Hello Citizens,

We always start these notes saying that it was a busy month… because it’s true! Let’s jump into what happened this past March…

Engineering

On the FPS side, Gordon has finished up most of his work on the cover system, the last piece was procedural cover which allows you to slide and shoot around edges, and has moved onto the vaulting and mantling mechanic. First stages of this are going well, working with the animators so we can do procedural alignment of the animations. We’ve also changed the markup so it’s now a normal entity in the zone system. This then gives us all the advantages of the zone system so vaulting in a moving spaceship will work seamlessly. Jamie has been doing some work on the grenades as well as general bug fixing. Romulo has been carrying on with improvements to the weapons including interrupting the reload and general balance.

Craig’s improvements to the landing are progressing nicely and has completed the 2nd stage of the implementation which is a much simplified way of using the automatic landing. He’s now moving on to the 3rd stage which involves landing inside another ship. The easy first bit of doing the landing once inside is now complete, the slightly harder task of getting the automatic landing to work whilst the ship you’re trying to land is moving is the next job. Dave has started implementing the radar and scanning mechanic, he actually did a lot of work previously getting it working whilst in a ship scanning other ships, but he’s now extended it to also work in FPS mode. A lot of the work actually ends up being on the UI side, so he’s been working closely with Simon and Zane to get the UI working nicely. Rob is working again on the conversation system and integrating it with our Subsumption system, which is what is going to end up driving it going forwards. A conversation can be seen as just another task, so for the obligatory bar tender example, task 1 he can have a conversation about what drink a customer want, task 2 mix the drink, task 3 serve the drink, task 4 have a conversation about how the customer’s day has been, and so on.

Steve’s been continuing work on the Object Containers and we’re nearly at the point where we can use them to set the ships up, we’re using the Retaliator as a bit of a test bed. Unfortunately we have hit a slight snag on the networking synchronisation side which means we need his Spawn Bundle system to make it work correctly, so now he’s moved over and is concentrating on finishing that up.

Graphics

This month, we’ve looked into our facial animation tech, fixing several cases where the wrong detail level would have been selected, and made improvements to the data compilation step, vastly reducing the number of vertices that need to be stored and processed. We’ve also been working on a performance profiling system that unifies all the important data into one screen, with built in filters to let us see what we have too much of, where it is, and which team is responsible for fixing it.

We’ve built a system for linking lights to emissive surfaces, so that the luminance of the surface is automatically calculated from the intensity of the lights that are linked to it – this means that turning a light off can implicitly make the light bulb stop glowing, and gives the new optical effects (mentioned in last month’s report) physically plausible light units to work from.

We’ve done a pass over the particle effect shaders, adding an HDR temperature gradient option to let us have hot fire and dark smoke within a single particle, fixing conservation-of-energy when viewing particles from different angles, and correcting animated particles to warp smoothly from frame to frame.

Work has continued on rendering gas clouds, and we’ve started responding to bugs and feedback from the art and design teams. We’ve also revisited the tiled lighting system, to push past the last few performance hurdles that are stopping us from switching over and deprecating the older system.

Ships

Ship team have been as busy as ever this month. The Starfarer that has been months in the making finally went into players hangars. The team is also happy to have successfully delivered the unique X’ian Khartu-Al, allowing players to fly this.

We have also made incredible progress on the Idris and Javelin. This month we managed to get the Idris bridge, Gravity Room, Armory, Cargo Room and Escape Pods done. On the Javelin we got through the Bridge and the entire Engineering Deck.

Specifically to S42 we are very impressive with how the Bengal is shaping up. Wrapping up our final texture sheets on the exterior and creating the building sets needed for the interior. Bringing the Bengal up to the quality our community has come to expect from Star Citizen is very important to us.

Finally, we are making progress on the Drake Herald and Caterpillar as well as the new Hornet F7A for Squadron 42. All of these are now in full production and we look forward to being able to share more on the progress of these soon!

Environments

This month has seen another big push on SQ42, including one level which is now being moved into Final Art Phase. The whole facility is locked in terms of content and layout which will include terrain based traversal [blending with procedural content], maintenance bays, habitation sections, technical areas etc. It will be a full living, breathing environment by the time we are finished with it which is perfect for a sandbox based experience. Other locations of the campaign are progressing nicely, the guys are Greyboxing out the areas and translating the elements from the concept art into 3D.

