Hi all,

It’s been another busy month again for us in the UK. Always helps when the temperature is plummeting outside and it’s raining, as there is no reason to be anywhere else but in the office. We’ve made great strides with S42, from everything from getting all our Vanduul and UEE capital ships into the production pipeline, using the new modular system to really start building out the levels in the game, as well as charging forward with the Character pipeline. Not to mention taking all of Illfonics cool FPS work (along with Moon Collider’s AI) and incorporating it into our working branch so we can have combat in the levels. Arena Commander 1.0 work is going well in collaboration with the rest of the studios, and we’re just about to kick off the first tests and actual final animation with our first UK motion capture shoot which is taking place in London over the next couple of weeks.

Loads of info below for you below from the guys. Everybody have a fantastic holiday break, enjoy yourselves, and I look forward to updating you guys (and showing all the cool stuff) next month!

Art

Environment Art

This month we’ve created the interior Tier building set for Shubin Interstellar. It’s really basic whitebox geometric split up into individual building blocks which can be used to create an almost infinite variety of layouts. Design department can now run free and create environments using this building set without needing art support, leaving the art team to get started on the Greybox phase

We’re also starting to get an understanding of what being Inside the facility is like and drive the types of artistic experience you get as you engage in various missions – not only will it be functional but also mechanically beautiful in its own way!

Ships

The Vehicle team has been hard at work this month! We’re preparing the Gladiator for Hangar release along with further development and refinement of the Retaliator interior, we have 3 guys on this so its shifting along at a good pace. As you know the Gladius was released into the hangars a couple of weeks ago and so now it’s time to get the ship Flight ready which also means we are going to test the new damage system in-engine very soon! Our tech department has been working hard along with our artists to bring a more resource light but visually heavy damage system up and running (watch this space)The Argo Utility vehicle is getting some further attention and will make a great addition to the fleet. The Idris and Javelin capships are still ongoing for their interiors, both of them will feature heavily in SQ42 and we really want to make these ships shine! And last but not least for ships, we are creating the final versions for the Gladius and Gladiator weapons and missile racks.

Animation

The Retaliator, oh the beautiful Retaliator – it’s being rigged and animated and its continuing its journey to deliver a visual treat! Previz animations are being pumped out for testing out our conversation system as well as making sure the sleeping pods/ rescue pods system works as we hoped.

Gladiator is being finalized for hangar ready, not long now and you’ll be looking around and taking movies of its loveliness! (you can tell we are fans :D)

Finally, prep for the mocap shoot is underway! Teams from around the company are visiting next week and we’ll be tackling all the issues that remain in the cinematic pipeline to deliver the experience the fans expect.

VFX

Damage effects, damage effects and more damage effects! :) Specifically, better quality smoke, fire, sparks and explosions, both interior and exterior along with a smattering of Arena Commander map VFX improvements and bug fixes

Characters

This month we’ve successfully built and tested our facial scanning rig; it’s a thing of beauty – well, we think so :D We have 48 SLR cameras perfectly timed to capture the likeness of a model within 1/100’s of a second as well as capture the 70+ facial expressions we will use to drive the facial animation.

3Lateral and Infinite Realities gave the studio a visit too, ensuring our rig and processes are world class and the results we are seeing are fantastic. We’re also exploring the possibility of using the camera rig for other purposes, such as creating light probes, PBR and material surface calibration as well as scanning other items and objects like a hand (but we can do whatever – a rock, a hat, a gun etc)

We’ve assembling a shortlist of some of the most impressive and beautiful body models that we can scan, process and model to create the foundations for all of the new characters and character customisation system within the Star Citizen universe, with these and the new pipeline, it will take the very best of what star citizen has to offer and look ahead to pushing the quality of the all of the characters within the star citizen universe – we are shooting for the moon, nay, the stars on this one!

Audio

Hello again everyone!

