiken zu berechnen, sehr nützlich für die Cloud-Umgebung, in der wir uns befinden und die manchmal unvorhersehbar sein kann. Einige interessante Herausforderungen wurden auch in Bezug darauf angegangen, wie wir die tatsächlichen Spielerrankings so beibehalten können, dass wir ein benutzerdefiniertes Board für Spieler anzeigen können, die keinen sequentiellen Rang teilen. Ein gutes Beispiel dafür ist die Rangliste "per Organisation". Ein sehr cooles neues Feature, das Sie technisch gesehen jetzt in den Händen halten sollten, ist das Hangar-Konfigurationsprogramm. Dieses neue Tool, das in Ihrem "Mein Hangar" zugänglich ist, ermöglicht es Ihnen, auszuwählen, welches Ihrer Schiffe in welcher Bucht des von Ihnen gewählten Hangars auftaucht. Dieses neue Subsystem stellt die verschiedenen Hangarbuchten der Plattform zur Verfügung, so dass Sie von Hand auswählen können, welches Ihrer Schiffe Sie sehen möchten, und gibt den Spielern die Kontrolle über diesen Prozess, der früher von einem Algorithmus gesteuert wurde. Das Team hatte endlich Zeit, sich einige der Probleme mit dem Chat-System anzusehen, die Web-Benutzer erlebt haben! Mit der Bereitstellung eines neuen Satzes von Verbindungsmanagern (ein Prozess, der HTTP-zu-XMPP-Socket-Verbindungen verarbeitet) scheint es, dass die Trennungsprobleme, die bei Spielern aufgetreten sind, behoben wurden. In Verbindung mit ein paar Bugfixes für den Webclient sollte das Chat-Erlebnis stark verbessert werden. Chatten Sie weiter! Weiter zum Lobby-System! UX & Design Die UX- und Art-Teams haben einige Fortschritte auf einer neuen Homepage für Star Citizen gemacht und das Erlebnis für neue Spieler neu gestaltet. Dazu gehören neue Videoinhalte; neue Website UX, neuer Spielerführer, etc.... Dies ist der Beginn eines langen Prozesses, um zu versuchen, das Star Citizen-Universum für neue Spieler zu destillieren, aber wir hoffen, dass wir diesen Plan in mundgerechten Stücken umsetzen können, sobald sie sich bereit machen. Wir konnten einen Design Review über die Funktionalität des Organisationsforums durchführen, der Anfang dieses Monats entworfen wurde, ein erster Schritt zur Validierung unserer Hypothese, bevor wir den Designprozess fortsetzen. UX hat auch eine Liste von Zusatzfunktionen zusammengestellt, die wir für den Holo-Viewer auf der Website entwickeln wollen. Einige Beispiele sind die Hinzufügung eines "Scale HUD" (um relative Schiffsgrößen mit Einheiten anzuzeigen), eines globalen "Ship Explorer", der nicht an die verschiedenen Shop-Seiten gebunden ist, auf denen Sie zwischen Herstellern und Schiff wechseln können, ohne den Betrachter zu verlassen, was dem Betrachter einen prominenteren Platz auf der Website bietet. Last but not least sind die inhaltlichen und gestalterischen Arbeiten für die Starmap im Gange! Sorry, noch keine weiteren Details! Grüße Bürger, Dies war ein wirklich solider Monat der Entwicklung von Infrastruktur und Kernfunktionen für unsere KI-Systeme, mit besonderem Fokus auf FPS-Kampf und persistente UniversumskI. In diesem Monat fanden viele Design- und Implementierungsarbeiten statt, um diese Systeme funktionsreich genug zu machen, dass die Designer in den anderen Studios wirklich anfangen können, in die Stadt zu gehen und coole Sachen mit der KI zu machen. Es gibt noch viel mehr zu tun, aber wir sind wirklich zufrieden mit den Fortschritten, die wir bisher gemacht haben. Design Ein großer Teil unserer jüngsten Arbeit hat sich mit einem tiefgreifenden und signifikanten Refactoring der Art und Weise beschäftigt, wie Designer KI-Aufgaben an die Hand geben und versuchen, ein gutes Gleichgewicht zwischen Flexibilität und Robustheit zu finden. Wir denken, dass die KI in Star Citizen viel interessanter sein wird, wenn Designer spezifisch sein können, was die KI zu bestimmten Zeiten tun soll, aber der Rest der Zeit kann sich darauf verlassen, dass die KI intelligent und vernünftig ist. Wir alle haben Spiele gespielt, in denen die KI verrückte Dinge tut, und die Designer arbeiten hart daran, das zu verhindern, also haben wir ein System entwickelt, um dies so weit wie möglich zu rationalisieren. Vor allem die Staffel 42 sollte davon wirklich profitieren. Wir haben eine Weile daran gearbeitet, aber diesen Monat haben wir einige ernsthafte Fortschritte bei der Umsetzung gemacht, und als Teil davon haben wir viel Zeit damit verbracht, die Details herauszufinden, von den hochrangigen Aufgaben, die der KI zugewiesen werden, über das mittlere Verhalten, das sie ausführen, bis hin zu den niedrigrangigen Aktionen. Und ein wichtiger Teil dieses Designs ist es, mit den Designern über Ideen nachzudenken, um sicherzustellen, dass das, was wir uns einfallen lassen, für sie einfach und intuitiv zu bedienen ist. In diesem Monat gab es auch viel Designarbeit, um Details des persistenten Universums zu konkretisieren, wobei ein besonderer Schwerpunkt darauf lag, sicherzustellen, dass unser Design im Einklang mit den anderen Teams steht, die persistente Universumsarbeit leisten. Es gibt viele kleine Details herauszufinden, von der Art und Weise, wie KI interessante und lebensechte Dinge in der Welt macht, bis hin zu dem, wie die Werkzeuge aussehen sollten, mit denen Designer diese Welt erschaffen werden. Ingenieurwesen Wie bereits erwähnt, haben wir in diesem Monat viel Arbeit geleistet und die Kernarchitektur für die Art und Weise, wie die KI kontrolliert wird, implementiert. Diese Arbeit betrifft die gesamte KI in Star Citizen, einschließlich der Luftkampf-KI, die Sie bereits verwenden. Wir haben alles auf ein neues Verhaltenssystem umgestellt, das es uns ermöglicht, komplexe und interessante Verhaltensweisen viel einfacher zu erstellen. Es gab hier viel zu tun, aber wir waren erfolgreich und deshalb freuen wir uns darauf, nächsten Monat einige interessante Dinge mit der KI zu tun, die zu gegebener Zeit bekannt gegeben werden, also haltet Ausschau danach! Im Bereich der FPS-KI haben wir seit einiger Zeit Charaktere, die sehen können, aber es war endlich an der Zeit, ihnen die Fähigkeit zu geben, auch zu hören. Geschützfeuer, Kugeln, die an ihren Köpfen vorbeiflitzen, Schritte eines Spielers, der erfolglos versucht, heimlich zu sein; das sind alles Dinge, die eine gute KI wissen sollte, und jetzt sind sie es. Und jetzt, da die KI mehr über die Welt weiß, können wir ihnen interessantere Verhaltensweisen geben, was wir mit unseren neuen Verhaltenssystemen begonnen haben. Schließlich haben wir für das persistente Universum einige Arbeiten durchgeführt, um es der KI zu ermöglichen, Gegenstände in der Welt zu verwenden. Wir haben ein System implementiert, das es Designern ermöglicht, Objekte in der Welt einzurichten und von der KI nutzen zu lassen. Es werden komplexere Interaktionen folgen, aber schon jetzt können wir der Welt ein lebendigeres Gefühl geben, und es wird spannend sein zu sehen, wie sich dies in den kommenden Monaten weiter entwickelt. Greetings