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Arena Commander Weekly Report - April 21-25
APRIL 25TH 2014

CLOUD IMPERIUM SANTA MONICA



Travis Day, Dogfight Producer
Greetings Citizens!

Ah what a week it has been! This is one of my favorite points in any project as you approach a release and start to see all the pieces coming together and aligning to the cohesive vision. Our team here in Santa Monica has been diligently pushing through all of their tasks to meet our lofty goals for the release of DFM.

We’ve seen a great deal of forward progress this week and below are some of the specifics of what various groups have been up to within our studio. There is a lot that goes on each week so apologies for not capturing every detail but here is a good high level overview of the new features.

Design
The design group has been hard at work this week making sure that all our ships are dogfighting ready. This includes analyzing/balancing the mass of ships and their parts, thruster distribution and output, and their responsiveness to player input. We are approaching have the ships flying the way we want them to (pending further testing and feedback ) and behaving in the way you would expect them to given their physical attributes.

With the work that engineering has put into the signature and missile system, Design has been balancing the cross sections, heat output, and EM emissions of each ship, item, and part. This has led to some great moments in the play tests where you receive and incoming missile alert and rather than dropping chaff/flares (depending on the missile type) you can instead – with a heaping dose of skill and luck – duck into a crater on an asteroid and see the missile fly by above you having lost its firm lock.

Design is also constantly adjusting and adding inputs for the various control methods based on the feedback gathered during internal playtests and as new features come online.

Engineering
Missile fixes galore! The signature system for detecting enemy ships based on their heat, radar cross-section, and electromagnetic emissions has been overhauled to be more flexible and dynamic. This in turn has allowed us to update the behavior of both the player radar (underway in the UK) and update the way missiles behave based off which type of signature they are able to target.

The engineers have also implemented and tuned a hit impulse system so that incoming fire from enemy ships will now cause both linear momentum and angular momentum to your own ship. This is based on the kinetic energy and the effect varies based on where it actually hits on the ship relative to the center of mass for your ship.

Our chat system is also underway! One of the things that became rapidly apparent during our cross-studio playtesting was that we needed the ability to taunt one another if we weren’t in the same room. Luckily we’re close to having a functioning chat system as we close out this week so we won’t have this problem much longer!

Meanwhile our Graphics Engineer has been updating many of the post-processing and shader effects being used in the game. The holorenderer shader used on the 3D objects in the HUD has been refactored and upgraded to allow better artist control and add some additional effects to sell the holographic/projected nature of these objects. He’s also implemented an effect for g-force induced red out to rival his awesome black out effect.

Art
The Aurora and 300i have been fully updated to properly take advantage of PBR, blow apart beautifully, and LOD out in way that maximizes performance while minimizing the visual impact. Of course our Lead Vehicle Modeler, Chris Smith, with his undying sense of perfectionism couldn’t let the 300i pass without uprezzing and slightly remodeling the interior. He’s just finished up this work and all I can say is that if you thought the 300i looked amazing in the commercial just wait until you see it in the DFM.

The latest pass of visual effects for the Hornet have been integrated into the game and hooked up (remember those huge XML’s Forrest showed off?) to all the parts, items, impacts, weapons fire, ammo types, and each of their various damage states. This pass has really improved the feel and visual feedback as to what is going happening in and on your ship. During the PAX East demo we were in the process of refactoring the hierarchy of the ship models so we didn’t get to show off as much of this as we wanted to. The 300i and the Aurora are now getting the same treatment as I write this and we should have an update on those next week!

Last but not least is the ongoing work on the HUD. Many new items have been added to the HUD warning system to bring different important events like missile locks, collision warnings, and other status messages to the player’s attention. We’ve been adjusting some of the HUD elements for better readability, adding elements that need to be better visually communicated, and generally improving upon the visual language being established as we go. Some of these things include adjusting the reticles to better communicate the status of your interaction with the target object/ship. We’ve been adjusting some of the 3D objects for the radar and the HUD to improve their look and readability to the player. Our master HUD artist, Zane, has also concepted out some ideas for the HUD of the Freelancer and Avenger for folks to review.

Conclusion
Well that about wraps it up for this past week of development here in Santa Monica. Again, this isn’t every task that was completed but rather a high level look at some of the more interesting new features and updates to existing features. There was one last discovery made this week worth mentioning however… We’ve noticed from our cross-studio playtesting on the backend that Santa Monica has, without question, the best dogfighters in the company.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us on our ‘Ask a Developer’ threads!

Cheers,
CIG Santa Monica


CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN



Eric Peterson, Studio Director
Hello Citizens, we had quite the week here in Austin on the big Dogfighting push.

Art:
Created some new weapons the Behring M6A laser, and the Omnisky Ultra 1 laser cannon. We continued to setup the aurora so that the geniuses in the Santa Monica office can make it fly correctly, and we continued the modeling on the UEE marine helmet.

Graphics:
Worked on some refraction particle shader issues, worked on the flickering artwork bugs, and continued tweaking the shield including working on the effect for Capture the core.

Design:
Assisted on the testing and debugging of both server and playability of the Dogfight Module.

Programming:
zSupervisor up and running, Profile rigid body asteroids, tested the load system, setting up SC Build system on new dev cluster hardware, helped REDACTED test matchmaking solution, updated account login step.

Audio:
Implemented dogfighting ship damage transitions, weapons SFX, Thruster SFX and Engine SFX.

Production:
Worked with other production teams within CIG to set up proper roll out plan for Dogfighting Module V1.

QA
Testing daily builds of the DFM, debugging logging bugs, checking fixes, and ensuring fidelity of global builds.

Heading into the big push for the rollout is always fun and exciting, seeing the ships come from barely flyable to super fun and engaging each studio in friendly battles makes us very proud and excited for what we have coming up.

See you all in the verse.

Eric

FOUNDRY 42



Erin Roberts, Studio Director
Hi from Foundry 42.

In general pretty much everything in the UK is in content lock down, with everyone focusing on stability, performance and polish. Outside of code, the majority of Foundry 42 is focused back on to the massive capital ships we need for S42 and the PU, as well as fleshing out the first S42 missions for the game. We’ve been having daily playtests over the cloud servers, and feeding back on bugs and polish issues.

Design:
This week we have been concentrating on the capture the core game mode, with the first full playtest of this mode over the last 3 days. It’s feeling pretty fun already, and we have a bunch of feedback from the rest of the team that we are implementing next week to improve it further. We also have added the Vanduul Scythe into the Swarm mode, and their AI is really starting to come together, after a few issues at the end of last week where they wouldn’t move due to thruster issues.

Code:
A bunch of work has been going on in this area. Loads of bugs and issues have been fixed all week, but main points are:

We’re going through a bunch of feedback on the HUD and it is now much less cluttered with everything not on by default. We are re-working elements of the radar so it is more readable when you are dealing with a lot of targets. Targeting is going through a lot of refining in terms of how you target / identify and lock different ships, and then how you pin them to your HUD. Also a lot of polish has gone into the feedback system, so the player has clear feedback on his score, who is friends / foes are etc.

The music system for the DF Module was also finished off this week, and we are looking at putting in one or two refinements next week for it.

Asteroids – A lot of work going on in this area as we are working on making them all destructible, but as you can imagine that has a huge knock on, not only with performance, but network traffic as once you create a bunch of debris, smaller asteroids from the larger ones you blow up it means we have to update, render and keep track of more objects. On the UK side we’ve been looking at reducing the physics overhead on all these objects, so when you have thousands in a scene they don’t kill the CPU. Over the pond a bunch of optimizations have been going in to make the amount of actual information being passed from the client to the server (to do with asteroids) as small as possible to make sure of minimal latency.

Graphics – On the VFX side a bunch of work has gone in to work out a clean solution to a nasty sorting issue we have. This will be completed next week, and should put an end to some of the flickering you will have seen in the latest footage.

Stats – Not as exciting as other areas, but just as important so you can see how you are doing. A number of issues were fixed to make sure that points are scored correctly / kills registered etc.

Stability – A number of re-spawn issues were fixed this week to make sure that when we push the module out it will be in a stable enough state so the community can feedback to us (hopefully) on the important stuff like play balancing, ship and weapons stats etc. rather than just getting frustrated if the game is crashing all the time.

Art:
Art is actually pretty much locked down now with the exception of some extra VFX work to make the game look even better, and some re-organisation of one of our structures (a huge Station ring) for capture the core in the game. The Art department and most of the design guys have been focusing on Capital ship white boxing and now actual art work for a few weeks now.

Animation:
Just some clean up on ejection which is now finished from the UK side.

 

LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN: $43 MILLION
APRIL 28TH 2014






Greetings Citizens,
Another incredible accomplishment by Star Citizen’s backers $43 million!



I’d like to begin today’s letter by showing you where one of our previous stretch goals is going. At $42 million, we unlocked the Gladius light fighter for Squadron 42. The team at Foundry 42 has been working on the ship and I’m pleased to show you some of the early WIP today! The Gladius is intended to be an older fighter that doesn’t have the arms and armor of a Hornet… but that can maneuver and strike quickly.

At $43 million, every backer (to this point) gets a set of marine combat armor added to their accounts! A full description is below, but you’ll learn a lot more about what this is good for as we lock down more information about Star Citizen’s FPS module.

• Omni Role Combat Armor (ORC) mk9 Manufacturer:CDS (Clark Defense Systems) The ‘standard’ Marine armor for almost twenty years, ORC armor is prohibitively more expensive than standard-issue infantry body armor used by Army Ground Forces, but the Marines boast far fewer numbers and tend to make compelling arguments to get what they ask for. Clark Defense Systems’ ORC armor is created of composite mesh of fibers reinforced with ablative plates, offering a modest protection against both energy and kinetic weapons. While it doesn’t offer the same protection of the Marines’ proprietary Nail-armor or their SpecOps variants, ORCmk9 armor is a baseline solution for any number of situations the average Marine will encounter on any given day. Besides, in the words of Lt. Col Armin Trask, “you wanna know the best armor? Not getting shot.”

The votes are in and the winner of the $45 million reward is… the mystery object! It’s pretty cool seeing the community take a chance on something unknown instead of going for a free weapon or other upgrade. And you won’t be disappointed! The mystery object is more than just a piece of flare, it’s a puzzle players will someday compete to solve. Where the artifact lead you? A lost Hadesian outpost, a cache of technology, a hidden jump point? It’s up to you to find out!

• Hadesian Artifact – The mystery of what happened in Hades has been one of the great archeological puzzles ever since the system was discovered in the early 26th Century. The evidence suggests that the Hadesians nearly erased their entire civilization in devastating civil war that left a planet cracked in half, but so many questions remained. Who were these Hadesians? How did the war get started? Over the centuries, even the public became enamored by the mystery of this system. This curiosity was inflamed when scientists recently discovered a lone Hadesian artifact on the black market of all places. Trinket manufacturers quickly tried to capitalize on the resurgence of interest by building exact copies of the artifact for sale to the public, even replicating the unidentified symbols along the base…

I don’t want to sound repetitive after so many levels, but thank you again for your support. Every additional dollar goes to Star Citizen’s development and makes it a better game. Please remember to take the penultimate player reward stretch goal poll, listed below. It’s hard to believe we’ve come this far, but the winner will be the $46 million stretch goal!

 

MONTHLY REPORT: APRIL, 2014 (Part 1)
MAY 1ST 2014

Greetings Citizens,
It’s time for April’s Star Citizen development report! As we have done previously, we’ve asked the people in charge of each CIG studio and outsource group to report on what they have been up to in the previous month. (Please note that this also replaces the Arena Commander Weekly Report for May 2nd, since it includes everything done on AC this week.)


CLOUD IMPERIUM SANTA MONICA



Travis Day, Dogfight Producer
As April comes to a close it is time again for us to reflect upon, and share, the major developments of the month! There is much to discuss so let’s get straight to it!

At the beginning of this month we revealed Arena Commander (AKA – DFM) to all the backers who were able to attend our pre-PAX East event in Boston and to the world via livestream. We also had the privilege of having Arena Commander playable on the show floor of PAX East for citizens and interested passerby alike in the Logitech booth. Of course we weren’t able to show everything we wanted to that night in Boston so we put together a video showing off some of the additional features we’ve been working on that didn’t make the demo level which you can see below if you missed it.

While showing off all our team’s hard work is very gratifying, the real treat is being able to interact with everyone in the community in person. Words cannot express how humbling and inspiring it is to be able to meet with so many people who are so passionate about the universe we are creating. It is incredibly motivating for all of us who were in attendance and while it isn’t truly possible to capture those indelible feelings we were able to share at least some of that with the team upon our return.

Speaking of the team, let’s move on to what they’ve been up to! Similar to many of the other studios, we here in Santa Monica are finishing up new feature implementation as we approach our branch date and code lock and move into final polish, tweaking, and bug fixing. To this end there has been a lot of planning and communication going on amongst all the studios to synchronize our finishing of feature development and finalizing our polish and rollout strategy. This will allow us to focus on finishing and stabilizing the planned features we’ve implemented and lower the risk of introducing new issues as we prepare for the launch of Arena Commander.

Whilst Production, Operations, and Network Engineering have been planning and executing the above strategy, our visual effects team has been finishing its final passes on effects and hooking them up to all the parts and states of the Aurora, 300i, Scythe, and Hornet and all of their possible item combinations. Our planning on this from Forrest and Casey has panned out quite well. In creating the effects for the Hornet and the Scythe along with all their weapons and items we’ve established a good starting point for an effects library for both UEE and Vanduul craft. Obviously these libraries will grow and change over time but it has us well positioned to rapidly iterate and hook up new ships and items in the future.

Speaking of ships breaking apart… This month has seen the completion of hooking up all of the damage pieces, LODs, particle effect nodes, etc. for the Scythe, 300i, Aurora, and Hornet. Not only do they all now explode, break, and LODproperly but we’ve also got them all flying properly this month. They’ve all been converted to PBR and as mentioned in a previous post the 300i has also undergone a major uprez and detail pass as it was being converted to PBR. All of the ships (which already looked great) are now looking absolutely fantastic. This is another case where our early work both in the way we approached it and focusing on the Hornet first has paid of dividends. By spending the time to R&D ship mechanics with the Hornet and locking down the process and documentation it has allowed us to blaze through the Scythe, Aurora, and 300i much more quickly and each ship has progressed more quickly than the last as we improve our technique, which is great to see.

