Travis Day, Dogfight Producer

Santa Monica, California… Home to year round sunshine, excellent restaurants along the walking promenade, and a 3-mile stretch of beautiful beach. We’ve seen none of these things for many weeks now as we’ve been locked in our office working hard on Dogfighting!

In all seriousness though while it is tiring, it is also very invigorating, and this project drives everyone’s passion and the knowledge that the community is just as excited as we are pushes us to our best work. I have never been more awed by a team’s discipline and dedication. We work not because we’re forced to but instead because we love what we’re working on and want to really wow people with Chris’ reveal before PAX East.

Alright, well at this point I am sure you’re thinking, “We get it, the teams is working hard… But what have you DONE?” Well fair enough, here we go!

The HUD has moved forward by leaps and bounds. This has been one of our most collaborative pieces of work with other studios and it is really shaping up! Over the course of the past couple of months, we have been working hard to conceptualize and define the base functionality that will drive the HUD and peripheral user interfaces in many of the ships that you will be piloting in the Star Citizen universe.

In any ship, you will be able to manage and interact with many different systems, such as weapons configuration management, power and energy management, shields management, radar configuration, navigation, comms, target tracking, preset configuration, and much more. All of these components need to be quickly accessible to you at any given point in time, especially during heated situations such as combat.

Our goal in designing the cockpit UI was to present such complex components in a manner that is functionally intuitive, yet aesthetically consistent with the fiction in that you’re piloting a ship from the future. One of the biggest challenges in designing any sci-fi interface is striking the right balance between what looks / feels visually interesting and what is functionally efficient, both of which are equally important in driving the immersion as you’re piloting ships in Star Citizen.

We feel that we have achieved a nice blending between the two in our design given some of the core concepts behind the UI. One of which for example, is the extensive use of actual 3D geometry within the UI to visually represent items and objects (such as targets, parts of your own ship, etc.), and the many various states they may have. We have also been doing extensive work developing a custom “holoshader” that gives these 3D objects a very “holographic” look, which will have them fit nicely into the overall design.

We’ve been developing some really cool features for the UI in Star Citizen. We are looking forward to sharing with you in detail our vision behind the HUD and all of its various components soon, but there is still much work to be done before it’s considered in any final state.

Multiplayer functionality has also been a large and bug filled undertaking this month. We’ve spent a great deal of time this month writing code to improve the systems we’d previously created and debugging issues with precision, latency, and bandwidth limitations. Now that we are testing with our newly crafted backend (CIGNet) we’re starting to work through the various systems to make sure that the experience remains playable with a variety of pings and available bandwidth.

Our design team has also been hard at work continuing to hook up and balance many newly created items and continuing to add nuance to the ships. We’ve finished implementing and doing an early balance pass on ship items. Furthermore, we’ve completed hooking up the Scythe for perfectly balanced flight with all of its thrusters working in concert to bring its weapons to bear on enemies. During this process our Physics programmer was able to tweak and debug his hand crafted thruster analysis tool which greatly aids in placing and balancing thrusters for all future ships.

We’ve also been upgrading the Hornet to PBR so it has a lot more realistic look and feel to it. During this process Chris Smith took it upon himself to make some interior upgrades to the cockpit with higher resolution pass adding a lot more intricate details to the interior of the cockpit. Intricate mechanical workings were done as well to make the canopy operate on a believable track system and modifying the seat for a believable ejection. Lastly with PBR came the integration of the weathering system that allows him to apply some very believable wear and tear looks to the models. He even took a pass of mocking up some different armor types for it. With all of these detailed changes plus the PBR conversion the Hornet is really looking quite stunning!

We’ve also grown our team here a bit over the last month with an additional three new employees bringing our total headcount in this studio to 27. Joining us this month were Kami Talebi (Production Coordinator), Joanna Whitmarsh (Marketing Associate), and James Pugh (Assistant Community Manger) who’ve all hit the ground running quite well! It has been amazing to watch the team here grow from three people almost a year ago to our current size today and we all look forward to continuing to grow the best possible team in the future with which to build the BDSSE!

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions about what you’ve seen in this report please do not hesitate to reach out to us on the ‘Ask a Developer’ threads in the forums.

See you in the ‘verse!