Hi all,

Another busy month at Foundry 42! It was a pleasure to meet a number of you at CitizenCon and PAX Australia, and I’m looking forward to delivering the space combat experience you deserve. Here’s what Foundry has been up to for the last month, from each department head:

Art

Word for the day: Growth! We have made great inroads to filling our open positions here at F42, animators, level artist, ship artist, go go go!

I’ll keep this brief this month (If I can), obviously there was PAX Australia and while we aren’t fully involved we are always there nibbling in the background, helping with advice, VF, animations. The character department has been working hard with ATX, outsource partners and Illfonic to help deliver characters ready for the show while also juggling the long process of defining the character customization pipeline. Part of the lower floor of the studio has been taken over to setup the face/body scanning camera rig and are busy ironing out the kinks so we can do our first Manchester test shoot – it’s a complex process but the team are blasting along well.

Let us not forget that it was also the Hangar ready sale of the Gladius! An incredible effort by the team on all fronts to get this ship ready and is a real milestone for F42 as this has been developed from start to finish in house, to top it all off it will be featured along with the ship pipeline team on a well know British (and worldwide) gaming magazine – coming soon!

While the Gladius took major focus, all the other ships are progressing well and we are ramping up art staff to finish off the Retaliator (Military version) along with the Gladiator which I know a lot of people are waiting for, it’ll be worth it, it’s a complex ship, so hang tight and it’ll be in your hangar before you know it!

We are also taking a look at the damage system for the ships that we are hoping will make it less art/memory/setup intensive which will be great for the global future of the game. Areas like progressive damage shaders and decals are also having work done by the tech and art team. Vanduul fleet is developing too, we have some first pass models to help with cinematic setup for Sq42.

Components! Yes, so many and so varied – it’s become our mission to help iron this stuff out, weapon mounts, weapons sizes, modularity and standardisation rules! Along with some redesigning of interior spaces for the Cutlass and Avenger. What about the Starfarer?! Its continuing, the cockpit and escape pods concepts are almost done, we are methodically working our way along the ship – as you know, it ain’t small.

For 13.2 the environment team put some major focus onto making the maps larger, reshuffling asset positions, improving lighting, VFX polish, tweaking of shaders, think of it as another layer of polish. On the flipside, the Shubin mining station has additional work and the interior are now being tiered and prefabbed, personally I can’t wait to be walking around this facility, it’ll be amazing.

Animation department has be pulled from pillar to post (as they say) and have coped admirably, taking on the wide range of tasks for Gladius, Gladiator, PAX demo intro and character work. Further discussions have taken place with 3Lateral about integrating their tech further into our pipeline, it’s been a steep learning curve for us this past year and this is one hill we really have to conquer! (please send oxygen!)

Audio

Hey everyone! PAX Australia and the FPS demo has been the main focus for the audio team for October. Designing the weapon sounds was a real focus for this, and a lot of time was spent finalising them as much as possible. Following on from that, ensuring the demo was mixed and sounding good was everything.

For those into the audio tech: it might not have been obvious from the livestream, but in-engine reverb wasn’t quite sufficient to sell the sense of different room-types and spaces when high energy impulses (guns etc.) were fired off. So especially authored content was added that modified the weapon sounds when they were triggered in different rooms, thus these spaces are more clearly defined in-play. This is a basic approach at a system we want to build upon much, much further, looking to ground the player in the world as much as we can and give them that sense of differing materials, space, and variation. All affecting the audio to reinforce immersion – this is very much what we’re all about. Sound should have meaning and be integral to the gameplay, and those systems that do this are so important to us.

Other sounds we were proud of included the personal shield, the area of denial gadget and the electric shotgun. We have electric arcing elements in the tail-off phase of the electric shotgun sound, which may seem like a little thing but is something we found satisfying! Plus it was fully ‘wet’ (100% mix) on the reverb side to really sell the energy and space-occupying quality of the weapon.

We found it cool to explore some of the UI sound scheme for the suit and helmet. It’s fair to say we’ve only scratched the surface of this, but it’s exciting to us to think how the suit/helmet HUD might differ from the in-ship HUD/UI elements.

As well as the sound design side of the FPS demo, we had some truly great and polished material through from Pedro Macedo Camacho, whose music contributed hugely to the mood throughout. He worked tirelessly, as did everyone, and we all hope it gave a good first impression. We’re aiming high (pardon the pun!) and it’ll only get better as we progress.

We’ve talked previously in these monthly updates about the ‘simulated sound’ concept of Star Citizen, which is the mechanism whereby sound in space is justified. Something we’re thinking about is whether a standalone suit would do as good a job of audio simulation as a ship would, when exposed to space directly. Perhaps considering it might have less processing power than the ship, it might be lacking somewhat? Or perhaps sound isn’t simulated when in the suit, at all, or it picks up a data stream from the player’s ship which attenuates/falls off over distance? The aesthetic and practical implications are many, so we’re curious as to what you might all think about this.

