Howdy from Texas!

The Austin team has been hard at work on many fronts through the month of July. We’ve had several updates to the live service with a number of game updates and a whole host of updates to our back end infrastructure. The team has been working tirelessly on many things that may be demo’d at Gamescom or soon thereafter. Here are detailed reports from each team!

Persistent Universe Team

Art

The PU Art Team has been busy this month preparing for Social Module v0 release and beyond. Our Environment Team has been full bore on the ArcCorp>Area18 environment. The level design has undergone a complete overhaul, and it has done wonders for the landing zone. We’ve added sweeping vista shots into the city, seedy back alleys for shady dealings, brushed up the shops to take them to the next level, and polished the VFX across the level. We’ve started from ground zero on the lighting over the whole level, updating the skybox, atmospherics, etc. to make a truly beautiful environment, which is saying something considering ArcCorp is supposed to be this gritty, grungy planet. Major kudos go to our internal Environment Team and the team at BHVR for making this environment truly something to behold.

Our Character Team has been working towards several goals this month. The FPS characters are in bug-fixing and optimization phase now, a few more fixes and these bad boys will be ready for release. We’ve also been updating our characters from the SXSW demo so that they will be ready for Social Module v0. Next month, we will start on creating some new clothing assets so that we can get some proper variety in place for the release of Social Module.

As ever, our Concept Team looks to the future busting out beautiful art that helps shape the PU. Ted Beargeon is wrapping up the Style Guide for the Stanton>MicroTech>New Babbage landing zone so that Ken Fairclough can take it and start working on some look/feel pieces for that particular environment. Ken has been fleshing out concepts for the Nyx>Delamar>Levski market bazaar area as well as finishing up a smaller version of the security turret prop he concepted a couple of months back. Character concept artist, Megan Cheever, has been helping to define the look for one of our clothing lines, Terra>Fashion Casual. This clothing line will likely be the most prominent line found in systems that fall within Terra’s sphere of influence. These are the types of clothes you’d find on planets like ArcCorp, Crusader, Odyssa, Mariana, and of course Terra itself.

Our Animation Team has been helping out on various areas of the project, as always. We’ve been lending a hand with animation tasks for our upcoming demo for GamesCom, and even though we can’t really reveal what exactly we’ve been doing for the event, we can say that we are extremely excited to show you guys what we’ve been doing. We’ve also been working on the revamped No-Weapon Locomotion set for the player character. We’re using mocap captured while at Imaginarium Studios, so with a little love from our Lead Animator, Bryan Brewer, we’re getting this locomotion set to the best it can be. On the PU side specifically, Vanessa Landeros has been implementing emote animations for our upcoming release. We’ve gotten 19 emotes hooked up so far including /taunt, /threaten, /cheer, /dance, and more.

Design

The first part of this month was spent wrapping up initial passes on design docs for the Smuggling, Piracy, and Mercenary occupations for the PU. Very early on, however, attention shifted to breathing life into the ArcCorp>Area18 environment for the purposes of a Social Module release. We’ve been setting up NPC activity on the landing pads, placing ship traffic around the city, and setting up NPC activity for various shops. We’ve also been hooking up emotes to the chat system via DataForge so that they can be viewed and tested in game.

Another task on the Design Team’s plate this month was discussions on standardization of object interaction points. We are trying to standardize several areas of our project to alleviate the workload required, and that includes standardizing how NPCs and players both pick up and put down objects such as crates, cups, weapons, tools, etc.

A few of our designers also spoke with the gameplay programmers multiple times this month with the purpose of brainstorming what tasks to include in Subsumption, our peaceful NPC AI System. Subsumption is now online and working, for all intents and purposes, but we are now going to be improving it by adding more NPC “tasks” for our designers to play with. This includes things like “Compare”, “Compute”, “Create Object”, “Destroy Object”, “Find Object”, “Pathfind”, “Use”, “Send Event”, “Wait”, and much more.

Engineering

The month of July was a wild ride for the PU Engineering Team, starting with the resonating bang of the Fourth of July celebrations!

The team put in some heavy support for the 1.1.5 release, which included the first iteration of our new Generic Instance Manager (GIM) as well as a lot of network optimization work to get our dogfighting matches up to 16 players (from 8) into a match together! Many thanks to our awesome QA department for helping us test this rigorously…we couldn’t have done it without them! As a part of this push to increase player count, we also implemented a lot of additional tools to help profile and monitor our network performance.

The team effort continues to make expansions and improvements to our GIM system for future releases, as well as updating and improving the many services that it interacts with such as our Persistence, Presence and Friends services. The Austin Team also enjoyed a visit from the LA studio’s Lead Engine Programmer Paul Reindell earlier in the month, who stopped by to work with our Lead Network Engineer Jason Ely on our Persistence service.

