Cloud Imperium Austin



Player Relations

Over at the Austin Studio, Player Relations travelled to the Foundry 42 and Turbulent offices to work on ways to better collect and distribute feedback that can be used during Evocati and PTU Waves during testing. At the same time, Player Relations helped test and launch both 2.6.1 and Spectrum.

Live Ops

The Server Engineering team has been supporting both live and the upcoming 2.6.2 patch. They also continued to enhance multi-region support for matchmaking. Fixes and tweaks have been made to the Party system and Contacts and Friends, which includes improvements to invitations and online/offline state notifications. The Austin Studio has directed much of their energy towards the new Diffusion architecture for the back end services. Diffusion allows the studio to easily create stateless micro services by combining C++ and Ooz scripting languages, which allows the creation of scalable and high-performing stateless services that will allow a larger number of concurrent players with improved stability and less downtime. All of the current back end services have been updated to run on the Diffusion core, which permits refactor/rewrite services for Diffusion without impacting current service operations. Finally, the new Diffusion API Gateway has been finished, which allows Spectrum and other external services to seamlessly integrate with the Diffusion network.

February marked the smooth launch of multi-region support for the LiveOps/DevOps team. The heavy lifting was directed toward the network and server side of our services which resulted in a relatively trouble free rollout for us. A good portion of our early development and testing was on the network to ensure the most reliable connections between the US, Germany, and Australia regions. The entire team was happy to see that the additional work paid off with performance and stability as expected. This allowed the team to move directly into writing enhancements to our monitoring and reporting tools.

Lighting

The Lighting team is working on initial lighting passes and polish passes for some of the locations in Squadron 42. The team is also doing some general optimizations and polish work on Retaliator and Constellation, among others. These changes will fix the infamous strobe lighting in the Retaliator cockpit, as well as improve performance inside these specific ships.

Ship Art

This month, the Drake Cutlass Black entered the greybox phase, so the Ship Art team added primary and secondary detail with geometry and material work. The team was able to kit bash pieces from the Caterpillar, add more details and complete a first lighting pass for the interiors.

Animation

The Austin Ship Animation team wrapped up the greybox phase of the mining ship, the MISC Prospector, with the UK Team. The Drake Buccaneer is getting finalized animations while the team also works on the Cutlass Black.

The PU Animation Team continued to create animations for NPCs to interact with the environment. One of these animations includes replacing the rough retargeted animations on the female with properly shot animations of female performance. They made progress debugging issues with animation, skeletons, and the animation pipeline in general, by working with Code and Design to create a better system to implement the hundreds of animations that have been developed.

One of Animation’s goals has been to create an entire eating experience for NPC characters at the Idris mess hall tables. The sequence begins with a character grabbing a tray and navigating to a table’s seat. Then, the character will sit, eat, drink, and perform any other actions. Finally, the character will stand with the tray in hand and navigate to the tray disposal. This exercise will actually incorporate almost all the departments and will answer a lot of questions about pushing the boundaries of natural NPC behavior.

Design

This month, the Design team worked on getting the first pass implementation of trade into the game with the goal of having a functioning, fluctuating economy that mirrors the real world in as many ways as possible. A few things are required to make this happen: the initial list of commodities must be developed, as well as the locations in which to buy and sell them, and a variable economy needs to be implemented. This economy will include goods flowing from their mined or gathered states, then onto the refineries, passing through manufacturers, and ultimately turning into buyable or tradable items. The price of these items will be an important element of gameplay, because player’s actions can impact the flow of resources, which will in turn affect supply and demand. Since this is still in the early stages, Design outlined a basic structure to represent major commodity groups: Ore, Gas, Food, Medical Supplies, and Vice (like drugs or other illegal items). That way, players can get an idea of which resource types will be traded or fought over. Once the system has been tested with the small subset, Design can expand the commodities into more specific things like Gold, Hydrogen, Rations, Bandages, and more. Next, places are needed so players can purchase and offload this cargo- once you buy it, refine it, and manufacture it.

Design has also been outlining the types of stores that will start to make their way into the PU. In the discussions about the new Truck Stop, it became apparent that all stations have the need for a certain level of resources to sustain their existence and thought that it was a little weird to sell resources directly to the shops themselves, so a new shop type was created. The Admin Office will focus on buying and selling station imports and exports for the local stores on the stage. This shop would also control Local Storage Rentals and include a job board to complete and plan deliveries. This shop type will be in the majority of the locations that don’t have a full-fleshed out Trade and Development Division (TDD), which is focused more on commodity trading.

Ultimately, the prices of commodities will vary based on the supply and demand of the dynamic economy, but, for testing purposes, commodity prices will be set by hand and stay within range of their base prices.

QA

For the month of February, QA Austin primarily focused on testing and supporting the release 2.6.1, and preparing for 2.6.2. This has included compiling comprehensive patch notes for both 2.6.1 and 2.6.2, daily checklists, and working with our UK QA counterparts to increase familiarity with the release process. Multiplayer Megamap and serialized variables have both been major focuses of attention. At the same time, Austin QA hired four new testers while also wrapping up their annual reviews for the existing team members leading to several corresponding promotions (congrats!). We have also been ramping up our attention on the Game-Dev stream as new tech comes online, to ensure stability for both Squadron 42 and 3.0 development.

IT & Operations

The IT team has been involved in multiple projects expanding of our internal build system infrastructure. Content continues to flow in through the ‘source – build – replication’ pipeline at an increasing pace so our infrastructure must occasionally grow along with it. The current upgrades are focusing on network and compute resources in the build system itself so we can isolate stability testing environments from production. In addition to reducing build times to some extent by reducing contention, we will also be able to double capacity for internal code testing further ensuring our engineers don’t have to wait in line. Soon after, the IT team will be shifting back to centralized storage growth but this time with a renewed focus on performance.