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News: All your up to the date Official RSI news in one thread!!!

Discussion in 'Star Citizen Public Discussion' started by NuclearMessiah, 4 Dec 2013.


  1. RSVP FOR GAMESCOM 2014
    JUNE 27TH 2014

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    Greetings Citizens,

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    We are headed back to Gamescom! Last year, we launched the Hangar Module at a special Citizens-only event held during Gamescom. There’s even more to celebrate this year, so we’re throwing an even bigger party!

    As with other Star Citizen events, the 2014 Gamescom presentation is open only to Citizens and does not require a Gamescom badge. Due to the increased cost of the larger venue, this year’s event will require a $10 admission charge.

    You can see footage from last year’s event here.

    Where
    The event will take place from 8 PM to midnight on August 15th, 2014 at E-Werk Cologne. The address is Schanzenstraße 37, 51063 Köln, Germany. Doors open at 8 PM. Subscribers and concierge members can enter at 7 PM. The venue can hold 2,000 Citizens, twice the size of last year!

    Hangar Item
    Your admission will also add the 2944 Gamescom trophy to your Hangar! If you are interested in purchasing the trophy but not RSVPing, it is available separately for $5.

    What to Bring
    Filling out the form below will generate an RSVP ticket, please remember to bring that!

    If you have a Citizen Card or any Star Citizen clothing, bring it! You’ll have plenty of chances to pose with Chris Roberts and the team in your Star Citizen attire. Food and drinks will be available for purchase.

    Many of you have kindly offered gifts for the team. Unfortunately, since we’re flying back to the United States the next day we are unable to accept anything at the event. We truly appreciate the thought, though!

    Register
    Event capacity is 2,000 and German law requires a strict door list, which means this event is Backers only. Registrants must be 18+. To register your attendance, please fill out the form below and proceed to the payment process. Every attendee must RSVP themselves. You can register here.

    UPDATE: The registration form can be filled out after a ticket has been purchased. Sorry for the confusion.
     
  2. AI DESIGN IN VANDUUL SWARM
    JUNE 27TH 2014

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    AI Design in Vanduul Swarm

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    Vanduul Swarm first went out to backers on June 4th, and many of you were waiting in eager anticipation to get your hands on it, for your very first chance to fly your ships and engage in your first Star Citizen dogfights. For our small team here in Edinburgh, Scotland, it was just as momentous – but for different reasons.

    We’re the team behind Kythera, the artificial intelligence middleware which powers Star Citizen, and Arena Commander v0.8 was its gameplay debut. We knew what you’d see and what you’d experience, because we’d been improving, testing, tweaking and tuning the AI for weeks. But as we waited for the first feedback from backers, there were some things we just couldn’t be sure of.

    Had we got the difficulty curve right? Was there a major bug or exploit that we’d missed? Would you guys think it was fun?

    We’ve got a lot of games development experience behind us, but this release was very personal – and very immediate. Hours after that magic build was approved, it was being streamed around the world. 33,000 of you played it in the first 12 hours.

    The best moment was tuning in to Twitch, to see an intrepid backer learning to play the game from scratch with thousands of other people looking on.

    And he seemed to be enjoying it.

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    A Balancing Act
    After all, fun is what it’s really all about. We at Moon Collider think that you as backers are helping to build the most ambitious game currently in development – but all that vision, realism and immersion would count for nothing if you didn’t think it was entertaining to play. And as developers of your AI dogfighting opponents for Vanduul Swarm, we were right on the fun front-line. And ultimately it all came down to balancing.

    While other teams were adjusting weapon capabilities, control schemes and flight control systems in to make the best first space combat experience they could, we worked with designers Ben and Will in Manchester on the AI opponents who focussed that experience to make it fun. And as those underlying systems changed under our feet, the Scythes had to adapt: when missiles became less powerful, we could use them more often; when IFCS made the ship more responsive, our Scythes could display more agility.

    Vanduul Swarm came with the extra design challenge that it’s not just your first glimpse of the dogfighting module, but also a training mission: the first opportunity to fly a spaceship in Star Citizen’s universe. There’s a lot to learn, and it’s just no fun if you’re blown to pieces before you’ve even figured out the controls.