On the engineering front the team has been focusing on finishing off some changes to the pipe system (framework which manages per ship and per part CPU, power, cooling, and fuel) to allow players to manipulate settings dynamically on a per item basis or on a global level for the ship which will affect all attached parts. This was a stretch goal for us going into the first release so we’re pleased that we’ve been able to fit this in as it will improve the dynamism of ships greatly and we think player’s will really enjoy it.

The pipe system wasn’t the only one to get a bit of an upgrade. Radar/detection system too has undergone an overhaul to expand its functionality both to improve its current features and to create the foundation for future features that designers can play with. It has also undergone an optimization both in parallel to this which has greatly increased its performance per frame. To expand upon the improvements to the radar system, it has been moved into a centralized system hosted by the vehicle that can be shared by multiple items and only get called once. That doesn’t sound very sexy but what it allows is for much more realistic simulation of missiles for example. Where you can feed your ships primary radar data to the missile for acquiring lock and then later switch to the missiles radar only once it has left the ship. It also paves the way for slaving radar from one ship to another or things like centralized command and control which is a feature we know a lot of our community is looking forward to. Lastly, we’ve adjusted the way the signal to noise ratio system works and expanded its functionality quite a bit to allow designers to play with different types of chaff, armor, nebulas, flares, etc. and have them impact the radar/detection system in entirely new ways.

On the graphics engineering side Okka Kyaw has been very busy working on many improvements to the HUD’s look and feel to make sure that the curvature shader works perfectly in a multitude of resolutions and has a projected holographic feel. He’s also created the redout effect to match his stellar g-force induced blackout effect and is now working on the interstitial effects such as blackout recovery to provide a more realistic and filmic return to consciousness. Overall we believe that folks will be really happy with the graphics effects and immersive feel that his work accomplishes.
Our headcount has increased by 1, with the addition of our new Human Resources specialist. We do have some exciting new hires coming up and we look forward to updating you about them next month!

We would like to close this month by taking a moment to thank you, each and every backer, for all of their support on this project. From backing the game, to fan fiction, to late night chatroll, ‘Ask a Dev’ threads, to fan gifts, to meeting everyone at events like the Arena Commander reveal. We are all truly humbled by all that you do for us and genuinely appreciate you making it possible for us to create this universe for us to share in together.

As always, feel free to post any comments or questions in our “Ask a Dev” threads and until next time… See you in the ‘verse!


CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN



Eric Peterson, Studio Director
Hello Citizens!

Here in Austin, we’ve been working on the integration of all the various studios’ code drops, in order to get the Dogfighting M… I mean Arena Commander… ready for launch. What that means is taking all the work done in places like Santa Monica, Manchester, Montreal and [Redacted], putting it together and making sure it all works the way it’s supposed to. We’re also knee deep in planning for the delivery of AC through the client side launcher/patcher; you know, that thing you log in to every time you visit your Hangar! Our other big dogfighting job is getting the backend server code stable for the release.

Outside of dogfighting, we’re working on the long-term planning and scheduling for both the planetside module and the eventual persistent universe. Launching Arena Commander is going to teach us a lot that we’ll need to know for both these future releases! We also hosted a cinematics and motion capture summit where teams from around the company plotted out the cinematic for both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. Essentially, we sat down and blocked out the entire script so we’ll know what needs to be shot for our game!

Engineering:
The engineering team has been focusing on Dog Fighting v1 tasks including hangar, ship and other bugs that need to be fixed prior to launching. This also includes zSupervisor work for starting up game server processes, working to get the matchmaking services integrated and monitoring server issues during play tests. We are continuing integration of CryEngine 3.6 and should be complete by the end of next week 5/2/2014 barring any unforeseen issues.

Engineering has also been working on fixing build system issues as they come up and working with IT to migrate the old build system to the newly configured build system cluster. Phase I of this should be completed next week and we will continue to upgrade the system as needs arise.

Cinematics/Mocap:
In addition to the big cinematics summit, we concluded the facilities search for a mocap location (more on that soon!) and have made good progress on crew, vendor and process planning. That is the who and how of the massive motion capture shoot needed for Squadron 42. We’re working to finish tests and evaluations on several software options for facial and body mocap solutions. We’ve also generated the first budget for the shoot and we’re working with Foundry 42 on what assets are going to be needed in terms of ships and virtual sets before we start putting actors in their rigs.

Animation:
Our biggest priority this month was supporting the dogfighting launch with animations. You’d be surprised how much goes into Arena Commander, beyond just flipping your helmet around as you board your ship! We’re also cleaning up the existing Hangar animations and supporting some needs for the upcoming ship commercials.

Animation is on the grow: we’ve hired a new senior animator who starts soon, and we’re getting ready to do some mocapping for the First Person Shooter module launch. Another major priority going forward is to complete the male and weapon locomotion sets as we move into supporting Foundry 42’s needs for Squadron 42 cinematics… and then, eventually, the persistent universe! Finally, we’ve received new rigged heads, which we are now integrating into the game.

Art:
Art is assisting animation in getting the scanned heads fitted onto our in-game bodies. It’s more difficult than it sounds! The process involves adjusting base model sculpts to work better with heads. We’re also working on the bodies and costumes needed for Squadron 42 and several upcoming ship videos, while fleshing out a more exact list of what’s going to be needed in the long run for the persistent universe.

Meanwhile, art in Austin is exploring head customization and NPC generation options; we’re confident that we’re going to have something very cool in the end. We are finishing up LODs and damage states for all the ships in the Arena Commander V1 release (Hornet, Aurora, 300i and Scythe) and we’re continuing development of Star Citizen’s alien races.

Production:
The production team is primarily focused on the release of Dog Fighting v1. In addition, the production team is working on a Persistent Universe schedule and updating our ship schedule. Up next, we will be fleshing out the character schedules as well as the weapons and items schedule. All of this in tandem with keeping the teams on task, generating the rollout plan for the DFMV1 release, and generally keeping up with all the other production groups at each studio to keep the machine humming along.

Video Production:
Shot various video b-roll and interviews for PAX East DFM reveal. Also, produced, wrote, directed, shot and edited episodes 62-66 of “Wingman’s Hangar”. Shot and edited a sequence of humorous reviews of HP Envy laptop forAMD partnership. Shot video of fan visits and edited them into a video package. Designed and specified power, lighting, sound control of sound stage for Wingman’s hangar and future mocap sessions. Continued to expand upon our video production standards and procedures for commonly used assets for video production. Assisted with technical planning for PAX East as well as future live events.

Design:
In addition to supporting the dogfighting release, we have been forging ahead with persistent universe work. With a staff that has doubled in the past month, we’re drilling into topics like jump point running, bounty hunting, salvaging, and our massive reputation system. Design continues to put a heavy focus on bringing our economy system into a testable state, so we’re neck-deep in spreadsheets about how things are put together, where they’re found, and what they’re worth.

We also continue to push forward with the future of the hangar, with an improved shooting range and an early look at overclocking on the near horizon.

Good news for the web junkies: an update to the ship stats page is coming soon!

Audio:
In April, the entire audio department has been focusing on the needs of the Dogfight Module, beginning with the PAXEast reveal and continuing on to the first release. Martin Galway has been hard at work wrangling the many facets of audio production – here is a look at what is going on with his team.

Pedro has been delivering interactive music clips that have been implemented so far by Jens Lind. Mason Fisher has been generating WAVs for [REDACTED] EVA work; Bill Munyon has spent most of his time on spacecraft sound design & implementation; Jason Cobb has concentrated on fixing existing audio, creating new implementation hooks and playtesting; Stefan was hired in mid-April and is still ramping up, starting with dialogue work for the Dogfighting module. Ian Chuprun has been working on environmental audio for the two multiplayer maps (in addition to asteroid hangar and general hangar upkeep).

IT:
April has been one of the busiest months of this year for the IT team. Between new user support and the PAX East event every member has been busy in their respective studios. With all dev teams working nearly around the clock on DFM Hassan, Dennis, and Chris have been working hard to keep up with upgrades and repairs resulting in virtually zero down time. Our Austin team spent some additional time preparing equipment for the PAX East event as well as wrapping up work on a new build server cluster which will help all dev teams speed up development and testing.
The IT team feels really good about our showing at PAX East and proud of our role in that event.

That is it from Texas – where the weather is getting warmer… and the dogfights getting more heated. And here’s a tip: if you see Rob Irving in the ‘verse, you might want to run… he is getting deadly accurate with his flight stick!

Thanks for your continued support!

Eric

 

MONTHLY REPORT: APRIL, 2014 (Part 2)
MAY 1ST 2014

FOUNDRY 42



Erin Roberts, Studio Director
Hi from Manchester again,

Another month has passed and it’s time to update you all on what we’ve been up to at Foundry 42. In short, there’s been a lot of work on both Arena Commander and Squadron 42. It’s a real pleasure to see both of these projects start to come together. I’d also like to add that I was personally revved up by getting to see our backers get their hands on the game for the first time at PAX East. It’s truly thrilling to see how quickly everyone ‘gets it’ and understands that Star Citizen is the real deal. Here are details on this month’s work from Foundry 42’s internal teams:

Design: (Nick Elms – Design Director)
What have we been doing? Building ships, of course! One of our most important tasks at the moment is designing the interiors of capital ships and space stations, because we’re going to need those as set pieces for some of Squadron 42’s earliest missions. Work on the Idris is continuing well, working alongside CGBot to deal with the few remaining uncertainties. The Javelin Destroyer has made a lot of progress since the concept art you saw; we have its internals mostly “grey boxed” now, with the exception of the bridge (coming soon!) The Panther-class Escort Carrier is almost “white-box” complete: an artist is tracing the pre-fab pieces, of which there are 146! Expect this stage to be complete by the end of the week. The venerable Bengal carrier is also in our shipyards, with white-boxing work being done on the hangar and the briefing room, as well as prototype work being done for methods of transport through the ship (trust me, you don’t want to walk a kilometre to get to your fighter before every mission.) The Shubin Mining Platform is making good progress in the same stage, with significant detailing on the monorail and landing pad sections. We’ve also detailed the refinery rooms, which have some serious machinery! We’re filling void areas with engineering ducts and hidden crannies, and are starting to populate rooms with placeholder props. Finally, some initial block-out has been done on the Xi’An Transport… but you’ll be hearing more about that later!

Seat actions may not be as exciting as fleet actions, but they’re also a necessary part of starship design: figuring out what station controls what in a capital ship, and how to make all of this fun for players. Our seat action plan is almost ready for signoff! On the specs side of things, we’re working on detailing the Vanduul fleet, with the Kingship, medium fighter, heavy fighter and destroyer on the bench at the moment. Next up is the “Void” bomber. The good guys are getting more hardware, too: the UEE dropship is in the works. Lastly, AI and profile work are being done on the Scythe to make sure it fights properly in Arena Commander.

Development of the conversation system is ongoing, with regular meetings to pin down the finer detail required to make the system work the way Chris Roberts imagines. There’s also been more work on the “Bitching Betty” and “Sim Announcer” conversation paths that will be relevant for Arena Commander’s evolution. We’ve also spent quite a bit of time on the multiplayer and Arena Commander V1 game modes. We’ve developed the “Capture the Core” mode from the ground up and it will be getting some final polish in the next few days. “Conquest,” which may not be in V1 but should be ready soon, is getting more development, especially in terms of code hook up. The hoard mode in “Vanduul Swarm” has made a great deal of progress, especially now that the Scythe is flying realistically!

Programming: (Derek Senior – Programming Director)
The main focus this month has been on Arena Commander. We’ve implemented 3D targeting reticules, the 3D HUDradar, scoring, the ITTS, HUD messaging (scoring feedback, join/leave notifications, boundary warnings, etc.), updated the missile launch sequence and refactored the targeting code. We’ve implemented new game rules for three modes, Squadron Battle, Capture the Core and Conquest. A lot of the work we’re doing boils down to bug squashing, especially for the multiplayer modes; now that we’re playing across studios, we can really identify and fix issues! A fair amount of this has been related to player re-spawning, which is now much more reliable. We’ve also done some work implementing HUD sound effects and the dynamic music system, and have polished the targeting panel’s functionality. One thing that I know is hotly debated among Star Citizen fans is controller functionality: we’ve been working on input maps for all types of controllers, from the keyboard to specific HOTAS setups. We’ve had feedback from players and designers across the company on this, and we’re dedicated to making sure Star Citizen is fun no matter what type of control mechanism you choose.

Art and Animation: (Paul Jones – Art Director)
The dogfighting module has been a true cross-company effort… but we’ll proudly take credit for the environment assets and map creation for Dying Star and Broken Moon! Our team went into the CryEngine running and the results speak for themselves. We have also been doing some assorted VFX work for the module and we’ve been helping with future game mode effect types. In April we’ve been perfecting everything from the terraforming stations to the landing platforms to the destructible platforms. We’ve also been working with design on the white-boxing and tiering of the Javelin, Panther and Bengal class warships. The exterior of the Retaliator is also looking great!

On the User Interface side of things, we’ve been nailing down the look and feel of the engineering seat action. Design has figured out what you need to do at a seat… now it’s up to us to figure out how the player should control things like power distribution, cooling, CPU load and the like!

Our concept artists have been doing plenty of 3D work, too! Functional models have been created for the Gladius light fighter (seen in a recent post), the Idris’ recovery ship and belly dock, the Javelin destroyer’s turret (interior and exterior) and the Panther escort carrier. Animation has been hard at work too, working on the dogfighting ejection and g-loc sequences, plus preparing the initial cinematic mocap tests for Squadron 42, the Vanduul pilot rigging and coutless ship weapon animations.

We’ve had another good month of getting through a bunch of needed concept, production and polish work in all departments. Next month (as we have pretty much finished all our Dog Fight Module tasks in the UK) we will be almost totally focussing on bringing capital ship systems online, as well as breaking down our mo-cap shoot needs for S42, as well as continuing to block out the first missions for S42 and everything that entails.