Citizens, It has been a busy month for Star Citizen! In the past month, we’ve released Arena Commander .9 and then followed it up with a number of patches. Perfecting Star Citizen’s physics, flight model and multiplayer is an effort that studios around the world have come together for… but we’ve also been building deeper elements of the game! The September reports below will let you in on just what we’ve been spending our time developing. Greetings Citizens! September was very busy and productive for the Santa Monica studio. Much of our focus this month has been on completing features and fixing bugs for v0.9 of Arena Commander. We were very excited about this release, as it introduced the new Murray Cup racing mode to the game, along with the M50 and 350R racing ships. Hopefully you all watched our “Galactic Gear” commercial that introduced these new features. There was quite a bit of buzz about the commercial around the Internet, and we were even referenced on the official “Top Gear” website for our homage to their show! In addition to supporting Arena Commander’s development, we have also been improving our pipeline for creating new ships. Recently, the ship pipeline was moved from Austin to LA, and we have been hard at work refining our process and improving our workflow so that we can develop ships more quickly and more efficiently than we have ever done before. The creation of new ships for Star Citizen is an incredibly complex and detailed process, so it made sense to move it to LA where Chris can maintain oversight and provide direction to everyone involved. Part of our process improvements included sitting down and reevaluating every step of the pipeline and making necessary adjustments to the workflow. If you are curious about what that looks like, please see the attached diagram of what it takes to develop a new ship for the game. And beyond supporting Arena Commander and building new ships, we’re also preparing for Citizen Con and PAX Australia events coming up in October. A lot of work is happening around the company to put together a sneak peak of many of the new areas of the game that are currently in development. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we reveal more of our progress to you. We have also been busy this month interviewing a number of applicants for various positions around the company. We’ve been talking to prospective 3D artists, concept artists, lighting artists, technical animators, technical designers, programmers, outsource managers, and many more. As a result, we’ve identified some really talented people who are ready to join us at Cloud Imperium Games. We’re very excited to be bringing on board some amazing new people who will help us to execute on Chris’s vision of the best damn space sim ever! As we add more resources to the project, it increases our development capacity and provides us with the ability to do even more on this ambitious project. None of this would be possible without all of our backers, so we thank you for your continued support in our development efforts! Now onto the departmental updates! Engineering Our engineering team in Santa Monica has been working on all aspects of Arena Commander this month. On the HUD front Brandon has been working on code support for new features and targeting modes that we are prototyping for introduction in a future patch to improve the HUD functionality and the user experience. Similarly everyone’s favorite Bug Smasher, Mark Abent, has been working with our Physics Programmer John Pritchett to improve everyone’s ability to “stay on target” with improvements to the lead prediction as well as some new aiming functionality for both gimbaled and fixed weapons that interface with the IFCS and should be rolling out to you guys soon. We’ve also created a new system for handling ship variants that cleverly allows us to share identical parts across variants. This new technology allows us to save an amazing amount of time and effort throughout the whole ship pipeline by eliminating the duplicate work we used to have to do updating the same pieces of a ship on all the variants separately. Now we can fix the bug or make the improvement we wanted to on the base model of a ship and it automatically propagates to all the variants of that ship that share that part. On the Graphics programming side our Engineer Okka Kyaw has been diligently working on moving to a 32-bit depth buffer. This will help to eliminate a lot of the z-fighting throughout the game. Previously the precision of the depth buffer was lacking which would cause geometry that was very close to each other to begin z-fighting when viewed from far distances. These fixes will be in an upcoming patch. Okka didn’t stop there though, he’s also begun the process of researching a developing a new vehicle paint system so that we can more easily create custom paint jobs for ships and paves the way for eventual customization by you in the community. Last but not least we here in Santa Monica had a Networking Summit where we hosted all of the top network and backend programmers from CIG and our partner studios led by Chris to discuss topics ranging from short term improvements like improving movement prediction, bandwidth consumption, server CPU usage, chat system, lobby systems, matchmaking, and telemetry data gathering. We also covered a multitude of longer term initiatives that included how best to handle clients migrating from server to server, handling the scale of the persistent universe, unified player and object ID’s for use across multiple servers, and a number of other topics dealing with delivering the most seamless multiplayer experience for both SQ42 and the Persistent Universe. All in all a very productive week long summit that laid a solid foundation for continued development. Design Design this month has been working in close collaboration with the Engineering and HUD team to design, prototype, and implement improvements to the HUD and targeting systems. Calix Reneau has been prototyping out ways to improve the control of gimbaled weapons on the control systems that commonly don’t natively support smooth analog movement such as joysticks, HOTAS, and gamepad peripherals. We are confident that these new systems, once implemented, will significantly improve the functionality of gimbaled weapons on these controller types. This month we have also been spending a significant amount of time reviewing community feedback on the balance of ships and their flight characteristics. You’ve already seen some patches since the V0.9 to address some of this feedback but we’re also working on some more long term balance changes that you will see in future releases. As part of this we’ve also been designing new weapons and items that we feel will further diversify the strategies that we see players using online. Another big push for