    You’ll know by now that the Vanduul come in a series of waves: fifteen of them, each more threatening than the last. We made sure that wave 15 is a challenge for even the very best players (nobody on the dev team got through it before release – though as we hoped, it seems a few of you have since!) But making AI hard is easy. Our first and toughest design problems came back in wave 1, when we knew our Vanduul might be facing rookie pilots, still stopping to check the flight manual.

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    Displaying Weakness
    You might think that AI programmers want their AI to be as smart as possible, but the truth is more subtle than that. The best tactics for an AI don’t always appear smart to a player (let alone fun). And while the Vanduul’s AI doesn’t “cheat” – it doesn’t have access to any information a human player wouldn’t have and it does obey all the same physical rules – it is able to process that information much more quickly and respond more precisely than the most experienced fighter ace ever could. So to give its opponents a fighting chance, we had to build in weaknesses as well as strengths.

    We didn’t always get it right first time. In an early version of Vanduul Swarm, we simply turned down the accuracy of the enemies’ targeting. It seemed to be working fine, until we noticed you could sit your spaceship motionless in space, and the Scythes would still miss you! (We changed it to vary with your speed, but now it seems some people are doing very well in decoupled mode, as a turret flying in a straight line – maybe we should tighten that up?)

    We also wanted to emphasise a particular style of combat in our dogfights. In PvP you’re sure to see ships flying straight towards each other with all guns blazing, which can end up like a medieval joust. But we think what you really want is the thrill of the chase – the chance to hang on an enemy’s tail and pursue your quarry through the blazing void. So we’ve programmed the Vanduul to go into a retreating, “follow me!” behaviour some of the time, to make sure you get that opportunity.

    So will the AI always let you win? Definitely not. We may have reined back the Scythes in Vanduul Swarm, trying to ensure everyone finds their level on the difficulty curve in their own time, and we hope you felt we got that about right. But if you’ve made it up to the later waves, you’ll know the best of the Vanduul have a lot more to throw at you. And rest assured that, for the reasons we’ve described, AI design for Vanduul Swarm is quite different from the vision for the larger Star Citizen universe, where you’ll find AI pilots every bit as cunning and ruthless as the best human players.

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    An Alien Swarm with Personality
    Chris has always emphasised to us the importance of personality in Star Citizen’s AI opponents. In response, we built in loads of tunable parameters and a “profiles” framework to help manage them, and Ben Sharples in Manchester was able to put this to good use.

    Those spacecraft flying towards you might all be Scythes, but they’re not all the same. You’ll have spotted that the load-out varies – for example the level bosses have missiles even while the grunts of the wave do not. But have you noticed that each boss engages with you in a slightly different way?

    The first boss you’ll meet is Little King, who’s programmed to stay at range from you and deploy countermeasures to avoid missile strikes, drawing you away from the centre of the battle. In contrast, the second boss – The Priest – is a close-range fighter, who gets in as close as possible and inflicts damage in terrifying short sharp bursts. (By the way, there’s a rumour on the forums that the Scythes are trying to ram you. They aren’t really. It’s just The Priest’s way of saying hi!)

    You’ll see this that taken to the next level in the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42, with individual pilots working to achieve their own long-term objectives as well as short-term goals, and their attitude to you informed by experience and displayed in their combat choices.

    Creating those characters will always be a tough job, both for designers and for us in providing them tools up to the job. But we saw one simple thing make a big difference in Vanduul Swarm: giving pilots names. “Boss1” and “Boss2” did behave distinctly, but with a name like “The Priest” to hint at their behaviour, they sprang to life and we could start to get under their skin.

    (The teammates, incidentally, were originally called “Ben” and “Willus” (we can’t imagine why). And while we were sad to see them go, “Warlord” and “Vixen” did seem rather more aggressive… )

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    Friendly Hornets
    Finally then, let’s take a quick look at the two allies who accompany you on your mission. “Warlord” and “Vixen” are far from expert pilots, but we think they work pretty well at their real task: to give the Vanduul alternative targets and draw them away from you. This gives you a chance to choose your encounters and to see dogfighting going on around you in its full glory – it always looks best when it’s happening to someone else!

