Hello Citizens! Another good month in Manchester. We’re quite pleased to have Alpha 2.4 in Citizens’ hands, and we’re eager for you to see some of the other content we’ve been working on. Here’s June!

Concept Art

The concept team is growing, we have secured two new artists to join the team, one will be taking on the mushrooming list of props and the second chap will be tackling environments plus anything else we can throw at him :)

As most of you will know the Drake Dragonfly went out the door for its concept sale, all I want to do now is put the whole team on making the other manufacturers versions but that’s just my own wish and I hand on heart have no idea what the plans are for more (no really I don’t!).

Gav Rothery has just wrapped up a new ship that I think looks pretty awesome and we’re now focusing back on solving some Klaus and Werner FPS weapon designs and fleshing out the family (in addition to some work on the new corvette!)

A new small vehicle has also been worked up and passed straight to the production team – hmm I wonder when that’ll come out??..Ship items and props are ripping along and the whole universe feels like it’s starting to be more cohesive which can only be a good thing.

Also taking some time to work with Justin in LA and solve some areas of the Caterpillar that needed another round of attention and love – don’t worry owners, it’s mainly some shape language work to the command module and Turret – looks good, but then I’m biased!

Next month we’ll be addressing ship weapons and how to make more from less – watch this space.

Environment Team

The environment team has been working on many different tasks this month. As always the main production focus is on a sq42 level, and now we’ve started to move into the Final Art phase for most of the Shubin interior levels too. We are hardening up the Levski landing zone environment and bedding it into the procedural tech – feels really cool flying from space and onto a planet! Our lighting team has been blocking in some visual target areas for GrimHEX, this environment is shaping up and have a really good flavour to it. There is a demo coming up and we’re well on the way making sure we’re going to show you something special.

Props

As mentioned last month we have been on the final push for this batch of ship items. Shields, Coolers, Power Plants and Quantum drives are on their final art pass and we are just finishing up the last few Avionics modules, this should be complete within the next sprint (possible two…) and that closes off the first round of ship components.

We’ve had 3 new artists start in June so it’s been a busy few weeks but it is really going to help with supporting all the different areas of the game that require props and ship items.

Work has also progressed with the useable items which allow our players and AI to be able to fully interact with the props and environments, it’s a collaboration between the animation, design and props teams and will add that layer of natural interaction that will help to fully immerse the player in the game world.

With the amazing new procedural tech coming online we are looking at what we need to do to really push the visuals and work out what technical limitations we will need to accommodate when we ramp up resources for the feature.

Looking forward we are moving some of the team onto the smaller vehicle components to support the release of the Drake Dragonfly and pushing forward with the other ship item types while the rest of the team continue ploughing through our Squadron 42 prop list and as always do our best to squash any bugs with our live releases.

All in all, it has been a busy but productive month… and next month will be more of the same!

Spaceships

With another exciting month having gone by, the ship team in the UK has been plenty busy. We have made substantial progress on the Bengal with the main hangar, hangar lift wrapping up shortly along with the interior and exterior bridge of the ship. Idris interior does not have many more rooms left to do, with the team now focusing on some final polish before moving on to lighting and exterior damage.

Every improvement we make on the Idris will directly benefit the Javelin, one of the many benefits of using the manufacturer set to keep pushing the quality bar. Speaking of the Javelin, a lot of time has been spent finding the right look and feel for the hangar which is needed in both Squadron 42 and when it goes live in the PU. So capital ship progress is coming along great!

What about the other ships you ask? Well, we are happy to report that the Argo is wrapping up this week where we are left to hand it over to remaining disciplines and ensure it has everything it needs in order to go out to all of you! Several improvements have been made to the pod since it was last shown so keep a look out! We have also started production on both the Dragonfly and another vehicle, something we are all very excited for as it presents new challenges for us to tackle. The Dragonfly will be finishing its whitebox phase this week. Lastly, we are doing a lot of work to make sure the Vanduul ships look great, the UK team are focusing on the Driller (a carrier) at the moment. Every lesson learned here will allow us to share procedures and techniques across the entire Vanduul fleet!

Graphics

This month the graphics team have primarily been focussing on fixing bugs for the next release, and continuing with several major refactors to the underlying renderer code to pave the way for future features (e.g. improved transparency sorting & phasing out of DirectX 9 style code to help move to newer graphics APIs).

The gas cloud tech is also undergoing a major change to make use of a ‘bricked’ voxel format which allows increased detail in just the areas we need it. This is crucial for achieving details on very large gas clouds that would otherwise require a prohibitive amount of memory. The brick format should also allow us to make a number of optimisations where we can perform fewer calculations on large open areas.

The work on the improved HDR effects is continuing with upgrades to the exposure control system, but we’re excited that the new physically based bloom and lens flares have been enabled in the main development branch meaning this will be part of the next release to the backers. The new optical effects are faster than the previous effects, look much better, and crucially allow art to globally change the appearance of these affects with just a few button presses rather than having to tweak hundreds of individual flares. This is because the new flares are created in screen-space rather than being hand placed, and as a result we get flares off reflections too (e.g. when the sun reflects of the very shiny Starfarer).