In November, we’ve been getting the ship computer voice stuff updated – pick-up sessions with those ship computers that we already have are coming. And getting a whole new ship computer voice recorded too, Drake. Aegis we need to cover so that’ll be coming next month. The UI sound scheme is something we’ve been working hard on for the different manufacturers; trying to get that meaningful and consistent but stylistically different across them all is a challenge. In fact, here are some words from Stefan about this very subject:



Recently the audio team has been putting some thought into the ship computer UI sounds. Some of the messages are so important that it is imperative that the player understands them. Because of this we have devised rules for some of the most critical of sounds. The idea is to impart meaning through the sounds rather than just inherit it over time (through repetition of the event in-game). Therefore Morse code has been loosely used to help describe the sonic response. Each manufacturer will follow these rules but the tonality of the sounds will be different. If you’d spent your whole time in the ‘verse driving an Aegis ship and then decided to become a space pirate and jump in a Drake ship you should still be able to understand the UI sound for the critical sounds but also hear the different character of the sounds for each manufacturer. Sounds will be layered on top that do not fit within the suggested rhythm’s to add interesting design ideas/character and possibly add more meaning (dissonant honks might indicate a more serious warning for example). Just to add in a bit of a twist we’d likely change these rules for alien races to help it feel like a more alien environment.



Ui/Warning Name Rhythm Sound Rules Rationale for Rule Creation Example System Down .- … the ‘-’ should bend upwards in pitch. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid loss of life (and ships!). Your browser does not support the audio element. Shields Down … Each ‘.’ should descend in pitch (sort of like the UI is reflecting a power down). Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid loss of life (and ships!). Your browser does not support the audio element. Objective received —- Three longer beeps. Should be pretty neutral sounding in tone. Objectives are very important to the player. Ensuring that these are communicated without confusion is very important. Your browser does not support the audio element. Missile Locking Me — .- Same as Missile locked me but without the ‘-’ rising pitch. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid loss of life (and ships!). Your browser does not support the audio element. Missile Locked Target — The last ‘-’ should be a fifth (or octave) above. It seems reasonable to think that manufacturers would standardize such a sound to make such a drastic action (locking missiles!) obvious. Your browser does not support the audio element. Missile Locked Me — .- Each ‘-’ should rise in pitch. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid loss of life (and ships!). Your browser does not support the audio element. Missile Lock Lost — The last ‘-’ should be a fifth (or octave) below. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid loss of life (and ships!). Your browser does not support the audio element. Missile Evaded — . Each note should rise in pitch in order to sound ‘positive’. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid loss of life (and ships!). Your browser does not support the audio element. Life Support Offline .- .-.. Timed in the same way as the example. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid loss of life (and ships!). Your browser does not support the audio element. Ejection Warning .- . The ‘-’ should rise in pitch. The sound should repeat as long as the warning is displayed. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid accidental ejection. Your browser does not support the audio element. Critical Hit Alarm (taken hit) .- . . Each of the -‘s should bend upwards in pitch. Important to understand damage taken. Your browser does not support the audio element. Collision . . Should repeat as the warning repeats. Manufacturers might standardize such a sound to avoid unnecessary damage to ships. Your browser does not support the audio element.

Ships

Ships: Gladiator – we’ve has been working on that, getting to Hangar Ready for you all so that all moving parts make required sound where possible. Everything Is quite ship-focused for us right now as you can tell. We’ve been looking at thrusters, we really want to up our game with those and it’s quite a complex system so bear with us on that; a lot of work’s being done in this area. It’s related to the missile system too which we’re looking at currently for a future release.

Generally, in audio we’ve been ramping up on getting resources in, making sure we have the tools we need. This has involved talking to all sorts of talented people as well as getting in software and hardware for evaluation. We have a new sound designer starting here in January which is excellent news! And we’re still searching in that area… get in touch if you’re a great sound designer reading this, we’re always on the look-out currently.

As far as the back-end of audio goes – Wwise integration steadily continues on the programming side, we’re almost at a stage where we can start the process of taking our assets across from FMOD to Wwise. It’s a pretty big job, however! And there’s just no automatic way to go about it, really is quite a lot of authoring work.

Also this month we’ve been talking to companies about 3D Audio. That includes binaural, high resolution HRTF, room modelling (delay, or echo, and reverberation models) and spatialisation. It’s a pretty competitive space but it’s an interesting field to look into. This will benefit most those of you that immerse yourself with headphones, and longer term for any VR systems such as Oculus Rift obviously. However it is still relevant to those listening on speakers; all those delays/reverbs provide spatial cues for everyone!

