This post is a transcript of the May 2016 Monthly Report, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!



LOS ANGELES

Engineering

John Pritchett currently in the UK working on positional controls for capital-class ships

Also was helping the QA team by providing custom builds for QA to test specific parameters of the game

Chad McKinney wrote a technical design doc for the engineers on Signal Pipes after working on the Entity Health components

Patrick Mathieu did a code merge for the Seats and Controller managers and also had a hand in other systems such as Energy Control manager, Flight Controls and game’s event systems

Updated technical design doc and started testing the system in ships with testing functionality of how IR and heat signatures can be tuned

Allows simulations between similar assets such as collision proxies, ropes, etc

Ariel Xu going over his Port Editor and Loadout Editor and recently implemented simulation parameters into Loadout Editor

Mark Abent focused on 2.4 Phys Controller and Seat Integration, he and Paul Reindell have been supporting the engineering team in persistence and shopping features

Much of the 2.4.0 happenings have been based on what the engineering team has been doing such as shopping, persistence, bug fixes, etc

Tech Design

Matt also working on supporting the Buccaneer and added updates to Carrack design brief

Matt Sherman working on white box for Drake Herald while getting Reliant flight ready

Tech Design team also performs the designing of how ship functionality will operate in-game

On ship side, he’s been working on the Origin 85x and coordinating with the Engineering team on how heat and wear will function in terms of design

Lead Tech Designer Kirk Tome started testing the Power Plants and Shields 2.0 systems and designing an overview of how overheating/heat spiking will affect ship components

Art & Animation

Including adjusting the Command Module, turrets, decals, tractor beam room, engines and cargo as well as materials pass

Gurmukh Bhasin and Justin Wentz doing exterior passes on the Caterpillar

CG supervisor Forrest Stephen working on clothing support for character team for 2.4.0 and his efforts look ahead to what what they are currently delivering and extend out to 2.5.0 and further

Global Technical Content

Matt Intrieri working on asset validation tool and started work on Tech Art white box for Drake Herald

Gaige Hallman resolved some bugs in regards to the clothing volume system and has been working on asset rigging for Shubin Miner uniform

He’s currently working on cleaning up Mannequin and digging deep into their systems to help increase their deliveries

New Associate Tech Animator joined the team, Erik Link and is working with animation team

Narrative

If you have a question unanswered from the old Ask A Dev, repost it in the new one and they’ll try their best to answer it

On PU side, not a lot to tell that can be talked about at the moment

A couple people were in the UK to help with the pick up performance capture shoot

Quality Assurance

Terrain is pretty sparse looking but still early stages

Early look at preliminary large scale solar systems with procedural planets, going from space to atmosphere and landing

Saitek provided a Saitek X-56 Rhino HOTAS peripheral so they could put the controller through its paces

Focused on all the new 2.4 features including new PU clothing, shopping system, large amount of persistence and performance testing and troubleshooting stability issues

Development

Big thanks to Mark Skelton for his efforts but he’ll be moving onto a new project and new chapter

Also be touching up some of the ships as well

Emre Switzer doing a lighting revamp for several areas of the game, already tackled ArcCorp and moving on to Crusader

Also helped by getting in some new ‘weapon inspect’ animations

PU team supporting SQ42 with implementing background animations, specifically animations for the Mess Hall scenes and interacting with ship terminals

Daniel Craig wrapped up work on updated 300i enter/exit animations and moving onto Avenger next

Jay Brushwood was on set of mocap shoot at Imaginarium capturing new enter/exit animations for all ships

Ian Guthrie at Wyrmbyte helped create an Analytics service for Gameplay Engineers to hook into to provide data that Pete Mackay needs

Near term taskload includes Persistent UEC which will allow them to actually use UEC as part of Persistence instead of test currency Alpha UEC

Most massive change to their core tech since the debut of Large World tech and many hiccups to iron out