our Design team has been spec’ing out improvements to the nascent signature and emissions system with our teammates at Foundry 42. We’ve had numerous discussions with them as well as the Engineering team and have a solid plan for implementing Chris’ vision for this system. Alongside this the team has also been designing game modes for Arena Commander that will better focus on gameplay that isn’t purely about dogfighting and instead will highlight the advantages of ships like the Aurora and other yet to be introduced ships that are less capable dogfighters and maybe have a bit more cargo capacity… Art With the move of the Ship Pipeline to Santa Monica from Austin we’ve been building our Art team in Santa Monica with additional Concept and 3D resources. The team has hit the ground running and have been blazing away at all the new ships that we are concepting, adding the hangar, and adding into Arena Commander. We are also continuing to hire in order to increase our pipelines capacity for developing more ships simultaneously. Especially since as we move forward to the larger and larger ships they will occupy our Artists for longer periods of time than the single seat ships have. With regard to ship development, we have a number of new concepts we are working on this month, including the Hearald, Carrack, Reclaimer, Avenger variants, 890 Jump, as well as new concepts for various items and weapons. We’ve completed the models for the full Mustang lineup, the full Cutlass lineup, and beginning to dive-in on Avenger variants, the Herald, Redeemer, and a few others… Now that we have the new variant system from Engineering we’re also planning to tackle all the custom pieces, damage states, and LODs for the variants of the 300 series, Aurora series, and Hornet series to get all the variants dogfighting ready as quickly as possible from an Art perspective. The Art team has also been working closely with Production to flesh out the new and improved Ship Pipeline and helping to identify areas where we can improve quality, reduce time, and further parallelize the development of new ships. We’ve ended up with a new pipeline that we feel is much more streamlined and primed to deliver a higher level of quality much more efficiently. Of course pipelines are not set in stone and it will continue to evolve as we work with other disciplines to further improve and refine the process. The great thing is that everyone on this project is motivated by the same desire to achieve the best quality possible so modifying this pipeline has been a great collaborative effort with likeminded individuals. Cinematics Our huge Cinematics team in Santa Monica who are responsible for the most recent commercials that we do for our ships have been hard at work, all two of them… John Griffith and Chris Wolak who were most recently responsible for bringing the M50 Galactic Gear commercial to life have been pouring that same creative energy into a new Cinematic in-fiction commercial that will be revealed at Citizen Con on October 10th. We are quite excited to share it with everyone and look forward to reading the comments and reactions. The great thing about the Cinematics that we do is that we use all our game assets and our game engine to create them. With the level of quality that the Art, Animation, and VFX teams are putting into these assets we are able to accomplish these beautiful commercials with a team of just two, very talented, individuals working diligently to use all these game assets to create a piece that matches Chris’ vision. We are also lucky to have two very talented writers, David Haddock and William Weissbaum who, when they aren’t working on Squadron 42, pen the scripts for these commercials. At any rate, we are truly looking forward to sharing our next in engine cinematic piece with all of you in the community in seven days and hope everyone enjoys it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it! Well that about wraps up this month’s update for everyone and while we aren’t able to cover every little detail we feel like this touches on the most important and interesting developments of the past month without crossing the 2000 word mark. As always we’d like to reiterate to everyone that we sincerely appreciate your support in making this game with us. Without you guys none of this would be possible and we are grateful for the opportunity to develop and share this game with all of you! Howdy folks, The Austin team has been hard at work this month on many different fronts. We’ve been a bit more quiet than usual, but we are very excited to be able to have something to demonstrate very soon. Our team has been working hard on Persistent Universe tasks and a multitude of Live Operations activities. Here’s a brief report from each team! Programming This month in Austin we have been hard at work on the Persistent Universe. We have made substantial progress on several of the core technologies critical to the Persistent Universe. Brian Mazza continues his work on server side persistence, which is essential to allow players to retain their inventory after they log out, among other things. James Wright and Allen Chen tag-teamed to wrap up Large World “Phase 1” this month as well, which is the first step to getting truly expansive galaxies in place that will literally take days to traverse without quantum travel. Tom Davies wrapped up development on the System Layout Tool, which our designers will be using to physically lay out our universe in-game as well as define properties and attributes of various planets and other objects within a solar system. Tony Zurovec completed the first design iteration of Subsumption, Star Citizen’s objective-oriented NPC AI system, and we’ve now moved into full production. Moon Collider – our AI partners in the UK – have started the long process of adding support for the multitude of specific features we’re going to need to their Kythera AI engine. Two of our Austin programmers – Jeff Uriarte and Tom Davies – have begun work on some of the numerous tools that will be required for the highly data-driven design, which will in turn eventually allow the constitution of the NPC population and even their daily schedules to be algorithmically determined based upon what’s occurring in the surrounding environment, and heavily contribute to providing the feeling of a living, breathing universe. Design Much groundwork was laid this month on laying out designs for some key elements to building our universe. We started looking into several different types of space phenomena and what types of interesting encounters they might make for our explorers out there. Each of these phenomena has different technical and artistic considerations, and we want to be sure to pick the most interesting and exciting to use as space exploration points of interest (POI). Some sensational examples we