    You probably think we’d planned it that way from the start, but we hadn’t. The teammates were a late addition – a flash of inspiration from Will Greenough, a designer at Foundry 42 just down the road from us in Manchester. Adding friendly AI to the design at such a late stage would usually be a pretty scary thing to attempt – and I’ll admit we were nervous of the issues it might raise. But actually, Kythera’s Hornets were dogfighting against each other long before human players could join in.

    So we didn’t have to do any coding. And there was virtually no level setup, because our behaviors have always been unscripted – Kythera is all about AI being able to make informed decisions, not slavishly following designer cues.

    In fact, the first we heard of the idea was that Will had already tried it and it “brought the whole scene to life.” We thought it was pretty bold but we went for it!

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    Next: The Universe
    So what’s next for Kythera in Star Citizen? Now the dogfighting module is out in the wild, we’re turning our focus to AI in the rest of the game – and we have our work cut out for us!

    On Arena Commander launch day, we were actually in Manchester for the Squadron 42 Summit. So we had ample reminders of how much needs to be done for AI in the rest of the Star Citizen universe – in particular FPS gameplay and bringing the enormous and diverse population of the Persistent Universe to life. (We talk about a few of those challenges on our website.)

    There will be incremental enhancements to Vanduul Swarm… but if extra features are slow to come, rest assured it’s because we’re working on whole new types of gameplay we know you want to see.

    In the meantime, we can’t stress enough how much we value your feedback. It’s hard for us to find and read it all and still develop the game! But we’ve never had such direct contact with you, the players, and we’ve been very grateful for your support. We hope you’ll carry on sharing your thoughts (and your bug reports!) right up to release day.

    We hope you’ve been having fun with Vanduul Swarm, but it’s just the first step, and we’re looking forward to bringing the rest of the universe to life.
     
  3. MONTHLY REPORT: JUNE, 2014
    JULY 1ST 2014

    Greetings Citizens,
    It’s hard to believe it’s June already! Here’s our monthly report on what all three Cloud Imperium Games studios and all of our outsource teams have been up to! From improving the website to making the Vanduul fight more fiercely, we’ve been hard at work building Star Citizen.

    CLOUD IMPERIUM SANTA MONICA

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    Travis Day, Dogfight Producer
    Greetings Citizens,
    June has been an exciting month for all of us here in the Santa Monica offices of Cloud Imperium Games. We released Arena Commander earlier this month and have been feverishly working to patch and resolve as many of the launch issues as possible with weekly updates to both the game client and the launcher.

    As I write this we are in the process of putting the finishing touches on our most recent update, patch 12.4. While initially the entire team was focused on bug fixing and patching for our next 12.X release we are slowly migrating the team back into Main so we can continue development on new larger features which we plan on releasing with Release 13 (known colloquially in the community as V0.9).

    This month we were also fortunate enough to be hosted in Alienware’s booth at E3 2014 here in Los Angeles where we had Arena Commander available for folks to play. Mark Abent, Chad Zamzow, myself and a few others from the development team were on hand to spread the word about Star Citizen and show off the game to passerby. We encountered a broad range of people from the entirely uninitiated who’d never heard of Star Citizen to longtime backers who’d been playing Arena Commander at home. All in all we had a great showing and even nabbed a nomination for ‘Best of E3’ from The Escapist.

    Of the utmost importance this month has been steadily increasing the number of people in multiplayer for Arena Commander working out all of the backend, game server, and matchmaking issues being exposed by the volume of traffic. We are making some great headway on this and we really appreciate everyone’s assistance and patience in helping us to test and create our universe backend that will one day serve as the backbone for all of Star Citizen’s connectivity.

    As I mentioned previously, the team is beginning to work on some of the larger features for our V0.9 release as well as versions even further down the road. Some of the items being worked on include support for in-game custom key binding configuration, a bevy of larger improvements in the flight model, some additional ships, improvements toHUD, and many more features were not quite ready to ruin the surprise of just yet.