Stefan did some rather cool stuff involving some old speakers, taking them apart, balancing various objects on the drivers and playing UI sounds out of them in order to ‘dirty them up’ for one of the ship manufacturers. We’d love to show you this but the videos just don’t seem to want to get off the camera/phone that we used! But we’ll work on it and try to get that to you next time.

Okay, that’s all for now! Thanks for listening.

Programming

A lot of work this month going on underneath the bonnet of Star Citizen, work which is never immediately apparent but necessary to make sure we can deliver on all the features for the future. Moving over to Wwise for our audio is a good case in point. Initially the audio in the Wwise Perforce stream has taken a large step back with most of it no longer working, and over the next few months there will be a lot of work just getting it back to where we are at the moment, but going forwards it will allow us to do so much more with all the tools and tech it affords to make Star Citizen not only the best looking, but also the best sounding, game out there!

Similarly we are refactoring the vehicle seat code, which will involve some pain to begin with, but is required to make our multi-crewed capital ships work in the way we want them to work. We’re helping out with the other studios with server optimizations to increase the number of players that can connect to a game, moving over to a global entity id which will allow players to move between servers in the PU, and the new StoryForge tool, built upon DataForge, to help the designers/scriptwriters set up dialogue and conversations. We’ve also done a localisation pass as well, transferring all of the hardcoded strings from the code/xml files into our database now that our localisation system is up and running.

Finally on the Squadron 42 side we’re continuing to do work on the various game mechanics we require, including zero-g traversal, a new looting mechanic, takeoff/landing and the conversation/reputation system. And we’re continuing to polish and refine the Arena Commander module for its 1.0.0 release.

Graphics Programming

We’ve been continuing our work on the volumetric gas shader and we’re at a point where the artists and level designers can start to ‘white box’ their level with the shapes of these gas clouds. They can do this by creating a simple mesh defining the overall shape and the code then turns this into a fluffy gas cloud by adding all the complexity to the broad shape, and this frees the artists from modelling minute details on the gas clouds. The next stage will be to start work on the lighting and shadows which is the most complex part of volumetric rendering.

We’ve also been making progress on the new ship damage shader, and aim to have a visual prototype working in December. This will include precise location specific dents, burn marks & embers, and even holes in the weaker areas of the hull, and the aim is to give players more dynamic and impressive effects that really tell the story of what impacts your ship has taken.

The rest of our focus has been on fixing issue for upcoming v1.0.0 release, improving the distant star rendering to give show much more detail and greater artist flexibility, and looking into various performance improvements.

Design

Another productive month for design over here in the UK.

Arena Commander has been progressing well towards V1 . The rear view camera first implementation is in and the chase cam has been improving greatly. Single player “Vanduul Swarm” now has 18 waves, and balancing is going well. Also, first implementation of self-destruct is now in and working, this will be getting more love post V1 . More work has been put into the scoring balancing and that is something we will continue tweaking when we get all the backer feedback. All the new art assets have all gone into the race maps and the end game camera now works. We have designed the AC tutorial but it won’t make it in for V1, hopefully V1.1 now.

The Tech guys have got the Gladiator hanger ready now and it’s looking nice. The Avenger and Cutlass should be flight ready by V1 as they are progressing well. We are still looking at the cockpit layouts for all of the ships and standardizing screen ratio’s across all of them so that the HUD information can be configured to suit the player. We made an Idris test-bed to run some AI scenarios to see how it’s turrets operated. It’s very early days on this but it did prompt a few suggestions for additional coverage in a couple of areas.

S42 is progressing well with new “White-Box” reviews being done on the various locations. The modular Shubin base components are staring to roll in from art and they look great! I can’t really give much away on the S42 side because of spoilers which is a blow considering we have about 80% of our design resources here working on that title. Thanks again for all the super useful input from the community. I hope everyone has a fantastic Christmas and I’m really looking forward to us getting some awesome content out next year.

Cheers