looked into this month include the Dark Nebula, Pulsar, and Ice Giant. Other things the design team have been doing are standardizing our props for environments, investigating how we might incorporate FPS into our planetside locations, and developing reputations for the various corporations within our universe. We’ve been working on other things we can’t reveal at the moment, but you will get to see a taste of it fairly soon. Art Persistent Universe art tasks have all been geared towards getting the first planetside location, ArcCorp, up and running. Our Art Director, Mark Skelton, has been constantly interfacing with the team at Behaviour to really push the visual envelope. Cort Soest further fleshed out the Tier Toolset which our designers and artists will use to quickly and efficiently build out planetside environments, space stations, and potentially even huge capital ships. Work on visual effects and props for ArcCorp as well as other planetside environments are being worked on here as well. Concept work for our next planetside environment – Terra Prime – is nearing completion, and full production will soon commence. Bryan Brewer and the animation team has been hard at work supporting [REDACTED] in getting the FPS characters in ship shape. We have been improving our character locomotion to look more realistic, making sure our characters have an awesome ragdoll effect for when they get blown off their feet, and moving over our existing animations to a brand new rig that will help raise our characters to next-gen quality. We have also been working on several NPC animations so that when peaceful NPC AI system comes online, our NPC’s will have something to do. Chris Smith and the ship team worked very hard to spruce up the new racing ships that were released this past month. They’ve been horsin’ around on other things we can’t tell you about just yet, but stay tuned and you’ll find out soon enough! Quality Assurance Star Citizen QA hit the ground running for the month of September rigorously testing the long awaited v0.9. After a lot of hard work we were happy to finally share all the new features with everyone with a successful release. Then we did it all again with a total of four releases! We also continually tested our internal tools to ensure that our developers have the most up to date and stable dev environment. Thanks to our resident QA engineer Keegan Standifer, significant progress was made with our development of automated testing. This will be important to leverage as the Persistent Universe expands. This month we added two new members to the QA team. Please welcome Melissa Estrada and Jeffrey Pease! Jeffrey joins us from Blizzard Entertainment where he specialized in growing an epic beard! Melissa joins us from NCSoft where she gained valuable MMO QA experience. As a solid team, we look forward to continuing our bug squashing efforts in order to provide the most enjoyable experience possible with each future release. Live Operations Work on the Publishing and Live Ops side continues at a frenetic pace. The QA Team led by Justin Binford has been burning the midnight oil on a regular basis to test latest build versions for our various development teams and for upcoming publishes to the public. Our Austin QA team works very closely with the QA team in the UK office so that we can provide testing on a virtually 24/7 basis. We’re looking forward to seeing this work on a live server in the very near future. We’ve been working on a ton of behind the scenes upgrades to our build and deploy systems so that we can decrease turnaround time on new builds and then test and deploy updates more quickly around the world. Every bit we save in this area helps us be more productive throughout our operations. It’s been a busy month and we’re very excited that much of our “behind the scenes” work is going to be more visible to the public over the coming days. Stay tuned for more updates! And in the meantime, here’s something fun: “Long before introducing the AMX-1 Repair Bot for personal craft, Saga Datasystems was known for its more industrial designs. The M3-A Multifunction Space Drone has been in service for more than 50 years, and is ideal for performing basic unmanned tasks in and around stations. While never fit with any advanced AI or communications capability, the M3-A is perfectly capable of performing any basic assigned task – from simple repairs to tug functions and the manipulation of heavy mining and cargo containers.” Hi all, Another really busy month here at Foundry 42. We’ve been heavily involved in pushing out new content for Arena Commander, working on the Character pipeline for S42 and the Persistent Universe, working through concept, design and full production on the huge amount of ships we need for Squadron 42, and of course moving forward on the design and implementation of the first missions. Lots of areas to update you guys below, and as always thanks for your support, it really makes a difference to the team, we are REALLY enjoying making this game with you guys. Creative Director September was a good “Housekeeping” month for us, having been full speed ahead for the last few months, we needed some time to catch up with ourselves and some of the fixes that have gone in. Arena Commander: We have increased the size of the maps now that the Z-Buffer issue has been fixed by the engineers, (which you guys will see soon) so now sorting issues will diminish. It’s quite an achievement actually, considering that some of our asteroids are bigger than most of the levels in Crysis. Again thanks to numerous code fixes, we also got to some of the polish tasks, such as getting the asteroids rotating and placing some more accurate physics objects. A lot more design time went into the first implementation of our missiles vs emissions gameplay, and that work is now underway, as well as breaking down the planned features for the 13 stream which will include HUD mode updates, and Leader-boards and of course continued improvements to the key bindings. At the same time we are progressing on branch 14 where we plan to introduce proper lobbies, a huge amount of polish to space flight mechanics and effects, ship / helmet HUD displays, and new ships systems. Matchmaking is now becoming a big consideration, to give the community a choice on what and who they play with. Ship Design: The StarFarer got a much needed design white-box pass, and came off slightly more heavily armed, with two extra rear belly turrets on either side. Stay tuned for updates on its progress as it gets built out. All the other ships including our huge capital ships are moving along nicely. Squadron 42: We are working through a bunch of new mechanics for Squadron 42, to give the community a really immersive experience. Our verticle slice is in good shape, and so the art department is really motoring through the