Animation

This month we’ve been focusing in on the core FPS elements of the game. A new jump mechanic is being worked out, as well as testing stocked cover and blind fire and making tweaks where necessary to keep first and third person working well together. New pistol and stocked reload animations have been worked on to give a bit more weight and feel to reloading the weapons. We’ve been involved in testing the new camera and eye stabilisation and working our way through as many assets as possible to give a nice solid core feeling to the fps portion of the game. Selecting and deselecting weapons has been given another pass, working with tech animation we’re very hopeful to get a more polished 1P and 3P system online very soon. We’re excited with the progress even if there is still a lot more to come.

Engineering

Always seems to be a busy month getting a new release out, this time 2.4.0. As mentioned previously this was a large release for us because it’s the first time we’ve effected persistence in this production environment, and it changed the way a lot of systems worked, which in the long run is a very good thing but it was a major piece of engineering with a great deal of complexity.

Moving on from that we’ve been aware for a long time that some pretty hefty enhancements to CryNetwork would be required for a project of this scale, and getting 2.4.0 out really just re-emphasised this. CryNetwork was really starting to creak under the demands we’re making of it. We’re now chomping at the bit to start making a sustained effort on developing the new technology we’ve been designing on paper and proving it in the codebase. One such technology is the Global Serialized Variables which are designed to make the gameplay programmers’ lives easier and help optimise the network bandwidth. Previously when we were using “aspects” it is up to the gameplay programmer to decide what information needed to be sent over the network and then also to deal with both writing that information out on one end and reading it back in again at the other. This was always prone to mistakes in transmission because of the nature of network latency, which is unfortunately never really under your control. If you don’t receive, read, and parse the data in exactly the same manner you wrote it out you end up with a disconnection, which can prove more fiddly than you’d imagine. It was also very inefficient as if even one bit of data got changed the whole aspect block would have to get sent. The serialized variables takes all that away, the programmer just marks which variables they want to replicate to the server/clients and then the underlying system can just detect which have changed since the last time they were sent, and which haven’t, and takes care of the rest in a nice and efficient manner.

We’ve also been having problems with the underlying message queue which, although it would send packets through reliably, they wouldn’t necessarily come through in the correct order, and so you end up with a lot of code having to untangle that. Issues caused by this are very hard to track down and fix, especially within the real-time requirements of a multiplayer game, as by their nature they are completely random and the fixes tend to be horrible and nasty. We’re completely rewriting this message queue and it is going to be designed to better enforce the ordering and transmission of packets. This means we can make certain assumptions which will help clean up the codebase, for example if you get a message telling a player to respawn you know that the message killing them in the first place has already arrived and been processed. If there are any logicians out there in the audience, you’d love this stuff.

Otherwise gameplay progress has been ticking over nicely on all the usual aspects of the game.

Audio

Hello all! June was another busy month for CIG Audio. Here’s a breakdown of what people have been up to.

Sam Hall was mainly working on getting the dynamic bank loading to work as it should. As it stands, work is 99% complete, but we still need to deal with bank loading synchronisation before we can go live with it – this is to ensure sounds play on cue first time, every time.

Sam has also been optimising the Editor’s audio plugin start-up time to help with productivity. It now saves up to ten seconds every time the Editor starts up. Though this may seem inconsequential in the context of a single instance, all these periods waiting add up! (Think about how much time you’d lose in your own life if you had to wait at least ten seconds every time you opened your email or a Word document) Sam’s also currently working on improving the audio playback with the animation tool, Mannequin.

Graham Phillipson has been refactoring and refining the code to better support reverbs and weapon tails, to make transition between areas smoother and more “realistic”. Added more options to audio mark-up for how audio triggers begin. At the start of the month he got the prototype together for in-game VOIP which has wide-ranging implications for the persistent universe.

Darren Lambourne has been undertaking general maintenance of ship audio (improving sync on anims, bug fixing). Establish the audio structure (geometry and Wwise side) for the playable Idris, and working on designing the ‘tone’ and first pass implementation of the Idris ambiences.

Luke Hatton has been working on new explosion sounds so that smaller ship sizes (Hornet, Xian Scout, M50) aren’t quite as overbearing as the larger ones. He’s also been working on more pass-bys for the likes of the Origin M50; he’s currently looking at the pass-bys for the Starfarer, which require a different style because of the sheer size of the ship.

Stefan Rutherford has been continuing work on the GrimHex map, putting down the foundations there for ambience. We’ve changed our process quite a lot where ambience is concerned; this is a lot more spatialized these days rather than made up of ‘2D’ beds/backgrounds so that the audio is far more compatible with head-tracking based audio rendering (i.e. VR) and also offers more momentary variation and interest. Otherwise he’s been revising and improving upon the FPS weapons.

Ross Tregenza has been primarily designing a system that will play cool cinematic music in a self-managing and context sensitive way throughout the Persistent Universe. He’s been working with Pedro Macedo Camacho to get the new music in place and fine tune the system – it’s already sounding awesome. The dynamic music system is also starting to make its way into Squadron 42, where it’ll be used in tandem with bespoke set piece music for the most dramatic moments of the game. He’s been working with Geoff Zanelli on that content – again, already sounding fantastic, even in its early days.