Our friends at Wyrmbyte have wrapped up the bugs with their iPredictor system, which helps out by reducing the amount of network traffic consumed by tracking ships, asteroids and missiles in real-time play. Feedback from that has been nothing but positive. Wyrmbyte has also been busy diving into network and animation improvements for characters as well, which will be essential for our upcoming Social and FPS modules. All the while, progress has continued on our Solar System Server and Universe Simulator, both of which will be needed to help bring the Persistent Universe to life.

Chugging away behind the scenes, some of our team continues to focus on internal tools for engineers, artists and designers. Continual updates, improvements and added functionality have been rolling out for our Dataforge, Asset Validation Tool, and our Useable and Character Archetype Editors.

Currently, the bulk of the team is supporting work planned to be shared with you all at Gamescom in August. For sake of not spoiling the surprises, we won’t go into detail here…just prepare yourself to be “wow’d.” The team is very excited to share the labors of their efforts and expect backer reaction to be enthusiastic. They have also been working towards new features and content for a big PTU release that will be incoming after Gamescom. We’re sure this has you all on the edge of your seats! We’re confident that the wait will be worth it.

On top of all this, the team continues on bug fixes and feature support for various features being focused on both inside and outside of Austin. There’s always a lot of moving parts and a variety of work to keep everyone busy, but it is part of what makes working in game development exciting. There’s definitely never a dull moment! Stay tuned for more action next month!

Live Operations

QA

The month of July has been very active on the QA front with multiple PTU and public releases as well as one hotfix. In addition to ensuring that these releases were properly tested, the team worked on many other tasks.

Andrew Hesse has been settling into his new role of being QA lead by overseeing all areas of testing. Andrew worked closely with our engineers to provide valuable profiling data during our 1.1.5 internal multiplayer playtests. This data was instrumental in helping developers identify some potential fixes which helped eliminate in most cases the frequent stalls that have been happening when ships are destroyed and respawn. In addition to this, Andrew tested a significant improvement to the way ships fly from Wyrmbyte called iPredictor which resulted in ships flying much smoother when viewed by others.

Jeffrey Pease has been working closely with engineers to test and monitor the new Generic Instance Manager. After the release of 1.1.5, Jeffrey continued to monitor connection issues over the weekend and reported any outages directly to our server engineers. We were able to identify multiple issues and promptly deployed a 1.1.5 hotfix the following Monday that included fixes to the Generic Instance Manager. These fixes helped to dramatically improve the lobby connection experience.

The team worked closely with designers Matt Sherman and Calix Reneau providing comprehensive feedback on any balance changes. This was a very iterative process that eventually resulted in some welcome changes to ship flight, health, weapon heating/cooling as well as missile and countermeasure effectiveness.

Robert Gaither is our newest addition to the QA team. Robert has extensive QA experience and has already been very effective in assisting Todd Raffray with Social Module and Persistent Universe testing.

Todd, Robert, and Melissa have been spearheading the testing for Gamescom. Each day they test each aspect of the presentation and at the end of the day provide a comprehensive break down of critical issues.

Todd has continued to ensure that any features related to multi-crew, Social Module and Persistent Universe are thoroughly tested. The latest of which is the Augmented Reality experience while shopping which is part of the shopping phase 1 deliverables for social module.

Tyler Witkin and Andrew Rexroth have been continually testing Star Marine. Tyler ensures that all open issues are current as well as verifying any issues are fixed that have been set as resolved by development. He also has been coordinating each company wide Star Marine playtest and gathering the resulting feedback for our design directors. Tyler also conducted a comprehensive analysis of the Star Marine juke system.

In addition to his Star Marine duties, Tyler captured video footage and screenshots that are being used by community, marketing, Turbulent, and production for various projects like advertisements, weekly FPS reports, and the background of the new launcher.

Some other things QA was working on that may not seem as exciting but are still very important are fielding special testing requests by individual developers, testing integrity of builds deployed by the new BuildBot system, testing the Cryengine version 3.7 integration into the project, and testing new deployments of the tool used to disseminate builds to developers we call CopyBuild.

This next month is going to be another big one for QA. We are currently focused on the Gamescom presentation, as well as some expected releases around the same time. Also we hope to roll out the new Issue Council by the end of August. This will dramatically improve the bug reporting experience for any members of the community that would like to assist in the testing process. See you at Gamescom!

Game Support

This has been an exciting month for the Game Support team, particularly since we got up and rolling with the 1.1.5 Publish(es) to the Live Service this month!

Our core mission is to represent the needs of the player base and to help make the service better, and we feel that we kept busy on that front. We worked very closely with designers and developers, as well as with a few of our more intrepid players in the modding community, to make 1.1.5 a more compelling experience. Not only did we do the normal job of triaging game-facing bugs, but we actively teamed up with DevOps and QA throughout the month to monitor the deployment and release of the new Launcher and the General Instance Manager (GIM), something we will continue to do for each publish.