grey boxing of our levels and we have also started white boxing a number of new levels so we are ready for the big motion capture shoot we will be performing after Christmas. Progress is continuing well on the script, with multiple updates as we refine the gameplay within levels and we have started white boxing the gameplay (sandbox) for the interstitials (Your base or home ship), so the player will feel like they are in a living HUB which they can interact in and explore. All in all, a good month of cleaning up, and progressing Star Citizen on all fronts. Programming Director One of the big pushes we’ve been making this month in getting the new controller customisation UI into Arena Commander. We know it’s something a lot of people have been clamouring for a long time (ever since the first Dogfighting module release!) and this will be the start of allowing you to set up your controller(s) just the way you like. We intend to keep developing it over future releases to give you full control of your setup. Our networking engineers have just come back from a very productive mini networking summit held over in Santa Monica, where all the networking engineers from all the studios spent a week going over the features required for Star Citizen. It’s been a really interesting week for all involved, discussing everything from player prediction on the client level, to the server architecture, databases, chat, security etc… It’s really good having these meetings for internal visibility, and make sure everything is moving forwards in the right direction. Other than that, we’ve been concentrating in the usual areas to keep Arena Commander, Squadron 42, and the PU moving forwards. Bug of the month: The Flashlight of Thor! So we were having this problem where if you flew your ship around for a period of time it would suddenly explode for no particular reason. To begin with we thought it was just the usual excuses for people’s bad flying, but when it was still happening in an empty level we did have to conclude there might be something else afoot. After much scratching of heads, and drinking of tea, we finally discovered that after an update a flashlight, which should have been attached to the player, had suddenly gone rogue. It was colliding with the interior of your ship and doing a tiny piece of damage every single frame, eventually culminating in calamity. Yes, one flashlight could take down the mighty Hornet! Graphics Programming Director The graphics team have been working on some of the core tech to benefit each of the art pipelines (ships, characters, environments & vfx). For the ships we’ve been continuing work on the new damage shader that will give us fine grain location specific damage. This will be crucial for capital ships where the traditional method of cutting a ship into numerous meshes won’t be practical due to their immense scale, but this will also benefit smaller ships. We’ve also started work on the shader that will enable us to create custom paint jobs. This isn’t as simple as just swapping some textures because our paint jobs need to be sharper than is possible with traditional textures to maintain our high quality bar, but the paint also needs to degrade over time and respond correctly to the damage system (e.g. bending & burning). For the vfx team we’ve created a volumetric lighting shader for particles to approximate complex effects such as multiple-scattering of light and volumetric shadowing. To achieve this the vfx artists bake out 6 separate passes of an explosion or smoke from an offline fluid simulation, and the shader uses these to calculate how the in-game lights would bounce around inside the gas. The end result is smoke and explosion particles that are lit correctly with the in-game lights but approach the quality of an offline render. We’ve also been working on two general pieces of tech that should benefit the whole game, the first of which is 32 bit depth rendering. We’re moving towards 64 bit physics to handle enormous maps, however rendering doesn’t require such precision because from the cameras perspective everything is actually relatively nearby. However most games actually use just 24 bit depth buffers and this isn’t enough for large space scenes and so we’ve just completed the transition to 32 bit rendering. This has allowed us to enlarge the small dog-fighting maps which we desperately needed since the recent speed increase of the ships! The other general tech we’ve been developing is the ability to combine multiple textures at run-time to allow us to dynamically combine multiple objects into fewer large objects. This will significantly improve rendering performance while maintaining the flexibility and modularity of building the characters, ships and environments out of many smaller textures, which is crucial for the persistent universe (customisable ships, clothing & hangars etc). Art Director You want Characters? – you got it! We have taken a global view of the characters within the star citizen universe and are reviewing quality and pipeline going forward so they will not only cater for all aspects of the persistent universe but also stand out as world class AAA characters. Additional Documentation for outsource partners have been put together, we know the level of quality you the fans are expecting and we are placing the foundations for a strong versatile system. Along with an updated anatomically correct base male (and female to follow) we have taken possession of the camera scanning rig to help aid the development of photo real characters for Sq42 and the PU. Real focus is now being placed on answering the tough questions that could trip us up later down the line and working with talented folk like 3Lateral and Cubic motion is certainly making some areas easier (nothing is simple on SC though!) You want Ships? – you got it! The Gladius is now in the tech setup stage, making it suitable for the Hangar stage of release. The Retaliator is now 50% more awesome since you saw the video released recently (it was about a month old) along with the Gladiator which has most of its exterior given the PBS treatment with the complex dual cockpit/gunner interior next. The Idris and Javelin are still coming along and we are taking into account the Sq42 storyline, adding a few tweaks here and there to shapes and structure to create a more cohesive environment. The wait will be worth it, I promise. New and noteworthy, some of the Vanduul fleet is going into production which we need for the storyline too – tune in next month for more info – we are really excited about this as we can now really start dialing into who/what the Vanduul are and what their construction methods are. You want Environments? – you got it! Shubin mining facility – ‘Archon’ has reached the stage of Greybox complete, it’s a huge challenge but the visuals are matching its physical size, no