Ross has also been working on ambient sound for a variety of locations across Squadron 42, and keeping the audio guys informed of any S42 based developments, as well as assisting the dialogue guys when possible to help progress the battle-chatter systems.

Simon Price has been improving scalability of the dialogue pipeline, migrating Ship Computer dialogue over to the communication system ahead of a refactor/standardisation. Also generally porting dialogue to use the CommunicationSystem to give designers more control.

Bob Rissolo – lot of prep and preproduction work for S42 shoots, combined with editing dialogue for cinematics, making progress on the pipeline tools and tech with Simon.

Phil Smallwood has been riding shotgun with Bob recently so as to assist him on S42 shoot dialogue capture duties, and undertaking some dialogue edit work too.

Matteo Cerquone started taking ownership of various sub-systems such as physics, character Foley, as well as assisting Ross with S42 sound design.

Ewan Brown has been implementing support for multi-positional sounds within the game editor, which is a neat optimisation that reduces the number of voices for a given sound, even if it’s assigned to play from multiple positions. He’s also been working on low level audio synchronisation and various Mannequin tool improvements.

Last (but not least), Jason Cobb has been hard at work at a whole list of tasks! He’s been developing audio build validation scripts, fixing voice leaks, documenting test cases for Flowgraph audio trigger fixes and more… real nitty gritty stuff that will make Star Citizen all the more immersive from an audio persiectve! He’s about 90% complete an area-based mix state mark-up for multicrew ships, and he has been investigating the same for single-seat ships.

VFX

As has been the case company-wide this past month, the VFX team has dedicated a significant amount of time focusing on asset clean-up. Specifically in our case, we have been making sure none of our particle libraries are referencing missing textures, materials, custom lens flares or objects. These are the sort of tasks no one looks forward to, but there is something quite satisfying about whittling your way down a long error log list! Caleb in Frankfurt has been working hard on this, so no doubt he will elaborate on this process.

As well as this, we have been performing other general maintenance tasks such as converting various assets – smoke, fire and explosions in particular – over to the new heat map/gradient tech we now have in place. This is an ongoing process, as there are loads of legacy assets we want to convert in order to take advantage of the new tech.

Speaking of which, the new heat maps and gradients tie in beautifully with the optical bloom and flares that you will hopefully see in the next live release, as well as the tiled particle lighting we mentioned briefly in last month’s report. It’s been a long process getting all this tech to come together, but we feel confident that in the long run you will see a big step up in the quality of our effects!

In terms of new content, more work has been done on weapon impact effect variants, a polish pass on a new laser cannon, and an environment VFX pass for a new PU location. Finally, we have done an effects pass for flight-ready Reliant.

As always, busy busy busy!

Design

It’s been a busy June in the design department here in the UK. The Live team have grown to 4 full time designers and will be 5 in mid-July. I don’t want to spoil anything so I will just say that they are all working flat out working on expanding the content for the 2.7 Live release for the Stanton System. There is a lot of cool stuff going into that release on the systems side that we are excited to get out into the community, such as the new landing and take-off work that is being implemented by Craig. As of me writing this it is all using placeholder (programmer art), but are hopeful that Zane and crew will be able to take a pass at it before it is released into Live.

The systems design team have been working on MobiGlas and particularly the StarMap app, which is looking great as a portable version of our favourite web app.

As you will probably see from other reports we are refactoring the AI system for both combat and interstitials into one system called “Subsumption” that will systemically deal with a huge variety of different AI states. While this has affected some of the progress on a few S42 levels, it is looking hugely encouraging for the levels as a whole, cutting down massively on a lot of complex and sometimes fragile bespoke scripting from design.

The Tech team are working on the various ships and vehicles and we are hopeful to get the DragonFly, which is feeling very fun and different to what you will be used to, into the live stream soon. We are also almost there with the Argo light utility ship!

That’s it for now, except to say a big thanks as always for your fantastic support.

QA

UK QA have been very busy over the past month. Our primary focus was getting Alpha 2.4.0 out of the door. This required us to work in sync with our ATX counterparts, as well as the select backers in the Evocati group. As you’re no doubt aware, Alpha 2.4.0 is probably our biggest update since 2.0.0, with the introduction of shopping and persistence to Crusader, as well the Starfarer and Starfarer Gemini, our biggest flyable ships to date!

Alpha 2.4.0 is now in your hands, and has recently been patched up to Alpha 2.4.1 in order to extinguish a nasty infinite loading screen bug and an issue with ship persistence. We have continued to monitor the Live build, gathering feedback from you guys, as well as looking into issues that only seem to arise when the game is out in the wild.

Beyond that, testing on Squadron 42 continues as development ramps up, with our dedicated Squadron 42 testers performing daily smoke tests to help the devs narrow down on persistent issues. Adam Parker, our resident ship expert, has been putting the Reliant and the Argo through their initial paces. Mark Tobin, FPS extraordinaire, has been leading initial group tests on the FPS systems. Mark White, one of our seniors, has been testing additional systems you’ll be hearing about shortly!