Greetings Citizens,

Another busy month on Star Citizen! We have a lot to celebrate as the year draws to a close, and there’s a lot coming down the pipeline to share with our backers. Here’s our department-by-department breakdown of what was accomplished this month, as we march onward towards Squadron 42 and close out the year with Star Citizen Alpha 2.0!

Animation

This month we’ve been working closely with the animation director and programmers with the view to getting the locomotion sets, lookposes, stop starts, reloads, weapon select and deselects up to shape for the FPS portion of the game.

We’re also still looking to recruit a few more members to the team to handle the work load next year.

Graphics

This month has all been about getting 2.0 into the backers hands, and a lot of work has gone in behind the scenes to improve the underlying tech to make this release possible, but unfortunately the details aren’t as interesting as our usual graphics work! We’ve been crunching through dozens of bugs including Crossfire/SLI issues, light & LOD ‘popping’, shadow ‘peter panning’ and shadow ‘acne’ among many many others.

Other than bug fixing our other major focus this month has been on performance. The 2.0 release threw up a LOT of performance issues due to the scale of the map and the amount of content the design team are pushing in, and so our team helped the rest of the studio diagnose and fix these issues. Most of the performance issues were with the CPU and not the GPU, and so that’s where our focus has been, and after several weeks of optimising we got the base frame-rate up from 20 fps to above 60 fps. Many of these were ‘easy fixes’ where the game was processing a lot more objects/lights/whatever than it need to (easy to happen with such a large complex map!), and after improving the logic and/or culling algorithms we were able to vastly improve the performance. Unfortunately not all the performance issues were so easy to address, especially those relating to increase the number of ships in the levels, and so there’s now a few bigger improvements in the works from the game and core-tech teams that will greatly improve the performance in later releases but couldn’t be completed in time for 2.0. As we continue to resolve the CPU performance issues the bottleneck will then likely move towards the GPU and this is what we’ll need to focus on for the next few releases. On a related note we’ve noticed that a lot of our keen backers are tweaking their user.cfg file to change a lot of rendering settings to squeeze some extra performance out, but not always in the best way. So in a future release we’ll hopefully write a quick guide as to what exactly these settings do and how you can set them up to get either the best visuals or performance.

Engineering

Again this month we’re beavering away working towards the 2.0.0 live release. Our first main concern has been trying to get stability sorted, followed by performance, and then general bug fixing. Because this is such a big release with so many new features and new technology this has been quite a big challenge, especially when we start stressing all the systems getting more and more players in. For example one the big issues we had before we could get the build out to the PTU was that spawning in the big ships, such as the Retaliator or the Connie, would immediately cause everybody to disconnect with a network error. Not great for a release designed to bring multicrew gameplay out to the public! Because the standard CryEngine assumes everything is loaded at the start of a level, and doesn’t expect entities to be spawned in dynamically, we were fighting some of the network code to behave with how these larger ships are built. Finally after much head scratching a solution was found, and now it’s up on the PTU and so far it seems to have had a really positive reception, with people really having fun out there. There are still a few nasty bugs showing up, both on the clients and the server, which we’re hammering away at before we can get it to go live.

In the meantime… on the UI side. We’ve been working on a couple of new applications for Mobiglass. Firstly there’s the new mission viewer app. This allows you to track what missions you’ve received, which are currently active, and which have been completed. Similarly for the active missions you can then drill down and see what objectives they currently consist of, which you’ve completed and which are currently active. All active objectives can have HUD navigation markers so you can tell where you next need to go. The other app is another system to track all the information you’ve collected on your travels. As you go through the game you’ll be required to find information to help you complete your missions. This information can be uploaded to your Mobiglass as you go along, and this can be just from some interesting text, to images or audio and video clips. The app will allow you to browse and organise everything you’ve collected for future reference. Other UI work includes an ongoing optimisation pass, as it can get surprisingly expensive, especially when they’ve been initially prototyped and implemented in ActionScript.

Work is also continuing on the changes for the new component system, which again will help make the update of the entities more efficient in the longer term, and moving all the old GameobjectExtensions over to the new components. This is a pretty big change, and no doubt will cause some new issues, but it will in the long run mean more robust and faster code.