As always, thanks for all your support in allowing us to make this the best damn space sim ever… Without your commitment, support and belief we would not be where we are. I look forward to everyone checking out all the hard work that has gone into the game as we go live with Arena Commander, and maybe taking you guys on in the verse…

Cheers,
Erin


BHVR



Mathieu Beaulieu, Producer
April went by so fast, yet a lot was accomplished. As far as programming goes, a good portion of the team has been working on Dogfighting related features. Our highest priority has been to complete the implementation and polish various user interface functionalities. We’ve made some great progress towards the completion of the framework that works towards building the Visor HUD, the Shield and Power Management UI, in-game Scoreboards as well as the Matchmaking UI.

We are also continuously working on creating the core of the economic simulation, working actively on both the backend simulation services as well as the frontend tools that will allow us to drive the economy.

Spring has finally arrived in Montreal and the Discount, Business and Deluxe Hangars are getting ready for some spring cleaning. Once they have been revamped, we will be able to add expansions and specialty rooms (like the shooting range) to all hangars, including the Asteroid Hangar.

And that’s not all! Work is well underway for the UI/UX design of the mobiGlas OS. Step by step, we are developing a solid global view of what the entire system will look like and how it will work, which will allow us to develop future functionalities faster and keep a consistent look throughout all its applications. We are also working on the avatar customization system which is now better defined, and we are working closely with CIG to make sure we keep the PU characters at the highest level of detail while allowing for maximum customization.


CGBOT



Tara Decker, Producer
April in Monterrey has been all.about.ships. And dogfighting. Cool ships & dogfighting….that’s been our spring. Pretty cool.

Our crew has spent the last month getting the Hornet, Aurora and the 300i (with Mr. Chris Smith) looking beautiful and ready to go into space. Getting the damage, LOD and PBR conversion done for each ship was often challenging as the approach on how to do each is newly defined. But, the ships are looking great & break up really well when hit, so dogfighting is going to be really, really fun.

Artists were also continuing work on the Idris with Erin’s studio. Great group of guys to work with…and incredibly high standards! The ship layout is basically finalized and work on the various rooms and areas (bridge, brig, reactor room, etc…) is in progress. This is a massive ship and work will continue for quite a bit.

The Freelancer and all of it’s variants are almost complete. As is the Avenger. Additional work for damage states andLOD’s will be needed, but the modeling phases are wrapping up nicely.

Next up for us: the ship Chris Roberts says he’s most excited to own: the Constellation. No pressure.

So, I said April was all ships, but we also tackled character work as well. Updating the Male Explorer character. And doing helmet work. It’s crazy to note that as much time is going into modeling & texturing the interior of the helmet as the exterior. Nice.


FREELANCE CONTRACTORS



Sean Murphy, Outsource Manager
Our external contractors have been focusing heavily on ship art this cycle – Eddie del Rio has created some great concepts for the Xi’an Scout ship, Stephan Martiniere is working on bridge interiors, Jan Urschel is designing the Xi’an bomber, and Emmanuel Shiu is exploring the Banu Merchantman. Ryan Church is continuing to develop the Panther Escort Carrier and Jim Martin is creating concepts for variants of the Cutlass, while Gavin Rothery is solidifying the design of the Gladius Light Fighter. And Stefano Tsai is blazing on the M50!

In addition we have Rob McKinnon working on Marine Armor concepts and various other military outfits; Clint Schultz and Dave Scott are working on corporation logos, David Brochard and Justin Sweet are doing some alien character explorations, and Atey Ghailan and Ed Lee are helping refine environments.

Finally, we’re in discussions with another exciting concept artist who has approached us about working with us – but we can’t say anything yet!


FPS TEAM





[Redacted]
Here at [Redacted] in the land of [Redacted] we have been enjoying the [Redacted] weather while hard at work on the FPS module!

The artists have been cranking away creating some amazing looking environments for you Citizens to kill each other in. As more props, detail and polish get implemented, it’s becoming apparent that Star Citizen will not only be one of the best looking games in the depths of space, but also planet-side… or within the corridors of a massive space station.

Our engineers and animators continued tweaking and polishing EVA and Zero-G movement, while the visual FX team came up with some awesome looking thruster jet effects. And while floating around and zooming through levels using thrusters is a blast, the big hit around the office has been Magnetic Boots! These marvels of modern technology let you stomp around on any metal surface in Zero-G… floors, walls, ceilings, ship exteriors, you name it! Coupled with Zero-G, we think it is going to add a very unique twist to the combat.

Speaking of combat, we have also been implementing a cover system. Soon, Citizens will be able to hunker down behind objects or lean in from behind a wall to take shots at the enemy. All of these actions combined with the variety of weapons means that there is an absolutely huge amount of animation that needs to be motion captured… and it just so happens that we are doing motion capture this week.

Moving forward with the FPS module, the team is about to begin a heavy amount play-testing to ensure everything is coming together in a way that is fun, engaging and hopefully nothing quite like anything you’ve ever seen or played before. We can’t wait to show it off and we hope that you Citizens are just as excited as we are!

Currently [Redacted] has a total of 24 talented people working on Star Citizen. Nine artists, six programmers, 4 animators, a creative director, a level designer, a contractor for sound effects, a senior producer and a gameplay producer.


VOID ALPHA





Mark Day, Studio Director
Sherman was the new planet-side location announced in the latest edition of the Observist, and voidALPHA is focused on making it as spectacular as can be! Concept artist Emmanuel Shiu has painted the first 2 establishing shots and is now crafting the look and feel of the shop interiors. Design is building the rough level layout based on those concept shots, ensuring that the white box version accurately represents the architectural style and mood established for this demilitarized UEE base. Environment art has finished a majority of the geometry for The Blocks (Terra: Prime) and has now focused efforts on a basic material pass, getting us that much closer to completing one of the most foul and disreputable planet-side locations you will ever step foot on. Finally, our Centermass “Beautiful Corner” is…well…beautiful! We are in the final stretch of this shop interior, pending a few final lighting and material adjustments that are needed to make this shop a sight to behold!


TURBULENT



Benoit Beauséjour, Founder
The platform team at Turbulent has been focused this month on finalizing Multi-Orgs membership. This is a feature we wanted to release while diving deeper into the second drop of Orgs in which we add significant structure and command upgrades to Orgs. This process is going well as we are now developing the artwork for the viewers and control interface for your Org structure.

A serious amount of time was spent building the Arena Commander leaderboard system which will carry pilot and org stats for the module. The presence of game stats on the site also brings about a revamp of the Citizen Dossier to allow you to show off your simulator pilot skills! (And also maybe review a pilot skill before you recruit him?)

Work has continued on revamping the store experience and bringing about more details on the ship variants and equipment. We now have a full control model on the platform to allow us to update and display ship related stats. Expect more in the upcoming weeks!

The team has made great headway on the multi-factor authentication , another big platform improvement we want to get to the community to improve the security of your accounts and the platform across the board. Many under-the-hood features are also developed to help dealing with account security and other tools for your amazing CS team!


MOON COLLIDER



Matthew Jack, Founder
April began with intensity for the three developers of the core Kythera team, as we were in the thick of things iterating on gameplay for the PAX East demo. This was especially exciting for us because it represented the first public playtest of Kythera, in Star Citizen’s Vanduul Swarm mode. There’s footage from that build on our website.

Since PAX we’ve been working towards the Dogfighting v1 release itself. The biggest change for us is the move to the Scythe. Kythera has been flying Hornets thus far but the Scythe is needed for Vanduul Swarm mode and those ships handle very differently and use different maneuvers.

A key feature this month is the improvement of avoidance to better handle some large and complex pieces of geometry in the Vanduul Swarm levels, in particular the Terraformer in Broken Moon. We’re also extending our Inspector debugging tool to give much more powerful feedback to programmers and designers as they craft Vanduul Swarm mode’s gameplay.

 

MULTIPLE ORGANIZATION MEMBERSHIP LAUNCHED!
MAY 8TH 2014


Greetings Citizens,
Can’t choose between Imperium and LAMP? We’re proud to announce that the team at Turbulent has enabled multiple organization membership! Citizens can now select both a ‘main’ organization and up to nine ‘affiliates.’ Please check out the FAQ below for more details.

This can be considered ‘version 1.5’ of the Organizations system; additional features are coming in the future, including fleet view and inter-organizational reputation systems. Note that joining an Organization today will carry over into the finished game: these are some of your first steps into the Star Citizen universe!

MULTI-ORG FAQ
Q: How can I be part of more than one Org? What are “Mains” and “Affiliations”?
A: The new system allows any backer or owner of a game package to be part of up to 10 organizations at once. However, backers in multiple Orgs may choose one to be their Main Org and this is what will be displayed in your Forum info and your Profile Overview. The others will be known as “Affiliations”.

Q: What’s the difference between a Member and an Affiliate then?
A: An Org’s Members are the users who chose this Org as their Main. This means that they’ve chosen this Org to be displayed prominently in their Profile, but it also means that they’re allowed to have a Role in that Org (Recruiting, Branding… any kind of responsibility). Affiliates cannot have a Role in an Org.

Q: How do I choose my Main Org?
A: If you go to your Personal Account Settings, you’ll be able to choose your Main Organization: you can select “Set as Main” to any affiliation, making it your Main. You can also select “Set as Affiliation” your Main, to make it an affiliation. This means that you’re perfectly allowed to have no Main, just affiliations.
Be aware though that if you select “Set as Affiliation” on your Main, you’ll automatically lose any Role (meaning permissions) that you had in it.

Q: What does “Visibility” mean for an Org Member or Affiliate?
A: We’ve introduced the concept of Membership Visibility to give you control over what other backers can see. When you join an Org, either as your Main or as an Affiliation, you’ll immediately be asked to choose a Visibility.

Q: What are the types of Visibility?
A: There are three types of Visibility:

• Public: Everyone can see you’re part of that Org. It shows up in your Citizen Dossier, and you show up in its Member list.
• Redacted: People can see that you’re part of “an” Org, but can’t see which. Your Citizen Dossier has a “Redacted” block where that Org would be, and you show up as “Redacted” in its Member List. All “Redacted” blocks make it impossible to trace the Member or the Org. (Note: the Org’s Officers can still see you clearly in their own Admin view. They were the ones who recruited you anyway)
• Hidden: Nothing shows up in your Citizen Dossier. It’s like you were never part of it. The Org’s Member List shows a blank card where you would be. (Note: Again, the Org’s Officers can see you clearly in their Admin view)

New Citizen Dossier

Q: Can I “Redact” and “Hide” my Main Org?
A: You can Redact your Main Org but you cannot Hide it.

Q: Can I “Redact” and “Hide” my Affiliates?
A: Yes, You can both Redact and Hide Affiliates in any combination you desire.

Q: Can I change my Visibility Status after the fact?
A: Yes the Visibility can be changed at anytime

Q: Does Main and Affiliate Orgs impact the Org Activity Score if they are “Redacted” or “Hidden”?
A: All Org you are members of receive Org Activity Score from your actions regardless of Visibility. Public members however effect the Org Activity Score more than hidden members creating an incentive to have less hidden members.

Q: How do Redacted and Hidden Org Members look when inspecting an Org roster?
A: The Org Roster will have Boxes for every member of the Org but Redacted/Hidden Org members will be displayed as such. You will still know the number of Org members but not roster.

What’s an “Exclusive” Org?
A: An “Exclusive” Orgs is flagged, by its owners, as requiring its members to only be part of this org. This means they’re advertising that they’ll be policing their members to make sure it stays that way. Still, the system doesn’t enforce anything, so it won’t actively prevent the members from joining other orgs. It’s entirely up to the owners to keep their members in line.

 

HANGAR UPDATED
MAY 9TH 2014




Greetings Citizens,



A new patch for the Hangar module has been released! This is a smaller cleanup patch, which corrects a number of issues with the Hangar’s Oculus Rift support. These updates include true stereo rendering, orientation prediction and keyboard commands to toggle the Rift on and off and to recenter the view. Today’s patch also includes some flare! The Star Citizen UEE Observist towels rewarded to all who backed before reaching $42 million will now appear in your Hangars.

And if you’re a development subscriber, you’ll get your first piece of flare starting tomorrow, May 8! May’s item is an interactive calendar, which shows the current date in the Star Citizen universe and lets you examine some future holidays. Additional calendars will be available to gift to others for $5 each in the Subscriber store. Remember that all flare included as subscriber perks will also be available in-game in the persistent universe. (Anyone who subscribes this weekend will also receive a calendar, attributed Monday.)

You can view the complete patch notes here.

 

SHIP STATS UPDATED
MAY 9TH 2014



The ship stats page has been updated!

We’ve made a major update to the site showing Star Citizen’s comparative ship stats. This update reflects current balancing plans for existing ships and reveals the initial specifications for a number of unseen craft (including the 890 JUMP, Carrack, Herald and more!)

Remember: all ship stats are preliminary, and are likely to change as game balancing continues. Please do not contact the Customer Support department to inquire about ship stats; the designers responsible for changes will be available in the ‘Ask a Dev’ threads to answer your questions.

 

ARENA COMMANDER WEEKLY REPORT - MAY 5-9
MAY 9TH 2014



I know you’re all impatient to get your hands on the DFM, and believe me we’re all very eager to have it in the state that we can start to roll out it to all of you but as in any ambitious undertaking there’s still some details that we’re busy wrapping up in terms of the backend end, build deployment, matchmaking and network stability over the internet – All the while trying to balance and tune the core gameplay of the DFM.

We’ll have more exact dates to share by the end of next week, which we’ll update you with in next week’s report, but the goal is to start rolling out the DFM towards the end of this month – this will be staged as scaling to 250,000+ players is much more like launching a finished game as opposed to an early pre-alpha for gameplay feedback – our plan is to have Vanduul Swarm (single player against AI) available to everyone from the start, and then give people access to the multiplayer servers in increasing numbers as long as the system holds up. (To answer your next question, the rollout will be based on Citizen number; the earlier you backed, the earlier you will gain access to multiplayer dogfighting.)

We don’t know the maximum number of concurrent players or some of the backend server issues (as we’ll literally be dynamically spinning up hundreds of servers on demand depending on demand) we’re planning to go slow and cautious at first, while we make sure everything works. So please be patient and bear with us. Remember that with Arena Commander we are launching something much more akin to a full game (its feature set is more in line to an action arena combat game like World of Tanks) and to do that for the sheer number of backers that Star Citizen has is a challenge in itself!