Weapons & Levels

A lot of planning the previous month has really been helping get a good flow of work from the concept team, we are tackling both Sq42 content and in the gaps tackling areas for the PU too. Gary has spent a lot of time on the Xi’an Transport ship interior, Jort on Space station interiors and exterior configurations, Dan on components and Javelin hangar, Stu on ship weapons, Sarah on ship components and props, Gavin R on a new small ship, Miles on the second pass of Behring FPS weaponry we need for sq42, integrating a more visually interesting rail system and designing the ‘family’ (sniper, CQB, shotgun etc). We also took a trip down to Lionhead Studios who are sadly closing to see if any of their staff would be interested in the project – fingers crossed for a few more team members!

Character Team

Some of the eagle eyed will have noticed new character outfits in Nathan’s Starfarer video, the quality is really quite excellent! Mike has been working on Bridge crew outfits and Jon on the Vanduul, with having Chris in the studio it makes for much faster iteration, pushing and pulling and really getting this race to where Chris wants it.

QA

As always it’s been a very busy month here in QA at Foundry 42. As soon as we pushed 2.2 to Live we were hard at work on 2.3, making sure the epic Starfarer looked as good as it should and the Xi’an Aopoa Khartu-al was as fast and nippy a scout/exploration vehicle as it should be. Time was devoted to missile balancing, bringing those staple implements of dogfighting back into the fray as useful parts of the players arsenal and testing new changes to the EVA system, which I have to say is looking so good now! Our dedicated Squadron 42 testers Liam and Lee have been playing through new chapters as they have been integrated into the builds and put the Devastator-12 shotgun and the Arrowhead Sniper rifle through their paces.

Just around the corner is 2.3.1 which we are beavering away at, checking that infinite loading screens are vanquished whilst trying our hardest to shoo (excess) pirates away from Yela, hopefully making it as smooth an experience for you guys as possible and it should be ready soon™!

With every new PTU push Adam Parker gathered much appreciated feedback from the backers on PTU, which helps us immensely. I’d like to thank all of our backers for the help they provide QA with their feedback and Issue Council reports, especially the guys and gals who put in massive amounts of time and effort on PTU helping us find larger scale issues that are otherwise too cumbersome for internal team to reproduce. Your input is really invaluable, a huge thanks to you all!

We have also had three new additions come into the QA fold, so please welcome Wayne Owen, Michaela Oliver and Ray Warner to the team! All three have industry experience from Sony Computer Entertainment (Wayne & Ray) and Traveller’s Tales (Mici) adding further strength to our already formidable QA force! They have settled in and are quickly becoming part of the family here.

Right now we are testing the last areas of 2.3.1 whilst gearing up for 2.4 which has some very exciting additions that we can’t wait to try and break so you guys don’t have to!

See you in the ‘verse!

VFX

The VFX team have been focusing on Live release priorities this month, including hangar-ready Starfarer (man that thing’s a beast!) which requires lots of subtle interior effects. A lot of this is preparation – putting in the groundwork – for later flight-ready tasks. We’ve also been supporting Caleb in Frankfurt who was tasked with the majority of effects tasks for flight-ready Scout – no doubt you will read all about that in the Frankfurt report!

Away from live release, our new VFX artist Staffan has been getting to grips with weapon effects – we’re working on a couple of new ones and have been tidying up some existing effects too.

We’ve also been working closely with the graphics engineers to finalise several particle lighting improvements. We are really happy with how our particles “behave” now in all lighting conditions (a crucial factor when working on such a complex universe with so many lighting variables). Related to this, we have been testing how our particles hold up with the new bloom and flares settings applied. Hint: they look really lovely; things like sparks, and other “hot” particles look so much more natural now. We’re really looking forwards to showing off these improvements in later live releases.

Design

March was another busy month in the UK design department.

In terms of ships, we have a Starfarer flying around in the game now and what a beast it is! Hopefully we will be seeing a working refuelling system coming online very soon, but there is still work to do there in a number of areas. The Argo is getting very close to finished and the Javelin Destroyer has landed on the tech design table. We have seen some funny Idris landing videos doing the rounds this month as that ships gets closer to release. You would have to be a brave pilot to try to land a Hornet in there without Automatic Landing enabled, especially if it was moving. That said, we made good progress with the Automatic Landing system this month, and it feels great to land vertically on a station now, but we are still tuning the horizontal landing system, and waiting for the new UI to be implemented.

The first pass on the controls refactor is going in for 2.4.0, so you we see a much better unification between the various game modes, FPS, EVA and space combat. We are looking forward to getting any feedback on this.