He’s been talking with Gameplay Engineering team, Server Engineering team, DevOps team and Platform team to nail down best approach for capturing/displaying game analytics from various aspects of Star Citizen

Also been designated as the Design Owner for Game Analytics going forward

Focus for 2.5.0 will be to have some more grungy frontier clothing

Sometimes just material/texture variants of existing assets, sometimes brand new assets from all new clothing line/manufacturers

The goal is to have new clothing assets ready for every new release

Rob and Robert have been working with Character team to create briefs for/schedule in additional assets for future releases

Also specific ‘Try On’ animations for the character as well

Ex: trying on shoes, camera will zoom in to your feet

Focusing on designing additional phases of ‘Try On/Inspect Mode’, each clothing asset will have a specific camera record that ‘zooms in’ to specific parts depending on what you’re trying on

This feature will allow for purchasing of items that are too large to display in a conventional shop such as ship components, ship weapons, ships…

Got a final design for ‘Kiosk Purchasing’ in front of CR and awaiting feedback

Lead Designer Rob Reininger has been polishing/fixing bugs with Shopping experience and planning for several features coming down the pipe

He made sure item port placement makes sense for each type of flair and linking item ports so placing larger flair and ships cancels out the ability to place smaller flair and ships in immediate vicinity

Robert Gaither helped out with placing all item ports in the hangars so you’re able to customize the layout of flair objects/ships

Most of the month spent wrapping up tasks for 2.4.0 and planning ahead for 2.5.0

QA

Internally, gathering lots of server/client performance data for Engineering team to analyze to see if any improvements can be made short term to help performance

Improvements in item persistence to allow them to begin persisting the database across multiple builds

A number of server/client crashes fixed, improvements to Port Modification system and a number of fixes to shopping

This assisted Network Engineers to address them as they were identified and as a result a significant number of disconnects were corrected

With assistance of testers, they’ve been able to reliably reproduce a number of issues resulting Code 7 disconnects

QA has deployed 14 builds to PTU since initial release to Evocati testers

April’s 2.4.0 testing went well into May with build making its way to the PTU

Game Support

They’re interviewing for Game Support roles to help with tasks such as account security, tech support, publishing process, etc

Turbulent visited for a week and they discussed a variety of topics such as Issue Council improvements

If you’re interested in participating in Evocati or PTU, it’s possible through being an active member of the Issue Council

Opened up 2.4.0 to 1st Wave testers and then Subscribers

Chris Danks and Will Leverett spent first part of the month with Evocati Test Flight, helping get bugs into Issue Council and then into dev pipeline

IT/Operations

This reduces getting build changes out in seconds rather than minutes or hours

If successful, they might be able to compile portions of the build down to certain individual changes further reducing dependencies on other aspects of the larger build

Identifying ways they should be able to increase granularity in build process

As they work through the build pipeline, they found it might be possible to obtain further optimizations in the process

This month was about incorporating changes which support the new patching system into the build pipeline with affecting regularly scheduled deployments

Progress on patch reduction size project and they’re hoping to start seeing real world use of the new system for internal testing

LiveOps/DevOps

Persistence has shown they need configuration changes done quickly and easily rather than manually and the new system will enable them to do that

Goal for this project is to make publishes for automated and configurable

Delivered 18 publishes to PTU and countless deployments for QA and individual use dev testing

Concept Art

Props and prop dressing has continued, list of required props is getting longer so theyll take on additional resources to fill that gap

Working out upgrade paths for different sizes of ship gins and how to be efficient with designs

Four unannounced ships/vehicles in concept right now that are almost complete

Large amount of work for future ships, these aren’t needed for SQ42 but are needed for the persistent universe and to keep expanding the roles in the game

Environment Art

Moving forward on Final Art for their VS level – from lighting, materials, atmospheric, props, terrain, etc

Working SQ42 development, ending the greyboxing phase for Shubin interior levels and Final Art on some other undisclosed locations