— Chris Roberts


CLOUD IMPERIUM SANTA MONICA



Travis Day, Dogfight Producer
Greetings Citizens!

Thank you all for tuning in for another Friday Arena Commander update! As always the team here in Santa Monica has been hard at work wrapping up all the gameplay features and systems work for our first release of Arena Commander to everyone. We’re putting the last few major components to bed and should have something we’re confident in sharing soon™.

Speaking of systems work, Paul Reindell our Lead Engineer has been putting the finishing touches on the power system for our spaceships which just wrapped up this week. Paul has put together a properly balanced power generation and drawing system with configurable priorities for different systems. Meaning that if you are drawing large amounts of power on your weapons (pew pew), depending on the settings/priorities that you have put in place, it will either maximize your firepower while drawing down the power being deployed to the shields and thrusters or reduce your fire rate and power to maintain the maximum efficiency for thrusters and shields.

It sounds fairly standard but as with everything that we do the detail is what makes the system really shine. Not only can you apply broad stroke allocations like thrusters over weapons or vice versa but you can also assign priority with that. So if for example you experience a power shortage to your weapons you can have set priorities for power to the different individual weapons that you value most to keep them firing until the last drop of energy is consumed. This approach allows more casual players to make sweeping adjustments quite quickly while allowing for players to get as detailed as they want to on micromanaging every last aspect.

As everyone knows though… With great power, comes great… Improvements to the shield system! So not only did Paul finish off the power allocation and flow system, he’s also adjusted the shield system. Part of this was necessitated to insure the shield maintained its full functionality with the finalized power system but it has also improved the granularity of control that players will have over their shields via the HUD both in the shield management tab as well as the knock on effects of decisions they make in power management. It also helps to lay the ground work for having ships with multiple shield generators drawing from multiple or single power plants and battery systems.

Power and Shields are not the only systems that got closed off this week however. The IFCS has become much more configurable for the player so they can determine how “hands on” they want it to be. One of the major additions in this week alone was introducing the ability to configure how the ship’s IFCS handles turns.

Generally in the Arena Commander (and later SC/SQ42) as you “turn” the IFCS is not only firing thrusters to orient your ship rotationally to its new desired orientation. The IFCS is also using the thrusters to arrest your velocity on your old vector align your angular velocity to your new goal orientation and keep those in sync to maintain symmetry between orientation and velocity. As you can imagine, if your main engine is at full throttle your maneuvering thrusters have to expend a lot of energy adjusting angular velocity and this can cause you to turn slower the higher your primary engine is thrusting. We decided to adjust this mode so that the IFCS would no longer limit the rate of your rotation but instead reduce your throttle so that you could maintain maximum rotation performance. This has created a much more responsive and fun experience with the IFCS fully enabled. We’ve felt like this is driving in a car with traction control enabled as the IFCS will always prevent your ship from rotating faster than your angular velocity can change, basically keeping the backend from sliding out, to further the car analogy.

Well we’ve now introduced an intermediate step where you can fly with “traction control” turned off. This allows you to change the orientation of your ship without the IFCS dampening rotation to stay in lock step with your ships velocity vector. At higher rates of speed it means you can really get these two out of alignment if you’re not careful but it also makes for some really awesome slaloming through asteroid belts and, for lack of a better term, drifting through turns.

What good would all this power and maneuverability be without some beautiful weapon effects to back it all up though? This week has seen a lot of final polish and finishing touches going into each of the weapon and damage effects. Both Casey and Forrest have been revisiting all the effects and meeting with Chris to review and revise the particulars of each effect to meet his standards. The results have been quite stunning as we’re using some very complicated layered visual effects like you would see in a major motion picture at runtime. The effects are starting to take on more of the look of a summer blockbuster than a video game. The lighting for each of the ships and effects have also gotten their final passes following the finishing of the PBR integration and conversion work that has been ongoing.

We’re all really excited as we watch this game coming together and cannot wait to share it with as soon as humanly possible. There are still a great many breaking issues left to resolve but we are getting closer to having it each and every week. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading what we’ve been up to this week in Santa Monica. As always, if you have any questions please post them to our ‘Ask a Dev’ threads!

Thank you for your continued support!

Cloud Imperium Games Santa Monica





CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN




Eric Peterson, Studio Director
Citizens! Hello from sunny and getting hotter Austin.

It has been a very busy week here as we get closer and closer to sharing Arena Commander with all of you. We have had many a heated exchange with offices from all around the globe as we test our servers and flight mechanics to get them just right. In addition to working on Arena Commander we got a couple of patches out yesterday, one was to upgrade the patcher itself to prepare it for bigger and better things, and the other was a Hangar patch to fix up the Oculus rift in our game, and add some cool hangar flare – like the towel for everyone that joined us before 42m, and as you know 42 is significant to our community. We also added in a calendar for subscribers – this is so they always know the correct date in 2944.

So, without further ado here is what the Austin team was up to this week with the dogfighting module.

Art & Animation
In animation this week, we were skinning, rigging and animating thrusters, fixing the hangar versions and the landing gear for the 300i. We also are fixing the IK locators in the Hornet, fixing the offset in the freelancer cockpit. Fixed the canard turret, and are fixing materials for the power plant. The thruster placement on the 300i needed some work, and we exported all the 300i hangar ships and fixing the canard mannequin. In addition we dealt with the Freelancer (redacted but something really cool was here), worked out mannequin issues for the 300i and the Aurora, and are fixing cockpit animations for the button pushes and reactions.

Art has been busy this week working on the player helmet and getting it up to Star Citizen standards, we are also working on the skin materials for the new scanned heads for the game, and we are finishing up tons of components for the various ships for V1 of Arena Commander. In addition the 300i.

Programming
Our Engineers have been heads down fixing issues for the DFM, the hangar and have finalized the first version of the Match-Making service which will allow you to choose and be placed in a DFM match! We have also been working with IT to finalize the deployment of our new Build System for quicker patches – Hooray for quicker patches! Along those lines, the team has also fixed the last issues for patch 11.2 which should now be out to the public.

We have also finished up CryEngine 3.6 integration and are prepping it for the next patch for when we release Arena Commander to the Citizens.

Design
Design has been running down/documenting matchmaking changes, fixing stuff for the hangar patch (yeah I know not Arena commander), testing Arena Commander and giving feedback as we improve it’s playability. We also did a Missile update & submitted updated ships stats for review.

We are also very busy testing the multiplayer matchmaking, and getting tons of audio into the game for your aural pleasure. As we get closer and closer to the day in which we will be blowing each other to bits in the verse the excitement continues to build in each studio. A day does not go by in which we don’t realize how lucky we are, and we can never thank you Citizens enough. Thanks for your continued support.

EP


FOUNDRY 42



Erin Roberts, Studio Director
Hi everyone,

The best news I can report is that Arena Commander is at a point where our team in the UK is focusing less on dogfighting and more on Squadron 42 and developing capital ships. You’ll read more about that in the next monthly report, but in terms of the dogfighting module this week we have only been focusing on minor changes, balancing, bug fixes and playtesting the build. So the update from the UK is getting shorter, which is a good thing!

Running down the different areas:

Design
The design team has been working to balance the shield and weapon stats for the Scythe and the Hornet (especially important for the single player ‘Vanduul Swarm’ mode.) We have also been working on balancing game modes, including fixes for the aforementioned Swarm and the Capture the Core mode.

Art & Animation
We’ve been finishing the rigging and weighting for the Vanduul pilot, as well as creating and cleaning up finer detail cockpit animations for the player pilot. That’s things like pushing buttons, firing weapons and the like. We’ve also been cleaning up some of the effects for the Capture the Core mode.

Programming
In the graphics department, we have spent a lot of time updating the assets to work with the new 3.6 CryTek engine that we just moved over to as well as fixing some visual bugs associated with that. (It supports a lot of features we need, but also means we have to fix up any issues that come with the new build!)

We’ve also been doing some tweaks and changes to the controls for different joysticks. There has been some work on player ejection from the Hornet in order to make it look and work better. We are also working on the HUD so that it provides even more feedback to the player so they know when they’re getting hit, how far they are from a target and so on. On the debugging front, we’ve been working an issue with ships not registering hits properly and another where VFX don’t show up correctly.

That’s all from us this week in the UK. Thanks, as always, for your support!

 

ARENA COMMANDER WEEKLY REPORT - MAY 12-16 (Part 1)
MAY 16TH 2014




Greetings Citizens,



Let me begin with the information you most want to hear: we intend to launch Arena Commander in two weeks, on May 29th.The goal is that every backer will have access to the single player “Free Flight” and “Vanduul Swarm” games modes on this day, and the very first batch of multiplayer testers will get access to the game’s multiplayer game modes. We will scale up the multiplayer as quickly as possible starting on that date, increasing the number of players as it is stable and stopping to fix bugs where needed.
This date is based on our best possible projections using the latest information put together by Star Citizen’s production team as of this afternoon. This is a big part of what the often-unseen production side of game development does: schedule out every task they believe is required for a game to ship. Sometimes (in fact, more often than not) things go wrong and these forecasts change: bugs we don’t foresee appear, features we didn’t realize we needed become necessary and so on. This is why we haven’t had a solid release date yet; it’s not to better schedule marketing or because we want to keep you out of the cockpit… it’s because game development is a complex beast, and there are few games more complex than Star Citizen! At this point, we’re close enough that we feel fairly confident in this date… but the next two weeks will be a march!

Before I leave you to the individual studio weekly reports, I’d like to walk you through exactly what the next two weeks—if all goes well—mean for Arena Commander’s development:

• May 17th: our IT groups will be updating our global internal server infrastructure. A lot of the internal tools we use for game development (checking in builds, storing assets, etc.) are in dire need of downtime and update; we’ve been running them in the red zone so we can have 24 hour round-the-world development on Arena Commander. During this downtime we will also be switching over to a much more flexible and advanced architecture for our content management system Perforce. We will be upgrading to using Perforce Streams which will allow much quicker and more flexible movement between code branches for our development team. This prepares us for the added complexity of launching and supporting a live multiplayer service like Arena Commander. Saturday’s update will allow us to push the final Arena Commander update out to the world with much more confidence (corrupted data from these servers was a major issue at thePAX East reveal!)

• May 18th: with the new servers in place, we will split off the “Arena Commander Release” branch of Star Citizen. This will separate the Arena Commander you play from the rest of the game that is being developed by other teams. So data checked in by teams around the world that doesn’t have anything to do with dogfighting (such as FPS weapons, planetside maps or future ship assets) won’t cause additional bugs for the team to worry about.

• May 19th: The QA team will begin their final troubleshooting session with the new Arena Commander Release branch. They will go through the entire game and catalog all the current bugs they can find – ships not spawning in the correct place, physics not functioning correctly, disconnects during battle and so on. This will help to generate our final “Must Fix” list for release. It is important to remember though that our internal QA team cannot find everything and it is very likely that we will not fix everything prior to release. We are releasing playable code to the community much, much earlier than you normally would in AAA game development. Because of this it will not be as polished as a final game would be so we are going to need a lot of support from all of you to help us in bug finding and gameplay feedback!

• May 23rd: The official cross-studio playtesting of the Arena Commander Release begins. This represents a “pencils down” phase where, unless you are working on an authorized must fix issue the team is expected to QA the game as much as possible. After this point, only a limited number of “designated driver” team leads will be able to check in any changes to the game itself.

• May 27th: By this point, we hope to have the egregious, game breaking issues resolved but there will still be plenty of known and unknown issues. This is also our deadline for making sure the launcher is hardened for the deluge of users and the first set of necessary servers for the release have been spun up. After this point all check in privileges will be revoked and will only be returned on an as needed basis by senior Production staff and myself.

• May 28th: The release candidate build of the game will be compiled. If all goes as planned, this is the version of Arena Commander you will be playing! The team at Turbulent will begin switching over the website to the version that will make Arena Commander available to backers. I will personally ‘sign off’ Arena Commander as ready for the community on the evening of the 28th. To be clear, we fully expect that there will be bugs remaining, potentially some bad ones. That said, our primary focus is getting a version out to the community to help us find all the issues and work together to improve Arena Commander.

• May 29th: This morning, the web team will spin up additional authentication and web servers in the in anticipation of high traffic during the release. The engineering team will begin “warming” caches on cloud servers around the world, making sure the release candidate game is ready and waiting for users. By the end of the day, we will update the website making the game available, and the first public release of Arena Commander (which we’re calling v0.8) will be live to the world for testing!

After this we will continue to work hard finishing off game modes, making balancing calls and hotfixes as we spin up more and more servers, allowing for more and more concurrent multiplayer games.

• v0.9 will be an intermediate step with additional features, polish, fixes and the Squadron Battle game mode.

• v1.0 will be when everyone can access the multiplayer and all game modes are in (Capture the Core comes in with v1.0).

As you can see, there’s a lot to do over the next two weeks and as you have seen there can be many unforeseen issues. I believe this is the best development team in the industry and we are certainly backed by the most invested, supportive community in gaming. We will keep you updated as this process continues; if there are any unexpected changes, the community will know what they are AND how they impact the schedule as soon as I do.

This is what is unique about Star Citizen – you are getting a very close and personal look at what development is like from the inside. Enjoy the ride!

— Chris Roberts


CLOUD IMPERIUM SANTA MONICA



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 theHUD 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


CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN





Eric Peterson, Studio Director
Hello Citizens,

It has been a very busy week here in Austin on both the persistent universe side as well as working on Arena Commander. I’d like to write that my hands are a little tired from trying to duck and dodge missiles in testing… but the fact is we’ve been spending most of our time dealing with back-end bugs that are limiting the amount of cross studio testing. We have confidence in today’s build, though, and are really looking forward to getting back out there.

Our engineers have been working very hard on getting the bugs fixed in the multiplayer server code base, as well as finishing up the new build system hardware so we can deploy patches to all citizens in a much more efficient and timely manner. On Arena commander we feel like a big can of bug spray as we continue to hash through the code cleaning up bugs everywhere we find them, bugs on the multiplayer, client, vehicles, animations, sounds, and particles – yes sir, we have been very busy making Arena Commander a much more stable and fun place to be.

