What a month! The team in Austin has been working non-stop to support a variety of efforts for around the company, most dear to our hearts being the release of Social Module to the PTU and then to Public release in the same month! The team is so excited to be able to share this module with you, and so exhausted from all the work that has taken place in the leadup to this release. We’ve got big plans to release new features on a regular schedule and to continue to expand this module over time. Here are some detailed updates from the team leaders in Austin.

Persistent Universe Team

Art

The Art Team this month spent much of its time helping to ship Social Module v0 out with the release of Alpha 1.2.0. The PU Environment Team spent most of the month supporting BHVR in creating the awesome ArcCorp landing zone environment. Patrick Thomas, Lead Environment Artist, helped Mark Skelton review and provide feedback on a daily basis to get ArcCorp looking as polished as it could be. Lee Amarakoon did multiple VFX passes on ArcCorp to get it looking nice and grimy with steam effects, atmospherics, animating graphics on screens and monitors, and he even had a hand in getting our ships ready for use in the traffic patterns in the skies above Area18. Lee also created the fire effect in the incinerator you can see in one of the back alleys of Area18. Emre Switzer completely revamped the lighting in the environment, so that the courtyard was more impressive, the alleyways were properly dingy, and all the shops each had their own flavor. Cort Soest, Global Environment Tech Lead, spent much of his time this month monitoring the optimization of the assets used in creating the environment, so you can thank him for helping to get the environment to run smoothly on your computer! We also had a new addition to the PU Environment Team this month. Ali Seffouri, Environment Tech Artist, joins us from EA Tiburon in Orlando and has been helping out with creating some much needed tools to support the art team in making more amazing environments.

The PU Concept Team has been working hard to flesh out some of the look and feel of more upcoming planetside locations. Ted Beargeon has been doing work on making style guides for Crusader and MicroTech so that each landing zone has its own unique aesthetic. (For those of you who might not remember offhand, ArcCorp, Crusader, and MicroTech are all located in the Stanton system, so being able to travel between these planets and see all of these locations in the same solar system even if you don’t have a jump drive on your ship is something we’re all really looking forward to.) Ken Fairclough has then been taking these style guides and drilling down into the nitty gritty of what makes each location stand out. Megan Cheever continues to expand the wardrobe of our game. We now have one of our clothing line’s aesthetic pretty well-defined, the Terra-influenced Fashion Casual line. We’ve also been in discussions with BHVR and supporting them on streamlining and improving the chat interface.

Our Animation Team this month has been helping in several areas. For Social Module, Vanessa Landeros has been implementing all of the emotes you see in game. We’ve got more coming down the pipe so look forward to those soon! On the ship side of things, we’ve been doing a lot of bug fixing to get rid of some of our animation debt, so to speak, so that ship interactions don’t appear to be distractingly broken in our next release. We’ve also wrapped up establishing templates for ship enter/exit animations so that our modelers have something to follow for future work. This will reduce our animation footprint for future ships. We’ve also been updating our ship cockpit animations to match the brand new templates. Lastly, our Animation Lead Bryan Brewer has been working alongside our Rigger to test and implement new custom skeletons to match some of the proportions of our actors we had on set at the mocap shoot at Imaginarium. We’ve come up with an efficient way to create new skeletons quickly and efficiently, and it has been working pretty well so far.

Last but not least, our character artist Billy Lord has been doing some R&D on creating some new hairstyles for our characters. Pretty soon we’ll be able to see these in game, which in turn will allow our characters to have a little more variety in the cranial region. I know everyone is looking forward to finally seeing some flowing locks in game!

Design

All this month has been spent supporting the effort to get Social Module out the door and into your hands! Time and effort were spent on several aspects of Social Module, including setting up NPC’s in ArcCorp (activity around the landing pad outside Customs and Jobwell), hooking up emotes to play in game (all through DataForge), and setting up ship traffic in the sky above Area18 (I dare you to find a pattern!). In the coming weeks we will be spending more time fleshing out ArcCorp even more, including setting up the buying/selling functionality of our shops and NPC daily routines.

Looking toward the future, designer Pete Mackay has been spending some time on setting up the “Periodic Table of Elements” for Star Citizen. This will be the first step in defining our commodities and recipes. This will also help to establish what elements can be found while mining asteroids, how rare and valuable certain commodities are, and laying the groundwork for how trading will work in the PU.

