(Citizen Star News) - by Citizen Ed - 2015-05-09

This Week’s Citizen Star

years1hundred - Wanted to congratulate him on his Imagine trailer topping 1 million views this week on CIG’s youtube channel.

Originally a fan composition, but adopted (and slightly reworked) by CIG as it’s main promo. Years has also released an instrumental version of Imagine this week, for those allergic to wub wubs.

Star Citizen Alpha 1.1.2 released

Out of test! Featuring the New tutorial & significantly faster load times

Hyper Vanguard Force IV

This amazing minigame was developed on the side by Montreal-based game creators Dave Richard and Christine Marsh. It was then integrated into the website by the folks at Turbulent.

Has been getting rave reviews by the community and has started getting picked up by the gaming press: MassivelyOP | Kotaku

The Big Sale this week is the return of the MISC Starfarer

COMM-LINK with new updated art: Starfarer album.

Video courtesy of Teller

Looks almost hangar ready. And the debut of the upgunned and hardened Military upgrade, Starfarer Gemini aka Star-G, which is being offered as a concept sale, complete with Life time insurance. This is a bit unusual as variants aren’t usually offered as concept sales, but CIG thought the Gemini was different enough to consider it an exception.

The Prices are: Standalone Starfarer $195, Gemini LTI $240, Starfarer Upgrade to Gemini $45

Monthly & FPS/Star Marine Reports

Videos Courtesy of StarCitizenNewsRadio

Two very large progress reports dropped within a week of each other: April Monthly and Star Marine. We can see that a lot is going right now at CIG. In some senses they are clearly still shoring up the foundations of the project while trying to ship new product and keep the existing code stable. Not an easy task.

Star Marine is looking very good, but we see that a significant amount of work is still left before ship. The new skeleton is still ongoing.

From the Monthly report: “Lead Animator Bryan Brewer has been testing and debugging the brand new skeleton we are going to be moving our characters over to in order to improve various aspects of the character’s proportions and range of motion. Our entire animation team is now transitioning over to helping retarget our whole library of animations (over 2,000!) to this new skeleton.”

Austin’s character team has been solely focused on supporting the FPS character revisions this month. This mean delays for the Planetside.

The Star Marine release will also include significant revamps of the Matchmaking and Network back end. CIG Austin’s section of the FPS Report talks about the work on creating the new “Generic Instance Manager” which should manage the FPS matches as well as hopefully fix the remaining problems with Arena Commander.

FPS/StarMarine - “We will continue to provide regular updates on the Comm-Link and during Around the Verse until we’re ready to kick off the first public release.”

So when will this be available? What’s the new schedule? CIG doesn’t say.

If StarMarine makes it into even test before the end of May, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. Could easily end up released mid to late June or even July at this point.

Planetside still probably a month after StarMarine, are seeing a fair amount of work still being done on that. Arena Commander 2.0 at least a month after that. Squadron 42? We’ll see.

Important to remember that whenever CIG gives dates, they are optimistic. As in “earliest you could see this released, if nothing unexpected happens.”

A big task that has not been talked about is another CryEngine update has shipped. Version 3.7 was said to have been a reorganization in prep for bigger changes down the road such as VR & Linux support. Hopefully the CIG Foundry42 Frankfurt team can make this merge not a huge time sink.

Other things to look forward to mostly from the monthly report:

Radar system 2.0, signature system 2.0, vehicle params, and physical based damage.

They are currently prototyping wingmen commands, the ability for the player to assign specific goals such as “attack my target” or “defend me” to his wingmen instead of just having them engage enemies as they please.

Updates to Freelancer, Starfarer, and Connie. The last we’ve seen featured in the recent “Ship Shape” with Lisa Ohanian, on Around the Verse. Freelancer is said to have grown, really looking forward to seeing how that has turned out.

The monthly report featured Surfacing Artist Daniel Kamentsky (who apparently sits next to Lisa Ohanian, as mentioned on RtV) - Worn painted metal.

Environment Mini-summit - Foundry 42, BHVR, and Illfonic came to visit to discuss long term planning for Star Citizen Environments. “Our focus specifically for the PU this year will be fleshing out the “First 5” planetary landing zones, wrapping up our first batch of shops that will be found on those landing zones, and R&D on creating modular space stations that will serve a variety of functions in the PU.”

Evan Manning has been adding data to the Star Map to be used by our friends at Turbulent for the release of the Star Map on the Platform side. There is a lot of information to be documented and Evan has been doing a great job of ensuring every element in each system is in its proper place.

Miles Lee (who I am hoping will be our hero) has made significant progress in developing test automation. As a result, we are able to automate the capturing of performance data for each of our various builds. He is also working on automating our build sanity checks and assisting DevOps with the development of a headless client system that will enable us to automate stress tests on our back-end infrastructure.

Next month they plan to incorporate Social Module in our regular testing.

The UK animation team has expanded into a group of five ready to tackle and implement the ongoing Imaginarium shoot as it comes in.

They’ve been doing a lot of work in the last few months converting all the game’s “entity Ids” from a 32 bit number to a 64 bit number. Allows for lots of things to be scattered about our ships, hangars and landing zones.

BHVR - Holotable, shops

Issue Council - Custom Bug database

From AtV:

EWAR being worked on, Hack into an enemy's ship and mess with thrusters, spoof their radar etc.

MISC Reliant and repair bot is coming!

From RtV:

Recent art updates for the Genesis Starliner and the Endeavor.

Ben had a meeting with David Hobbins scheduled for later today, possibly about some contract work on rovers?

And that’s all we have for now -- this has been Citizen Star News dot com… hope to see you next week … in Star Citizen!

See Also

COMM-LINK - Weekly Rundown