The Future

The Persistent Universe will be moving to a more frequent release schedule, with the idea being to routinely put new functionality into your hands to enjoy, provide feedback, and help us verify how well certain systems are performing. One important point to note here is that there is a lot of work involved in releasing something that’s at such an early stage in its development, as no game smoothly proceeds throughout the entire development cycle. At any given moment, there are typically a variety of systems that are in completely different states – some having only recently been started, and many being in the middle of having new functionality inserted. Locking down the code base to ensure that everything is in an acceptable state for release to the public takes considerable time and effort. Thus, there is absolutely a real cost to releasing updates. For that reason, the next half dozen or so Persistent Universe releases will be considerably more focused upon giving you exposure to new features and ensuring that what we need to get feedback upon or tested is included, and less about trying to give a truly comprehensive sense of the gameplay. To some degree, that will limit the expense of releasing more frequent versions – minimize the impact to the long-term schedule. In practice, this means that, for example, when the AI finally makes an appearance you’ll see a fair sampling of character behaviors, but the focus will be upon stress testing the underlying Subsumption, animation, and networking systems, and less about trying to give a particularly accurate sense of what a final city will truly feel like. In essence, then, you will often see some basic functionality appear before we really attempt to go “wide” with the implementation. The appearance of new features will be fairly abrupt, but the full exploitation of those systems will arrive more gradually.

As has been noted elsewhere, Star Citizen’s code base split back in March when Star Marine – the FPS module – was targeted for release. The main development branch is called GameDev, whereas Star Marine’s was referred to as 1.2.0. Star Marine’s subsequent delay led to those two streams gradually growing apart, and a considerable delta now exists. The new back-end network service architecture was needed to ensure a smoother launch for Star Marine, and therefore all of the recent development and refinement was done in the 1.2.0 branch. This wasn’t supposed to be an issue for the Social Module because after Star Marine was launched GameDev and 1.2.0 were slated to be re-integrated, and the Social Module was to launch from there. With Star Marine’s latest postponement, though, the decision was made to flip the release dates and allow the Social Module to go out the door – something that the Persistent Universe group has been wanting to do for quite some time.

The re-integration of the two disparate branches has already started. Once that’s complete, subsequent updates to the Social Module will have access to other code that we developed earlier this year in the GameDev stream, as well as a number of major graphical and spatial partitioning optimizations done by other studios that should make Area 18 look and run quite a bit better than it already does.

Persistence

The next major deliverable for the Persistent Universe will be called Persistence. Its namesake feature won’t generate much in the way of immediate visual rewards, but it’s an absolutely crucial part of the underlying massively multiplayer technology. It will involve everything from communicating with the web platform so that purchased items are converted into actual game items, database abstraction layers and caching functionality, integration with a new global entity ID system that will allow the seamless transition of items from one server to another, and deep integration into various parts of the game server. Ultimately, this update will enable objects to begin to retain state, which sounds simple but – in the context of a massively multiplayer game with seamless transitions between servers – is actually quite involved. Shared hangars will come online and grant you the ability to invite others back to your private hangar. You’ll be able to more easily jump into simulated games together…and eventually head out as a group into space. The Casaba Outlet store in the main Area 18 courtyard will be opened up, and you’ll see quite a few more visual upgrades to the city, especially in the realm of store facades and the main Astro Armada building. Players that previously purchased memberships in the Million Mile High Club – and their invited friends – will gain access to private lounges accessible from their hangar elevator. Additional emotes will be unveiled, with the intent being to really ramp up the variety and allow players to start to really express themselves in the way that they want. The chat system will be dramatically enhanced, with private conversations, the ability to ignore other players, and a much more robust user interface made available. The maximum player count will rise, with the goal being at least forty players in a given server instance. There’s a lot more that will be going on under the hood, including a massive update of the Hub Service that acts as the intermediary between your client application and all of the back-end services, and a considerable enhancement to the communications layer on the game servers. A lot of work will also, of course, be getting done in areas that won’t be exposed until subsequent milestones arrive.

It is possible that Persistence will be split into two separate releases. The rationale is that once we’re back into GameDev we’ll be very close to being able to improve upon some of the basic features of the existing Social Module, and thus we might try to push an update out as soon as possible rather than wait for everything desired to be completed.

Shops

Following Persistence will come the Shopping release. It will allow a variety of items to be purchased in the Area 18 shops, including clothing so that you can begin the process of customizing your character. This update will devote considerable attention to the entirety of the shopping experience, including the augmented reality and mobiGlas interfaces, product delivery options, and how things like the medical scanner and healing apparatus in the hospital function. This release will also ensure that things like the product selection, pricing, and quantities available are connected to the appropriate back-end systems, which is a necessary step to eventually allowing such things to be impacted in real-time by the actions of players and NPCs. As will typically be the case, there will again be a lot of work expended in areas that are either improving the basic foundation – like a streamlined user interface programming architecture – or that won’t be ready for release until a bit later, such as facial customization. I’d expect a few surprises with regard to the types of things that you can purchase…and use…in Area 18 with this release.

Subsumption

The next major update will be Subsumption, which will showcase some of the hard work that’s been going into the development of systems that will allow us to construct environments filled with intelligent NPCs going about their business and that really feels alive. We’ll be aiming to deliver a completely new environment – Nyx – with that release as well. Final Frontier will follow and enable you and your friends to accept some simple missions while planetside and then head out into space together to accomplish them. Quantum will unveil the full-blown solar system navigation map and allow easy access to any part of the current system, including cities on three other Stanton planets: Hurston, Microtech, and Crusader.

More details will be provided on these updates as they get closer, but that’s the basic roadmap for the near future. In between the major releases it’s quite possible that you’ll see smaller revisions since delivering content becomes far easier as more and more of the underlying foundation comes online. While there’s still a tremendous amount of work to do, the clouds are finally starting to part and the stars are coming into view….

Sic itur ad astra.