Hi all,

Another really busy month here at Foundry 42. We’ve been heavily involved in pushing out new content for Arena Commander, working on the Character pipeline for S42 and the Persistent Universe, working through concept, design and full production on the huge amount of ships we need for Squadron 42, and of course moving forward on the design and implementation of the first missions. Lots of areas to update you guys below, and as always thanks for your support, it really makes a difference to the team, we are REALLY enjoying making this game with you guys.

Creative Director

September was a good “Housekeeping” month for us, having been full speed ahead for the last few months, we needed some time to catch up with ourselves and some of the fixes that have gone in.

Arena Commander: We have increased the size of the maps now that the Z-Buffer issue has been fixed by the engineers, (which you guys will see soon) so now sorting issues will diminish. It’s quite an achievement actually, considering that some of our asteroids are bigger than most of the levels in Crysis. Again thanks to numerous code fixes, we also got to some of the polish tasks, such as getting the asteroids rotating and placing some more accurate physics objects. A lot more design time went into the first implementation of our missiles vs emissions gameplay, and that work is now underway, as well as breaking down the planned features for the 13 stream which will include HUD mode updates, and Leader-boards and of course continued improvements to the key bindings. At the same time we are progressing on branch 14 where we plan to introduce proper lobbies, a huge amount of polish to space flight mechanics and effects, ship / helmet HUD displays, and new ships systems. Matchmaking is now becoming a big consideration, to give the community a choice on what and who they play with.

Ship Design: The StarFarer got a much needed design white-box pass, and came off slightly more heavily armed, with two extra rear belly turrets on either side. Stay tuned for updates on its progress as it gets built out. All the other ships including our huge capital ships are moving along nicely.

Squadron 42: We are working through a bunch of new mechanics for Squadron 42, to give the community a really immersive experience. Our verticle slice is in good shape, and so the art department is really motoring through the grey boxing of our levels and we have also started white boxing a number of new levels so we are ready for the big motion capture shoot we will be performing after Christmas. Progress is continuing well on the script, with multiple updates as we refine the gameplay within levels and we have started white boxing the gameplay (sandbox) for the interstitials (Your base or home ship), so the player will feel like they are in a living HUB which they can interact in and explore.

All in all, a good month of cleaning up, and progressing Star Citizen on all fronts.

Programming Director

One of the big pushes we’ve been making this month in getting the new controller customisation UI into Arena Commander. We know it’s something a lot of people have been clamouring for a long time (ever since the first Dogfighting module release!) and this will be the start of allowing you to set up your controller(s) just the way you like. We intend to keep developing it over future releases to give you full control of your setup.

Our networking engineers have just come back from a very productive mini networking summit held over in Santa Monica, where all the networking engineers from all the studios spent a week going over the features required for Star Citizen. It’s been a really interesting week for all involved, discussing everything from player prediction on the client level, to the server architecture, databases, chat, security etc… It’s really good having these meetings for internal visibility, and make sure everything is moving forwards in the right direction.

Other than that, we’ve been concentrating in the usual areas to keep Arena Commander, Squadron 42, and the PU moving forwards.

Bug of the month: The Flashlight of Thor! So we were having this problem where if you flew your ship around for a period of time it would suddenly explode for no particular reason. To begin with we thought it was just the usual excuses for people’s bad flying, but when it was still happening in an empty level we did have to conclude there might be something else afoot. After much scratching of heads, and drinking of tea, we finally discovered that after an update a flashlight, which should have been attached to the player, had suddenly gone rogue. It was colliding with the interior of your ship and doing a tiny piece of damage every single frame, eventually culminating in calamity. Yes, one flashlight could take down the mighty Hornet!

Graphics Programming Director

The graphics team have been working on some of the core tech to benefit each of the art pipelines (ships, characters, environments & vfx). For the ships we’ve been continuing work on the new damage shader that will give us fine grain location specific damage. This will be crucial for capital ships where the traditional method of cutting a ship into numerous meshes won’t be practical due to their immense scale, but this will also benefit smaller ships. We’ve also started work on the shader that will enable us to create custom paint jobs. This isn’t as simple as just swapping some textures because our paint jobs need to be sharper than is possible with traditional textures to maintain our high quality bar, but the paint also needs to degrade over time and respond correctly to the damage system (e.g. bending & burning).

For the vfx team we’ve created a volumetric lighting shader for particles to approximate complex effects such as multiple-scattering of light and volumetric shadowing. To achieve this the vfx artists bake out 6 separate passes of an explosion or smoke from an offline fluid simulation, and the shader uses these to calculate how the in-game lights would bounce around inside the gas. The end result is smoke and explosion particles that are lit correctly with the in-game lights but approach the quality of an offline render.