    We are looking forward to your feedback on our continued releases for Arena Commander and multiplayer as stability improves and additional players are added to the testing pool. As always, thank you very much for your support and if you have any questions please feel free to post in our Ask a Dev threads.

    Cheers,

    Cloud Imperium Games Santa Monica


    CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN

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    Eric Peterson, Studio Director
    Greetings Citizens,
    It has been a very busy month at the Texas offices of Cloud Imperium, we have been knee deep in Arena Commander releases, with 4 versions of it coming out during the month of June, and that is only the tip of the iceberg as more are on the way. We have also been busy working on the persistent universe and backend server component for AC, which will serve the PU as well. In addition, we have been hard at work on several ships and getting them ready to be put in the hangar and into the pipeline to make them fly. So, without further ado here is an update from each department.

    Design:
    The Austin design team continues with persistent universe content as its primary focus. This month, we’ve been focused on refining tools for star system creation, evaluating and providing guidance on kits for constructing planet-side locations, and growing the mission creation tool for quick persistent universe content. The design team is also building our internal roadmap for the next year and beyond, with the economy remaining the centerpiece to that work.

    We’re also still providing support for the dogfighting teams, with ship parts, modularity, and customization being one of our primary areas of support. And we haven’t forgotten the hangar. In the past month, we’ve gotten the new Freelancers into the hangars and started work on other upcoming ships, while still continuing to provide bug fixes for the hangar module.

    Art
    This month the Art Department was hard at work on several ships. The Freelancer variants, Constellation, Mustang, M50, Aurora variants, 300 series, Hornet variants, P52 Merlin, Avenger, and Xi’an Scout all saw some love from our artists here this month. Our character artists were kept busy bringing the FPS characters up to speed, as well as beautifying the characters used in our commercials. Other things that were completed are the UEE Marine helmet,VFX for some of our Planet side locations, as well as concepts for some cool new cargo containers that match the new cargo system design. Our animators have been busy fixing up character interactions with our ships and polishing animation sets for Squadron 42 and FPS.

    Engineering – choo choo!
    ATX engineering worked on fixes for several Arena Commander Release 12 deployments. ATX engineering also monitored public universe for issues, and worked with QA on issues that occurred on test universe clusters.

    Engineering did hookup of Freelancer variants and TNGS ships in the hangar for the weekend surprise, we also fixed many game server, hub server, matchmaking, and generally crushed tons of bugs. Many hangar and dogfighting bug fixes were implemented. Engineering also worked to improve validation of ship selection and load out on the game server. We began live universe stats web page implementation, and began evaluating Avatar customization tech source code.

    Launcher improvements including selectable payloads, bug fixes, and testing of caching patch servers were made and deployed. Nightly builds and continuous builds of active streams were enabled, along with additional dev tools like p4 review and p4 web.

    Multiple Sandbox Editor fixes and improvements were made (including fixes to reloading modified assets from disk), and engineering worked with QA and Art to jump-start the Unstable->Recent->Stable testing and promotion process. DevOps migrated public universe cluster from Rackspace to Google Compute, and made progress on large universe cluster scripted deployment.

    Audio
    The Audio Department has been working on more improvements to Arena Commander! Featuring revised weapon fire sound-effects that have more punch, along with new sound-effects for ordnance whizz-bys, missiles, explosions and the afterburner/boost. We’re also working towards our Gamescom release in 6 weeks! (you will have to ask Chris what that is :) ) .

    IT
    The IT team worked on several different but important initiatives this month. Austin’s IT group worked on the company network infrastructure. Initial work in this area has become necessary in order to keep up with the increased network traffic to all connected development teams. Early results are showing 15x improvement in data transfer rates between studios. LA’s IT Manager has been busy setting up new staff and reconfiguring development machines to squeeze every bit of performance out of them. Our Manchester IT is burning the midnight oil working on the build out of a new floor for development as well as custom building the demo machines that will be used at our Gamescon event in Germany.

    Overview
    This next month promises to be just as exciting as the last, as we continue to add more Citizens to Arena Commander, add in new game types, and prepare for our upcoming event at Gamescom in Germany. Working forCIG is always an adventure, and we are happy that every one of you is along for the ride with us – See you all – in the verse !

