Greetings Citizens,

It was wonderful to see so many of you at CitizenCon earlier this month, and gratifying to hear that so many people around the world tuned in for the show! We hope you had a good time seeing first-hand some of our work, and there’s plenty more to come. Here’s the breakdown of what we did in October:

Design

October is done and CitizenCon is out of the way, now all the focus here is on getting the first phase Crusader build into your hands. We are working flat out to get it in a stable enough state to give you an impression of the scope of this incredible game. There are still issues we are closing out that need to be in a better state for release, such as EVA which is going to be an integral part of Star Citizen.

Quantum Fuel is also going to be a factor for players to manage and consider, adding a layer of realism and strategy to travelling around the universe. Service stations, run by Cry-Astro have begun to pop up around the Crusader map allowing players to refuel, rearm and repair; for simplicity and convenience in testing the Alpha 2.0 build, these will initially be free, but when REC comes online in future builds it will give players more to think about.

We have implemented several starter missions for Players to tackle that are dotted around the map, and as we continue to fixup the FPS gameplay we now have a specific location that will host FPS combat for those brave enough to dive in. All in all we hope to deliver enough content to keep you busy for a while.

Another happy side effect from all the focus on the Star Citizen 2.0 build is that we have been able to move design resources back on to Squadron 42 now that a number of critical blockers have been removed. We have been making great progress on the AI system with the team looking at getting something into future Star Citizen – Live releases in the form of an asteroid base for you to tackle.

All in all, another exciting month on Star Citizen where we are really starting to feel things coming together after all the time consuming, but essential technology work that the engineers have been doing to allow us to deliver the experience that you demand. As always thank you so much for allowing us to do what we do to make this fantastic game happen.

Audio

This last month has been somewhat split into two as far as our main focuses (foci?!) of attention in audio have been concerned.

Firstly, we had CitizenCon, which was massive of course, and to varying degrees occupied the whole CIG Audio team right up until the event itself. Apart from the solid work that was done, i.e. the material that’s all going forward into the game, we put in an awful lot of work to try to make sure it was the best sounding event as far as the live streaming aspect was concerned. From our perspective, we weren’t altogether satisfied with Gamescom and there was a lot more we could do about CitizenCon’s audio quality and prep; making sure it all went smoothly was so important to us. Stefan Rutherford has to take a lot of credit for that, he was there throughout assisting the audio engineers and I feel that it really paid off.

It was awesome finally to show parts of Squadron 42 which has been something we’ve been working hard on for some time, our Dialogue Specialist Bob Rissolo put in some serious work to make sure that the Bishop’s Speech and Morrow Tour came across as well as they did on the vocal side of things. Talking of the Morrow Tour (also another facet of Squadron 42) – that featured sound design from most of the team but honourable mention to Ross Tregenza who owned that and ensured it all came together. Geoff Zanelli’s music was great to hear for all the Squadron 42 sections too. I have to mention Darren Lambourne, Luke Hatton, Jason Cobb, and our audio code team Sam Hall, Mikhail Korotyaev and Graham Phillipson who all put in so much effort to get it all across the line.

Hopefully you all saw (and heard) the StarMap which Phil Smallwood and Matteo Cerquone owned and pushed forward with on the audio side. Some great music from Pedro Macedo Camacho there for that too.

After CitizenCon, our second big focus for this last month has been SC Alpha 2.0, which features a lot of what was shown off at CitizenCon and more besides. E.g. on the dialogue front, we’ve been carrying out sessions for updated ship computer material and a whole host of requirements for various points of interest. We’ve also been continuing work on the many points of interest that you will be able to explore.

As well as the Alpha 2.0 work, we’ve been continuing on the sound for the Social Module, with audio also now being started on for the Million Mile High Club. Somehow we’ll get some ‘luxury’ sound in there! Also the FPS work has continued, esp. on the Foley side, and we’re now really looking to improve the EVA sound-scheme to contrast with the in-ship audio direction.

Of course ships are a massive aspect of our game and we’ve been both improving how we approach these, as well as creating whole sets of new pass-bys for specific ships and manufacturers. So they won’t just sound cool as they thunder past you, they’ll hopefully be more readily identifiable. This concept of ensuring consistent characters to different ship types is fuelling much of our 2.0 ship audio approach.