From system design, we got the mobiGlas refactored design signed off and into production. Also, the Holotable updated design is going into the engineering and UI teams hands for final implementation.

S42 is still getting the bulk of our design resources and the levels now locked down from design/art layout standpoint. The mechanics are filtering in and the NPC AI is getting more robust so we are starting to get a better feel for the play spaces.

Thanks again for the fantastic support as always.

Props

Props, short and sweet this month:

This month has seen a bit of a shift in priorities with ship components getting a few more resources and now we understand the feature better we want to make sure that when it goes live we have plenty of components to play with and customise your ships. There is going to be plenty of choices that should allow you to make your ship really feel yours and fly just how you want it.

Shopping has been the other big focus at the start of the month, we spent a bit of time bug fixing and doing some optimisations after getting some feedback and stats from our tech artist as well as putting the finishing touches on some of the props to make them work with the new tech that is being finalised.

Squadron 42 work is continuing, we made an effort to go through and do a really quick pass on getting placeholders in for any props we were missing so that the environment artists and designers can dress their scenes and we can make sure we aren’t missing anything off our plans.

Next month, a lot more ship components and with our new team members settling in fast a few more props!

Audio

CIG Audio has been busy as ever this month.

CIG Audio has been busy as ever this month.

Hopefully by now most of you will have enjoyed the Starfarer promo, including some beautifully produced music by Pedro Macedo Camacho for that. For the ship’s sound design itself, Darren Lambourne has been busy working on the thrusters and interior soundscapes, still work in progress but hopefully befitting such an impressive ship. Luke Hatton has been giving many ships a review to ensure all is working as it should be and that the audio is ship-shape!

Matteo Cerquone has been supporting the procedural Foley system and content for that, and is also responsible for a large part of the Xi’An Scout’s sound design – quite different to the usual ship schemes I’m sure you’ll agree.

Ross Tregenza has been keeping on top of all things musical as usual, both for the Persistent Universe (while I’m writing this report, I’m listening live to another orchestral session that’s being undertaken to ensure Star Citizen’s music is performed live as much as possible; Ross is attending to that in person as I’ve not been able to this time round); and we’re also getting rolling with music for Squadron 42 too. We’re hoping to get a new level of interactive score into the live release soon, following in the tradition of Chris Roberts’ work in Wing Commander. We’ll be taking a huge mass of material to a studio to mix with a film score mix engineer in the next month which should elevate this material even further.

We had an exterior gun recording session in March, which took place in Copehill Down in the south of England in conjunction with Steve Whetman (aka AudioBeast). We’ve worked with him a number of times now on gun recording sessions and are now getting some lovely outdoor gunshot material through from this latest session – will take some time to edit and process, there’s a lot of channels we captured from multiple perspectives. Stefan Rutherford headed that session up from our side, ably assisted by Matteo Cerquone and Philip Smallwood. We’ll compile some photos and material for your reference and enjoyment, of course.

Phil Smallwood has been training up with Bob Rissolo to assist him with all things dialogue related, puts us in a good place to deal with the Squadron 42 workload, as well as the vocal requirements for the persistent universe.

Jason Cobb’s been busy working on ship explosion debris cloud sweeteners and providing a lot of support for the build process where audio is concerned, and assisting in Wwise tech support wherever possible. Stefan, myself and Jason have been looking at ways to re-structure the Wwise project to benefit procedural and linear-style mixing.

All the audio programming team have been working on various bugs and optimisations, as well as looking to progress the Ship Computer dialogue system (Sam Hall); the in-game VOIP-style system and procedural/automated Foley/footsteps (Graham Phillipson); and we’ve had Simon Price digging ever deeper into dialogue pipeline tools and systems.

Our general aim is to keep improving all things audio, from tools, workflows, pipelines on our side, to the content and overall sound that you hear and appreciate on the player side. Do keep asking questions and providing feedback on the Ask A Dev forum, that’s always hugely valuable to us.

Thanks for listening!

Animation

We’ve been working on the core locomotion – start stops and steps to improve player movement and responsiveness. Additionally, pistol aimpose exploration to strike a balance between first person and third person is working nicely together and the initial implementation of railgun animations has gone in so that we have a functioning weapon. The next stage will be to bring them up to final. There has also been support for ai animation – guys checking vents and reacting to sounds and the like. Finally, testing and feedback of new tool suite that is coming online is continuing!