Greetings Citizens,

Foundry 42 is energized and ready to keep working hard! Between supporting the p-cap shoot in London, working on Squadron 42 in its own right and continuing engineering tasks for multicrew Arena Commander, we’ve been busy! Here’s the details from our department heads:

Animation

We’ve started work on breaking up some of the systemic Ai animations for enemy actions. These include things like stepping and running in to cover from various angles. Reacting to grenades and moving out of the way. As well as that the team has been working on refining some of the mechanics that are currently implemented in game to try and achieve a more responsive feel while keeping the realistic motion captured data. As always we’re on hand to provide any block out mechanics and environmental animations for the art and design teams here at Foundry 42.

Engineering

Two areas I’d like to talk about this month, which we’re getting more heavily involved with here in the UK, are the UI and AI.

On the AI front we’re taking a more active role in its development and have been doing a lot of the ground work getting our new CIGAI system up and running, alongside our colleagues in Frankfurt and Moon Collider. We have been looking at a new communication system, and how we can use it in conjunction with our current dialogue logic, to expand on the ground-work laid by the DFM survival mode’s Warlord and Vixen AI characters, as well as using it to make the cockpit audio system (a.k.a. Bitching Betty) smarter.

We’ve also been moving over some of the functionality from CryAI into our system and then amending it so it works better for our requirements on Star Citizen. So recently that has included the Tactical Point System, which includes things like cover, and the Group AI system, which allows better and easier handling of multiple AI objects, especially in the visual gameplay scripts (or the flow graph, which ever you prefer!)

On the UI we’ve been doing work here for quite some time now, but have recently started taking a bigger responsibility and taking on more of the work. We’ve been expanding the team with a new artist and a new engineer. Having the new engineer means that we can now have someone concentrating solely with bringing the User Interface requirements of Squadron 42 to life. Some of the many features that we have thrown his way are to develop the interface for the Tactical Visor and Looting. These will require various augmented reality overlays and post process effects to highlight people and objects, giving the player additional information about the world around them. We have also been performing an iteration on the visor displays for Star Marine, as each of the helmet types will have their own unique look and feel which require their own their own individual UI setup.

Our new artist is currently working on look-dev’ of the ship manufacturers, in parallel with this the ship UI code is undergoing lots of planning work so it can deal with multi-crew ships and all the challenges that throws our way, such as a captain being able to delegate (or lock out) various controls to the co-pilot or turret gunner. Planning is also underway to allow players to be able to customize their display outputs in their cockpits, giving them the ability to transfer various output to different displays. All of this planning is because, to support the functionality we require, the underlying structure that the UI code sits upon is going to need a bit of a refactor. We’ve already taken a lot of the hard coded setup of the UI and made it much more data driven (using our DataForge tool), but also were changing it to make it much more flexible, so any part of the HUD can be attached to anything else in the game that can take UI. So all of a sudden moving the radar from your visor and onto one of your cockpit displays becomes easy. This is going to be awesome!

Graphics

This month the UK graphics team have been focussing on several areas in parallel. The work on the mesh-merging tech continues, and is being trialled in larger environments such as asteroid fields to ensure it can handle any number of objects. This is coming along well and will be ready for production very soon and will start being used in public releases soon to give you better performance on new levels.

We’ve got a new senior programmer who’s been working on volumetric gas cloud rendering, investigating rendering dense clouds and soft fog with anisotropic lighting (the bright rim you get on the edge of clouds). This will be a very long term task as it’s hugely complex but is something we really want to push in our game. We’ve also been looking into facial animation technology, profiling various setups to see how far we can push the technology while maintaining a decent frame-rate. This includes trying different polygon counts, number of joints/bones in the face and the number of poses/blend-shapes that each character can use. As part of this we’ve also been investigating what we could do to push the rendering of our faces, which is no easy task when you also have to support many characters on screen. We’ll hopefully be starting this face rendering R’n’D next month and look forward to sharing the result (good or bad!).”

Design

June has been a busy month for design here with GamesCom looming. We are still flat out on Squadron 42, supporting the performance capture shoot with last minute level tweaks at the studio site to make it look at as fantastic as possible. All of the levels are looking more and more polished with a steady stream of great looking building tiles coming from our environment team that are iterated on until they look fantastic, while still allowing the level designers to layout the environments in a believable way.

We had an internal “Show-and-Tell” this month as a lot of the new staff had not seen the full depth of the plan for Star Citizen and it’s safe to say that it went fantastically well, with lots of jaw dropping amazement at depth of the game. It was great to see just how much work has actually been done in such a short period.

The technical design team has grown and is now covering tasks from FPS weapon balancing all the way to getting the Vanduul fleet operational in the engine, capital ships to fighters.

The Arena Commander team have now got the “large-world” code from the engineering team and are starting to realize what can be achieved in terms of universe size, suffice to say you should be seeing the fruits of their labours soon.