The 1.1.5 release had a TON of new content and features, as well as several backend services, so we actively kept busy on our tickets as well as providing Live Service Notifications on our forums and on Reddit (both have which have proved very popular). Particularly helpful was working with the community in understanding the user experience from all over the globe. We spent a couple of weekends making sure everything was working smoothly, to which we received extremely kind messages thanking us for our service. We’d like to thank you in return as we are here for you… and we’re as excited about seeing Star Citizen grow as you are!

Speaking of, since we are back in the cycle of pushing out publishes, the Game Support team will be actively engaged managing further playtests, starting with testing the new Arena Commander 1.1.6 and Launcher 2.3 updates and all throughout August with Live concurrency playtests. We think there is a lot of value in working with players to improve the game, which fundamentally is the spirit of the entire project.

To that end, Game Support will also be creating a special “test group” to be named that’s made up of players who are dedicated to the meticulous and detail-oriented challenge of playtesting the game with us. We’ll expand what we have learned from running our playtests to having regularly scheduled sessions on PTU where we give you specific “missions” to test new content and features, and how to report that in a manner that is much improved from the current forum-based solution. More on that will come from our Turbulent team, but we’re very excited to team up with them for a new system that will be formally announced very shortly!

In addition, we had some really good times exploring and learning some of the Star Marine modules during our internal playtests (plus, it’s fun!). It’s great to “feel” the environment in which players are going to live and breathe, and only by walking through their steps can we best help them. We’ve got some great ideas on how players will be interfacing not only inside their module, but in the greater Star Citizen ecosystem. We’ll be excited to continue to learn along with you as the universe continues to grow and expand, and to better understand how we can best continue to serve you.

IT/Operations

Rapid builds and lots of developer support and testing for us in July. This month we’ve spread the team out to support multiple initiatives. Paul and Hassan completed the Frankfurt office move on time and on budget. Everything went smooth and the developers weren’t impacted by any down time; some commenting that they’ve never seen a move go this well in any other company. As soon as they returned to their studios Paul and Hassan continued planning, building, and testing for the GamesCom event in early August. Paul has already flown back to Manchester to help Hassan with final preparations and to help pack all our gear for the events.

Mike “Sniper” Pickett has directed his laser focus to enhancing and developing new internal tools to further improve the data delivery performance throughout the company. Much like our experience with the new launcher patcher development effort, he’s had to spend some time tuning down performance as he has now found ways of totally saturating a gigabit network to the point of failure. His work has been invaluable to the development effort though with some developers reporting as much as 120x improvement in delivery times for our largest assets used in development and testing, particularly for those who must switch back and forth supporting different branches of code throughout the day.

Dennis, Chris, and Kyle have been very busy supporting developers at each studio with hardware adjustments and upgrades. They’ve also been building and rebuilding test systems for the QA teams to help them work through various bugs seen on different hardware configurations.

With the major improvements made to the build system by the DevOps team, IT has also started the final pass of tuning on the build servers themselves. This project involves much greater use of parallel processing and caching on custom built compute and storage arrays. We’ve started work on the game server build processing by moving the major compiling workload away from the larger build servers to an array of smaller build workers. Early results are positive so testing will continue prior to an official roll out next month. We’ll be applying the same improvements to game client builds as well.

We’ll see you at GamesCom!

Dev Ops

The majority of July has been focused on two of the large projects the team was working on last month; the new launcher, and the new build server.

However, we have also shipped a few patches to PTU, released a test version of the new launcher also to PTU, and released the 1.1.4 and 1.1.5 patches to live.

The current public launcher is version 1.6 and uses a third party code base for the UI and patching. Our new launcher is written completely in house. Over the past couple of weeks, players have had a chance to use version 2.1 and version 2.2 on the PTU. Players have been testing out the new UI and speed increases, however we have gotten some complaints from players that the launcher hogs too much of their bandwidth! Version 2.3 will have options to allow the players to put bandwidth caps on the launcher which will hopefully grant a better experience. Version 2.3 is currently in testing with the company for playtests, and will be released very soon to the PTU, and if testing goes well we plan to begin using it with the Live service very soon as well!

We are now in testing with the new build server. This new build server architecture is built on BuildBot instead of Jenkins, and is completely redesigned from the ground up. This makes builds much more modular, easier to troubleshoot, and faster. We are close to switching to this server to build new builds going forward. The first builds from that system going out to the public in September. For the players, they shouldn’t see any difference at all from this switch over. Just as a reminder, not only should it allow us to run more builds at the same time, increasing the throughput of work, but by reducing the amount of time developers wait for build, it will also decrease overall build times. Currently, it takes about 4hrs to make one build on our Jenkins server and we usually make around 6-8 builds a day for development to progress. As you can probably quickly see from the math, this is more time in the day than we have. The new build server will allow us to run 2-4 builds at the same time, and should reduce the build time to around 1hr 40mins (this time is from our initial tests). This should improve performance for everyone in development!

The team is gearing up to support GamesCom and a bunch of upcoming releases that we are excited to share with our backers! August promises to be a very busy and productive month.