Eric Peterson, Studio Director

Greeting Citizens!

The Month of May here in Texas has brought us much rain, and many difficult challenges. As everyone is aware, most of the company is busy working on Arena Commander, and as we get closer to the release, we continue to run into new issues every day, even though our fix rate has been positive in a significant way, we are just not close enough to let it out into the wild just yet. That being said the Austin office has been very busy during this month, and I would like to share some of that with all of you.

Audio/Video – In May we have been working on the planning and construction of our sound studios at the Austin and Manchester locations, as well as finishing up work on the Arena Commander release. As we’ve progressed toward the end of the month, the dogfighting work is more playtesting and adjusting as we go, and less generation/implementation of new content, to ensure the release is of the highest quality. Hopefully you will enjoy blasting your friends into oblivion with the sound turned up all the way to 11. Video this month has been about wrapping up and transferring media production to Santa Monica. We now have a multi-copy, multi-location file server to store the video record of the game’s development. That record will be the primary source for the documentary of the making of Star Citizen. We also produced the last four episodes of “Wingman’s Hangar” – seventy-two in all. As we shoot the last show, we take a look back at the last twenty months of fun, hijinks, and “serious” reporting.

Design – We have been firefighting for dogfighting release and pitching in with testing and feedback for the gameplay, from joystick controls, to missile and laser damage, the team has been hammering away in both single player and multiplayer to get it as stable and fun as possible for when it goes out.

In the meantime, we’re still pushing ahead on persistent universe work, including helping Tony Zurovec get up to speed on all facets of the project. Hangar support continues, with the additions of new ships as they come online, hangar flair items, and a brand new firing range that we think you’ll love! Economy work is moving ahead full-bore, as well, with local simulation playtests going on weekly, along with populating the universe with all of the goodies that players will get to discover. We’re breaking new ground on mission development, too, and putting finishing touches on some core systems. And we’ve updated the ship specs – not once, but twice – this month. Enjoy!

IT – The IT department has been busy working on build and deployment system improvements this month. These initiatives are important for internal development because they speed up the rate of iteration between builds allowing for much faster bug fixes and overall product improvements. We’ve also been able to make good headway on our publishing process which allows us to deploy fixes and content out to players with less downtime. The IT team has also been developing the tools and procedures for monitoring external game services. Based on requests from development we will be adding a much higher level of system and service monitoring and reporting than typically offered so we can determine the best ways to improve and optimize our live services in addition to making sure things stay up and running.

Production – We have been busy tracking down local tasks for the Arena Commander release, from server side, to game play, to IK issues with animation, our job has been to make sure the folks are alerted and up to date on priority tasks and getting things completed in a timely manner. The production team continued its valiant efforts to plan and execute the ship and character pipelines. We also continued to support the dog fighting module through ATX based development and QA. We continue to support the other studios in our collective efforts to release the Vanduul Swarm, Free flight, and Multi-player dog fighting modules and maps. Our long term plan is to increase efficiency via strategic initiatives such as working with our vendor partners to dynamically improve our art pipeline.

Engineering – Engineering has been busy working towards the Dogfighting v1 release, including gameplay logic, special effects implementation, engine fixes and improvements, rendering fixes, and bug and crash fixes. In addition to core universe service work and process management, ATX engineering is assisting with implementation of matchmaking and instance management services used for dogfighting and to be expanded later for the persistent universe. Tool improvements and bug fixes, build and patching system fixes and improvements, and development tool and process improvements such as migrating to Perforce Streams were also done this month.

QA – The last month has been very busy for CIG QA. Progress has been made on overall QA process. Our new QA additions from Foundry 42 began this month and were able to hit the ground running. Geoffery Coffin, William Clark and Andrew Nicholson reported for duty and immediately contributed with improving documentation and procedure and helping to ensure we have global testing coverage. We also had a new addition to the QA team here in Austin. A big Star Citizen welcome to Keegan Standifer! This month many company-wide play tests were conducted that were instrumental in bringing us closer towards the release of Arena Commander. It saddens us to sometimes be the bearer of bad news when we must bring to light some of the issues that may delay a release. However, we hope to have enough of the kinks ironed out to ensure Arena Commander is an incredibly enjoyable experience. After release we will still need your help! Much more testing will be needed and we look forward to everyone’s feedback to help ensure Arena Commander and eventually Star Citizen is the Best Damn Space Sim Ever!

There is a lot of things to be proud of this month, and we are getting oh so close to sharing some important work with you guys. This game and community share the same passion, and it is the most exciting thing we have ever worked on, and that is all thanks to you! Thank you all for your continued support.

EP