The systems designers have been finalising the specification for the “multi-functional displays” in the cockpits so that the functionality can be extended across all ships and is totally scalable from single-man ships up to larger capital ships. This is another one of our urgent tasks needed for GamesCom and will hopefully be shown in more detail very soon.

We are also trying to get a first implementation of “Quantum Jumping” ready to allow a more speedy way of navigating around the new “large-world” technology, which is looking very promising.

All in all a big month for us, but I’ve got a feeling we will be getting a lot busier in the next few months. Might be time to string up a hammock in the office soon. Thanks to everyone as always.

Art

Concept Art

Biggies this month have been the Bengal Bridge update and the Mining Bot, additional work continues on the Behring Ballistic shotgun, Xi’an transport ship, Vanduul fleet and further prop concept definition to add to the Shubin mining base and a few pirate bases needed for the Sq42 storyline (no spoilers!)

Ships

The Retaliator has been worked on this month to continue getting it ready for Flight – exciting times! Argo RUV is reaching Final art (excluding the pod which needs revisions for the cinematics), the Idris is looking very good in places, can’t wait to reveal some of it. Cutlass started its new greybox taking in to account design revisions, mining bot going to texture and material stage, Starfarer – going slower than we’d like, it’s a matter of resources, and we need more talented folk to help build this ship as its more complex than expected. Bengal Bridge will start once concepts are signed off.

Environment Art

A short update this month as much of what we’ve been doing must be kept secret for now. Progress is continuing with our VS environment which has hangars, control rooms, corridors, airlocks, and exterior landing pads – all of which can be traversed seamlessly. Hopefully we’ll be able to show you some of the really cool things we’ve been working on in the not too distant future, so stay tuned!

Props

We are getting clear documentation ready for outsource, dialling in with the techniques needed for materials which causes us most problems and then next month, we should be rolling.

VFX

The VFX team have been hard at work getting more ships “flight-ready” – this includes effects for thrusters, weapons and damage. In particular, the Scythe’s effects are looking pretty badass! We’ve also been continuing to iterate on environment effects – interior as well as exterior – for the Vertical Slice. We also began to focus on Star Marine’s weapon VFX, to make sure they’re matching the overall quality of the levels, characters and of course weapons. Truly exciting times to be a VFX artist at Foundry 42!

Audio

Hey everyone! This CIG Audio community report might meander a little, there’s a lot going on but think this should cover most of the interesting parts.

Firstly, Wwise. We’re nearly there as far as our mass of asset conversion/re-engineering is concerned; at least, the end is in sight. So Stefan, Darren and I have spent some time thinking more about how to set things up so we can mix the game well. Our game is on-going, constantly being revised of course, so the strategy we need to take is not typical to that we’d pursue for a one-shot release title. We think we have the basis of what should serve us well, and we’re changing the project structure to reflect this.

On the audio engineering side, much of it is still making sure things that used to work, work again; and ironing out any more emergent bugs/foibles that are still present. A certain ironic twist to what we’re doing is that the more we get individual sounds working, across all sorts of systems, the more we’re contributing to the problem of too many sounds playing, or being processed at some level, at once. Wwise has some ways of handling this situation, but the ideal is to make sure Wwise doesn’t get bogged down processing elements that are outside the player’s sphere of interest. At the core of it, if something is too far away to be heard, then we put it into a suspended-animation state where audio is concerned, but only to the extent that we need to so that when it comes back to life, it works as expected. There are all sorts of things to consider with this but that’s where we are right now in terms of core audio engineering. It’s not glamorous I know but it will keep things running smoothly if we get this right sooner rather than later.

We have a couple of new ships coming, one of which Darren’s been working on a lot. This had to have new dialogue recorded for its ship computer too and he’s been looking at the UI aspect, designing sounds and seeing how best to get them in. So much game UI these days is based somehow in Flash and that can be problematic for implementing sound in a way that we can iterate upon easily. So while we’re doing that we’re thinking of ways to improve this pipeline.

Incidentally, regarding the Origin ship computer, I’m holding my hands up on this one and admitting I failed to capture the previous essence of what made the ship computer so great for the Origin models. Basically, we’ve listened to you and absorbed the feedback you provided regarding the new one – and I’m absolutely determined that we’re going to win this one back. I’m not happy with it and this will be fixed!

Persistent Universe. We can’t say too much about this as yet but been ongoing support for the environmental audio for this.

FPS. So much of this is tied up in Wwise, there’s been plenty of new content required for FPS in terms of weapons, character Foley and dialogue and that’s coming along nicely. We’re getting a bunch of new music content down for FPS too. Thus we tested out a workflow where our composer, Pedro Macedo Camacho, works from his studio within Wwise, and we import what he sets up of his music into Wwise at our end. It’s not practical in terms of logistics to provide access to our own Wwise project (which is growing all the time), so testing out this workflow where he passes us a project file, has proved really valuable.

