Hello Star Citizens!

Between Star Citizen 2.2 and continuing work on Foundry 42, all of the Foundry 42 UK teams have been working hard and delivering excellent results. Keep in mind that we can’t share everything for fear of spoiling the events of Squadron 42… but there’s still plenty we CAN talk about.

Design

We have had another busy month in the UK design department. We are still working on the “new player experience” which is hopefully going to make the learning curve less steep for new backers. This not only encompasses a simplified UI set, but also has a refactor of the controls system to be more conceptually consistent across the various game modes such as EVA, FPS, and space flight. We are still working on mobiGlas, this is a biggie as it is one of the major aspects of both S42 and the PU so we want to get it right the first time around. Scanning, for both cockpit and FPS, is now underway, and we are looking forward to getting sub-targeting of components into the game soon.

Andrew and the Tech team have had a number of meetings about the various balancing issues and we are hopeful that you will start to see the positive results in the coming releases (not in time for 2.2 unfortunately).

The Idris is getting closer to a game ready state and we have enjoyed our first forays into the test universe with a design team crewing it.

S42 is moving along nicely and we are starting to see blockers shifted in a timely manner so the design truck can keep rolling.

Audio

It’s been a jam-packed month as far as CIG Audio is concerned. Apart from the usual bug fixes, we had a very nasty in-game distortion issue at the start of February that was extremely hard to reproduce, and near-impossible to profile. Thanks to our fantastic QA department, as well as Sam Hall, Graham Phillipson, Mikhail Korotyaev and our friends at Audiokinetic for assisting with fixing that, and the community at large who were hugely helpful in sending us data and user stories. Apologies to anyone who suffered from this but we reacted to it as fast as we could. Good came of it, in that we now have added some analytics for the audio system, so we can keep an eye on audio resource usage in the wild (again, thanks to Sam for pushing that out there).

Work continues apace on ‘Squadron 42’, and Ross Tregenza has continued with putting down as many audio foundations as possible, and keeping close eye on cross-discipline progress. All of the systematic elements we’re working on across the whole game feed into Squadron 42, but there’s still a lot of custom and bespoke aspects of it to keep track of and make sure we’re ready for, so that when the time is right the whole team will sweep across this module.

Ross also worked with Sam Hall on the monitored zone system audio which you’ll witness soon enough, it’s still in a relatively early stage where the audio is concerned and we’ll improve this further as we iterate upon it.

Bob Rissolo has been very heavily invested in the Dialogue Pipeline tools and database. This is quite a large project in itself, that feeds into the main Star Citizen experience but is again very important for Squadron 42 which is going to be very character dialogue-centric. He’s been mainly working with Simon Price, who’s joined us as a Consultant Audio Programmer.

Bob Rissolo and Phil Smallwood built up and tested out the dialogue recording rig extensively in a test shoot in mid-February, to make sure we’re up to the task of recording dialogue for performance capture sessions. For the most part it all worked as expected with only minor settings tweaks and optimisations required.

Sam Hall has submitted Version 2.0 of the Music System, including a visual logic editor. This shipped in 2.2.0 and was a ‘surprisingly smooth’ transition, at least so he says! Until we get some new content it might not be hugely obvious it’s there, which is a good thing in some respects. You want an in-game soundtrack and musical cues to sound as natural as it does in the movies, if not moreso. If it were to catch your attention unnecessarily, it could be more distracting than immersive.

Talking of new music content though: myself, Ross Tregenza and Pedro Macedo Camacho combined our powers and braved the (actually rather mild) Slovakian winter to attend our first orchestral performance this year, at the Slovak Radio building with the Slovakian National Symphony Orchestra. This provided us with new content for ship-based space combat, which will feed into the aforementioned music-logic system when the material is ready; we still need to add some extra momentary layers and elements for it to be as reactive to the game as Chris Roberts desires. Chris is very into his dynamic music, having pioneered such a system back on ‘Wing Commander’. So, we still have the extra material to come before we take it to a mixing session to give it some polish, after we’ve proven its effectiveness in our new system. Will keep you posted, and try to get some material from this out for you to experience when the time is right. Many thanks to our conductor Allan Wilson, recording engineer Peter Fuchs and our orchestral fixer Paul Talkington for arranging things.