Our Designers are mostly working on the persistent universe – but every time we get into a big dogfighting, you need to be aware that they are in there, Rob Irving and his missiles are a formidable foe.

Audio has been supporting the completion of Arena Commander this week by plugging in the first versions of the final pieces of music from Pedro Camacho. We are also installing sound-effects for the many maneuvering thrusters across all ships, and sound-effects for the 300i and Aurora. We’re also making tweaks to the sound mix, as now we are able to hear what it’s like to have several other ships around you in a dogfight. Finally, we’re hard at work finishing off the player’s breathing sounds.

On the art side, our partners at CGBot made some revisions to damage meshes on the 300i and Aurora; as we were testing the ships in-game we discovered that we had been overly enthusiastic about how many bits of debris we could have on a ship, and how small they should be. CGBot took the damage for those ships and consolidated a lot of the pieces, and removed a lot of the smaller bits that ended up looking like pixie dust in the game. Meanwhile our internal team has been busy working on the helmet which gets you into Arena Commander. We also have our team creating lots of ship components, as well as continuing to adjust the ships needed in the first drop of Arena Commander.

In our animation department we were thrilled as a new animator joined us this week. Also, we have facial animation now working in engine using a combination of joints and blend shapes. We have a new camera in head system that allows for better first person experience and we continue to implement ship animations and hook them up in game. We have new updated animations for getting into and out of the 300i, and have also started on animations for the cockpit that shows the character interacting with the controls and worked on Ejection animations.

CIG Austin QA continues testing builds as they become available. We are working very closely with our new QA partners in Foundry 42. They have been a huge help with testing and providing feedback on how we can improve overall QA process. We are incredibly excited for this opportunity to extend our testing coverage farther across the glove in a nearly 24 hour cycle. Cross studio play tests continue. We are very impressed with the entire teams’ willingness to participate with the preliminary testing effort. Receiving reports and feedback from each of the disciplines is useful beyond measure. Development is moving at lightning speed. The game is already really fun and we can’t wait to share it with everyone!

Non Dogfighting tasks this week include continuing to solve mocap data for the First Person Shooter. We have a new set of no weapon animations for running around the hanger ready to be hooked up by code. We are also working on animations for upcoming commercials of our ships.

Production has been busy tracking the bug fixing tasks, and making sure that Jira is up to the minute in accuracy for the upcoming launch of Arena Commander. Our production game performance team continues to track our improvements in Arena Commander every single day, and is also working on the global ship schedule which will allow Citizens to fly all types of ships in our universe.

That’s it from Austin! We’re looking forward to a playtest tonight; until then, I have a full schedule of meetings to discuss the upcoming rollout.

See you all in the verse.

Eric

 

ARENA COMMANDER WEEKLY REPORT - MAY 12-16 (Part 2)
MAY 16TH 2014

FOUNDRY 42



Erin Roberts, Studio Director
Hello from Manchester!

This week, Star Citizen’s UK contingent has been tasked with a number of polish-related tasks, to make sure the Arena Commander release you see in the near future really shines. As they say, you only have one chance to make a first impression… so we want to be sure that Arena Commander really gives players a glimpse of what’s going to be possible in Star Citizen proper.

In terms of game modes, the single player Vanduul Swarm (which we hope to have everyone playing very soon) has really been coming along this week and I’m happy to report we’re all having fun! Most of the work has been focused on getting the AI to be fun to fight against so we’ve been working on their behaviour to make their flight nice and smooth to give you that satisfying dogfighting feeling! Now that the AI are flying well we’ve also been able to work on the structure of the mode. Questions like ‘how many fighters in a wave?’ ‘how many waves?’ and ‘how tough do we make the fighters?’ are getting answered and the mode is starting to take on some structure. We’re also working on getting the unique HUD elements for the mode working as well as making the VFX as bold and satisfying as possible. We’ll have all that locked down soon but for now it’s just fun to slide in behind a Vanduul, open fire on their engines and watch the fuel tanks detonate with a satisfying boom.

Art has been focusing on Capture the Core visual effects. We have been experimenting with the lightning entities; it’s early in the process, but it shows signs of being a pretty cool visual effect that we can use in future AC drops! With the integration of CryEngine code 3.6, there has been some loss of quality on existing effects and we’ve been working through them to bring it back to the expected quality. Work has also continued on creating Conquest game type assets ready for testing with in the DFM. The Animation department has been experimenting with in-game pilot reactions and getting the Vanduul pilot ready for his Scythe!

Our programmers and designers have been helping with a million smaller tasks to help get V1 feature complete. These include polishing the HUD colour customization, updating the ITTS reticle, setting the rules for player ejection and respawn, editing the FoV and general bug fixing. We’ve tackled missile reloading for the Vanduul swarm mode, hit feedback, controller integration and done work on SFX implementation.

That’s all from Manchester; be sure to catch the monthly report in two weeks to find out about all the work we’re doing on Squadron 42 and pledge ships like the Gladiator and Retaliator!

 

LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN: $44 MILLION
MAY 23RD 2014



Greetings Citizens,

$44 million! I think I can safely say that this will be the last letter I write before Arena Commander launches, and I can’t wait to share the first taste of what you’ve been helping us build. Getting to dogfight in deep space is going to make Star Citizen real for a lot of people… but I also know that everyone who has supported us to this point already understands. Thank you for getting us here!




The final week push to get Arena Commander V.8 out the door has begun here, so I’ll keep this letter short… but I would like to share a piece of concept art. You’re looking at what we call the “negotiation room” in the Banu Merchantman freighter. It’s a place where traders can invite others into their ships, display their cargo (the bay is visible) and make deals!

As we look to the next stages of Star Citizen beyond dogfighting, we’re putting more and more thought into how systems like cargo and trading will take shape. We’re building a system that makes sense, measuring ship interiors, building a standardized cargo container measurement system (see diagram) and determining exactly how cargo will be loaded, unloaded and interacted with in port (and during flight!) As the most recent set of changes to our preliminary ship stats reflect, transporting cargo is going to be more complex than just finding the ship with the highest storage capacity… it’s going to involve finding the right ship type for the job.

Everyone who pledged for Star Citizen before this point will be getting an additional room added to their hangars, once the modular room system launches:

• Stellar Cartography – Walk among the distant horizons you’ve charted in Star Citizen’s dedicated “map room” featuring a 3D holographic representation of the known universe. Your map room will start with a basic guide to the United Empire of Earth, and will expand into something that is unique to you as you explore uncharted worlds and discover new secrets. Build the most in-depth universe map possible and show it off to visitors, or lock down your secret jump points and hidden trading posts so that no one else can follow. Interface directly with the Observist guide to find out everything from what ores are in demand on MacArthur to who serves the best pasta on Terra. And with the ability to leave your own notes about your encounters and travels, it’s more than a map: it’s your digital diary!

And the results of the penultimate player reward stretch goal are in! Backers who pledge before $46 million will get an updated scanning software suite from Chimera Communications. Here are the details:

• Updated Scanning Software – Chimera Communications unveiled the latest version of their SBit scanning software, also announcing a one-time free upgrade for their current and long-standing customers. The new SBit upgrade offers advanced scanning capabilities for prospecting asteroids above and beyond their baseline systems. SBit is a FIB-based system that floods the scan-zone with energy then processes the frequency of the energy reflected back, providing the operator with a composite sketch of potential ore deposits. With the new version, Chimera included an updated library of searchable frequencies as well as variable scan sizes, allowing smaller surface, higher-resolution scans. The general public will be able to purchase the update when SBit is officially released.

Again, thank you for your continued support. That support means a bigger, better game… the first part of which you’re going to play very soon. Remember to vote in the poll below, which will determine the final player reward stretch goal!

— Chris Roberts

 

ARENA COMMANDER WEEKLY REPORT - MAY 19-23
MAY 23RD 2014



Greetings Citizens,

V0.8 of Arena Commander is almost here! Hopefully this will be the final weekly report before it launches. You can find the individual studio reports below, but first I’d like to run through the milestones we listed last week.

• May 17th: The planned server update was successful, thanks to our hard working IT groups!

• May 18th: Perforce Streams setup was completed and an Arena Commander Release Stream was successfully created and work began to make sure the build system would be ready to build from the new streams setup.

• May 19th: The QA team began their troubleshooting session, which lasted several days as the final work was done to finish integration of the Arena Commander Release Stream with the build system. A ‘must fix’ list was generated and updated through the week as progress was made.

• May 22nd: Pencils down! Infrastructure change to Perforce Streams was completed successfully, Perforce was locked down and it was successfully updated with the latest from main. All developers successfully migrated to the Arena Commander Release Stream which was officially closed to new check-ins last night. Only updates that have gone through a specific approval process will be included with V.8 of the Arena Commander now.

What that boils down to is that we’re still on schedule and things are looking good. There’s still a lot to do over the next seven days and there are still unknowns… but we have a great team that is dedicated to making Arena Commander a reality!

CLOUD IMPERIUM SANTA MONICA



Travis Day, Dogfight Producer



Greetings Citizens!

It is with mixed feelings that I write this weekly report… While I have great progress to report on the development of Arena Commander I fear that if all continues to go well, most of you will not read my Monthly report next week because you’ll be too busy playing Arena Commander. Perhaps I should approve a few of these risky commits to ensure a captive audience…

I kid, I kid… In all seriousness there has been tremendous progress this week and so far we are on track with the timetable we outlined last week. That said, it’s worth reiterating that in software development, with so many moving parts, there is always the potential for unforeseen issues to arise! I like to call it Malcom’s Lazor, (Murphy’s Law and Occam’s Razor) anything that can go wrong will and it is usually the simplest thing.

This week was a big accomplishment, as you’ve read above we entered code lock on our Release Stream and the team is busily fixing as many of the most game breaking bugs as we possibly can. So far we have been hitting the schedule we set for ourselves and the transitions to Perforce Streams, migration of the build process, and enforcement of lockdown has been going as planned.

Here in LA the focus has been primarily on finalizing the ships, their component features, and the visual effects. We’ve gotten VFX to a point where we are quite happy for the first release of Arena Commander. There is still a lot more we would like to do with them in the future with additional graphics engineering support, but we think you’ll enjoy what we’ve cooked up so far.

The HUD is to a point where we are happy with it for our pre-alpha release. There are some bugs, room for improvement on usability, and additional visuals but the core functionality is in and ready for the community to start giving us feedback on. The HUD is something that we really look forward to working closely with the community on as it is a very important part of player experience and readability. So please, help us to make a HUD that meets your needs while maintaining Chris’ vision by providing feedback.

The ship damage system has been further revised and improved to support breaking the ships in a procedural way based on the location of impacts. The system for making sure the visual effects properly attach has also been revised to best showcase the pieces of the ship blowing off from your shots. We feel like we have reached a point with this system where we’re pretty happy with its current state. There are still some improvements in performance and potential for additional functionality but this represents a good first pass at the functionality we will need for this system in the long term.

Flight controls are often a hotly debated topic amongst the studios. This week we’ve settled on button configurations and feel for the IFCS that most people are happy with. There are still some small tweaks to make and long debates to be had but we’re very close to achieving what we feel is the best feeling flight model. Of course this is another one, like the HUD, where player feedback is very important to us. We’ve made it a point to add as many flight modes as possible so that people can experiment with different styles and let us know what works and what doesn’t.

Balance is ongoing (looking at you 300i mega thread) and will be ongoing after our initial release right on in to the Persistent Universe. We are currently working to make sure that every ship feels unique and has its own set of pros and cons in broad strokes and we will continue to hone in their unique place within the universe from there. Again, part of the reason that we wanted to go with these early pre-alpha module releases was so that we could involve the community as early as possible to get feedback! So please, give us feedback!

This has been a great week as we turn from feature development to an exclusive focus on stability, performance, and polish. The team is very excited for everyone in the community to start playing Arena Commander as soon as possible! Hopefully this time next week you will be enjoying Arena Commander for yourself and sending us feedback rather than reading about it here!

Until then, thanks for reading and please feel free to post any questions in our ‘Ask a Dev’ threads.

Cheers,

Cloud Imperium Games Santa Monica

CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN



Eric Peterson, Studio Director



Hello Citizens!

We have been working extremely hard to get Arena Commander into your hands. Folks here are excited about getting to show off all the stuff we have been working on and getting it into your hands, so without further ado here is the report from the Austin office.

QA
CIG ATX QA has been feverishly testing each build as they become available. Once we determine the build is ready for play testing an email is sent to the global team with details and instructions. During each play test information and other diagnostics are gathered by our gameplay and server programming teams. Once the playtest has concluded, feedback is gathered from each discipline; Art, Animation, Design, and Programming. The results are then sent to production to be included in the daily studio update. Chris & the team will then respond to the feedback. Based on those responses additional tasks may be created and assigned out to development. QA will then continue to regress test resolved issues as well as log any new issues that may be uncovered. At the end of the day a new build is kicked off and the process starts over. It is a lot of hard work, but very rewarding to witness the creation of Arena Commander which will stand on its own as an incredibly fun game as well as be the foundation for space flight for the Persistent Universe and the Squadron 42 single player experience.

Audio
Audio has been finishing up our tasks on the initial Arena Commander release. We are only making the absolutely necessary changes now in order to keep the build stable, things like mix levels, and what comes out of daily testing are the things we are changing. Some last-minute tech like the first-person breathing manager, Ejection and EVA is getting its audio finished off, too.

Design
ATX design has continued to push forward on the persistent universe, while also keeping involved with the imminent dogfighting release. Our technical design staff is helping to put the finishing touches on all of the moving parts for dogfighting – from the ships themselves all the way down to the little bits, like the parts you see on the radar. Meanwhile, we’re hammering away at both single-player and multi-player matches, providing feedback, and becoming the most feared pilots in the ‘verse.

Art
The art team was hard at work this week making tweaks to the Aurora, 300i, and Scythe to get them in top notch shape to duke it out in Arena Commander. Engine glow, warning indicator lights, detail on the missile racks, and adjusting the seat in the Aurora so you can see out the cockpit better were just a few of the things being done to the ships. Optimized versions of all items were created for the HUD, explosions and other VFX were created for when a ship is destroyed, and the RSI helmet was polished up as well.

