Travis Day, Dogfight Producer

Greetings Citizens!

Glad to be back with you all to share our studios progress on creating the BDSSE! I want to start this week’s update a little bit differently by giving a shout out and much deserved credit to ‘our team’ which is far larger than just the folks in the studio here in Santa Monica. While we here (in Santa Monica) have been leading the development of Arena Commander, we could not have accomplished what we have without the support of our team. Our team is currently comprised of individuals working at seven different studios both internal and external working together as a single team towards creating the BDSSE. Truly, we in the Santa Monica studio are lucky to have such an amazingly talented group supporting Arena Commander’s development worldwide to make sure we deliver something that all our backers can be proud of. We in Santa Monica wanted to take the beginning of this post to acknowledge that fact and thank everyone globally for their amazing work for this amazing community!

Ok, enough globetrotting and introspection. Back to the details of what we’ve been up to here in Santa Monica! We’ve told you in the past about our amazing damage modeling on the ships so that you can blow them into literally hundreds of little pieces. Well, after you blow a ship (or two or three) into hundreds of pieces you are left with a lot of debris! I’m happy to announce we’ve finalized a system that we’re calling the “debris manager” which has been written by our Gameplay Programmer Mark Abent. While on the surface it doesn’t sound like the most exciting it actually enables a lot of the most exciting gameplay moments!

As ships fly around all of their parts, pieces, and items are controlled by the vehicle itself. As soon as damage occurs and things start popping off those entities are passed from the vehicle in the debris manager which handles everything that has detached from any ship in the game. It manages their physics, particle effects, entity IDs, LODs, distance culling, etc. Still not sounding exciting? Okay, well let us state this differently: when you are chasing and shooting at the Vanduul ahead of you and blow off his thruster which, still flaming, flies backwards at your cockpit and glances off your shield which flares up on contact, you can thank the debris manager. Later in the persistent universe when you blow off an enemy’s wing which has a powerful weapon attached to it, then fly alongside and tractor in that weapon to sell at the nearest planet, you can thank the debris manager.

Next we have some exciting updates to the HUD. As we’ve mentioned previously, the HUD is probably one of the most collaboratively worked-on pieces. It started with the initial pre-vis concept work from Johnny Likens to generate multiple look and movement ideas. Then moved to Zane Bien to concept out the actual HUD that you see in game. Once that concept was created by Zane he moved on to creating all the artwork for virtually every single piece of the HUD and cockpit displays. At the same time the Foundry 42 team worked on the programming behind the radar and targeting system. BHVR worked on the holorenderer framework which is the underlying system for hosting all the 3D holographic objects in the HUD and projected by ship displays. REDACTED even got in on the action helping with the attachment of the HUD to the glass visor of the helmet.

This week has seen us all finishing off the core features of the HUD and we’ve started to go back through for a second pass polishing the different displays, adding information/feedback while cleaning up some clutter, and optimizing the performance of the HUD and UI. It has been a long journey but as we’re seeing it come into its final form the hard work is really paying off and seeing the in-game HUD get closer and closer to Zane’s initial, beautiful, concept mockups.

On the Physics side, we’ve closed out the work remaining to implement a redout effect that was created by our graphics programmer so watch those negative G’s! On the visuals front we’ve made large progress this week on adding all kinds of cool particle effects for the various damage states and impacts inside the cockpit so you feel the incoming hits appreciate the punishment that your ship is enduring. Visual effects is another good example of where our global team has been amazingly helpful and supportive as effects are being done by artists at all the different studios and it has been a great collaborative process which has continued to push the visuals to the high level that we expect from Star Citizen.

This week we added a new member to the development team, Alex Mayberry, who has taken on the role of being the Executive Producer for Star Citizen. He and his experience is already proving valuable to the global team and improving our processes so we’re all excited to have him aboard!

Thank you as always for reading our Santa Monica Studio update as we’re always excited to share our efforts with you. Please remember, if you have any questions please feel free to post in our ‘Ask a Dev’ threads. Until next time!

Cheers,

Cloud Imperium Games Santa Monica