It was actually surprisingly easy to import his work-units into our Wwise project, and made me think that this might be an avenue for those of our modding community who wish to import their mods/material into Star Citizen. New assets could feasibly be produced by modders within Wwise, then passed to us for integration in the Wwise project, thus we export to sound banks etc. and pass the event triggers back to you for use. It might be a little unwieldy on the face of it, but I think ultimately working together with the modding community is the way to go to ensure a quality experience, and I’d love to try this out.

Arena Commander (or dog fighting module); a whole host of material has been converted, or some cases entirely re-created to work better than before. As Audio Director I don’t often get to do much sound design at the moment, which is obviously something of a shame as it’s what I am, at my core. So it’s been so good to be able to fit in some time for working on some ship thruster stuff and contribute in a material way to some thruster design! Luke’s taken what I’ve done and fixed it up a bit too, he’s very into the spaceship audio aspect of our game so that’s been reassuring for him to fix up my implementation. Generally a lot of this material is taking up time for all our sound designers, as it’s the lion’s share of Star Citizen right now there’s simply a lot to do but we’re whittling through it nicely.

Re: dialogue support for the Squadron 42. Our Dialogue Superman (not an official title) Bob Rissolo has still been hard at it down in London. It’s wrapping up soon, at least for now, which means he’ll be moving in-house permanently here to Foundry 42. A big move for him, we’re still hugely grateful he’s swapping sunny San Diego for the more, well, variable climate of Manchester!

Regarding our sound studios. By the time you read this we’ll have actually had our new doors installed for these. I know, doors seem like such an obvious thing to have, and of course, they are when you’re trying not to assail the rest of the studio with FPS gun sound effects, explosions and the like. But we’ve been waiting a while for a particular set of doors to be manufactured, simply we’ve been on the wrong end of some manufacturer-side production issues with them they’re each a different colour. I know that seems frivolous but when you have a number of isolated rooms and coming from another discipline, it saves time to be able to direct someone to the ‘orange sound studio’ rather than specify a room by who may or may not be there. Also means we can swap rooms to some extent. My own room is going to be a reference room for the rest of CIG Audio to test our surround mix, for instance.

Right now, tools improvements is something we’re considering. The better our tools, the easier it is for us to keep improving things. Wwise is an event-based system, and is reliant on external events of some form to trigger sounds in certain ways. For instance we want to trigger certain one shot-sounds when a thruster is transitioning from zero thrust to full thrust, on top of what we trigger for thrusters generally. And then trigger different one-shot events when the very same thruster transitions from full thrust back down to zero thrust. This is actually something that’s tricky to do ‘in the box’, the box being Wwise in this instance, so we want to be able to set-up these events more easily as sound designers rather than as programmers, so there’s a whole tool-set that we’re considering for defining logic to cater for this. This is just one tool out of many we can see a real need for.

We’re arranging to go back down to Pinewood, to record a whole bunch of duress elements for the ships. You might recall that they’ve worked with us on character Foley for FPS. There’s a new library of this sort of rattling, bone-shaking material that we’re also looking at (you can never have enough source) but we also want to make sure our stuff is that bit more individually tailored to our requirements. We’ll be taking down the Butt-kickers for this, for sure.

I’m sure there’s more stuff I’ve missed from this update, do feel free to ask us more on the Ask A Dev part of the community forums and we’ll continue to do our best to respond. Thanks for listening!

QA

UK QA have had to split our efforts this month to deal with the upcoming major events and releases. Star Marine (the FPS module) plus preparing for Gamescom, are on the cards for the near future, and Squadron 42 testing continues as normal.

Star Marine has had a lot of focus in order to root out major multiplayer bugs and try to find any general polish issues. Glenn Kneale from the UK and Tyler Witkin from ATX QA have been collaborating to make sure this game mode gets thoroughly tested. There’s been a lot of cross studio stress testing to help ensure that it should be stable once it gets released.

We’re focusing quite heavily on testing the sections of the game that will be shown at GamesCom. Unfortunately not too much can be mentioned there, but we’re all very excited about how what’s currently planned to be shown will be received.

Finally Squadron 42 is getting more testing time dedicated to it, as the game progresses we need to ensure the new mechanics are and alpha level run throughs can be completed. We also spent some time creating some more documentation to address our current plans to expand testing on S42.

Steven Brennon has continued to compile feedback from you guys and making sure it gets appropriately compiled and sent to the relevant people.

Sadly we’ll also be losing Chris “Chill” Hill at the end of the month. We wish him all the best as he’s been simply fantastic since he joined us last year, but looking forward we’re training up Steve Brennon to be a replacement lead.