We’ve also been continuing to evaluate 3D Audio tech with a view to choosing an ideal solution for VR and headphones. We get a lot of posts about binaural audio and that has some bearing here, clearly.

Thanks for listening!

Animation

After a big push on getting the pcap pipeline up and running in order to support the Squadron 42 “Morrow Tour” demo that was shown at Citizen Con, the UK animation team has now joined in with supporting the SC Alpha 2.0 release by getting any of the FPS animations in order – this has involved R+D work for some of the team here to get to know the ropes, and then polishing up existing assets and supporting the Design and Code team with what they need.

We’ve also been spending time getting the new animator, Oscar, settled in to the team in Frankfurt and getting him up to speed with the tech so that he can work fulltime with the FPS team in Germany for the duration of the project.

QA

The QA team in the UK have been doing the usual of juggling the requests from Dev and supporting the live releases such as 1.3.0. Earlier in the month we even had some of the CitizenCon limelight when our team demoed Crusader, the Morrow Tour and the ARK Starmap live on stage to the sell-out capacity crowd which was quite a bit of pressure!

We’re now testing the hell out of SC Alpha 2.0 to get that ship shape for its introduction!

Also we’ve grown in size, with a new addition to the team in Ben Hickton and have another tester on the way next month so we’re looking forward to having more hands on deck. In part this is to replace the void that Assistant QA Manager, Geoff Coffin and his lovely beard have left in the team after making a switch to Tech Design.

Graphics

This month the graphics team have been putting the finishing touches to a number of features such as distant shadows, multi-crew ship damage, the improved LOD system, advanced face wrinkle shader. We’ve covered many of these in previous reports but as we get closer to releasing the next version of Arena Commander we’ve had to stress test these systems and fix all the bugs to ensure the backers get a good user experience. We’ve also been looking at lots of performance issues because as we’ve been expanding our maps we’ve been stress-testing the engine in ways it hasn’t experienced before. These have mainly been CPU optimisations rather than GPU optimisations as larger maps don’t necessarily results in more objects on screen, but do mean we need to process a lot more objects to check whether they’re visible and also to update their gameplay/AI.

One of the next features we’ll be focussing on is more improvements to the face shader. We’re getting some great results from the advanced face rigs we have, but the memory cost is currently pretty high and so we’re trialling a new technique that will vastly reduce the memory cost to just a small fraction of what it is currently, with the bonus of actually achieving more detail, so we’re excited to get this tested and hopefully in-game soon. We’re also going to start a major re-work of both the UI rendering and shield shader. Both of these were written very early in the project and as the design of the game has become more finalised it’s become clear they need an upgrade in order to do everything we’ll need in the final PU. For the UI we’ll be integrating it more closely into the rest of the rendering pipeline which will allow it to fit better into the scene and also be slightly cheaper to render. For the shield shader the technique will get a major visual and performance improvement which we’re excited to get started on!

Engineering

Just a short update from the UK this month. After a really successful CitizenCon at the beginning of the month we’re now working hard to get the large world map out and released into the wild. A lot of this is polishing up what we already have, bug fixing and performance improvements, but cumulative small polish is critical for delivering a game that plays smoothly, even on a powerful computer.

This doesn’t mean we’re not doing any new features. We’re looking at improving the Retaliator’s damage so you can get it to split in two, which is a bigger task than might be expected. When a piece breaks off a ship like the Retaliator then what the game recognises as the interior also has to be broken in two and a new instance created. Also our debris system wasn’t network synced as the pieces from a fighter were small enough not to really be concerned about. This obviously changes when you have a piece of Retaliator debris bigger than the ships you’ve flown so far, then we have to start worrying about it being in the same position on all clients. We could have just hacked a fix in for this build, but we want to do things properly which has meant making that whole system more robust and future proof going forwards. Takes more time in the short term but you benefit in the long run.

There is a lot more going in which we hope to be able to show you shortly, but we’re now at the stage where it’s just a case of working hard fixing up all the current issues.

Art

A lot of time has been focussed into hiring again this month, artists across the board, from all over the world and we are still going – if only we could add another level to this building like the environment guys do! Concept team has grown by two and given us a good boost in being able to dial in concept work Xi’an Scout, MISC Freelancer and Starlancer. We have a welcome Senior Character artist added to the team and they has been a flurry of activity on characters for SQ42 and heads for promo pieces (giving nothing away here!)