These days we’re thinking heavily about dynamic/procedural mix methods, rather than the usual state-based mixing that’s common to more linear titles. To this end Darren Lambourne has been putting together a dynamic bass management prototype, which is a great place to start when it comes to figuring out mix fundamentals within Wwise. Many games suffer from the summation of too much low-end and we want to keep the experience clean, and configurable, for our users to reflect their different demands and differing set-ups. Will let you know when we have this ready to push out to the game proper but so far it’s quite promising.

And talking of mix – Darren is also working on a parametric mix/effects system to reflect atmospheric depressurisation, whether that’s out in space or when inside depressurised interior locations. We have the concept right now whereby exterior sound is simulated within ships – controversial we know but we feel it makes sense! However, the player suit when exposed to space independent of one’s ship, in our lore at least, it doesn’t have the processing power to perform the same function, at least not to the same level of fidelity. So what you’ll probably hear will be much more akin to structure-borne sound transmission, coupled with a lot of suit/internalised elements. We’re just starting with this one and we want it to be consistent with logic and gameplay, but also dramatically satisfying in its own right. Will share more once we have this at a good place.

Darren’s also pushed out some great EVA audio improvements, particularly re. the manoeuvring jetpack thrusters. We hope you appreciate this one, the articulation is way ahead of where it was previously. In some ways this is now much more subtle, but also far more responsive to player input. We’ll get together some video to show this off properly but it’s far more characterful while still retaining subtlety. We hope you like it.

Stefan Rutherford’s been working on some space-station mixing – there’s some neat bass modulation on one of the stations that varies things as you traverse. He’s done some lovely stuff on the Reliant, too; he’s produced ship ambient mark-up, with parameterisation of sounds so that all of them become far more responsive to external factors. E.g. power-plant level, ship strain. Under his model a single light buzz on a panel can change in tone and timbre, if power output is high to other components – because non-critical ones (such as a light) are receiving less power. A light fitting will also tend to rattle when the ship is undergoing excessive gravitational forces or ‘excitement’. We hope the summation of this level of detail will contribute to the ship experience.

Thanks to hard work by Graham Phillipson and Matteo Cerquone, we now have a solid and working piece of tech for ‘Automatic Character Foley’ in place. Traditionally, this sort of character-based sound would be spotted by hand to animation files, but we wanted to make this far more system-driven, as it’s a very labour intensive approach that doesn’t stand up to variable wearables (that’s a tough thing to say) or animation and clothing simply changing dynamically. So now, we have a system that modulates clothing and equipment sounds in response to limb velocities. We’ll hopefully be able to factor in clothing changes soon too, plus added equipment layers that’ll change depending on what weapon you may have equipped. Matteo’s also been working with the Xi’an Scout which has some great SFX in place.

Following on from the auto Foley though, we now also have a solid prototype for Automated Footsteps. Again, this is traditionally very labour intensive stuff, whereby sound designers would open up an animation file and spot to a timeline. That’s not a robust enough solution for us, so Graham has somehow figured out a way to infer accurate footstep movement and articulation, and play back appropriate sounds – in real time. We know this might not seem like a massive deal but there are many sound designers who’ve contributed man-months to this very task in the past so to solve this problem… well, one of us cried a tear of joy. Almost.

As fuel for the Foley fires (again with the tongue-twisters), we have a ‘wild Foley’ session upcoming to record footsteps, and some physics object style sounds (impacts, slides, rolls etc.). Stefan and Matteo will be overseeing that session, hopefully we’ll gather some eminently usable material there.