Ship damage is something we want to look at soon. We have so many ideas in this area; the different ways the ship might perform sonically to reflect its state, right from its smallest parts to its largest constituents. There are some great opportunities to go to town with detail, almost to the extent that the player can close their eyes and know just what’s wrong with their ship at a given moment – that’s what we’re aiming for. Again, any ideas that you have here will always be welcome!

In terms of the back-end side of things re. audio. I’m sure it’s something you’ve heard before, but we are moving to Wwise from FMOD – there are some technical hurdles to overcome with this, and taking our assets from FMOD and incorporating them into Wwise and eventually going live with it, is honestly no trivial task. But doing this properly will set up our foundation for the future of Star Citizen audio and it’s truly not something to be taken lightly. We’re taking a ‘measure twice, cut once’ approach, we want to minimise any ‘audio downtime’ and ensure a smooth transition so that no-one’s enjoyment of the game is affected. Once it’s done we can really push onward!

Incidentally, I’m the new Audio Director on Star Citizen, Lee Banyard. Feel free to address any questions regarding audio my way. My background – I’ve been lucky enough to have worked on the sound design of the Batman Arkham series of titles (including Asylum, City, and most recently Knight) for Rocksteady over the last six and a half years. I’ve been involved in game audio for almost my entire professional life and I consider it an absolute honour and privilege to be where I am right now on Star Citizen. There’s a lot I’m pushing to do behind the scenes to maximise sonically the Star Citizen experience. I’ve more of an emphasis on sound design than music, I think that’s fair to say, but I have a deep appreciation for all aspects of the audio experience and as we build the team here, I hope our push for quality becomes more and more evident.

That’s all from us sound people for now, thanks for reading (and listening!).

Programming

Foundry 42’s engineers have been busily hammering away on several fronts over the last month. For the 0.9.2 Arena Commander patch we’ve added new targeting features to the game including Gimbal Lock, Look-ahead and Target Focus, as well as polishing up relative mode, the HOMAS (or HOJAM depending on which way you like to hold your stick!) control scheme and control customisation. It’s been great to see a large amount of you fans are enjoying theses updates after the hard work that went into them and it’s really a double win for us as the new targeting controls further enhance the feel of the Squadron 42 gameplay.

In Arena Commander we’ve also implemented the new target reticule, scanning and missile lock animations on the HUD as well as helping out on stats tracking, fixes to race mode and the terraformer beam. There was also a fix for that nasty 300i level loading hang that was blocking some users from multiplayer dogfighting; a bug that was tracked down to a Linux server only issue which made it a hard one to spot in our Windows development environments. In our next big future patch there’s also some multiplayer scoring additions to look forward to including bonuses for first blood, kill streaks and revenge kills amongst other things.

On the Squadron 42 front work on various mechanics is in progress including zero-g player traversal and we have been assisting the US team in looking at multi-crew ship and vehicle system fix ups. Our tools team has been hard at work on our “DataForge” application, a game reflection database that will be used for a wide range of things from editing ships in game to setting up conversations for S42 and the PU.

Last but not least work is underway on our new Localisation system to make the game playable in other languages, network engine upgrades are in progress to assist our PU friends state-side and work is being done to switch our sound engine to Wwise – this will help to speed up our sound effects pipeline due to its feature rich toolset and keep the audio guys in the basement happy!

Graphics Programming

This month the graphics team has primarily been adding features and bug fixes for the PAX FPS demo and the 0.9.2 release. This includes effects such as the breathing on the helmet glass (which we’re still working on improving), improving the quality of the out-of-focus blur when using the ironsights on guns, and fixing various issue with the lens-flare effects you see around bright light sources. In parallel to this work we’ve completed the ship paint job tech and have begun the long process of rolling this tech out to the many existing ships.

We’ve also started on one of the largest visual tech features we’ll be developing in the next six months which is a fully volumetric gas shader. The intention is to use this shader for both massive gas clouds to bring our space environments to life, and also smaller vfx like smoke and explosions. Rendering large semi-transparent volumes with real-time lighting is a significant challenge and is rarely tackled in computer games other than perhaps more limited solutions for cloud shaders in flight sims. As a result there are many aspects to this tech we’ll need to research separately such as the building/placement of the volumes, the complex shape and movement, the light scattering and shadowing, and efficient rendering. So far we’re concentrating on the first two of these, but we’ll keep the backers updated.

Design

This month has been a bit hectic, with a lot of work going into Arena Commander 0.9.2.

You will have seen the hangar ready Gladius, which we pushed to get ready for PAX. We have had it flying around in the engine, and it was great. But there is still some work to be done to tie up all the damage systems etc. to make it releasable.

There has also been a lot of work going into New Horizons Speedway, with greatly improved signing and new race track themed assets being placed in the map. We doubled the size of Broken Moon and Dying Star maps, spacing out spawn points and populating them with more art assets.

Squadron 42 is moving along well, with mechanics and levels all getting pinned down in greater detail. It’s always very exciting to get the video play through as the various levels get more art and design love. The fantastic FPS support from Illfonic has really helped our ground based levels come on leaps and bounds.

Turret gameplay was improved this month and is progressing well.

That’s about all I can report this month, thanks again for the fantastic support.