Howdy folks,

Happy holidays from all of us here at CIG Austin! As the year 2014 comes to a close, we look back on all we have accomplished this year and stand astounded. This past month has been no different, as we have made more progress on fleshing out our ever-expanding universe, we’ve launched a MAJOR game update, and we’ve launched a number of new publishing operations including a Public Test Universe.

Persistent Universe Team:

ART :

Our artists have had two major things on their minds this month: Characters and Props. Our awesome concept team consisting of Ted Beargeon, Megan Cheever, and new addition Ken Fairclough has been developing concept art for NPC’s you might find on ArcCorp or Terra, props you might find on space stations, as well as some initial look/feel for our next location after Terra: the Levski landing zone in the Nyx system.

Our Character Team has been hard at work developing the character models based off the concepts our concept team has been providing. Right now we are wrapping up work on NPC’s for ArcCorp and a Medic NPC you will find in the medical unit. Our Animation Team has been helping our character team out by testing out the new skeleton that was developed to help make our characters as anatomically correct as possible. They have also been fixing countless bugs to help improve the character animations for Arena Commander v1.0 release.

We have been preparing for production on our first chunk of props by gathering reference, standardizing metrics, and developing concepts so that our outsourcing partners have as much information as possible when helping us out. We are hoping to have around one hundred and fifty new props in place fairly soon for all of our environments we have been working on recently with BHVR.

Speaking of environments, work is progressing nicely on standardizing environment construction across the project. Our Lead Technical Artist, Cort Soest, has been instrumental in defining the process for how we build our environments and policing that process once it is established. We have also been doing some R&D on some cool new modular fountain VFX for our environments.

Our Ship Team were slaving away all month on helping to get the Aurora variants, Mustang variants, and Hornet variants in your hands for Arena Commander v1.0. We hope you enjoy flying around in them!

DESIGN :

At the beginning of this month our designers, Pete Mackay and Evan Manning, began concocting some awesome high-level designs for new landing zones. The Odyssa and Mariana landing zones are now in Whitebox phase in which our designers have been blocking out the specific layouts for where the shops, major points of interest, and landing pads will be located. They are now working with our concept team to develop the aesthetic for each location. It is exciting seeing the designs for new landing zones come online, as it is a reminder of the vast number of worlds we eventually will have in our universe.

Our Star Map is undergoing extreme renovation! Rob Irving has been working with Dave

Haddock to completely revamp the layout of our universe. As our project has grown and priorities have shifted the need for a new layout became apparent. It has been tricky switching everything around while still maintaining what has already been established in our fiction, but it won’t be too much longer until Star Map 2.0 will be complete. Our conference room table is covered in sticky notes with the various systems on them; indicative of the work we’ve been doing to make the Star Map bigger and better than before.

Other things our design team has been doing this month include investigation on landing sequences from orbit to planetside, updating our Persistent Universe Crimes List, and identifying bugs in our Orbit>Hangar>Planetside game loop.

ENGINEERING :

The PU Engineering Team hit some major milestones this month. Their biggest milestone was helping to support the roll-out of Arena Commander 1.0, where they rolled out both Friends v1.0 (aka “Contacts”) and the Lobby System in the same patch. Several new server configurations were a part of this launch, and our server team spent much of their weekend post-launch to support this. Special thanks to server engineers Tom Sawyer and Brian Mazza for their outstanding dedication and burning the midnight oil to support our launch, as well as the strong support from our DevOps, IT and QA departments.

The team also continues to be busy working on tools to support our Peaceful NPC AI system. We will be wrapping up some heavy lifting on that early next year. Additionally, they have finished their backend implementation for a new Chat System, which they have begun testing themselves. Work will begin next year on the user interface for this system so that our QA team can get their hands on it. On top of all this, our server team has also been busy working on being able to invite other players to your hangars, working on our Process Manager, and investigating ways that we can increase player counts on our maps.

The PU Programming team has also recently added a new Senior Network Engineer to the fold: Jason Ely. Some of you may be familiar with his fantasy 2D MMO “Elderlands.” Jason also helped develop such titles as Ultima and the Crusader series. Jason has already proven to be a valuable asset to CIG, as he is the engineer that has been developing our incoming Chat System. The CIG Austin studio and PU Engineering Team is lucky and ecstatic to have Jason on board.

The PU Engineering Team would like to thank everyone for all of the outstanding support, and to wish everyone a great 2015! We’re looking forward to delivering some more great content to you all next year. See you then!

Live Operations:

QA:

During December the Star Citizen QA team focused on testing the Arena Commander v1.0 while also testing and deploying a new launcher update as well as Arena Commander patch 0.9.2.2. The entire QA team did a great job.

