Throughout April, the AI Team made a ton of improvements for the release of Alpha 3.5. This included optimizing the AI EventDispatcher to register entities to specific events, which brought down CPU usage from around 12 milliseconds to 600 microseconds. They also optimized the navigation mesh loading time during server-level initialization and deferred behavior-specific queries to the zone system to take advantage of multi-threading and use less CPU time during subsumption updates.

A project to optimize usables began that will eventually allow the team to cache animation and navigation data for interactive objects and improve runtime usage. This will be most useful in densely-populated areas like landing zones and space stations. The team are also looking to improve the compilation times for subsumption task nodes and extend the Tactical Point System ( TPS ) to allow the time-sliced evaluation of game-code-defined functionalities.

Away from optimization, human combat AI was refactored to allow a more modular approach to the definition of tactics and behavior. The aim of this is to give the designers an efficient template that they can expand on and customize as they like.

Animation is working on a new mission giver, Eddie Parr, a bartender who gives out missions. So, to match the gold standard of our mission givers, we are adjusting the bartender experience to make the experience as engaging and realistic as possible. They’re also refiningbar patron animations to help populate the locations that Eddie will be bartending. Part of this work moves the team forward on their ‘recycled body animation tech’ (), which will help them expand the ever-growing universe while keeping the animation footprint down without sacrificing quality.

The Landing Zone Team began early whitebox exploration of Crusader’s landing zone, Orison. Basic architectural forms and structures are being developed and even at this early stage, the mood and atmosphere is unique and interesting. The team are also working alongside Level Design to find the right balance between expansive on-foot areas and keeping essential points of interest within sensible traversal times of each other.

The Modular Team finished whiteboxing new sets of assets for more diverse space station exterior shapes. Prefabs, rules, and filters that enable the procedural tool to do its thing are being established too, with promising early results. All of this will lead to a much more interesting and diverse set of station exteriors to fly around and land at very soon.

The Environment Team also focused on the ‘hi-tech’ common elements found throughout New Babbage. The new hangar, hab, transit, garage, and security elements are currently being finished up and readied for their debut in Alpha 3.8. On the organics side, they completed another push on procedural caves and continued to update the PU’s existing planets, including investigating canyons (the first results of which are looking very promising).

Art (Ships)





Lead Vehicle Artist Chris Smith completed the whitebox phase of another as-yet-unnamed ship, which means the basic low-poly geometry and components are now usable in-engine. Chris now moved onto the greybox phase, where he will further refine the geometry, make a first lighting pass, and properly tackle the cockpit area.

Vehicle Artist Josh Coons is concentrating on refining the textures and materials of the Banu Defender, which are essential to getting the desired final look. He is also progressing with the interior lighting and receiving assistance from the LA-based Vehicle Team on the cockpit area and a few additional texture sets.



MISC Reliant variants (the Mako, Sen, and, Tana) and continued work on the Origin 315p, 325a, and 350r. The Esperia Prowler completed its whitebox phase and now joins the Banu Defender in greybox. Progress was also made on the Kruger P-72 Archimedes, which is due for release in Alpha 3.6. Vehicle Content helped release the Origin 300i rework and theReliant variants (the Mako, Sen, and, Tana) and continued work on the Origin 315p, 325a, and 350r. The Esperia Prowler completed its whitebox phase and now joins the Banu Defender in greybox. Progress was also made on the Kruger P-72 Archimedes, which is due for release in Alpha 3.6.



RSI Constellation, making a pass on vehicle hull proxies, and reworking landing gear compression on the Drake Caterpillar. Aside from art and design, Tech Art completed several smaller tasks including building a new template tool, reorganizing hierarchies on theConstellation, making a pass on vehicle hull proxies, and reworking landing gear compression on the Drake Caterpillar.









Art (Weapons)

Last month, Weapon Art worked on finishing the Behring S38 pistol, Apocalypse Arms Animus missile launcher, and Klaus & Werner Lumin V submachine gun.

Audio (PU)

This month, Audio started work on the next quarter’s goals alongside looking at polishing sections of the newly-released Area18. The team felt that some sections of the city would benefit from extra attention, namely ambient sounds in various areas, which will be live in an as-yet undetermined future patch.

For Alpha 3.6, the team are looking at the new features currently under development and are providing support where needed, such as on the new Behring ballistic pistol and MaxOx NN-Series neutron repeater. They’re also looking into the various UI additions that coincide with new gameplay features to ensure everything is up to the expected quality.

Backend Services

Throughout April, Backend Services primarily supported the launch of Alpha 3.5. However, optimizations were made to the persistence backend pipeline, various bugs were fixed, and adjustments were made to various backend-supported gameplay features. They’re also finishing up the new iCache, with only testing and integration remaining. They’re currently working on a prototype of the new Star Service, which marries game server and diffusion technologies, allowing more gameplay systems to live in scalable services on the backend.

Characters

The Character Team worked on several concepts for outfits and locations, including plenty of new items for microTech. They also started concepting new armor and continued through the high-poly stage with others. Now that the female player character is in the PU, all the existing clothing is being brought up to standard to work with the new model. Work also continued on the hair pipeline, specifically on tools to help the artists build new hairstyles that consistently meet Star Citizen’s quality standards.

