Hi everyone!

March has been a great month for the Austin team. We had a blast supporting PAX East and participating in SXSW with several different events, and we revealed some work from the Austin Persistent Universe team! Our Live Operations team has been hard at work with the release of Version 1.1.0 and then a ton of research and work on improving multiplayer support and capacity on the live servers. We’ve also fired up our nascent ‘Game Support’ team to bolster our Live Operations activities and you’ll see a new report from Will in the Live Ops section of the team reports below!

Persistent Universe Team:

Art:

True to form, March has been a busy month for the PU Art team. We’ve had several different “hero” props in the works, with concepts being done by Ted Beargeon and Ken Fairclough on things like hulking radar dishes and solar panels for space stations, holo-object viewing kiosks for our shop locations, and the Medical Display Carousel prop which features prominently in the Medical Unit. We also have multiple outsourcers cranking away on minor props that will flesh out our planetside environments, at the moment specifically ArcCorp and Terra.

The first half of this month our character team was working long hours to support the video you guys saw at SXSW. We had several new faces appear in that video, including the bartender, nurse, and a few bar patrons and workers. Recently our character artists have switched from supporting the Social Module release to helping out full time on the FPS characters. They’re making tweaks to the armor, materials, and helmets to ensure that they are the best they can be for when the first drop of FPS hits (SOON!).

In other news we’ve been developing the look and feel of NPC’s in the PU with the help of Megan Cheever and another external vendor. We are setting it up so that, depending on a specific planetside location’s sphere of influence (Terra, Earth, Frontier, etc.), the NPC’s will have a slightly different aesthetic. We’ve been defining what those aesthetics are and how they all relate to one another, specifically this month working on the Terra-influenced White Collar aesthetic and the Frontier-influenced Counter Culture aesthetic.

Speaking of different spheres of influence, Mark Skelton has been defining the aesthetic of various architectural styles within the Persistent Universe. The styles we are developing are all deeply entrenched in the lore of Star Citizen and reflect the era in which they were built. We just recently wrapped up defining the “Colonialism” style, which represents a style you might find on a world very recently colonized. We are also actively working on the “Monumentalism” style, the “Hennowism” style, and the “Streamline” style. We look forward to showing these off to you as they come online.

Our Animation team has their hands dipped into several different areas of the project. We’ve got Daniel Craig and Jay Brushwood helping to get the Gladiator interactions running smoothly. Vanessa Landeros is working on drunk animations for booth, walking, and idle positions. David Peng has been standardizing cockpit templates so that our ship modelers going forward can be as consistent as possible. Lastly, Lead Animator Bryan Brewer has been working on an animation set we like to call “Grabby Hands”. More on that later!

Last but not least, Patrick Thomas has been hard at work bringing the mobiGlas object itself to life. Pretty soon we will have a beautiful, intricate prop to go with the amazing UI work being done up at BHVR.

Design:

Much of the designers’ time this month was spent setting up and capturing the footage for the video shown at SXSW here in Austin. Lots of great stuff went into that video and we have Nate Blaisdell, Rob Reininger, and Sean Tracy to thank for much of what was shown.

Pete “Weekly Weather Wizard” Mackay has been developing a tool called the “Thruster Calculator” that, you guessed it, calculates thrust for our ships. It’s a very robust tool that should help us greatly in the long run when trying to balance our ships.

New Design Director, Todd Papy, came over from Frankfurt and spent a week with Tony Zurovec discussing high level design for Star Citizen and delving into the nitty gritty of things like NPC AI. Some great discussions came out of Todd’s time here that you’ll get to see the fruits of hopefully in the not-too-distant future.

As the release for the Social Module inches closer, ironing out details and specifics becomes a top priority. Things like what will the shopping experience be like, what happens when a player tries to enter an area meant only for NPC’s, and how will players interact with objects all become important questions to figure out answers to as soon as possible. We’ll continue to nail things down as we progress into April.

Engineering:

March was a month of marvel and wonder for our ATX programming team. Their BIG ticket item was our contribution helping our SXSW demo come to life as well as their support for our recent 1.1.0 patch. Thank you to all of the great folks who came out to support Start Citizen at SXSW; our team had a great time mingling with the lot of you while consuming delicious Star Citizen themed alcoholic beverages!

Our networking team has been rocking it hard! They’ve made some strong progress on a variety of systems, including: Multiplayer Hangars, Ship and Missile Movement Prediction, Player Persistence, Universe Simulator, Chat, Emotes and more! They’ve also been building out the base foundation of the game’s network architecture.

We also have some engineers dedicated to building out our services to accommodate our growing numbers of players, and investigating ways to optimize our networking performance and to increase server scalability.

We held a successful Network Summit here in Austin. We flew in many core members from across the globe to begin our next phase of planning for new features on our horizon and for the many boundaries that we plan to push. We were also able to share a bit of Austin culture during SXSW with our engineers from abroad—and they loved every second of the experience!

Our ninja-commando strike team of programmers also continue to develop and iterate on a variety of tools for use across all CIG studios. These…oft unsung heroes…have tirelessly and enthusiastically been developing AI Editors, Asset Tools, and other tools to support our team and enable us to make our game.

To top it all off, our engineers got to enjoy some green beer on St. Patrick’s Day with the entire studio…which allowed them time to reflect on their past accomplishments with their co-workers and dream of the great things we have planned. Everyone is looking forward to April and excited to continue progress on the Persistent Universe!

Live Operations:

QA :

The month of March was business as usual for QA. For most of the month, the team focused on testing 1.1.0 and was very excited for its successful release. In addition to testing 1.1.0, QA was also continually testing the FPS module release. Tyler Witkin and his UK counterpart Glenn Kneale have done an exceptional job ensuring the FPS module has had the proper attention it needs.