    EP


    FOUNDRY 42

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    Erin Roberts, Studio Director
    Hi guys, what a month it’s been, we’re really excited that the Dog Fight Module is out there and also we’re working towards getting everyone into multiplayer and improving, bug fixing and balancing with all your help. We’ve also taken big steps forward in white boxing our first levels in Squadron 42, as well as started work on Multi-crewed Vehicles, and last but not least the Capital Ships are really starting to look great. Wandering round the “Javelin” Destroyer is a real treat… Next month we’ll be really solidifying the DFM with bug fixes, new features and game modes and of course a fully operational ranking boards so people can start to compare stats. Also let’s not forget Gamescom is around the corner, we plan to have some cool new stuff to unveil at the show. AS always thanks for the dedication and support from everyone, without your guys support and feedback we wouldn’t be making this game great game. You will be seeing updates coming fast and furious from the team now we have put our stake in the ground and given everyonethe first glimpse of Star Citizen with the DFM module.

    Programming Director – Derek Senior
    This month has been the month of the DFM. From the start of June, we’ve been working incredibly hard to make the launch of DFM as successful as possible, this work continues. A lot of the work has been fixing up bugs, issues and adding some more polish to the game, adding new default mappings for more controllers, getting the Battle Royale game mode available for the MP rollout. We’ve also been working on some other, exciting, game modes coming your way.

    We’ve also been getting going on some more behind the scenes work for future DFM, SQ42 and the PU. From working on tools to help designers and artists to set up the hundreds of components we have on each ship, to individual manufacturer HUD colourisation, HUD usability updates, UI for multi-crewed ships, audio improvements,GPU and CPU improvements and bug fixes as well as controller customisation, conversation system prototyping, and lots, lots, more.

    Design Director – Nick Elms
    Another month whizzes by.

    We are still spitting design here in a number of areas, mainly :- Dog Fight Module support, Squadron 42 mission designs and Capital Ship design with Seat Actions.

    Dog fighting is out there now! We have a long, and ever growing list of fixes, optimizations, polish, new features, etc. that we are planning to put in over the coming releases. The designers are, as ever, monitoring forum feedback, which is super useful for us and a lot of the issues that you have flagged up will be getting addressed over the coming weeks/months.

    We have run through the “Vertical slice” mission this month, lots of outstanding issues to solve, but the walkthrough was awesome. I wish I could post a video, but with it being a S42 mission it would be too much of a spoiler. Suffice to say that when people leave a 2 hour meeting smiling you know something went well.

    We’ve had another round of feedback on the “Idris” Frigate interior, just tidying up some minor points before the fullPBR texture pass. We needed to add a few more escape pods to cater for the increased crew capacity, and make a bit more sense of the docking systems. You should now be able to drop your Constellation, Retaliator, etc. neatly on the top of the Idris and disembark through the docking collar with some dignity. We are really looking forward to seeing this “Hangar” ready soon.

    The “Javelin Destroyer” and “Escort Carrier” are still in “Grey box” phase, but are coming together really well. We are benefiting from lots of lessons learnt from the Idris re-working. Aside from the above, we have been making good progress on ship systems. Mike Northeast even started a new forum thread to specifically discuss the “seat actions” with everyone, which seems to be going well so far. Thanks for all the feedback and ideas.

    Overall a very good month in Star Citizen development from here in the UK, thanks again for the fantastic support.

    Art Director – Paul Jones
    Wow – what a month! Things are progressing along well in all areas, DFM, Sq42, outsourcing – it’s all go, we’ve taken on a concept artist intern and also had 3 students in this last week making a Star Citizen side scroller as their work experience project – it’s a holistic place here in Manchester, give back where we can :)

    Space ships, Space ships, Spaceships! All continuing along well, the ones in full production are advancing well and we are learning on the job – it’s a tough mix of product design, mechanical design and performance optimization but the team is doing well, I’m looking forward to when we show more of the Gladius and Gladiator to the community. We also have a heavy fighter in concept phase with Gavin Rothery and its shaping up to be pretty mean looking!