shaders yet, just lots of geo, I mean lots! To give you an idea there are at least 26 landing pads located around the facility, each of them the player can land on, get out of their ship and walk around. All of these details will help make the Shubin Archon Facility feel like a living and breathing environment. You want concepts? – you got it! Concepts department has slowed a little this month (instead of 100mph its more like 90mph :P). Shubin interior wrapping up, Starfarer has been given the ‘Parry’ treatment and a full interior has been worked out along with some meddlesome functionality issues, this has now gone out to be fully visualised, it’s a pretty big ship so it won’t be done in a week if that’s what you think! Xi’an transport ship interior is also taking good shape, we’ve now dialled into a visual language that we are happy with, it makes developing the rest of the rooms a ton easier once you have a few key factors to launch from. Focus is also shifting to answering the niggling parts of the UEE crew costumes, we are taking a systemic approach of really defining how these designs will work, how they fit with the customization system and do they have the level of detail we need to keep Chris and you the fans happy. You want animations? – you got it! Animation department (who we are looking to grow) has started looking at Previz and prep work for some of the in game action sequences – I can’t give much away at this stage without giving out spoilers. We’ve also been supporting the design department working on specific game mechanic animations, it’s an important part of the process, early Previz for design often saves on wasted work further down the line. You want spice with your VFX? – you got it! Self shadowing lit particles, mmm, tasty – that’s what the VFX department has been developing with the tech department, we’re still trying to think of a name for this technique/texture format by the way, we’d love for it to be something snappy/media-friendly, but the current name is SSL (Self-shadowing lighting). Aside from that, we’re also starting to improve the vehicle damage effects starting with smoke and fire, trying to make a cleaner more efficient system that has greater long term effects for the project. That’s it – a full on man vs polygon serving of heart stopping griddle cooked CGI goodness. Signed, The Chef Audio Lead This month the audio team have split between Citizencon related tasks and the upcoming demo of the FPS module. The environment sounds for the demo level are starting to shape up. A lot of attention is being paid to the details in this area. All of the whirring, hums, and general ambiance comes from specific points in 3d space. We we’re never going to be satisfied with a faked 2d ambient soundscape! Computers will idly tick away, screens and lights will hum and buzz, air conditioners and fans will whoosh and whirr! This will all move around you as you move your player. We’ve also been working on R&D and generally testing the water with the FPS weapon firing. There’s a lot to consider with something like a gun sound! First person gun firing, iron sights gun firing, 3rd person gun firing, gun sounds over distance, environmental effects on gun sounds and this is just firing the guns!! Getting this right is a long process and will be ongoing long into the future. Even so, we are hoping that with the work we’ve done so far, it’ll be a great start to the FPS sound when it is demo’d for PAX. Other than that we’ve been working on a selection of the fps gadgets and trying to keep up with the unending (but awesome) onslaught of ship related sound tasks! Citizens! September was a month of great accomplishments for the Montreal team. We can’t wait to have you try out all of the new features we have been working on, and we are looking forward to hearing your feedback. As always, it is a great pleasure to be a part of creating this game for you guys. Meanwhile, here is the latest update from the team. Design On the level design side the guys have been hard at work debugging and working on the new hangars. We have also (re)started work on blocking out Planetside locations which we’ve been designing on paper quite a while now. Seeing them finally taking shape in-engine is “SC grade” fantasticness! More flair objects have been designed (we probably have enough flairs lined up for the next 18 months ;) Our goal is to incorporate as much lore as we can into the flair objects we design, which keeps them interesting and unique, so they don’t end up getting fed to the monster living in your hangar’s garbage compactor. On a related note, some special add-on rooms for the hangars are in the brainstorming phase. If all goes well, you’ll be able to add them to your hangar in the future. With Gamescom and the bulk of the work for the new hangar public releases now behind us, we’ve (re)kicked off mobiGlas development. Hand in hand with the fabulous UI team, we’ve refined our designs for various mG apps to get them ready for production: mG HOME, easyShop, Wear, skyLine and Scheduler, to name a few, are in the pipeline. mG Scheduler already has a version running in the engine and is coming along nicely. On a more technical note, we’ve been working closely with engineers to develop the TAG system tool which allows us to tag practically every object in the game world. It’s a bit like hashtags on Twitter or the use of keywords in search engines. With this powerful tool we will be able to add and query items dynamically in-engine for faster, more efficient development, and the real bonus for the design team: the ability to track and update the game seamlessly. Programming One of the main focuses for programming during the month of September has been to complete and deliver a first version of control customization to the public. There are still loads of features that we want to add to it and we’ll definitely be working on it for a few more months. We’ve also spent quite a bit of time polishing and debugging the new version of the pause menu that was released earlier this month. After a couple months of working on a few higher priority tasks, we’re finally getting back to mobiGlas development. Our new Tag Editor Tool has been receiving a lot of focus and attention internally and we’re eager to connect it with the next systems we are planning to implement. As usual, the hangars weren’t left behind as we reworked the ship spawning algorithm to support the feature where players will be able to customize their hangar ship layout through the RSI website. Finally, we’ve also added a few nifty flair items for our subscribers to enjoy. Art The art team has been very busy working on both interiors and exteriors for various planetside locations, as well as preparing a section of Arc Corp that will be shown soon! We have also started work on next month’s flair object, and have something