We’ve also been working on two general pieces of tech that should benefit the whole game, the first of which is 32 bit depth rendering. We’re moving towards 64 bit physics to handle enormous maps, however rendering doesn’t require such precision because from the cameras perspective everything is actually relatively nearby. However most games actually use just 24 bit depth buffers and this isn’t enough for large space scenes and so we’ve just completed the transition to 32 bit rendering. This has allowed us to enlarge the small dog-fighting maps which we desperately needed since the recent speed increase of the ships! The other general tech we’ve been developing is the ability to combine multiple textures at run-time to allow us to dynamically combine multiple objects into fewer large objects. This will significantly improve rendering performance while maintaining the flexibility and modularity of building the characters, ships and environments out of many smaller textures, which is crucial for the persistent universe (customisable ships, clothing & hangars etc).

Art Director

You want Characters? – you got it! We have taken a global view of the characters within the star citizen universe and are reviewing quality and pipeline going forward so they will not only cater for all aspects of the persistent universe but also stand out as world class AAA characters. Additional Documentation for outsource partners have been put together, we know the level of quality you the fans are expecting and we are placing the foundations for a strong versatile system. Along with an updated anatomically correct base male (and female to follow) we have taken possession of the camera scanning rig to help aid the development of photo real characters for Sq42 and the PU. Real focus is now being placed on answering the tough questions that could trip us up later down the line and working with talented folk like 3Lateral and Cubic motion is certainly making some areas easier (nothing is simple on SC though!)

You want Ships? – you got it! The Gladius is now in the tech setup stage, making it suitable for the Hangar stage of release. The Retaliator is now 50% more awesome since you saw the video released recently (it was about a month old) along with the Gladiator which has most of its exterior given the PBS treatment with the complex dual cockpit/gunner interior next. The Idris and Javelin are still coming along and we are taking into account the Sq42 storyline, adding a few tweaks here and there to shapes and structure to create a more cohesive environment. The wait will be worth it, I promise. New and noteworthy, some of the Vanduul fleet is going into production which we need for the storyline too – tune in next month for more info – we are really excited about this as we can now really start dialing into who/what the Vanduul are and what their construction methods are.

You want Environments? – you got it! Shubin mining facility – ‘Archon’ has reached the stage of Greybox complete, it’s a huge challenge but the visuals are matching its physical size, no shaders yet, just lots of geo, I mean lots! To give you an idea there are at least 26 landing pads located around the facility, each of them the player can land on, get out of their ship and walk around. All of these details will help make the Shubin Archon Facility feel like a living and breathing environment.

You want concepts? – you got it! Concepts department has slowed a little this month (instead of 100mph its more like 90mph :P). Shubin interior wrapping up, Starfarer has been given the ‘Parry’ treatment and a full interior has been worked out along with some meddlesome functionality issues, this has now gone out to be fully visualised, it’s a pretty big ship so it won’t be done in a week if that’s what you think! Xi’an transport ship interior is also taking good shape, we’ve now dialled into a visual language that we are happy with, it makes developing the rest of the rooms a ton easier once you have a few key factors to launch from. Focus is also shifting to answering the niggling parts of the UEE crew costumes, we are taking a systemic approach of really defining how these designs will work, how they fit with the customization system and do they have the level of detail we need to keep Chris and you the fans happy.

You want animations? – you got it! Animation department (who we are looking to grow) has started looking at Previz and prep work for some of the in game action sequences – I can’t give much away at this stage without giving out spoilers. We’ve also been supporting the design department working on specific game mechanic animations, it’s an important part of the process, early Previz for design often saves on wasted work further down the line.

You want spice with your VFX? – you got it! Self shadowing lit particles, mmm, tasty – that’s what the VFX department has been developing with the tech department, we’re still trying to think of a name for this technique/texture format by the way, we’d love for it to be something snappy/media-friendly, but the current name is SSL (Self-shadowing lighting). Aside from that, we’re also starting to improve the vehicle damage effects starting with smoke and fire, trying to make a cleaner more efficient system that has greater long term effects for the project.

That’s it – a full on man vs polygon serving of heart stopping griddle cooked CGI goodness.

Signed, The Chef

Audio Lead

This month the audio team have split between Citizencon related tasks and the upcoming demo of the FPS module.

The environment sounds for the demo level are starting to shape up. A lot of attention is being paid to the details in this area. All of the whirring, hums, and general ambiance comes from specific points in 3d space. We we’re never going to be satisfied with a faked 2d ambient soundscape! Computers will idly tick away, screens and lights will hum and buzz, air conditioners and fans will whoosh and whirr! This will all move around you as you move your player.

We’ve also been working on R&D and generally testing the water with the FPS weapon firing. There’s a lot to consider with something like a gun sound! First person gun firing, iron sights gun firing, 3rd person gun firing, gun sounds over distance, environmental effects on gun sounds and this is just firing the guns!! Getting this right is a long process and will be ongoing long into the future. Even so, we are hoping that with the work we’ve done so far, it’ll be a great start to the FPS sound when it is demo’d for PAX.

Other than that we’ve been working on a selection of the fps gadgets and trying to keep up with the unending (but awesome) onslaught of ship related sound tasks!