Lastly, Tony Zurovec has been spending time this month thinking over the top-down layouts of upcoming Planetside locations. Specifically, the Orison landing on Crusader and the New Babbage landing zone on MicroTech. Area18 went through a number of revisions over the past few months to get the first release just right, and we learned a lot that will help make the initial layouts of these landing zones much easier to accomplish. We’ve also recruited a few designers in the UK to help out with an additional landing zone design, the Lorville landing zone on Hurston, so we will be overseeing that as well in the coming months. Before you know it our designers will have their hands full breathing life into not only the locations above, but also Levski landing zone in the Nyx system.

Engineering

The Engineering Team was excited to play a big role in shipping our first iteration of the Social Module in August! They helped ship and support a couple of pushes to the PTU and have been providing continuing support behind the scenes on improvements for the live release since it went out in late August. The Server Team in particular is continuing to work on backend code that will be pushed out to continue to improve the experience of this first Social Module release.

Working on the Social Module was a great team effort…a lot of eager blood, sweat and tears went into putting this module together. Engineering worked very closely with our DevOps and QA teams daily here in Austin for many weeks, which led to improvements in our communications and workflow as well as in increase in team bonding. Together, and with support for various other disciplines, they were able to run a few very successful large cross-studio playtests in prep for the release. We’ve had our top guys analyzing both network and client profiles of playtests and identifying areas where we need to make improvements. This process included adding new analytical tools to further diagnose everything going on under the hood.

A lot of other work, not specific only to this Social Module release, progressed throughout the month of August as well. Improvements have been being made to the network optimizations for our characters, as we will be working towards adding more and more players and NPCs to game modes and maps as we go forward. As always, work continues on our various backend services and memory issues, including the juggling of new feature work with various bugs that get raised on our live game or by QA. In Austin we’re also continuing to share our engineering expertise for other features being developed outside of Austin, including support for the Frankfurt and UK studios.

A group of engineers continues to work closely with out design team to build out Subsumption Tools, which will allow our designers to create AI behavior for our NPCs. Yes…NPCs in ArcCorp will be coming, and the team is excited to be making progress on reaching that goal! The team has been chugging away at creating new Subsumption Tool functionality as well as implementing new types of behaviors and tasks that can be assigned toNPCs. Nevertheless, other tools have not been suffering from lack of attention and we continue to make improvements and fix bugs for such tools as the Sandbox Editor, Dataforge and the Asset Validation Tool.

Other engineers…our unsung heroes…have been focused on crucial super-behind-the-scenes laborious work in getting our various development streams integrated with each other. With feature work for various releases such as our recent Gamescom demo, Social Module and upcoming FPS release, as well as the integration of an updated version of CryEngine, our experts have been working to keep the correct content in the correct stream at the correct times to coincide with our release schedule, all the while working to ensure that the streams diverge only as much as is absolutely needed to support our stream workflow. While it takes attention and effort to split off different projects into different development streams and merge back together later, this process enables parallelization of work assignments and frees us to deliver content at a pace that is more satisfying to backers who are interested in sampling our work in progress. Without the effort being put into separate streams, there would be far fewer releases and a much longer wait between patches of any kind, because all of the features – as well as all of their bugs – would be tied together.

Live Operations

QA

QA met the month of August in a full swing crunch for the content we were debuting at Gamescom. Our focus was squarely set on the multi crew functionality. Each day QA would play through the demo in which we were prepping to show off our new features multiple times verifying fixes and reporting new issues. The day would conclude with a play through with the developers in LA. We found this very valuable as the developers’ in depth understanding of their systems helped to identify additional issues. We were incredibly happy with how well received the team’s efforts were at the Gamescom presentation. It was a hard crunch but in the end it was all worth it to see the overwhelming positive feedback from everyone. This has energized us to work even harder to get Social Module, Multi-Crew and Star Marine out to everyone as soon as possible.

After Gamescom, our focus shifted to testing the ArcCorp/Area18 Social module in preparation for its release to the Public Test Universe and eventually the live environment. Our Social Module Specialist Todd Raffray has been very effective in ensuring each feature is properly tested. Because of this, we were able to identify a hand full of critical issues that were promptly fixed. In addition to these we have found and fixed multiple issues related to our back-end Generic Instance Manager but will be standing by to identify and address any new issues that arise from a large influx of curious citizens eager to explore Area18.

Tyler Witkin and Andrew Rexroth have been comprehensively testing Star Marine, a process which included an analysis of the cover system, how projectiles interact with the environment, as well as weapon zeroing improvements. Tyler has also helped to provide videos and screenshots of Star Marine and Social Module which have been used on the website, the latest issue of Jump Point and shared through social media.

