Eric Peterson, Studio Director

Hello Citizens!

We have been working extremely hard to get Arena Commander into your hands. Folks here are excited about getting to show off all the stuff we have been working on and getting it into your hands, so without further ado here is the report from the Austin office.

QA

CIG ATX QA has been feverishly testing each build as they become available. Once we determine the build is ready for play testing an email is sent to the global team with details and instructions. During each play test information and other diagnostics are gathered by our gameplay and server programming teams. Once the playtest has concluded, feedback is gathered from each discipline; Art, Animation, Design, and Programming. The results are then sent to production to be included in the daily studio update. Chris & the team will then respond to the feedback. Based on those responses additional tasks may be created and assigned out to development. QA will then continue to regress test resolved issues as well as log any new issues that may be uncovered. At the end of the day a new build is kicked off and the process starts over. It is a lot of hard work, but very rewarding to witness the creation of Arena Commander which will stand on its own as an incredibly fun game as well as be the foundation for space flight for the Persistent Universe and the Squadron 42 single player experience.

Audio

Audio has been finishing up our tasks on the initial Arena Commander release. We are only making the absolutely necessary changes now in order to keep the build stable, things like mix levels, and what comes out of daily testing are the things we are changing. Some last-minute tech like the first-person breathing manager, Ejection and EVA is getting its audio finished off, too.

Design

ATX design has continued to push forward on the persistent universe, while also keeping involved with the imminent dogfighting release. Our technical design staff is helping to put the finishing touches on all of the moving parts for dogfighting – from the ships themselves all the way down to the little bits, like the parts you see on the radar. Meanwhile, we’re hammering away at both single-player and multi-player matches, providing feedback, and becoming the most feared pilots in the ‘verse.

Art

The art team was hard at work this week making tweaks to the Aurora, 300i, and Scythe to get them in top notch shape to duke it out in Arena Commander. Engine glow, warning indicator lights, detail on the missile racks, and adjusting the seat in the Aurora so you can see out the cockpit better were just a few of the things being done to the ships. Optimized versions of all items were created for the HUD, explosions and other VFX were created for when a ship is destroyed, and the RSI helmet was polished up as well.

Animation

We are continuing to make progress with hooking up the 300i and the Aurora getting them looking as good as the Hornet. Animations have been created to match the new layout for the 300i. The seat in the aurora has been raised for a better view out of the cockpit & both Ships have a full G Force and reaction animations done. New thrusters have been created, skinned, animated, and exported.

Outside of dogfighting we continue to work on all the locomotion animations. New animations will be in game. There are still a few visual bugs but we are working on resolving the code that is causing them.

IT

The IT Department has been hard at work this week making infrastructure improvements to support the dev teams efforts on Arena Commander. The Austin team made massive improvements in the build and source control systems which were necessary to support continued development and push builds out faster. UK and LA IT Managers performed various upgrades to individual developer machines in order to ensure they are able to do game builds and renders as fast as possible. We are preparing for the onslaught of Citizens downloading Arena Commander when it comes out, should be fun.

Video Production

We got a glimpse at Arena Commander with WH episode 70. This week we’re shooting deeper coverage with Rob Irving and some of the design team for next week’s Wingman’s Hangar.

Also, our media heritage is now secure. Our call for a proper data integrity plan for the terabytes of video being created by CIG has resulted in a dual storage solution based in Santa Monica and Austin. Mike Jones was instrumental in identifying the hardware and procedural solutions to ensure all media producers have access to our growing archive of media and securing that media for the future.

Engineering

This week, Austin Engineering worked towards the first Dogfighting release by working on the universe services themselves and game servers, and fixing, building, and deploying full release playtest client and server builds for Arena Commander playtesting, and improving and profiling game client performance. In addition, we assisted with the integration and bug fixing of matchmaking and also fixed ship, rendering, tool, and engine bugs affecting the Hangar and the Sandbox Editor tool from CryEngine 3.6 integration and dogfighting changes. Additionally, we continued to improve the build and deployment system and switched the development team over to a more efficient and easier to use source (and asset) control paradigm called Perforce Streams and assisted individuals with the migration. Perforce Streams also allows team members to switch between the release stream and main stream quickly, which is important for our distributed development team and to keep the release stream stable.

Production

Our production team has performed admirably in supporting Arena commander, by chasing down individual tasks and dependencies, and making sure that things were handed off from studio to studio in an efficient manner. We are constantly moving things in and out of the first release cycle based upon time needed to completion and risk assessment, once you feel you are on top of things, another batch of Jira tasks comes sliding down the pipeline to be reviewed, assigned and chased, it is all in good fun though, in order for us to bring Arena Commander out to the Citizens. We also continued our efforts in planning out ships and will soon begin working with REDACTED on the weapons for the FPS (Go Jake!!). In addition, we have plans in place to monitor the performance of the game once it is launched to make sure we can properly focus and prioritize any bugs that the Citizens might uncover.

So that is it from Austin – it has been a tough hill to climb but we can see the crest, and are looking forward to a little fresh meat in the verse ! BRING IT CITIZENS !!! Wingman – out !