Last remaining bugs for 2.4 have been fixed

Props

Focusing on ship items for awhile to make sure there is plenty of content when the feature goes live

Now they have the new shader tech they need to get documentation together and update old ones

The way they approach props allows anything they create to be used anywhere in the game

Focusing on ship items and props to add narrative to SQ42

Spaceships

They may have come up with a plan for very cool, very small ship, more on that soon

Completed work on ‘pods’ for the Argo transport, which will allow you to use it for different utility functions

Work ongoing on the F7A Hornet, which is the hero ship for SQ42

Interior work on Idris has largely wrapped up and move to building some story specific SQ42

Graphics

Uncapping the GPU texture budget so GPUs with more memory can benefit from higher texture resolutions and less likelihood of seeing any ‘popping’ from texture streaming

Focusing on exposure control system next to make it better approximate the complexities of the human eye and brain’s ability to adapt to environments

Work on various high dynamic ranges features continues, with completion of the light linking feature to allow realistic levels of brightness and flow from lights

This has been deactivated on recent public builds but expected to be enabled in next major release

Added volumetric shadowing, they can now get accurate shafts of light passing through particles

Major upgrade to the particle lighting system, it’s been changed so that it uses the new tiled-lighting system and matches the rest of the lighting better

Engineering

Romulo doing player refactor and moving armour over to new Item 2.0 and weapon polish

Gordon doing more polish work on the cover as well as vaulting and mantling

Steve making progress on Object Container system and entity component system, he will be leaving UK for LA

George is working on a new message queue system which should help this

The ability to resuse entity IDs has resulted in issues as the engine was never really designed to do that

These are coming from changes required for persistence not working well with current networking system

Shopping all in and working, again bug fixes and polish

Finishing off port modification system, now complete and in final stages of bug fixing/polishing

Much of the month involved 2.4.0 and helping get it in a state for release to live

Audio

Also worked on various other additions, tweaks, and bugs with the audio system, as well as beginning work on the audio inventory script.

Work progressing well on in-game VOIP tech; an internal tech demo was readied, went over very well.

Making sure that only needed audio will load in; gunshots etc… need to be ready to go instantly, they’ll be loaded always, whereas other sounds that require less immediacy won’t stay loaded

More audio work at Imaginarium studios for add-on shoots to the SQ42 cinematics

Lots of work keeping WWise organized and formatted correctly, as well as adding new FPS sounds

Aurora now has a bespoke whoosh sound, should be more easily identifiable

Lots of work correcting and setting up ship audio, setting up the Idris audio scheme

VFX

Close to moving to tiled lighting system for particles (allows accurate shadows).

Cinematics

Cinematic Animators have been supporting the Gameplay Team in the UK as they wait for data from the mocap shoot

This shoot even included some in universe show sections with a funny host!

The 2nd performance capture shoot for Squadron was done. This was completion and along side scenes.

AI

The Subsumption editor has been updated and enabled them to implement more functions from the tools now available to designers

AI has had some combat situation awareness added. Moving to specific locations, shooting from cover and querying the tactical point system

A way for designers to suggest the NPCs next activity or subactivity was implemented

The first pass for AI to support Action Areas has been implemented

Action Areas were explained in April’s monthly report but are elements in the world that designers can mark with certain information. This can be used to mark out a specific room i.e. the engine room, hangar etc. This allows NPCs to better decide what activity they should be doing

This system can also be used to notify other NPCs when another NPC is enter or exiting the area

Basic Subsumption code was also implemented. AI should now be aware of things going around them in the environment, which Subsumption tracks

First pass implementation of Usables/Interactors as navigations links. This was needed for Sq. 42 as well as SC and allows AI to find their way around areas and open doors to get to their destination

Behaviours are being implemented through so called ‘mental states’ to allow regular NPCs to know what to do during cinematic scenes and when at a crew position i.e. pilot, gunner etc

Ship behavior first pass almost complete. This is for telling ships what areas to patrol or guard and what areas are considered a no-go zone