QA has also been working very closely with production this month to help sync our testing standards and streamline the bug creation process across our studios. In an effort headed up by Gerard Manzanares, QA has implemented regular comprehensive performance testing to help developers investigate optimization improvements for the game.

The entire QA team had a really great time showing off the game at the SXSW gaming expo this month. We were so happy to meet so many backers and supporters! Many Citizens even stayed to help explain to people who have never seen Star Citizen what the game is all about. We have the best community!

In addition to our QA responsibilities, select members of the team were able to assist in multiple special projects this month. The team helped to gather video which was used in the new trailer shown at the SXSW closing party. Also some members of the team were able to assist our animation team. Andrew Hesse, Tyler Witkin, Melissa Estrada, and Glenn Kneale all helped to gather ship metrics in 3D Studio Max which will be essential for our Imaginarium mocap shoot.

This month we are happy to announce the newest addition to the QA team. Please welcome Miles Lee! Miles comes to us from Daybreak Game Company (Formerly SOE) where he was responsible for internal server deploys, live server deploys and build system maintenance. Miles will be our QA liaison to DevOps and will be helping in our efforts to expand our automated testing.

For the month of April, QA is looking towards more bug fix releases and testing the Arena Commander FPS module release.

Game Support

The month of March saw the creation of Star Citizen’s Game Support team, headed up by Will Leverett, and ultimately will grow to span multiple locations to best serve the worldwide SC community as we continue to grow.

So… what is Game Support?

Our primary mission is to serve players of the live service. Whether it’s through public communication on the forums and Reddit, individually assisting players with troubleshooting the launcher and client, coordinating with Dev Ops to monitor the live service, or working with Customer Support to identify and triage issues with new updates, everything we do is to make sure you have the absolute best gaming experience possible. Our first Game Support task was to establish a quick turnaround for players with technical support issues with 1.0.3. Once accomplished, we found that there was a need with our 1.1.0 patch to publicly communicate with players about the state of the service.

Closely coordinating with DevOps and Community, we created the Live Service Notifications forum category to better relay the health of the live service to you. We’ve worked this week to better understand the nature of our multiplayer issues, working closely with many individual players to understand more about what’s occurring so that we can create a stable live environment. The discourse that Game Support has established with our players has been incredibly crucial. What we’ve learned from players providing their reports on the Live Service Notification forum has helped us better understand where we have bottlenecks on our service.

This is a bit of what you can expect from us in the future, too. We’re excited to be a part of the great adventure of bringing you the BDSSE!

IT/Operations:

March has been one of the busiest and most exciting months in history for the CIG IT/Operations team. The entire IT department helped prepare dozens of demo computers for multiple events including PAX East and SXSW. Systems were deployed at each event location then repacked and shipped to their next location in time for their next performance. Chris and Paul from the Austin office coordinated these efforts ensuring that everything arrived safely and performed as expected. As usual challenges surface any time we go on the road but our expert team travels with a full contingency kit allowing them to defeat any problem which could arise. We had a great time at these events and enjoyed meeting and speaking with many backers and their families.

Hassan from our UK studio has kept extremely busy this month as well by single-handedly setting up for our latest mocap shoot in London. All networking and connectivity back to the home office plus security, storage, and cameras were delivered safely and configured on time to meet our aggressive schedule. In L.A. Dennis continued his evaluation of new hardware solutions while working directly with the Dev Team to ensure compatibility and correct functionality.

In addition to supporting the Dev Team’s efforts toward our major demos this month, IT in Austin has been continuing our work to improve the internal build/development cycle. This is being accomplished by reducing the time it takes to move data from our build system to all development locations. Sometimes it’s hard to fathom the amount of data we’re moving on a daily basis as our build system constantly cranks out builds around the clock. Each of these builds must be delivered rapidly to each studio for testing and continued development. We’re all extremely proud of Mike “Sniper” Pickett’s work in this area but every improvement made is followed quickly by a new challenge. We have now surpassed 5 PB /mo in internal data for build delivery. This doesn’t include public data delivery of published patches from our live services. Encountering these behind the scenes challenges and designing solutions is one of the many reasons we love working on Star Citizen.

Dev Ops:

The Dev Ops team has been working on several projects over the month of March, many of these will continue into the next couple months as well.

Jeffrey Parker and Francesco Di Mizio have been continuing to build and roll out a new Build Server using the BuildBot frame work. Joe Holley worked with the Tech Art team and built a tool we call Copy Build that all the studios now use to get dev builds internally. Keegan Standifer has been hard at work building a new prototype launcher and patching system. Alex Peruyera has been continuing to using Chef to build out our PTU and Live environments. And Joe and Alex have been working on creating a dynamic provisioner which will supply new VMs and services to the infrastructure to scale up and down based on player and service load.

As a team we have also been working improving our visualization of metrics from the live service, from Splunk, to Google Monitoring, to crash handlers, and logging cleanup and verbosity. We are slowly building a unified solution for the company to view the detailed health and status of PTU and the Live Service. We have also begun setting up several different type of databases for implementation and performance testing.

In March we also participated in the CIG Networking Summit, where engineers from across the company flew in and discussed how to build a dynamic and scalable MMO.

On top of all this Dev Ops supported the release of 1.1.0 to PTU and Live. Unfortunately, since 1.1.0 went live we have been experiencing extreme instability in our Matchmaking code. The Dev Ops team, along with the Server Engineering team, have been working every day to track down problems, hotfix them, or check larger fixes into an upcoming release.

The Dev Ops team keeps working towards the future while also working to improve our current service. March was another crazy month at CIG, it is looking like April will be much the same!