QA

At the risk of re-treading what the other departments may have already said in their updates, November has been all about working hard to get the next iteration of Star Citizen to the public; in other words, the push of 2.0.0 to the PTU and eventually to Live. However, for the UK QA team, the long hours were quickly forgotten as soon as we started to get our first glimpses of the Largeworld map being played by the backers. It’s really been a great reward to see all the examples of emergent gameplay we knew were possible (and which the constant test cases kept us away from!). It’s like they always say, a PTU Largeworld Star Citizen patch is as good as a rest. Thankfully this was never truer than now.

Not only has the 2.0.0 patch going to PTU given us a chance to revel in the Largeworld map being played by backers for the first time, but it has also been the first proper opportunity for us to gauge the effectiveness of the Issue Council heading towards it’s long term use – especially with the less than perfect stability of the servers and client on the first push! So thanks to everyone that helped us in working through and entering Bugs into the site – you may have noticed some of the UK QA team joining you in the PTU servers – I’m sure they were perfect gentlemen.

Hopefully at the time you read this we’ll have gone through many more deployments of patches (at the time of writing we are at 2.0.0e) and we’ll have managed to get things stable enough to release 2.0.0 to the whole community. In order to get there, the UK QA team has been working with the network engineers at F42 to track down the server crashes (those which cause all users to receive a disconnection error) via a local Linux box server, as well as entering and reproducing all of the client crashes you’ve been encountering.

In summary, this was a very big month for the company as a whole – and the effects were felt in all studios and departments, not least in QA. For us, the way 2.0.0 has shaped up and come together clearly informs all future testing of Star Citizen in a way Arena Commander never could; not only is 2.0.0 a taster of what’s to come for the Star Citizen community, it’s a taster for the QA team and the challenges ahead. We’ve learned so much in the last few months, November in particular, that it would be extremely difficult for me to quantify everything we’ve been through. All I can say for sure is, we’re still enjoying the journey!

Art

We’ve been sharpening our magazine cover skills this month, both PC Gamer and GameStar magazine feature a collaborative effort by all the studios and given us further insight into the areas we need to figure out with the high fidelity characters. The Concept team has been working on defining the Freelancer interior, rocket launchers and method of entry and exit, as well as additional work to the Shubin Facility for Sq42 story line areas. This will be ongoing to help define a clear vision for the art team. Set dressing concepts have started for Alpha Bravo and Charlie Space stations (Crusader), this is so we can start to add personality to the levels rather than them being a vanilla modular kit. Last but not least, we worked on ‘low tech’ area props and how to bring them into line with our new art pipeline. On top of this we have our first dedicated lighting artist start and a senior tech artist – both positions we have been looking to fill for a very long time!

Environment

The primary focus of the environment team was polishing and optimising the Crusader environment for SCA 2.0, this isn’t the most Hollywood part of the development process but it is the most crucial. We’ve been optimising everything from our per asset LOD chain, vis areas setup, lighting etc. Also due to the scale and quantity of POI’s in the environment we’ve been fixing plenty of visuals bugs to improve the quality of the user experience as much as we possibly can.

As we’re ramping down on SCA 2.0 we are now beginning to look into the next environments which we will put into production – more on that next month.

From all the environment team, we hope all you space explorers enjoy SCA 2.0. We’ve been watching a few of the streams and it’s great seeing all the antics you guys get up to!

VFX

The VFX team’s focus has been very much on polishing and optimising all effects for 2.0. To do so, the team have been play-testing the game in a way only VFX artists can – deliberately crashing ships, shooting each other (a lot!), running around inside burning ships, Quantum Travelling in obscure camera positions, deliberately flying into incoming fire instead of avoiding it, etc.!

As well as being a ton of fun it’s been an invaluable process, as we discovered – and subsequently fixed – several issues which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. We’ve also been paying close attention to all the excellent PTU footage that our backers have been showing off. This too has been really useful to help us spot any issues and choose some key effects to improve (the laser impact sparks for example).

Away from 2.0, we also made a start on effects for another couple of ships that are due to be flight-ready in the near future. A flight-ready effects pass for ships usually includes: interior and exterior damage, all ship items (thrusters, weapons, counter measures) and anything else required. We have also begun looking at another couple of environments that will be due an effects pass in the very near future.