Animation
We are continuing to make progress with hooking up the 300i and the Aurora getting them looking as good as the Hornet. Animations have been created to match the new layout for the 300i. The seat in the aurora has been raised for a better view out of the cockpit & both Ships have a full G Force and reaction animations done. New thrusters have been created, skinned, animated, and exported.

Outside of dogfighting we continue to work on all the locomotion animations. New animations will be in game. There are still a few visual bugs but we are working on resolving the code that is causing them.

IT
The IT Department has been hard at work this week making infrastructure improvements to support the dev teams efforts on Arena Commander. The Austin team made massive improvements in the build and source control systems which were necessary to support continued development and push builds out faster. UK and LA IT Managers performed various upgrades to individual developer machines in order to ensure they are able to do game builds and renders as fast as possible. We are preparing for the onslaught of Citizens downloading Arena Commander when it comes out, should be fun.

Video Production
We got a glimpse at Arena Commander with WH episode 70. This week we’re shooting deeper coverage with Rob Irving and some of the design team for next week’s Wingman’s Hangar.

Also, our media heritage is now secure. Our call for a proper data integrity plan for the terabytes of video being created by CIG has resulted in a dual storage solution based in Santa Monica and Austin. Mike Jones was instrumental in identifying the hardware and procedural solutions to ensure all media producers have access to our growing archive of media and securing that media for the future.

Engineering
This week, Austin Engineering worked towards the first Dogfighting release by working on the universe services themselves and game servers, and fixing, building, and deploying full release playtest client and server builds for Arena Commander playtesting, and improving and profiling game client performance. In addition, we assisted with the integration and bug fixing of matchmaking and also fixed ship, rendering, tool, and engine bugs affecting the Hangar and the Sandbox Editor tool from CryEngine 3.6 integration and dogfighting changes. Additionally, we continued to improve the build and deployment system and switched the development team over to a more efficient and easier to use source (and asset) control paradigm called Perforce Streams and assisted individuals with the migration. Perforce Streams also allows team members to switch between the release stream and main stream quickly, which is important for our distributed development team and to keep the release stream stable.

Production
Our production team has performed admirably in supporting Arena commander, by chasing down individual tasks and dependencies, and making sure that things were handed off from studio to studio in an efficient manner. We are constantly moving things in and out of the first release cycle based upon time needed to completion and risk assessment, once you feel you are on top of things, another batch of Jira tasks comes sliding down the pipeline to be reviewed, assigned and chased, it is all in good fun though, in order for us to bring Arena Commander out to the Citizens. We also continued our efforts in planning out ships and will soon begin working with REDACTED on the weapons for the FPS (Go Jake!!). In addition, we have plans in place to monitor the performance of the game once it is launched to make sure we can properly focus and prioritize any bugs that the Citizens might uncover.

So that is it from Austin – it has been a tough hill to climb but we can see the crest, and are looking forward to a little fresh meat in the verse ! BRING IT CITIZENS !!! Wingman – out !

FOUNDRY 42



Erin Roberts, Studio Director
Design (Nick Elms)
We have a great week balancing the AI for our survival mode “Vanduul Swarm” and providing detailed polish feedback for Engineering and Art. Office playtests were longer and noisier than before, which is a good sign we are getting towards making it fun. There is still work to do, but we have had a whole lot of smiles around the office when playing here.

The multiplayer modes, “Capture-the-Core” and “Battle Royale” are coming along, but we still have some important back end issues to tidy up to help make these feel more satisfying. It feels like everyone in the world-wide team is pushing themselves so hard to get as much into this deliverable as humanly possible.

As you can probably imagine, with so many “super enthusiastic” Devs constantly checking in new stuff around the clock, the production guys have had to pull out all the stops to keep everyone organized. I for one think they have done an amazing job. Anyway… I really hope you guys enjoy the “Vanduul Swarm” and I’m looking forward to pushing it further with your input.

Engineering (Derek Senior)
The list of tasks for Foundry 42’s engineering department to assist with on Arena Commander is getting smaller and smaller! We’ve been focusing on general fixes and polish, including a particular focus on the targeting HUD. We’ve done some additional work on the menus and the ‘landing platform’ that you take off from in the simulator, and are working an ejection update and improved controller feedback implementation.

Art (Paul Jones)
In addition to heavily working on look and feel for key areas of the Squadron 42 storyline, we’ve been doing some future DFM work going ahead with assets being greyboxed for testing in “Conquest” game type.

VFX have been working heavily on DFM tasks, we’ve been working to give a more cinematic feel to them and also define a narrative (a Forrest term) so that it’s not just a flame attached to a wing piece as it flies past your cockpit, if you watch it, it’ll go through a whole sequence of events in its lifecycle, this is the kind of love we like to all areas of the game given time.

Animation cracking on with ejection animations to make it more fun when you are shot out of your cockpit before it blows into its many parts, alongside that, Cinematic head integration testing to make the best looking cinematic heads seen in a space game.

 

ARENA COMMANDER V.8 DELAY
MAY 29TH 2014





Greetings Citizens,
The team has been working around the clock for the past two weeks to polish gameplay and eliminate the bugs that would allow us to release Arena Commander V0.8. Today at 4:00 PM PST, I sat down with Star Citizen’s production leads for a ‘go/no-go’ meeting. We went around the virtual table, like a ground control team preparing to launch a rocket, and the decision was that we are not able to release Arena Commander tomorrow as there are too many blocking and critical issues outstanding.


Programmers Mark Abent and Paul Reindell kill bugs!

Below you will find a list of the current bugs being tracked by the team. Game developers classify bugs based on their severity: blockers, critical, major, moderate and minor. The most serious of these, blockers, are bugs that completely prevent the game from working and from being in a releasable state. Unfortunately, as of tonight, there are still two blockers and half a dozen critical issues (which we would like to fix before launch.) Our biggest issue today is a newly developed DirectX crash which breaks the single player Vanduul Swarm mode every backer will be given access to.

It would be foolish to release an unstable build, even if pre-alpha for the sake of meeting an internal deadline. This is the power of the crowdfunding that made Star Citizen possible: a publisher would make us ship tomorrow regardless of the current build quality… but as you are all focused on quality rather than a financial return for shareholders we are able to take a few more days to deliver something that is stable.

I know that’s not the news you wanted to hear tonight. No-one would like to see the community get their hands on Arena Commander more than I would.

This is what can happen with an open development process, especially when we are sharing code and content long before one normally would in traditional development. But I don’t think you would want it any other way! The Star Citizen team feeds off of your incredible enthusiasm and your energy for the project… and we want more than anything to see what happens when you get into space.

In order to keep our backers as informed as possible, I’m asking the production team to provide DAILY updates for the community until Arena Commander V0.8 ships. This will be the raw stuff: lists of bugs and other information to tell you the current health of the build. You will see the same information I do, and you will be able to follow as we resolve each “blocker” preventing the build’s release.

I want you to know that we’re very close… just not close enough to launch tomorrow. Stay tuned!

— Chris Roberts

Arena Commander V.8 Bug List – April 28, 2014
Blockers

• Vanduul Swarm – Display drivers can crash when Vanduul spawn or blow up
• Lag in feedback and update of essential game events resulting in increasingly divergent multiplayer sync

Critical

• Battle Royale (Crash) – While Flying (Shader)
• Camera – After respawn character is stuck looking up
• Vanduul Swarm (Crash) – Shortly after missile lock
• All Maps – Occasionally, when first spawning into the maps lasers and ballistic fire is invisible but can be heard when firing – they eventually appear
• Crash on exit after returning from DFM match
• Character is unable to exit DFM Aurora bed if helmet is on
• Gforce animations are not playing on the pilot in any of the ships
• Character and parts of cockpit interior vanish while accelerating

 

Arena Commander V.8 Daily Bug Update - May 29, 2014
MAY 30TH 2014



Greetings Citizens,
As promised, we are updating each day Arena Commander V.8 is delayed with a copy of the same bug list we track internally. Do not be too concerned that today’s list is longer than what appeared yesterday: it’s not unusual for additional bugs to be generated as we squash more serious issues. The news today is very positive: the programming team eliminated the major DirectX bug that was encountered yesterday and excellent strides are being made to put the game into a releasable state! Thank you for bearing with us; we know you’re here to play (and help us test this game!), and we’re eager to let you. We are anticipating having these issues resolved very soon.

Blockers

• Dogfight Module – Multiplayer – Camera – After respawn character is stuck looking up
• Lag in feedback and update of essential game events resulting in increasingly divergent multiplayer sync

Critical

• After respawning, the player immediately blackout, couldn’t get back into gameplay
• Character shakes and twitches when freelooking left or right in any cockpit
• Free look does not work in Single Player in the Hornet
• Server put into a bad state after round end, unable to accept further player connections or recover
• Aurora – Crash after 3 deaths from border in 3rd person
• 300i does not seem to be able to lock / fire missiles in multiplayer
• Cockpit camera shakes when seated in DFM Aurora

Major

• Dogfighting Module – Vanduul Swarm – All Maps – Animation – Missing flight animations for the pilot in the cockpit when flying the Aurora

Moderate

• 300i – The player character’s hands are contorted in the cockpit view
• Walk through railing, fall out of map after interacting with helmet pedestal

RESOLVED!

• Vanduul Swarm – Display drivers can crash when Vanduul spawn or blow up
• Battle Royale (Crash) – While Flying (Shader)
• Vanduul Swarm (Crash) – Shortly after missile lock
• All Maps – Occasionally, when first spawning into the maps lasers and ballistic fire * is invisible but can be heard when firing – they eventually appear
• Crash on exit after returning from DFM match
• Character is unable to exit DFM Aurora bed if helmet is on
• Gforce animations are not playing on the pilot in any of the ships
• Character and parts of cockpit interior vanish while accelerating

 

ARENA COMMANDER V.8 DAILY BUG UPDATE - MAY 30, 2014
MAY 31ST 2014



Greetings Citizens,



The news today is positive! We’re pleased to report that we believe tonight’s internal Release Candidate resolves all of the bugs (pending testing) you read about last night, including the two critical “show stopper” issues. Arena Commander V.8 is looking more stable than before, and hopefully additional testing on this new build will not uncover more blocking issues.



What happens next? The Arena Commander team will be working through the weekend to test this build, and fix any issues as they are found. Next week, we will have another “go/no-go” meeting with the worldwide development teams. Our next update will be on Monday and we will continue to update you on any issues and their impact to the schedule then.

Even if tonight’s build is the one you end up playing, it needs to be put through its paces by QA to ensure that we haven’t introduced any new issues. We have team members from around the company scheduled to playtest this weekend in order to verify the integrity of the build.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen posts from some backers wondering why they’ve only seen images of the Hornet in Arena Commander. To put that to rest, Zane has captured images of all three ships in action! These are unaltered screenshots, taken within the game itself (from a camera in back of the character head.) We’re very proud of how this game is looking!

The team has also put together a short teaser showing some of what you’ll be playing soon. This, again, is 100% in-game footage. You’re looking at Arena Commander’s AI battling each other in real time! Check it out below.

 

Arena Commander V.8 Daily Bug Update - June 2, 2014
JUNE 3RD 2014



Greetings Citizens,
We’re almost there! A weekend of hard testing revealed several blockers in the current Release Candidate. The team has worked to resolve these today, and believe we have a good build now. Our internal QA group will be testing it overnight tonight, with our next “go/no-go” meeting scheduled for early tomorrow morning. The good news is that we’re closer than ever, and our efforts over the weekend had the team resolving issues on the fly as they were found by QA.

We will update you tomorrow morning (US time) on the results of the go/no-go meeting.

 

ARENA COMMANDER BUILD UPDATE!
JUNE 4TH 2014

Greetings Citizens,

The go/no-go meeting has happened and the word is GO! Arena Commander V0.8 is currently being uploaded to our server partners. If all goes according to plan, the module should be available to play later tonight! There’s no need to keep reloading your Star Citizen Launcher: we will post here as soon as the download is available.

In the meantime, we’ve put together a quick gallery of what we call “body horror” screenshots collected by the team in Santa Monica over the past several months. These show off some of the more bizarre bugs we’ve run into during the game’s development. We expect you’ll find a lot more once you start helping us test Arena Commander… but hopefully these have all been eliminated!

 

MONTHLY REPORT: MAY, 2014
JUNE 4TH 2014

Greetings Citizens,

We know you’re excited to get into space tonight, but we wanted to make good on another promise and share the monthly studio reports from Cloud Imperium and our partners around the world. May has seen a lot of focus on dogfighting, but work also continues on other areas of the game (like Squadron 42 and the FPS module.) Here’s the full story!


CLOUD IMPERIUM SANTA MONICA



Travis Day, Dogfight Producer
Greetings Citizens,

I’m going to keep it short today! First, sorry for the delay on getting this monthly report out, the team was a smidge distracted with other issues… The big news from Santa Monica is that Arena Commander V0.8 is OUT! We launched AC today and… well, it’s unlikely you’re even reading the Monthly Report at this point and I am probably asleep. Go download your copy and get your first taste of space combat in Star Citizen. We sincerely hope you enjoy the fruits of our labor; and now a lot of very tired Star Citizen developers will be getting a good night’s sleep tonight so we are ready to come back and work on bug fixing tomorrow!

As you may have surmised, the Santa Monica team was laser focused on getting dogfighting V0.8 out the door in May. The efforts don’t stop here, though: we’re going to keep our current pace of development up to finish V0.9 and finally V1.0 with all the features promised at PAX and the complete multiplayer experience. Once that’s out, we’ll really get to rest.

The Santa Monica art team is growing, too! A new Junior Concept Artist, Gurmukh Bhasin, has joined David Hobbins in our art pit. The pair are currently working on an array of Constellation variants… and while they look incredible (almost as incredible as Hobbins himself) I can’t talk much about those just yet.

The community team is getting ready for several upcoming events, the first of which is The Next Great Starship finale on Saturday. Star Citizen fans from around the world are going to join the judges and Santa Monica team at the YouTube Space in Playa Del Rey where the final episode will be livestreamed and a winner selected. Having had no involvement in the show we’re really looking forward to meeting the teams that have put together such awesome ships in the engine. After that, it’s full steam ahead for the Community team towards the Gamescom event and other convention appearances later this summer!