We also have a firearms session due at the end of March to capture outdoor gun-fire impulses/tails in an urban environment, for in-atmosphere locations with lots of reflective surfaces, in contrast to our earlier interior sessions which were more ‘roomy’, this is all about distant reflections that help define the outdoors.

Jason Cobb has been working on bug fixes, design documentation, scripting improvements to workflow. He also has sound design coming together for ship debris clouds, subject to a system to drive this properly, but looking forward to that.

Luke Hatton has continued on ship sounds, as is his specialism – we’re always fixing and refining audio for those as you know!

Oh, watch out for an upcoming extended version of the Big Benny Noodles theme. But I’ve already said too much about this, I’m sure…

Thanks for listening everyone, sorry it was such a long update but it’s been a big old month. We blame the leap year thing. Thanks!

Engineering

This month’s new big feature for the live releases is the hostility system. We wanted to start coming up with ways where you could see that your actions would have some sort of consequence, and as a result get some additional emergent gameplay going on. As a first step we’ve introduced safe zones, such as around Port Olisar, where the space will be monitored for any illegal behaviour. If you start shooting up an innocent party in the zone you will automatically get a wanted level, become a hostile, you will be marked up on everybody else’s radar as hostile and as you fire on more and more innocent parties the higher your wanted level goes up. Whilst you’re in the safe zone AI will spawn in and try and take you down. To make it more interesting if you have a wanted level you also become fair game for all the other players, so now anybody can now attack you without fear of reprisal. Of course if you are attacking other players outside of a monitored zone it won’t get noticed and your global reputation stands intact, although the players you attacked will remember and see you as hostile going forwards. You can reduce your wanted level though by using a terminal to hack into the system…

Outside of the releases, we’ve been making progress on lots of the other systems. The code to support turrets has been having a bit of an overhaul as previously it was tied very closely to the vehicles, whereas we want to have standalone turrets on a space station for example. We kicked off work on the scanning feature, where you will be able to use your radar to scan vehicles in more detail and get information as to what weapons they’ve got or even what cargo they’re carrying. This of course depends on how good your scanning hardware is and how good the blocking hardware of what you’re trying to scan has. This scanning is also going to be incorporated in the same way when in FPS mode so you can get information about the players around you.

Talking about FPS again it’s about making steady progress on all its mechanics. The new physicalized EVA is getting more and more solid, we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to fix up a lot of edge case issues, mostly when transitioning from inside a vehicle to outside, so you’re going from gravity to zero-g, or vice-versa (or from non-EVA to EVA). Cover is getting better and work has now started on prone and vaulting.

Graphics

This month the team has completed some final R&D work into the Gas Cloud tech, and out of that has created a roadmap for the gas cloud system. This outlines when we can start giving this tech to our other internal teams, such as art and design, to work with.

After discovering resolving several bugs with our recent Vis Area/Zone tweaks, the team moved to working on the facial tech. This work has been testing the current framework, to find performance bottle necks, bugs and the look to make general improvements to the tech to get the best out of it without reducing performance.

We have also been working on updates to bloom and lens flares. The current bloom implementation has a harsh falloff around glowing objects and requires their brightness to be cranked up significantly to be visible. The new system will allow for more subtle glows with a softer falloff, and its performance will also scale better with higher resolutions.

With the current flare system, an artist has to create a flare set for each light that generates flares, and simulating different lenses (e.g. for cinematics vs gameplay) which requires a lot of manual work creating multiple sets. There is also a limit on the number of flares that can be rendered per frame before they start breaking. We’re working on a system to procedurally render flares in screen space with a more physically based method, and the new system should significantly reduce the workload for artists and make it easier to change the look of the scene on the fly.

VFX

This month the VFX team have been working on getting the latest flight-ready ships including the Vanguard and Sabre. We’ve also done some thorough R&D for the Xi’An Scout effects, as we want to tie in with the fiction and create a unique style of effects compared to the human and Vanduul technologies. This all based on the VFX style guide which we mentioned in last month’s report; building a consistent visual language through a ship’s effects is very important for player readability, especially against the vast backdrop of space!