    What about Cap ships? Modular Tier interiors are laid out and now we need to push more through the concept pipeline to have the key rooms designed to meet Sq42 cinematic requirements, this is also the case for Shubin now that we have a good idea of mission requirements.

    DFM continues alongside, Capture the Core and Conquest mode assets are being readied for release to the public. Lots of animation work going on for new ship types that we are working on getting Hangar ready, and into DFM.


    BHVR

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    Mathieu Beaulieu, Producer
    Time flies, but so do our spaceships! A lot was done in June: we were able to get some sunny days in Canada :), we’ll end the month with 104 F, we showed no mercy in a couple of dogfighting matches internally, the best pilots are on the rise, and we also worked hard on some new game features.

    This month, we’ve started revamping the Discount, Deluxe and Business Hangars, we want them as detailed as the Asteroid Hangar. We also need to review them so we can add speciality rooms. We still have a good month of work on them to bring them to the required quality.

    At the same time, we are back on the mobiGlas, its development has been slowed down so we could help on the Dogfighting module, but we are now able to move forward. First steps will be ship and room customisation.

    Also, the next flair object is almost ready, I think this one will make you Dance with joy. It should be released early July.

    In the long run, planets are being constructed, tech for the avatar customisation is being developed and we are getting some interesting output for the economy system.

    See you near Broken Moon.


    CGBOT

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    Austin Goddard, Producer
    June has flown by as we continue to prepare ships for shipment!

    As you may recall from last month’s update, CGBot has been laboring over every last detail of the four variants of the Constellation ship which include [Redacted], [Redacted] and [Redacted]. To optimize performance, each of these variants has several versions with varying level of detail.

    Progress is the keyword when talking about the Idris. This ship’s massive greybox has been completed and we are continuing to work with the design team to flesh out the model that will end up in your hangar. We think that the final version of this ship will fulfill the hype that it has rightfully received.

    Along with working on these ships, we having been ironing out the final models and textures for the Male and Female explorer. We hope that the level of detail we put into these characters coupled with the amazing work being done by our colleagues creates an immersive experience that transcends your monitor and puts you in the pilot seat.


    FREELANCE CONTRACTORS

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    Sean Murphy, Outsource Manager
    CGBot has been heavily focused on getting the Constellation and new variants delivered to us, while they’ve wrapped up greybox work on the Idris and are starting on the final texture pass to get it ready. They’ve also been finishing up on a couple of Explorer characters we’ll be seeing shortly.

    In the meantime Virtuos is starting work on a couple of variants of the Cutlass and continuing to create prop assets for the FPS level. We’ve started testing a new vendor, Red Hot CG, on some concept work for ship components. And Rmory is creating a cool new weapon for FPS while we also test their ability to create in-game FPSweapons for us.

    On the contractor front, there’s been a lot of focusing of efforts; several of our contract concept artists have been working on a variety of Vanduul ships. George Hull has delivered a gorgeous illustration of the Collector ship and Jim Martin is refining concepts for the Caterpillar in preparation for modeling. Rob McKinnon and David Brochard are polishing some character concepts for FPS characters, Dennis Chan has given us some gorgeous illustrations for Jump Point, and Clint Schultz and David Scott continue to create Corporation logos for us.

    Finally Stefano Tsai has finished his work on the M50 and is going to be starting on a brand new ship very soon.
     
  4. FPS TEAM

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    [Redacted]
    Greetings from the FPS team at [REDACTED]! We hope you are all enjoying flying your ships in Arena Commander. It’s been really exciting to finally see you guys and gals playing the game, and hopefully enjoying the results of all the hard work that has gone into making it happen from each studio. We’ve definitely been having a blast watching your live streams… and playing along with you!

    June was a very productive month for the FPS team. The artists continued to work on the space station environment. Adding props, applying materials and setting up lights to set the mood. Visual effects are also being added. This includes things like steam flowing out of vents, water dripping from pipes, dust being pulled around by pressure shifts and other details that really make the station come alive and keep it from feeling static. In addition to the environmental effects, we have also been working on first pass effects for tracer rounds, muzzle flashes, explosions and a bunch of other flashy-shiny-noisy bits. A first pass concept of the FPS HUD was also created, and we are now working on hooking it up in the game.