Thank you all for your continued support and patience. I know that the last few days have been as much of a rollercoaster for you as it has for us. Hopefully now that the ride is over and you have your first taste of our vision for Arena Commander and what we are starting to build for space combat in Star Citizen you will be as inspired as we are about the direction we’re going together.

As always, if you have any questions about this post or anything else, please post your questions to our ‘Ask a Dev’ threads.

Cheers,

Cloud Imperium Games Santa Monica


CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN



Eric Peterson, Studio Director
Greeting Citizens!

The Month of May here in Texas has brought us much rain, and many difficult challenges. As everyone is aware, most of the company is busy working on Arena Commander, and as we get closer to the release, we continue to run into new issues every day, even though our fix rate has been positive in a significant way, we are just not close enough to let it out into the wild just yet. That being said the Austin office has been very busy during this month, and I would like to share some of that with all of you.

Audio/Video – In May we have been working on the planning and construction of our sound studios at the Austin and Manchester locations, as well as finishing up work on the Arena Commander release. As we’ve progressed toward the end of the month, the dogfighting work is more playtesting and adjusting as we go, and less generation/implementation of new content, to ensure the release is of the highest quality. Hopefully you will enjoy blasting your friends into oblivion with the sound turned up all the way to 11. Video this month has been about wrapping up and transferring media production to Santa Monica. We now have a multi-copy, multi-location file server to store the video record of the game’s development. That record will be the primary source for the documentary of the making of Star Citizen. We also produced the last four episodes of “Wingman’s Hangar” – seventy-two in all. As we shoot the last show, we take a look back at the last twenty months of fun, hijinks, and “serious” reporting.

Design – We have been firefighting for dogfighting release and pitching in with testing and feedback for the gameplay, from joystick controls, to missile and laser damage, the team has been hammering away in both single player and multiplayer to get it as stable and fun as possible for when it goes out.

In the meantime, we’re still pushing ahead on persistent universe work, including helping Tony Zurovec get up to speed on all facets of the project. Hangar support continues, with the additions of new ships as they come online, hangar flair items, and a brand new firing range that we think you’ll love! Economy work is moving ahead full-bore, as well, with local simulation playtests going on weekly, along with populating the universe with all of the goodies that players will get to discover. We’re breaking new ground on mission development, too, and putting finishing touches on some core systems. And we’ve updated the ship specs – not once, but twice – this month. Enjoy!

IT – The IT department has been busy working on build and deployment system improvements this month. These initiatives are important for internal development because they speed up the rate of iteration between builds allowing for much faster bug fixes and overall product improvements. We’ve also been able to make good headway on our publishing process which allows us to deploy fixes and content out to players with less downtime. The IT team has also been developing the tools and procedures for monitoring external game services. Based on requests from development we will be adding a much higher level of system and service monitoring and reporting than typically offered so we can determine the best ways to improve and optimize our live services in addition to making sure things stay up and running.

Production – We have been busy tracking down local tasks for the Arena Commander release, from server side, to game play, to IK issues with animation, our job has been to make sure the folks are alerted and up to date on priority tasks and getting things completed in a timely manner. The production team continued its valiant efforts to plan and execute the ship and character pipelines. We also continued to support the dog fighting module through ATX based development and QA. We continue to support the other studios in our collective efforts to release the Vanduul Swarm, Free flight, and Multi-player dog fighting modules and maps. Our long term plan is to increase efficiency via strategic initiatives such as working with our vendor partners to dynamically improve our art pipeline.

Engineering – Engineering has been busy working towards the Dogfighting v1 release, including gameplay logic, special effects implementation, engine fixes and improvements, rendering fixes, and bug and crash fixes. In addition to core universe service work and process management, ATX engineering is assisting with implementation of matchmaking and instance management services used for dogfighting and to be expanded later for the persistent universe. Tool improvements and bug fixes, build and patching system fixes and improvements, and development tool and process improvements such as migrating to Perforce Streams were also done this month.

QA – The last month has been very busy for CIG QA. Progress has been made on overall QA process. Our new QA additions from Foundry 42 began this month and were able to hit the ground running. Geoffery Coffin, William Clark and Andrew Nicholson reported for duty and immediately contributed with improving documentation and procedure and helping to ensure we have global testing coverage. We also had a new addition to the QA team here in Austin. A big Star Citizen welcome to Keegan Standifer! This month many company-wide play tests were conducted that were instrumental in bringing us closer towards the release of Arena Commander. It saddens us to sometimes be the bearer of bad news when we must bring to light some of the issues that may delay a release. However, we hope to have enough of the kinks ironed out to ensure Arena Commander is an incredibly enjoyable experience. After release we will still need your help! Much more testing will be needed and we look forward to everyone’s feedback to help ensure Arena Commander and eventually Star Citizen is the Best Damn Space Sim Ever!

There is a lot of things to be proud of this month, and we are getting oh so close to sharing some important work with you guys. This game and community share the same passion, and it is the most exciting thing we have ever worked on, and that is all thanks to you! Thank you all for your continued support.

EP


FOUNDRY 42



Erin Roberts, Studio Director
Design – Nick Elms
As you can imagine, it’s been a hectic month here in the UK for the designers. The survival mode “Vanduul Swarm” has taken a lot of design focus. We have been playing the game all day, every day, providing a “server crashing” amount of feedback for the Artists and Engineers. We have been tweaking all kinds of statistics to balance the enemy waves and the co-op AI pilots performance.

A lot of effort has gone into setting up AI profiles for the Vanduul named pilots, making sure that they are more of a challenge when compared to the “Scavengers”.

It’s been really good to see the single player survival mode coming together with some polish being thrown in, obviously there is a lot more to do, but we feel we have a solid base to work from. Multi-player feels like it is coming together, we just have a few technical hurdles to get over before we can stick a smiley face on our feedback emails.

Aside from the Dogfighting module, we have been making steady progress with the Squadron 42 level designs and where available the level “white-boxing” has been under review. The UEE capital ships are still full steam ahead, with “grey-box” versions of almost all of them, but the “Bengal” (which is still in white-box), and crew seat actions have started to get mock-up HUD animations to explain their functionality better.
That’s about all I can report this month.

Programming – Derek Senior
Another month and lots of engineering work to get DFM to the quality level demanded from Chris. There’s been a big push on the HUD side, working with our colleagues from the US, with big items like the radar, targeting, shield damage feedback, ITTS, and lots more small tweaks and refinements. From the audio side we’ve been adding to the interactive music, with lots of new SFX from shield hits to cockpit feedback. Bitching Betty is giving more and better information to keep you informed of what is going on and the state of your systems.

The controllers have had a lot of attention, the interaction between your controller and the ship’s dynamics has been an ongoing relationship (through good times and bad!), with plenty of tweaks and feedback. Other areas of work include the camera system allowing you to focus on different areas of the screen, be it a ship you are targeting or some particular part of your dashboard with dynamic FoV and DoF, player ejection and how that affects your scoring, and ongoing gameplay improvements. Aside from all of that there’s been a general push on cpu performance, gpu performance, multiplayer, stability, and a huge amount of bug fixing.

Art – Paul Jones
DFM work has been mainly bug fixing along some future work for the Conquest gametype along with some extra VFXwork to help sell damage to the player and shields.

Sq42 work has been progressing well with large strides made in building the modular interiors for the three capship classes – Javelin, Panther and Bengal; we can already see the potential in these monsters and the ideas are really starting to flow in making this a unique experience.

Alongside this work is also underway on the large Shubin Mining platform, making sure it’s on tier and whiteboxed ready for design to start protoyping missions.

Outside of the building contract concept artists have been making great strides in look dev, Gavin Rothery has finished of the Gladius concept and moved onto a Heavy fighter, Jon McCoy working on key areas for missions and Ryan Church is continuing defining the massive Panther class interiors.

We have also started work on a rescue utility vehicle (concept complete) and also refining of the Gladiator bomber and additional rooms of the Javelin – it’s all going on this month!


BHVR



Mathieu Beaulieu, Producer
As programmers are applying the last fixes for the dog fighting module, artists and designers have brought the latest environment to the next level. Today, the Asteroid Hangar is Beta and should be ready for release quite soon. While working on it, we have also made progress on the room system and you should soon be able to add speciality rooms to your hangar.

Our UI designers have been busy getting their hands dirty with all kinds of things: dog fighting module bits and pieces, matchmaking UI finishing touches, hangar flair objects, logo design, motion graphics, economy tool UX design, and, of course, our baby: the mobiGlas. A solid look-and-feel is coming together and several mobiGlas apps have had an initial UI/UX pass, as we continue to strive to bring you the BDSS-OS-E…

On top of all that, the design team is preparing the field by identifying gameplay mechanics for every type of Planetside location, from bars to garages to clothing outlets.

Architectural styles for the first 20 landing zones have been woven into Star Citizen fiction to create believable locales rich with history.

In economy design, we’ve started identifying which factories, vendors and natural resources are located in which system. Some of this data has been entered in the economy tool, which will allow us to simulate different economic scenarios.

Stay tuned…


CGBOT



Tara Decker, Producer
Is there anything to talk about in May besides Dogfighting? There is but it’s probably not as interesting.

The ships we’ve contributed to dogfighting (300i, Aurora, Hornet..) have been in the hands of the DFM crew while they work to make dogfighting amazing. After the updates and tweaks to damage & LOD needed, our focus has been a little in the back-shadows of the massive DFM goal. Not a problem for us.

We’ve been creating ships in the background of this game for awhile now.
The next ship on our dossier for April/May has been the anticipated Freelancer. The updated FL and it’s variants were completed in May. Hope you all like.

Currently on deck: the Constellation. We’re due to complete 2 versions in early June and finish up the other variants by end of June. Chris has high expectations for this ship and so do we. We’ll deliver no Constellation before its time (said in Orson Welles voice, with latitude .

And, the massive, impressive Idris marches on. The greybox will be complete within the next week or so. Once it’s vetted by design and art, the final steps to completion commence, and an early fall delivery is scheduled. This ship has taken a bit of time, but all involved expect it to be worth the sweat.

Though April was our big push, in May we continued to work with the Turbulent team in Montreal to create beautiful, accurate renders of the ships for purchase.

CGBot doesn’t only work on ships…we do characters, too. Male Explorer suit will be completed in June; along with the final helmet. The interior of the helmet is next on deck for additional modeling and texturing. Because no detail is left un-detailed in this game. Realistic. Top-notch.


FREELANCE CONTRACTORS



Sean Murphy, Outsource Manager
On the Art side of things our contractors are continuing to produce exciting concept art – this month we added George Hull (The Matrix, Elysium, Transformers) to the list of artists working for us; George has been working on preliminary designs for the Collector starship (which began life as the Surveyor). We’ve moved several of our artists onto supporting Squadron 42 ship needs – Emmanuel Shiu, Eddie del Rio, and John Dickenson are all now working on Vanduul ships. Jan Urschel has continued to refine Xi’an ships and Jim Martin has been working on concepts for the Cutlass variants. Stefano Tsai is close to finishing the M50 and has created some amazing renders for Jump Point (you’ll want these for your desktop wallpapers!) and David Brochard has designed some really cool Outlaw armor sets for the REDACTED FPS group. We’ve also added Kurt Kaufman (Jurassic Park, Star Wars Episodes I and II, War of the Worlds) to our roster; Kurt’s doing concept exploration of Banu environments. The internal art team continues to work on new ships for the persistent universe, as well as tweaking the ships in Arena Commander to where they are just right.


FPS TEAM



[Redacted]
Wow, has it really been a month already? I guess it has, time sure flies when you’re making games!

This last month has been a busy one for everyone involved with Star Citizen, including the FPS Team at [Redacted]. Everybody has been coming together in one massive effort to launch Arena Commander… and it looks like that day has finally arrived!

While the guys on the art team have still been modeling environments and props, creating materials and generally making things things look pretty for FPS, the engineering team has been working hard with the other studios to whip Arena Commander into shipping shape. Have you ever seen that movie Starship Troopers? You know that scene where the group of kids are squashing all of the bugs on the sidewalk? It’s kind of like that

The animation team has been taking all of the mocap data that was captured at the start of the month and merging it with the different poses and stances that are needed for weapons and combat.

From the design side, cover placement is being added to the levels and lots of documentation has been created concerning energy recharge stations and gear placement on the player. Maybe that doesn’t sound too exciting, but it will be once it has been implemented… honest!

But like Travis said in the Santa Monica report… why are you still reading this?! Go download AC and let us know what you think!

 

MONTHLY REPORT: MAY, 2014 (Continued)
JUNE 4TH 2014


VOID ALPHA



Mark Day, Studio Director
Made up of three areas, Landing Zone, City Center, and The Blocks all connected via a monorail system the planet-side of Terra Prime is really coming to life. In addition to polish on The Landing Zone/Centermass and finalizing design for Sherman our main focus this month has been the creation of Prime’s seedy underbelly, The Blocks! For those of you who shall we say, “Hope to pursue a more adventurous lifestyle outside the troublesome rules of polite society,” will feel right at home. Existing in the perpetual shadow of the wealth and power of Prime’s city sprawl high above what the Blocks lacks in maintenance and physical beauty in makes up for in excitement and opportunity.

voidALPHA remains a tight team of: 2 Environment Artists
1 Concept Artist
1 Designer
1 Project Manager


TURBULENT



Benoit Beauséjour, Founder
This month the Platform team in Montreal kept on track with the development of the Arena Commander public leaderboards. The UI is now integrated and work is continuing on receiving data from the game servers to populate and store your scores for public display. The Citizen Dossier part of the stats is also receiving more updates as we work to get nice stats graphs animated. The team also tackled many requests from the engineering team to handle the different pieces of logic needed for the Arena Commander roll-out.

This month we also moved over to the XMPP-based chat. With more traffic to handle and power users on the system we feel we still have work to do and will tackle updates as soon as time permits. Expect performance improvements and bug fixes in the web client as well as a few new UI features integrated. (Kudos to citizen Koros for his awesome work on the RSI Chat Toolkit).