cool in the works for Pax Australia. Our concept artists have been focusing on ArcCorp production, but have also started to get further into Terra concepts. We have also made a few 890 Jump concepts for the brochure. And last but not least… UI This month a lot of work has been going into developing control customization, which we will be rolling out in several phases. Engineers and UI artists alike have been working hard to make sure that the user experience feels just right. As mentioned, we have also moved into asset development for various mobiGlas apps, specifically HOME and easyShop (for starters), as well as some of the core components that will be used across all mobiGlas apps. We have also been having a lot of fun creating decals, in-fiction billboards, and fake ui screens for the ArcCorp Citizencon environment. Hello Esteemed Citizens, Another month flies right on by faster than the Murray Cup leaders and PAX Australia is approaching quicker than a fully equipped M50! September has been a crazy month for the FPS team. We have been pushing hard to make sure everything is ready for the big event and we really, really want to knock all of your socks off. This past month we were focused on getting all the last pieces of the game we plan to show at PAX implemented and the month of October will be spent polishing and tweaking all those pieces leading up to the event. Design Our Creative Director, Lead Designer and Level Designers have been putting the final touches on the level we plan to show at PAX Australia. In addition to that work, they have also been creating paper designs and grey room levels for the FPS Module. Work continues on destructible objects as well and there is now a really good amount of things that shatter, fall to pieces and explode populating the FPS environments. All of this detail gives a real sense of power to the weapons. The design team has also been finalizing weapons balance, at least for the PAX event. As we’ve mentioned before, weapon balance is an ongoing task that will continue to be worked on up to the FPS Module release and beyond, especially once you Citizens have had a chance to dig your teeth into FPS and give us that invaluable feedback. Programming Throughout last month, the programming team has been focused on getting everything implemented and functional. There has also been lots of collaboration with the animation team to get everything looking and feeling right. This isn’t your standard FPS… and the approach we are taking relies very heavily on animation and code being perfectly in sync. I don’t want to say any more than that at this point, but feel free to speculate as much as you want! Other programming tasks over the last month have included some pretty major fixes in physics and networking. All of the weapons and gadgets are now working over the network properly so we can really start play-testing them and iterating as fast as possible on the mechanics. Lastly, there was a very productive Networking Summit that took place at CiG Santa Monica where all of the brightest coder brains from each studio gathered to discuss things that I won’t even pretend to understand. Animation Wow, the animation team here has been crazy busy… probably more so than anybody else at [REDACTED] (and that’s really saying something considering how busy everybody else has been!). They have been working on re-targeting animations to a new rig that fixes a whole slew of issues. In addition, they have been working with design and programming on a daily basis to make sure that Star Citizen FPS is something truly unique. We can’t wait for you Citizens to see what they have been putting together for PAX and we sincerely hope that you will notice the differences in what we are creating. I also want to mention that the team in Austin has been giving us a huge helping hand with animation in general. We couldn’t have done it without you guys, and we really appreciate the help. Audio Speaking of big helping hands, Foundry 42 has taken on the task of finishing out all of the sound effects for PAX and some big thanks are in order there as well. It really is amazing to be involved with such an ambitious game where everybody at all the studios involved are so willing to pitch in and help each other out where it’s needed. The guys over in the UK are putting together some amazing sound effects for the remaining weapons, gadgets and grenades as well as doing a huge amount of environmental sound effects that should make the FPS Module sound as good as it looks (and believe me… it looks amazing!). Art The art team here has really done a spectacular job over the last month. While finishing up modeling and textures for the last few gadgets that are needed for PAX, they have been adding an insane amount of detail to the environments. I have been in the industry for over 10 years, and I can honestly say that I have never seen this level of polish in visuals before (except the work coming from the rest of the Star Citizen team!). It is something truly amazing and my hat goes off to them. The visual FX team has been iterating and polishing the weapon and environmental FX, and that work will continue over the next few weeks. Impact decals and particles have also been going in, which looks amazing when combined with the destructible environments. That should about wrap it up for the [REDACTED] report this month (yes, I know I killed that joke for most of you last month and I apologize). Before I sign off here, I want to throw out a big thanks to High Admiral Tristram who sent us a care package with some Nerf guns in it. Thanks from all of us Tristram! Now back to work… see you in a month! Hi! Pushing hard into September, the team has been putting most of it’s effort in supporting the deployment of R13 and the leaderboards system that is used to rank players in the different game modes on the web platform. We’re really excited about this subsystem because not only is it a very awesome feature it’s also the first time the game servers are sending data back to your account. We plan on using that to give you more ways to access the different data points that you generate as you pilot your ship in Arena Commander. As always, seeing the reaction of the community to a launch is always the best part of working in the Star Citizen universe. Programming Most engineering time was spent supervising the deployment of the leaderboards system. As you play Spectrum Matches, definite statistics from the match are sent back to the platform for ranking and processing. The data pipeline created at this stage makes use of a durable and persistent messaging queue system that allows us to never lose a game and always compute the rankings and stats, very useful for the cloud environment we are in which can be unpredictable at times. Some interesting challenges were also tackled as to how we would persist