Character team

Well, we doubled the team here last week – i.e. we went from one to two character artists, yes, we are understaffed, we are looking for talented folk, there seems to be a worldwide shortage! On a positive note, we are making some top notch characters that Chris is happy with and looking forward to revealing more as we progress.

Props

The ship component pipeline has been the order of the month, to get final resolution on poly counts, materials, style, the tests are looking good, still some polish to do but ideally this will meet the gold standard. We do need to strengthen this team too so if you are looking to build a massive variety of objects then please apply, prop nirvana awaits!

Ships

Production is pushing forward on several ships. The Freelancer is in the middle of a complete makeover to bring the ship up to current tech and required standards. It will be Flight ready very soon for everyone that has been patiently waiting for the last of the initial pledge ships to be fully flyable. The Starfarer is making great progress towards being Hangar ready. Both the Freelancer and Starfarer share a lot of similar design elements and materials as they are from the same manufacturer which helps.

The Aegis Vanguard is into its last couple of cycles of production to flight ready and the Aegis Sabre is also approaching hangar ready with its cockpit taken to final for all other departments to get running with.

Design

November was a great month for the UK Design team. Even though we haven’t got 2.0 in a robust enough state for full release we made a ton of progress on fixing up some critical blocking issues that have hampered progress on Squadron 42. The designers are now moving ahead at a healthy pace on both the Live Build and Squadron 42. There are still loads of fixup, balancing and additional layers of design to implement in the coming releases, but it feels like we are starting to get a solid platform to work from now.

We have the Squadron 42 game-world map now put into the new “Large World” system for the first time, so we are no longer looking at the locations in isolation, but as part of the overall Odin system. This is really helping with placement and pacing for the campaign as a whole.

The AI is coming along well in our test map and will really start to look incredible when the final animation sets begin to come in.

Also this month, we have spent a lot of time working with the engineers with regards to optimization allowing us to have more life, be it AI or player in the current Live Build. Again, we still have a long way to go, but the processes and approach is starting to pay off. We created a test map with a bunch of characters placed in Port Olisar, going about their daily business, repairing things, interacting with vendors or just talking and it made a huge difference to the feel of the place. So now we are in a process of analysing where the performance hits come from adding theses to the build and systematically fixing them up.

So all-in-all we are feeling happy about where we are currently with 2.0 and where we are heading with the Live build and Squadron 42 in the future.

Audio

Hello all!

In CIG Audio we’ve had quite the busy month working on Alpha 2.0. What kind of audio went into this release? Outlaw placeholder voice sets (three total), UI sounds for the Port Olisar ship selector, the black box beacon for Crusader, sounds for datapad interaction, Charlie Station’s internal sounds and dialogue, repair drone SFX, audio log SFX and even the Warlock’s EMP module charge-up and release! There was a great deal of audio work that went into spaceflight notifications, too: planetary boundry notifications, fly by sounds, green zone notifications and more.

Of course, there was plenty of work on ships, too. We continued with the Aegis UI cockpit revamp and are preparing to move on to other manufactures. We’re trying to create a ‘sonic indentity’ that will parallel the different visual identity for each manufacturer, separating them from other ships of the same size and class. We worked on audio for a number of impending ships, including the Vanguard, Constellation (the cargo door and main elevator sounds!), the Freelancer and some fixes for the primary thrusters of the Origin 300 series and the Avenger. We have also begun prototyping the sound of the ship’s power-plant, which will become crucial to defining a ship’s signature. Additionally, we are planning to provide a much richer ambient soundscape within our ships by having piping, computers, engine drones and damage all react from appropriate positions within the ship, rather than just approximating it all with a static 2D ambience.

Work on the ‘back end’ includes setup for FPS battlechatter hooks, code for the chatter system, code for the music logic system and setup for ambient states, work on the interactive music system and the first plans for FPS & EVA music states. We spent some time rewriting the Cry-Engine’s Area Manager which is responsible for implementation of the area-based audio functionality (ambient sound effects and reverbs). We’ve now integrated it with the Zone System, updated and streamlined area priority management logic, refactored and simplified the logic that handles area geometry. The new Area Manager should be able to scale much better for the large worlds we are building, and should be easier to extend with the new geometry types that better suit our needs.

Thanks again for all the fantastic support and have a great holiday and new year.