Away from ships, things are progressing solidly on Squadron 42’s environmental effects, as the environment and design teams have been fleshing out their levels in greater detail which allows us to jump in and add effects where required. There’s so much here we would love to tell you about but we can’t for obvious reasons – no spoilers!

Art

The team has been full steam ahead, internal concept and external all busting out fab looking work and it’s been a varied lot too!

Here’s a list which I’m sure you can discern what belongs to what: the Idris Gravity Generator room, Idris Cargo Room, Idris story line look dev, Planet look dev, Vanduul weapon look dev, Bengal Hangar, Hangar Breakouts, Bengal Bridge console/chair refinement, Powerplants, Quantum Drives, Coolers, Military props, Shubin Pilot briefing room, Shubin Bridge, [REDACTED] ship cargo room, Research Station look dev for the Gravity room and communal areas, Scourge Rail gun final pass, Rail Attachment system, ammo and just started on a new small ship! Oh – and some 2nd pass concept on storyline bases – that’s it for Feb!

Props

There is a running theme here, another month and a few more ship components! We now have the first couple of coolers and shield generators complete and the power plants have been started.

But more exciting than that is that our team has grown! We have gone from 2 in the UK at the start of January up to 4, with our 5th member joining next week!

Apart from the ship components the team has been focusing on low tech props, we are focusing mainly on assets that can be used in both the PU environments as well as the squadron 42 environments. We have completed a few more tests with the blend layer material mentioned last month and have asked for a few little tweaks from the rendering team before we can go full steam ahead with it.

Finally we’ve have been making an effort to get on top of our documentation backlog. Now the teams growing it’s really important to have our pipeline properly documented and as its evolved over the last couple of months there is a bit to update! I’ve also been creating and updating our template files to make the animators lives a little easier and improve consistency across the board.

Characters

Our two man team has been busy as a pair of motivated bees, I’m not going to spoil any surprises but the character work now is really starting to matchup with the rest of the game in terms of fidelity and quality – exciting times, plus we have hired 2 more people to join the UK team – things are looking up!

Environment Art

This month the environment team have been hard at work fleshing out the environments for Squadron 42, there is a huge range of environments in production currently, so there is a frenzy of activity within the team. There is lots of back and forth between the level artists and designers as they move forwards refining the designs and layouts, something which is quick and entirely real-time using our modular system. That’s it for this months, back to it!

Ships

The Ship Team has been in the process of planning their angle of attack for the rest of the year, laying foundations down to hopefully make the rest of the year’s production run smoothly to push towards fully content complete of the SQ42 within the next few months ( content complete meaning all assets are in-game, playable but requiring polish ). Major highlights of this process have been pulling the RSI Bengal into a metric system that will take full advantage of a modular construction approach, much like we have done on the Idris, meaning we can have twice as much visual awesomeness with less of a knock on to both visual and memory costs in the engine. The Bengal was the first ship to be seen ever for Star Citizen in the original reveal, it’s like the Crown Jewel of SC and will be treated as such!

Both the Aegis Idris and Javelin have continued into final production, the Javelin taking full advantage of the Idris’ interior modules, meaning essentially whatever wins we make on the Idris roll over to the Javelin by default, this also has the added benefit that the Javelins interior production will in fact finish not far behind the Idris even though production on the Idris started several months before, we are gaining variation between the two ships with a clever use of material swaps, lighting and atmospherics, the Javelins will have a far more grittier feel to suit its role / characteristic as a ship.

On top of the above, production is almost complete on the Starfarer Base variant, she is looking beautiful indeed, but more so in our opinion is the Gemini variant, the Gemini being kitted out by Aegis really brings an interesting dynamic to the ship’s aesthetic.