actual player rankings in a way that would allow us to display a custom board for player who do not share a sequential rank. A good example of this would be a “per Organization” leaderboard. A very cool new feature that you technically should have in hands now is the hangar configuration utility. This new tool, accessible in your “My Hangar” allows you to pick which of your ship shows up in which bay of your chosen hangar. This new subsystem exposes the different hangar bays to the platform so that you can hand pick which of your ships you want to see, giving the players control over this process that used to be powered by an algorithm. The team finally had time to look at some of the chat system issues web users have been experiencing! With the deployment of a new set of connection managers(a process that handles HTTP to XMPP socket connections) it seems the disconnect issues that players were experiencing have been resolved. Coupled with a few web client bug fixes the chat experience should be greatly improved. Chat away! Onwards to the lobby system! UX & Design The UX and Art teams have been doing some headway on a new home page for Star Citizen as well as revamping the experience for new players. This includes new video content ; new website UX, new player guide, etc… This is the beginning of a long process to try to distill the Star Citizen universe for new players but we hope to bring this plan to fruition in bite size pieces as they get ready. We’ve been able to have a design review on the Organization Forums functionality that was designed earlier this month, a first step in validating our hypothesis before continuing the design process. UX also compiled a list of add-on features we want to develop for the Holo-Viewer on the site. Some examples are the addition of a “Scale HUD” (to show relative ship sizes with units), a global “Ship Explorer” not tied to the different store pages where you could swap between manufacturers and ship without leaving the viewer giving a more prominent place for the viewer in the site. Last but not least, the content and design effort for the Starmap are under way! Sorry, no more details yet! Greetings Citizens, This has been a really solid month of developing infrastructure and core features for our AI systems, with a particular focus on FPS combat and persistent universe AI. A lot of design and implementation work took place this month to get these systems feature-rich enough that the designers at the other studios can really start going to town and doing cool stuff with the AI. There’s still plenty more to do, but we’re really happy with the progress we’ve made so far. Design A large part of our recent work has been on a deep and significant refactoring of how designers give AI tasks to perform, trying to find a good balance between flexibility and robustness. We think the AI in Star Citizen will be much more interesting if designers can be specific with what they want the AI to do at certain times, but the rest of the time can rely on the AI to be smart and sensible. We’ve all played games where AI do crazy things, and designers work hard to stop this from happening, so we’ve been designing a system to streamline this as much as we can. Squadron 42, in particular, should see a real benefit from this. We’ve been working on this for a while, but this month we made some serious progress implementing it, and as part of this we spent a lot of time figuring out the details, from the high level tasks that the AI are assigned, through the mid-level behaviors that they run, right down to the low level actions. And a key part of this design is iterating over ideas with the designers to make sure what we’re coming up with is easy and intuitive for them to use. There was also a lot of design work this month fleshing out details of the persistent universe, with a particular focus on making sure our design is in step with the other teams doing persistent universe work. There are lots of little details to figure out, from the way AI do interesting and lifelike things in the world, through to what the tools should look like that designers will use to create this world. Engineering As mentioned above, we did a lot of work this month implementing core architecture for the way AI are controlled. This work affects all of the AI in Star Citizen, including the dogfighting AI you’re already using. We’ve been converting everything to a new behavior system that will allow us to create complex and interesting behaviors much more easily. There was a lot of work to be done here, but we were successful and as a result we look forward to doing some interesting things with AI next month, which will be revealed in due course, so keep an eye out for that! On the FPS AI front, we’ve had for a while now characters that can see, but it was finally time to give them the ability to hear as well. Gunfire, bullets whizzing past their heads, footsteps of a player trying unsuccessfully to be sneaky; these are all things that a good AI should be aware of, and now they are. And now that the AI know more about the world, we can give them more interesting behaviors, which we’ve started doing using our new behavior systems. Finally, for the persistent universe, we’ve been doing some work on allowing AI to use items in the world. We implemented a system that allows designers to start setting up objects in the world and make the AI use them. There are more complex interactions to come, but already we can make the world feel more alive, and it will be exciting to see this develop further over the coming months. Links ----- No links available. Images ------ 23 image/jpeg [ ![](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/3rmy7me5o3lwvr/source/Aurorahud.jpg) ](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/3rmy7me5o3lwvr/source/Aurorahud.jpg) Aurorahud.jpg [Details](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links/images/2277) Last Modified 11 years ago Size 1.65 MB [Source](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/3rmy7me5o3lwvr/source/Aurorahud.jpg) [Info](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links/images/2277) image/png [ ![How an idea becomes a ship.](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/jsypy77iz1tw8r/source/Shippipe.png) ](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/media/jsypy77iz1tw8r/source/Shippipe.png) Shippipe.png How an idea becomes a ship. 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[Info](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/comm-links/images/40391) Metadata -------- CIG ID 14191 Channel Undefined Category Undefined Series Monthly Reports Comments 214 Published 11 years ago (2014-10-03T00:00:00+00:00) [RSI Article](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14191-Monthly-Report-September-2014) [API](https://api.star-citizen.wiki/api/comm-links/14191)