    The animation team has been working through the mocap data, which will continue for quite some time… There’s a ton of it! They also worked with our engineers on a new way to rig weapons that helped to eliminate some pesky bugs we were running in to. With the cover system, zero-G, and the variety of weapons available, they definitely have their work cut out for them.

    The design team has been tweaking the properties for a few of the weapons, mostly making sure that they feel good and are well balanced. Of course this is a continuous process that will be iterated upon all the way up to, and after, the game is released. Our design team also came up with some pretty neat concepts for possible gameplay modes.

    The programming team has been implementing new features like crazy! Improvements to the cover system, zero G movement, a prone stance, energy recharge stations, HUD implementation, ammo variety system… and I could keep going. A LOT of new systems have gone into the game… and with those new systems, lots of new bugs! Just kidding, these guys do solid work and I am fairly certain that their code is completely bug free. cough cough

    But in all seriousness, the FPS module is finally getting to a point where most of the core features have been implemented, at least in prototype form, and that is really exciting for us! Until next month Citizens! This is [REDACTED], over and out!


    VOID ALPHA

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    Mark Day, Studio Director

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    Terra Prime is looking better & better thanks to some additional help courtesy of the fine folks at CiG Austin. We meet on a regular basis to review the production art in progress, specifically Centermass & the monorail station. We are given a steady flow of diverse feedback, ranging from technical advice to art direction. All that has gotten us that much closer to completing the final look of the monorail station & it is looking mighty gorgeous!

    Centermass is a shop that needs to look extremely futuristic, sleek & classy. We changed directions in some significant but subtle ways to achieve this look as we weren’t quite there at first. We are now closer than ever at attaining that goal!

    Sherman has received tons of concept art attention, getting final designs for the interior & exterior for the Edge of Oblivion bar as well as the Military Police building. The Blocks also got some much needed assistance for concept designs such as the ticket kiosks, turnstiles, graffiti & the monorail car.

    Overall, the improvements made are significant & the work being produced is representative of that progress, so we can’t wait to unveil it!

    We remain a tight focused group of:

    2 – Environment Artist
    1 – Concept Artist
    1 – Designer/Technical Designer


    TURBULENT

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    Benoit Beauséjour, Founder
    The platform team is currently hard at work on the design and UX of Orgs Drop 2. Many of the features we want to bring forward in the second drop of Orgs require a lot of back and forth between design and implementation teams and so all of our concept resources are locked in to make this happen. We can’t wait to get coding on this one!

    The first version of the ship catalog took most of the programming time this month and is our main focus for a release soon™. You have seen parts of this new catalog look with the Freelancer sales product page and of course with the 3D Ship Viewer we integrated into the Xi’An Scout concept. We were thrilled with your reactions to this prototype. We’re hoping to have many more ships in the viewer and more functionality to view the different types of POI on the ships so you can really “see” the ships while browsing their specs. There are still many challenges left , especially with the bigger ships (which might require special shaders so they look good and are actually properly browsable). We are thinking also that this first foray into 3D visualization might pave the way for more components like this, especially when thinking about the Galactapedia for planets , systems and more game objects.

    Our work on the leaderboards system is expected to pick up soon now that AC multiplayer is ramping up. The data exchange process between game servers and the platform servers is now identified and set up. We are having many talks and discussions with the game design and implementation teams on how points and rankings are calculated so that we can display the right information for you to see on the boards and your profiles. We can’t wait to see how this will work out once it starts!

    -b


    MOON COLLIDER

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    Matthew Jack, Founder
    This month got off to an exciting start for the Kythera team, as the Arena Commander v0.8 release was our middleware’s gameplay debut. We’ve written about that and the work leading up to it in the recent post “AI Design in Vanduul Swarm”. (Thanks for your comments there, I’ve been poring over them!)