VFX

It’s been full steam (and other ambient effects!) ahead for Alpha 2.0 release. Specifically this means we have continued to polish and optimise the ship damage effects as well as ironing out some functionality concerns we had regarding how the interior effects trigger in relation to receiving exterior damage. That’s all coming together very nicely.

Also we did a fully sanity check on ship thruster effects to make sure they were still behaving as expected post-IFCS update. Fingers crossed, all good!

Aside from the ships, there have been lots of ambient environment effects polish and optimisation for the new map – leaking coolant, steam, airlock effects, holomaps and general space dust/debris to name but a few. There’s been a real focus on making sure these effects are as efficient as possible due to the sheer quantity required to populate such a massive area. We place these on a per-location basis, but as there are several locations within a single map, the overall particle entity count can get pretty huge. Thankfully we have a plethora of optimisation settings to play with, so within reason the effects shouldn’t cause too big a performance hit.

We’ve also been working with the graphics engineer to ensure our particles are being correctly lit/shadowed based on location/placement within visareas.

We also began R&D on a new type of ship weapon – can’t say too much about this but its effects requirements present us with some unique challenges. Looking forward to seeing this one take shape in the near future!

Ship Team

Ship team has been growing, we have an influx of new starters, here we always start them on props to get used to the pipeline and then add them into the production process of the ships. So, to the meat of it – Starfarer Interior, it’s ongoing, pushing to establish hero areas of the interior of the ship which then serves as the kit foundation of all other areas within the ship.

For the exterior, we continuing to establish the MISC exterior shader set / style, working up thrusters and landing gear in tandem. Additionally, the AEGIS Vanguard is marching forward to Hangar ready, using existing shaders and mesh parts established during the Retaliator production.

The Freelancer interior and exterior: still early days but the ship is really taking shape and giving off the MISC vibes, cockpit fitting, UI and cockpit fitting have worked hard to come up with something new and interesting yet functional for this ship so watch out for further updates.

The Sabre, currently being Greyboxed to establish a solid mesh foundation to build from at this stage, we’ll give this to ship tech to take through its paces and identify any snags before going into final production.

The Prop Team

Now Citizencon is out in the public I can talk a bit more freely about what the Prop team have been focused on. Citizencon was used as a test bed for how we are approaching dressing the larger multicrew ships. The hangar dressing was a main focus, we concentrated on building all the engineering and diagnostic tools that the engineers need to keep their fleet in working order. A lot of work was also put into supporting the animations and performance captures, we have a good understanding of the technical set up required for getting the props working with the animation data. There is still a lot of work to be done on the smaller scale human props that we want to deliver, to really sell that lived-in feeling when you step on board these ships and environments, but the engineers are now geared up to fix any battle scars your fleet of fighters may receive!

The prop team is now focusing on 2 major areas, the ship components and the shopping experience. The ship components are super exciting for us, it’s going to pave the way in terms of ship customisation and performance. We are supporting the design team and making sure that all the options they want to give to the players from a game play point of view are viable from an art standpoint. So far its super exciting, the concepts are fantastic and we hope to have the first couple completed soon. Once we have the foundations in place we should be delivering new component artwork on a regular basis.

The shopping experience is part of the social module, it’s all about giving the players more options. I don’t want to give away just yet what shop is our focus but nailing that immersive shopping experience is our priority, making the shop feel alive and used when you walk and purchase your wares.

Summing this month up in two words, it would be dressing and customisation!

Environment Art

Optimise, test, polish, bug, repeat. This has been the mantra for the environment team since the demo you saw of SCA2.0 at Citizencon. It’s not the most fun part of game development but is an absolutely crucial step to ensure then end experience for the user is as good as possible.

The final level of dressing has been added to the scenes, everything from personal belongings left behind to half eaten boxes of Big Benny’s noodles – this process lets us tell small stories within the environment and hopefully adds the human element to the scene.

SCA2.0 has been the perfect proof of concept for large world environments and space stations for both the PU and SQ42, its shown how modular building sets can work and how amazing it can be to create space stations real time in the editor – simply amazing tech!

The environment team can’t wait to see you guys play 2.0, we want to see lots of videos of you guys exploring, and having fun within the sandbox 