Alpha 3.5’s character customizer was top priority for many of the team throughout April, which was immediately followed by planning the next iteration that will come in Alpha 3.6. Alongside customizer work, they began improving and integrating the VoIP and chat system into Arena Commander and Star Marine and gave support to limited-commodity shopping.







Community



The Community Team dived into April with an MISC Reliant variants. Over 500 submissions were received – thanks to all who entered! The Community Team dived into April with an Easter Screenshot Contest that highlighted hard-to-find locations in the ‘verse like Benny Henge and the Javelin wreck. Players were tasked with tracking them down and capturing their best images for a chance to win one of the newly-introducedReliant variants. Over 500 submissions were received – thanks to all who entered!

The team launched another commercial contest this time focusing on the agile and aggressive Anvil Arrow. Producers, editors, and camera operators still have until May 15th to send in their work.

After a three-week hiatus, Thursday’s show is back! Inside Star Citizen gives a firsthand look at Star Citizen’s development with a new name and a revamped format. Our live show has undergone a major makeover too – Star Citizen Live broadcasts on our Twitch channel every Friday. The first episode sees Jared and Luke Presley embroiled in the criminal underworld of Area18.

Some of the Community Team visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester for BritizenCon , the unofficial annual UK Star Citizen fan convention. A big thank you to the organizers for putting on such a great event.

Gamescom 2949 is right around the corner and the team are looking forward to meeting all the Star Citizen fans making the trip to Cologne. The Community Team will be on hand at Bar Citizen events in the evenings, with Friday’s meetup including special guests Erin Roberts and Brian Chambers. Exclusive goodies to give away are in the making too, so check out the agenda and make sure you say hello!

Design

The first and one of the most noticeable changes Design made recently is regarding the economy. For Alpha 3.5, item distribution was completely refactored in a few noticeable ways, including a ‘travel tax’ that’s now applied to items as they appear further from the point that they entered the system. The aim is to mimic real life in how item prices are affected by how far they have traveled from their production source, but also to make it so that players can find better deals on items if they’re willing to search them out. This feature will continue to be refined in the future. Regarding item distribution itself, the entire item list (2300+ items) was redistributed into the various shops based on the shop’s brand franchise. As the franchise list expands and more come, players will start to see items reach their ‘ultimate’ homes.

NPC s (the ability for players to respond to this beacon type will be coming in a subsequent release). The team also added what they’re calling ‘spoofed’ missions, which are driven through the Service Beacon feature. These are important to the team as they’re the first attempt at having AI dynamically generate missions for players as they fly around the universe. Currently, the AI will only request combat assistance from players, but the doors are now open to start using the approach for other beacons as further AI features come online. For example, the team are currently working on a refueling beacon for Alpha 3.6 that will allow players to request fuel froms (the ability for players to respond to this beacon type will be coming in a subsequent release).

Design are making progress with the latest version of the bartender archetype. They currently have several of the core usables set up with blocked-in animations to enable them to check everything functions as expected in preparation for an upcoming motion capture session.

Design partnered with the Mission Feature Team to create new missions for (probably) Tecia ‘Twitch’ Pacheco in Alpha 3.6. Alongside the main aim of creating new content, this will help one of the designers get up to speed with the mission toolset.

Finally, an internal initiative to improve the Service Beacon creation pipeline was launched. This is because, at present, it takes considerable work for the programmers to add new beacon types into the game. With the help of the UI Team, new technology is being created to allow the designers to create UI screens on their own with little to no programmer support. This is important to the team who plan to regularly add new beacon types which, at the moment, can be quite difficult. In the future, players can expect new beacons added much more regularly.

Engineering

DOF . They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). Alongside profiling and squashing bugs for Alpha 3.5, the Engineering Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality fixes for gather-based. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor).

They continued to collect system-wide context switch information to aid in performance analysis and parallel processing optimization (just on Linux for now). Various improvements and robustness changes for crash digest computation were made too, the results of which will be used in Sentry.

The team also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.

FPS mode. The team spent a lot of time supporting the release of Alpha 3.5, which included tackling a lot of crash and build-stability-related bugs. When the patch released, they moved onto optimizing server-side object container streaming and general PU performance, R&D into the current status of the tile system, support for integrating physics into the game-dev stream, and preparatory work towards adding a target selector into themode.

Graphics

The Graphics Team focused on two main features this month. The first is ‘procedural planet tech v4’, which includes a wide array of general improvements to planets. The Graphics Team’s role has been making the texture placement and tinting more ‘physically’ based, which offers many benefits such gradual transitions between biomes and logical texture placement, which give a more varied planet, quicker content authoring, and less pop-in. It also removes the need for ‘distance fade’, meaning players can scout locations from orbit knowing the appearance won’t change when they reach the surface. Although it’s going well, procedural planet tech v4 is still very much work-in-progress and won’t be ready for the PU for some time.

The other major tech feature worked on this month is Live Environment Probes, where previously-baked bounced lighting is updated at run-time to allow real-time changes with sun positioning. It’ll improve the artist’s workflow too.

Level Design

The Level Design Team continued work on Area18 and were exceptionally happy to see it live in the PU. In the future, updates will be made including the addition of new points of interest around the planet. They made progress on the procedural tool by building up of a library of rooms to give more variation to future rest stops (including refineries and cargo ports) and began pre-production of New Babbage and Orison. These new locations will first get their foundations finalized before moving into the whitebox phase.