One task we tackled this month was also the creation of a first version of the “Star Citizen Project Status” overview. A matrix showing the state of the different game modules and a first draft of the individual module pages will show up soon. The client download area was also reworked to become the “Star Citizen” download. Since the client will soon contain the Arena Commander module, some rework was needed to deal with he different module requirements.


MOON COLLIDER



Matthew Jack, Founder
This month the Moon Collider team has been focused on polishing gameplay for the single-player Vanduul Swarm mode. The Arena Commander v0.8 release will our first big gameplay release for Kythera, so we’ve done all we can to make a good first impression.

While the fundamentals of space combat under Kythera were all mature – such as targeting, dogfighting behaviours, manoeuvres and dynamic avoidance – there were various changes needed for the upcoming release.

The first was the switch from the Hornets – used as opponents for the PAX demo – to the Scythes that the design required. We adjusted for their handling characteristics and incorporated the latest tuning of the IFCS system to get them flying well, and then moved on to the implications for combat. The Scythes use fixed weapons rather than turrets, so require very accurate flight and orientation in order to hit their targets.

Next was working with designers at Foundry 42 to develop their characteristics and the Vanduul Swarm gameplay. Mike, our lead engineer, visited Manchester for a few days to make this most effective.

Vanduul Swarm is a more arcade-like mode, intended to let everyone have fun while getting used to the flight model and controls of the ships. Hence, earlier waves of Scythes are by design quite easy to dispatch, while later waves and boss-ships should be much more challenging. We iterated very closely with the designers to give them all the parameters they needed to achieve this.

We also worked to give them a distinctive flight style and constrained their manoeuvrability where necessary, to ensure players could get “on their tail” for satisfying dogfighting.

When these fundamentals were looking solid, the designers proposed a fairly bold change: to add “friendly Hornets”. These are not intended to be wingmen to be ordered around, but rather independent companion fighters. These friendly AI get involved in their own dogfights, tailing Scythes and being tailed, so there’s much more going on around the player. We think they bring the whole scene to life.

As release has approached, we’ve been standing by with final support while the last bugs are ironed out in the build, and playing regularly to ensure gameplay balance is maintained. We’re also doing some longer-term planning on AI for modules to come.

We’re very excited to have Kythera going out to so many backers and providing gameplay in Vanduul Swarm. There’s much more to come, but we hope you all have fun with this first taster.

 

ARENA COMMANDER LAUNCHED!
JUNE 4TH 2014




Greetings Citizens!

We are very happy to finally share with you the first public build of Arena Commander!

The build we are releasing today is what we’re calling Version 0.8. You can download it by either updating your existing Hangar through the launcher or by accessing the Star Citizen Download page. V0.8 will give every qualified backer access to the Vanduul Swarm and Freeflight modes and includes the ability to fly the Aurora, 300i and Hornet. If you haven’t pledged for one of these ships, we’ll give you a loaner that is the closest in class to what you fly; we want everyone with Alpha access (or an Arena Commander pass) to get their first taste of spaceflight!

WARNING: the updated version of the Star Citizen launcher will replace the USER folder when it patches. If you have any saved screenshots or other content, please move them before downloading Arena Commander.

Arena Commander V0.8 also includes multiplayer functionality for the Battle Royale and Team modes. These modes will be available for a small number of players today. As we hunt down lag and synch issues and spin up servers, we will open these modes up to more and more players in the coming weeks.

Remember: V0.8 is just the beginning. It’s the start of a hard push for the development team as we head towards V0.9 and finally V1.0, at which point Arena Commander will be ‘feature complete’ with the modes, maps and options promised at PAX. By the time V1.0 drops, we aim for the entire community to have access to the multiplayer game modes!

As we move forward to Version 0.9, we will focus on adding the following improvements:

• Improved client and multiplayer server stability
• General performance optimizations and fixes for hardware specific issues discovered during community testing
• Audio improvements with additional SFX, music, mix, and improvements to the dynamic music system
• Improvements to the HUD to better differentiate the manufacturers, improve ITTS, and add mouse control functionality
• Additional character animations to add immersion to the cockpit and resolve outstanding animation issues
• Further flight model upgrades to better handle unique thruster power combinations and refine the control of each ship
• Additional ship, weapon, item, and thruster tuning to improve the balance of Arena Commander based on community testing
• New multiplayer game mode for public testing along with AI improvements and updates to Vanduul Swarm.
• Hangar bug fixing along with enhanced visuals and animations.
• Cockpit polish with improved damage effects and more dynamic lighting that responds to gameplay events and ship status.
• Some additional weapons and items for use with Arena Commander.
• Update player breathing sound effects and responses to incoming impulses and g-forces

Extras

I’m also excited to announce that we’ve created some special extras to go with Arena Commander. Click here to check out the Arena Commander manual, which teaches you how to play the game and gets you further into the Star Citizen ‘verse. There’s also a cool new trailer available below! And stay tuned: the manual and other content will be updated as the game evolves.



Testing Arena Commander

It’s been a longer wait than many of you would have liked, and the team and I share your impatience as we all wanted to have this in your hands a lot sooner. I can assure you though, it has not been from lack of effort or focus. A significant portion of our world-wide teams have been working around the clock to finish off the first set of features and get the build stabilized enough that we feel comfortable in releasing it to a wider testing pool.

I have heard the sentiment from portions of the community that indicate a desire to have the build in their hands sooner in order to help with testing efforts. The team and I appreciate the eagerness to help out, but I want to take a few minutes to explain why we have been following our present course.

Normally in game development you have staged testing. When you have a build that already has far more issues and instability than can be easily fixed, it’s inefficient to open it up for quality assurance testing as you consume a lot of extra management and team bandwidth sifting through the issues, many of which will already be known and be duplicates of previously reported issues, or issues the team just can’t get to because there are higher priority problems that have to be addressed first. Once the build becomes more stable and has most of the intended features in place, you then open it up to full QA to really hammer on it and find issues that aren’t immediately obvious or provide gameplay feedback now that the game isn’t crashing every five minutes.

Remember: you ARE our full QA department! Thus far, we’ve been testing Arena Commander with a team of seven dedicated QA testers (plus anyone else in the company with time to dogfight.) We’re releasing today because we feel the game is at a point where it’s stable enough to go out to a wider audience. That’s not because it’s done, but because it’s ready for testing on a bigger scale. There are still plenty of known issues we’re working and there are likely many you will discover that we haven’t seen yet. What you play today will crash, it will have slowdowns, installation issues and other problems.

You can help make sure we get this right by reporting your bugs on the forums. We’ve added two new
bug reporting forums, one for the single player modes and one for multiplayer (visible only to users with access to those modes.) I’m including the list of known bugs at the bottom of this post so you know what we’re already tracking internally. These are the issues we know about but don’t consider big enough to block the release. We’re working to fix them right now, and then we need to know what you’re running into! Don’t just report crashes and animation errors, though; let us know in the general Arena Commander area what you think of the flight model, how you’d improve balance and so on. You’re helping to build this game!

Please post everything to the forums; the Customer Support team isn’t able to assist with Arena Commander bugs with you at this time (remember, this is pre-alpha!) We’re working on expanding this process, too: the team at Turbulent is building an external bug tracking system; in future builds, you’ll be able to submit bugs that will go right to the team instead of via the forums!



The Future of Open Development

Your part in testing Arena Commander is the heart of what I think makes the approach to how we are building Star Citizen so strong for the long term health and fun of the game. We are deliberately sharing the game at a much earlier stage than any traditional AAA game and also much earlier than a lot of other crowd funded games. We want to get aspects of the game, even if they only represent one facet, into the hands of the people who made this game possible in the first place. These builds are early enough that the feedback from people who love this genre so much they’ve been willing to put their money up way in advance of getting the finished product can be actioned on, allowing us to build a better, more stable game in the long run.

So I encourage you all to have patience and if there is something that you like or don’t like, voice your opinion on the forums. I can’t promise we will act on every comment but like all things with Star Citizen we actively listen to the community’s feedback, both positive and negative, and then act on the issues that resonate with us. You just don’t get this opportunity in the traditional publisher model when a Beta release is really a pre-release marketing ploy!

We are deliberately making our development process much more open and transparent. This is why we started the monthly reports from the numerous studios working on the game. There are now more than 250 people working on all aspects of the game of which Arena Commander is only one facet. The level of ambition with Star Citizen is unprecedented in the independent world and has only been made possible by your commitment and excitement. Not everything will go smoothly or on time, as a project of this size and complexity will always present unforeseen issues, which is why we have been endeavoring to share information with you that anyone in the traditional publishing model would not. The dates that we shared are a good example of this.

As soon as we had an internal target that we were hopeful of making, we shared it with you, with the caveat “if everything goes according to plan.” In ordinary development, such dates would never be shared with the public. Publishers take these dates from their teams and build in large lead times. And even then, unforeseen issues can still arise that cause further delays. But we view you, the community, as part of the team. We know how keen you are to get your hands on Arena Commander and so we’ve decided to share our current projections with you.

My question to you is: should we continue to do this? I’m given pause not by internal cricisim from frustrated backers who really just want to get into space (which we completely understand!) but by sensationalistic headlines that imply we’re not working hard or that the game is some sort of scam. I can assure you that the whole team is committed to making the best game possible, so it is disheartening when our attempts at transparency are used against us to paint a negative picture of this amazing project.

Since we’re a community driven game, I’m going to leave it up to you whether you want the same level of visibility with regards to dates (knowing that they are estimates and are subject to change) or would rather just be given hard, long-term dates like a publisher. If you choose the former, we’ll just have to put the word “TENTATIVE” in caps for the benefit of everyone that doesn’t follow the project as closely as all you. You can vote to decide in the poll below!



Take Off!

I hope you all enjoy Arena Commander V0.8. I’m very proud of what the team has achieved with all of their hard work. Despite being pre-alpha and a build that’s earlier than anything I’ve ever shared with the public before, I think it looks spectacular and that it’s a great foundation to build on. There will be many updates over the coming months adding features and content — We’re going to be adding in all the ships you pledged for… and plenty you haven’t seen yet. There will be new game modes, environments and equipment. We’re going to work on performance, stability and improve the technology: the loading screens you see today won’t be present in the finished game!

For now, though, enjoy your first taste of space combat in Star Citizen’s developing world; I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Together we will follow our collective dream: to build the BDSSE!

— Chris Roberts


KNOWN ISSUES IN ARENA COMMANDER V0.8



Known Issues
Global

• No way to easily distinguish dogfighting eligible ships from ineligible ones.
• There are multiple issues with the persistence system that can cause ship loadouts to not appear and bugs with the helmet in the hangar. Easy workaround for most issues is to delete your “USER” folder inside the game client.
• Having multiple input devices connected (I.E. Joystick + Gamepad) will cause conflicts between the throttle settings when certain actions are performed like changing flight modes or receiving damage with hit impulses
• Hangar – Art – X55 debug text appears in key bindings menu
• Some combinations of computer hardware can sometimes experience graphical glitches and artifacts.
• Ship collisions with environmental objects needs tuning and refinement for proper damage attribution.
• All Maps – Gameplay / Weapons – The flare countermeasure doesn’t always cause missiles to miss and follow it
• Player cockpit animations and enter/exit animations still need some improvements
• Infrequent crashes still occur during gameplay in special circumstances and after extended periods of play
• Issues with scoreboard display when awaiting respawn or in 3rd person perspective.
• Radar and signature system still needs improvement for occlusion handling and a balance pass to increase the variability of radar effectiveness.
• When ejecting from the ship after the character pulls the ejection handle he tposes for a few frames before ejecting
• When ejecting at high speeds you go into the cockpit a little bit before impulsing up
• Particle effect remains indefinitely after gatling gun is destroyed
• Some users are reporting a bypassable “No Disk in Drive” error when updating
• Render thread spikes could cause performance issues
• Bitching Betty may announce ‘system overheating’ at incorrect times
• Missing chair whilst the player is ejecting in first person view
• Camera transitions between the three animation states of ejection have large glitching issues.
• Some foot IK animation errors when walking inside Constellation
• Camera spins wildly when third person is activated after ejecting
• On the Aurora the fixed weapon aiming reticule turns green when pointing directly at the target or behind the target’s direction
• Blacking out can happen too easily sometimes
• Buggy can sometimes slide around and flip over
• Buggy can sometimes not accelerate unless turbo is applied (Shift)
• Badger Repeater weapon geometry becomes offset when fired from the firing range
• Near impossible to navigate Arena Commander UI using Oculus Rift
• Some users can experience an issue of falling through the elevator floor when using lower spec machines
• The Outfit Changer has been temporarily disabled
• Clicking the launch button on the Arena Commander UI multiple times can cause undesired behavior

Vanduul Swarm

• All Maps – Vanduul Swarm – Gameplay – If pausing as the game loads into the level, the player will be left on a black screen indefinitely
• All Ships – Vanduul Swarm / DFM_Survival – Art – There is a green, occasionally graphically corrupt, bar present when the player kills an enemy
• Vanduul Swarm / DFM_Survival – AI – The Ai controlled wingmen are too quickly overheating their own Gatling guns to the point of destroying them
• Dying Star – Vanduul Swarm – Gameplay – Wave 7 didn’t spawn in during Vanduul Swarm (only once)
• No HUD element to show remaining lives

Free Flight

• All Maps – Freeflight – Gameplay – Difficult to get back onto the landing platform if running and jumping off it in EVA mode
• Landing gear will not deploy correctly when attempting to land on landing platform

Multiplayer

• Rarely the server will crash at the end of a round.
• Multiplayer synchronization issues still present under certain conditions
• Matchmaking and load balancing server technology still needs improvement to ensure fair matches and properly distributed player loads.
• Player is not told who killed them when killed in any game type
• Sometimes the client will crash on respawn
• Sometimes the client will crash on game join
• Sometimes the server will crash when two players slam into each other and both ships are fully destroyed.
• Both clients will crash if they crash into each other after the end of the round.
• Player is unable to respawn if flying through the map boundary while waiting for other players to join.
• Ship corpse can sometimes rubberband
• Multiplayer server crashes infrequently occur in particular situations based on gameplay.
• Low repro crash when you die in Multiplayer
• Server takes too long to realize a player has left/crashed. Can’t get back on until it has cleared
• Gatling guns destroy themselves after firing