The focus on Multicrew testing was a boon for our overall development but did result in some things being pushed aside temporarily. One of which is our automated testing development. However we are now in a position to significantly move forward on this particular front. Melissa Estrada is our resident engine specialist and has been working to train others in her in depth knowledge of proper testing of the Cryengine Sandbox Editor. She has done an amazing job training our other QA team in Manchester. She is now free to work full time on our automation framework to get it running as soon as possible.

This month we welcome our newest addition to the QA team, Marissa Meissner! Marissa is filling the role of QA Information Specialist. The QA Information Specialist is tasked with ensuring all of our documentation is recorded and maintained as well as compiling our release patch notes. She is also the liaison to Customer Service, ensuring they are kept up to date on the latest issues affecting the game. She immediately hit the ground running and is already doing a great job in this very important position.

Thanks to Marissa’s efforts, Jeffrey Pease is now free to focus on the DevOps side of QA. He has become very knowledgeable in how our back-end services function and how to effectively monitor them. As soon as an issue is encountered, Jeffrey will log the issue and notify our engineers with all the needed information. He is also documenting these efforts which is laying the foundation for an eventual Network Operations Center.

For the month of September QA will be heavily focusing on Arena Commander 2.0 testing including, among many other things, multi-crew functionality and significantly larger areas.

Game Support

Game Support was all in for a big month in the history of Star Citizen. We first ran a public playtest to profile some of the larger Arena Commander issues of the day, worked on 1.1.6 and a brand new launcher, then pulled some double duty by creating the Gamescom multicrew demo videos, then moved straight into testing and preparing for the launch of Star Citizen 1.2, aka Social Module.

Our playtest was important because it again demonstrated the helpfulness of our backers, particularly those with a more technical or design-based aptitude. With that in mind, we’re still very keen to create our special “test group” which will assist in the nitty gritty details of playtesting changes to the Star Citizen service. This isn’t very glamorous duty; quite the opposite. But we need to test things such as network improvements, client optimizations, launcher updates, game balance changes, etc… anything that needs to hit a scaled test group or needs feedback before we roll it out.

We’re going to be announcing this in conjunction with the Issue Council this month, our brand new bug reporting system. We’ll be moving away from ticket and forum based bug reports into this official bug reporting system so that you can see and weigh in on the popularity of development issues with Star Citizen (we’re still in Alpha, after all!). This helps us as a development studio in understanding what’s important to the community.

We pulled a little side duty in helping create the Gamescom Multicrew demo videos as well (with a little help from Alex in DevOps). We hope that you enjoyed them as much as we did creating them!

We also worked with DevOps in releasing Launcher 2.0. As with any new product release, it’s not without faults, and the release unfortunately coincided with an unusually high adoption rate of Windows 10 (where most of our issues lie). But we’re seeing drastically improved download speeds and success rates, and we’ll continue working with DevOps to make this a completely seamless experience.

But our crown jewel for everyone at Cloud Imperium Games this month was rolling out the Social Module. What a great moment for backers, for the CIG team, for everyone involved! Game Support was heavily involved by organizing the testing groups for each phase of the rollout, as well as communicating with players along the way. We had to admit that seeing players run through the elevator for the first time was one of the coolest moments ever.

For September, we’ve got some cleanup to do. So much of our time was taken on other tasks that we’ve got a bit of a ticket backlog to work through, though we will be making the transition of bug reports into Issue Council. Once caught up, we’ll refocus our efforts towards getting Arena Commander 2.0 tested and out the door.

IT/Operations

GamesCom was incredible! Thanks to all the community members who volunteered to help us and it was especially great seeing everyone at the E-werk event and on the show floor. This month the IT department put a primary focus on preparing for the amazing content we wanted to show at GamesCom and the new build systems.

GamesCom work began early in the month with Paul joining Hassan & Kyle in our UK office to help with setup, testing, and tuning of 24 demo machines which would be used in Cologne. On site, Paul and Hassan met with some of our super supportive backers and many others during the week-long event. While this was going on, the development team keeps on working. IT continued to work closely with DevOps on the new build system and optimizing performance of other key systems supporting the delivery of assets throughout the company. At some points working around the clock we managed to keep up with everything even though a good portion of our team was deployed to Germany.