Andrew Hesse took the time to travel to our LA studio to sit with our technical designers for two weeks while they set up the new ships. He also was able to help with design by setting up the ship item tag system. Jeffrey Pease and his UK QA counterpart Geoffrey Coffin became our Lobby feature experts. They ensured that the lobby was continually tested over the course of the month and provided daily lobby hand-off emails detailing the feature’s progress. This was a very important task as the lobby system was the most at risk feature for Arena Commander v1.0. Jeffrey Pease also took on the task of generating the patch notes for the big v1.0 release.

Christopher Hill, Simon Ormiston, Liam Guest, Steven Brennon and Geoffrey Coffin provided detailed balance feedback concerning ship flight, systems and weapons. Melissa Estrada worked with her UK QA counterpart Andrew Nicholson to ensure v1.0 smoke tests were completed daily and the results were distributed to the team. Tyler Witkin continued working late and over the weekend assisting our server programmers while they addressed the issues encountered post launch.

This month, we were also able to roll out the first phase of the Public Test Universe. The community was incredibly helpful in our test of the PTU and we are very much looking forward to utilizing the PTU for future releases.

It has been a lot of work to ensure v1.0 could be released by our target date prior to the holidays. We are incredibly happy to finally share all the new v1.0 features with the community. QA is now setting their sights on testing the new features and releases for the new year including additional Arena Commander updates, an improved community bug reporting experience, FPS module and much, much more.

IT/Operations:

One thing about the IT team at Cloud Imperium Games is that they do not stop. No amount of challenge is too great when it comes to Star Citizen and this month’s 1.0 release is no exception.

This month, IT has been involved in every aspect of back end support required by the teams around the world. IT provided additional development systems and various upgrades for the developers who were burning the midnight oil. For QA, the IT team helped to provide a myriad of hardware to support compatibility and performance testing for 1.0 release testing.

Dennis, in Santa Monica, is one cool operator. He took charge of the multi studio live stream event and helped to coordinate our best live stream event so far. His hands were full too with a network outage right in the middle of the live stream which he fixed in less than 3 minutes moving right back to coordinating and supporting the live show without missing a beat. Hassan and Chris worked closely with Dennis to help setup cameras and demo machines at each studio which included lots of testing ahead of time to make sure everything would run smoothly between the multiple studio locations involved.

Austin IT pulled out the stops this month supporting many aspects of the live operation enhancements necessary to support the 1.0 launch. “Sniper” Picket expanded and enhanced our live server monitoring systems while at the same time developed a new suite of system performance reporting tools as well as the back end systems to collect and report all that data. These tools are already helping networking and server engineers to further analyze and tune our game servers faster than ever before. Austin IT also made major improvements to the build system and source control performance in support of the increasingly rapid pace of development. New servers were put in place along with some improvements to the publishing pipeline which further improve the rate by which we can deliver versions to the public. Our goal is to continually reduce the time it takes to publish and download patches and this month we made good gains in this area.

Looking back, this year has been an amazing ride of constant improvements and exciting challenges but none of this would be possible without the amazing developers and more importantly, the support of the Star Citizen community. 2014 has been awesome and 2015 is going to be even more exciting.

Dev Ops:

The Star Citizen Dev Ops team has been busy this month improving the launcher, adding analytics to the client and server, and of course shipping a major game patch.

In December we released the 0.9.2.2 patch, then 1.3.6 launcher update, our first version of the PTU (Public Test Universe), and of course the 1.0.0 Star Citizen patch. On top of all this we also worked on stripping out certain unnecessary client assets to reduce our overall patch and game client size, continued implementing analytics in the client to give our devs better visibility on player behavior and balance, and improving our ability to deploy our Universe Cluster.

Patch 1.0.0 not only introduced new game features and content, but it also completely changed the backend of our Universe Cluster. We added a Friends, Presence, Persistence, and Party server to the already complex back end in support of the Lobby feature for Arena Commander. This complexity is part of the reason for the problems we saw directly after launching patch 1.0.0. After spending the weekend fixing issues our Network and Dev Ops teams have just about fixed all the communication and connection issues we saw. We will continue to improve the backend stability with hotfixes and future patches.

The Dev Ops team had a new member join at the beginning of December. Joseph Holley joins us with years of experience working at Blizzard on World of Warcraft and other Blizzard titles.

We have been training him up on the Star Citizen code base and server architecture; already he has made several very beneficial contributions. January 5th we have another new employee joining our team which will make 2015 a very productive year!

2014 has been quite a year, with many, many patches, features, improvements, bug fixes, and success. The Dev Ops team is looking forward to 2015 with optimism and excitement with the number of massive releases that are coming that will shape Star Citizen into the game we all want to play. Thank you so much for all your support during the rough deployments and server issues, we really appreciate your patience.