It seems like we’re always reporting on performance improvements or the need for more speed. And it seems as if the more performance we find the more this incredible project requires of us. This month we were especially hard on our network infrastructure. We moved more builds and aggregate data across the wires than we’ve moved in the last three months combined. There’s just more of everything; more publishes to PTU and live service, more patches, more builds in general and more builds to replicate to each studio, more testing, more automation, just more and it’s exciting to see all this progress. By the time GamesCom got started we had pushed well beyond the capabilities of our core network infrastructure and it became noticeable to the company. Considering everything else going on, we couldn’t risk taking anything down and waiting for parts was out of the question as well. Mike “Sniper” Pickett quickly identified the hardest hit areas in our network and designed an overhaul of both our virtual and physical environments in the Texas office which increased our capacity and redundancy (in delivery terms, that’s a good thing – it means that some glitches that would otherwise crash your session have backup behind them and so you wouldn’t experience an interruption in service) by a factor of 2x without the need for additional hardware. This substantial upgrade was also done without downtime which is just how we like it.

August was a super exciting month and we can’t wait for what comes next. We’re preparing for Citizencon already and looking forward to meeting more of the community there.

Dev Ops

This month the DevOps team has been focusing on getting the new build system online and used by QA and developers. In addition we started work on the enormous amount of Automation testing that the company needs as a force multiplier, continuing to improve the Launcher, and rolled out a patch and several hotfixes to the live environment. We also lent a hand in supporting the roll out of all the GamesCom demo builds and helping create a Multicrew teaser video.

As part of the new build server roll out we have built a webpage visualizer to give developers an easy way to view and kick off builds. In addition work has been continuing on automatic integration/merge code to help us manage the changes between our many development branches. This ensures that builds have all the most up to date, compatible, changes in the builds we roll out to the public.

Work has continued on improving the game launcher; handling more error cases, improving the logging, adding analytic stats reporting, and of course attempting to eke out more speed for downloads. Expect another launcher patch iteration soon with more improvements.

For GamesCom the team split up into shifts to work with the IT team 24hrs a day for the week of the convention making sure builds and digital media being created were handed off to our support staff on the ground at GameCom. Though we ended the week quite exhausted, I think everyone was happy to see the fruits of the company’s labor in front of the backers. Plus we drank a bunch on that Friday to relax and enjoy the show.

The team has also been working quite closely with the server team looking at the performance of our Game Servers, General Instance Manager, and other Universe Services. This has led to creating and rolling out 12 hotfixes to improve crashes, memory leaks, deadlocks and performance over the last few weeks. In addition, work on setting up the game database has begun in earnest, and a couple of engineers from the DevOps team have already begun writing code for the interface layer to the eventual Persistence Server.

Finally, we began our four month automation project. This project will encompass work from the DevOps team in Germany as well as in Austin, and will cover the four major areas of automation; Perforce Tools, Game Client, Game Server, and Build Server. While we are still at the very beginning of this effort, the road map we have outlined promises to help QA reduce monotonous repetitive testing, ensure that checkins into the branches will not crash the build before they go in, enable engineers to see server load and performance without the need to organize massive playtests, and will fire off an array of build checks at the end of the build creation process. Obviously, the gritty part is getting all the coding done and then bug free!

Looking Ahead

As with every month here at CIG we’re working each and every day to bring you the next iterations of the Social Module and push onward towards the Persistent Universe proper. Select developers across the project are working on bug fixing for a subsequent patch to 1.2.0, but the majority of us have shifted focus to working towards the release of Social Module v1. Social Module v0 saw the release of features like Multiplayer functionality on our first planetside landing zone (ArcCorp’s Area18), the Chat System, and Emotes. Now that we’ve got some core backend technology as a foundation, we can start to build upon it to make the BDSSE!

Some features that are in active development at this present moment include improving the chat interface and functionality (hooray for private channels!), adding at LEAST 25 more emotes to choose from (now with audio!), updating the shop facades to make them absolutely unmistakable from across the Area18 courtyard, and something to do with…buggies??

We know you guys are looking forward to seeing the next landing zone, Levski in the Nyx system, and we are too! Levski is in Final Art stages and now we are looking at scheduling in time for optimization using some new tech called the Compound Render Node. This will significantly increase performance across all environments and will allow them to run smooth as butter while traipsing around these amazing locales.

It’s always scary to put something that you’ve worked so hard on out in the hands of people to render their judgment. We were hoping that you guys would like what we delivered, and the positive feedback has been overwhelming. Thank you for all of your support, we can’t wait to knock off your socks once again in the near future!