    The release happened while the whole team was visiting Foundry 42 in Manchester for the Squadron 42 Summit. It was great to meet up with them and the US teams, all of whom we normally only talk to over Skype, and have a chance to exchange ideas and progress the design for Squadron 42 together. In particular it was clear to us that people would soon need some simple FPS combat AI in place to start prototyping and so we’re moving our focus towards that.

    Between the Summit meetings, we were able to take a break and watch the first backers streaming Arena Commander on Twitch! Overall the release went pretty smoothly for us. In 12.2 we made some changes to reduce the number of collisions between Scythe and the player, but on the whole we have tried to keep our changes small, rather than disrupt what’s there, allowing us to focus on developing new features and new aspects of Star Citizen. We’re following your comments and plan to make other incremental improvements to Vanduul Swarm with the best bang-for-buck, while making sure that AI in the rest of the project is able to move forwards.

    On that note, we’ve resumed work on getting dogfighting AI running on the server which, as well as being essential for the Persistent Universe, could open up some interesting possibilities for new Arena Commander game modes.

    And we’ve also been working with the FPS team to get human AIs moving around and shooting at each other in the Hangar. It’s just simple behavior, but it’s great to get the basics in place so that designers can begin prototyping whole new parts of Star Citizen.
     
  5. STAR CITIZEN PATCH 12.4 RELEASED!
    JULY 3RD 2014

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    Greetings Citizens,
    Patch 12.4 for Arena Commander has been released! Today’s patch squashes numerous bugs, from fixing flickering Freelancer’s to improving server backend stability. You can find a full list of patches, plus known issues, in the Patch Notes. This release also sees several improvements, including control mapping for the Logitech G940, improved sound effects and new explosions! We are starting this patch with an additional 30,000 Citizens, bringing the total to 60,000. If your Citizen number falls in that range, you can access multiplayer now!
     
  6. Star Citizen Patch 12.4
    413.42055
    JULY 2ND 2014

    • Fixes
      • Players able to connect to Broken Moon
      • Performance improvements when targeting enemies in single player
      • Chainguns firing sounds and animations no longer cut out
      • Matchmaking and server stability improved:
        • Reduced rotational and positional errors of players in multiplayer
        • Resolved issue with players returning to hangar in the middle of matches
        • Bandwidth optimization improvements – a case where less is more
        • Session token authorization added
        • Improved sync between instance manager and matchmaker
        • Improved matchmaking queue functionality
      • Here are some of the crash fixes:
        • Attempting to zone into a multiplayer match is fixed
        • Choosing “Return to Hangar” is crushed
        • During multiplayer matches – stability FTW
        • No longer crashes when round ends
        • After running out of map border – you die, but you don’t crash [Well your ship crashes, and explodes, but the game doesn’t crash or explode – Ed.]
        • You can now alt-tab on the loading screen, without crashing
      • Sounds no longer stutter on missile lock sounds
      • Freelancer model no longer flickering
      • Missing textures on the calendar are found
      • Animation issues:
        • Reintroduced y-bobbing on character movement
        • Cleaned up freelancer bed animation
      • Source file corruption issues are improved
      • Metafile launcher errors are improved
    • Balancing
      • Balanced ballistic weapons ammo – no longer unlimited
    • Additional Features
      • Shield indicators added to ship model on HUD
      • Added Control Mapping for the G940 HOTAS
      • Improved weapon fire sounds that have more guts and punch
      • The whoosh of other ships flying close by you
      • The whizz of other players’ ordnance as they fire at you
      • New explosions
      • Improved sound mix
    • Known Issues
      • 300i right landing gear offset from ship
      • Firing range no longer aims after entering a second time
      • Higher latency connections can experience the following issues (after initial spawn or respawn):
        • IFCS issues causing the ship to fly erratically or very slowly
        • Character standing in the cockpit or offset from the seat and controls – restart client to reset
        • Character experiencing an extreme head shake – restart client to reset
      • Matchmaking can show stuck in queue and may require another attempt
      • Can get kicked back to hangar on connection attempt
      • Sometimes the helmet turns invisible when you pick it up
      • We’re continuing our work with AMD, NVidia & Crytek to try and resolve the Crossfire/SLI issues and improve multiple GPU performance
     
  7. SQUADRON BATTLE ENABLED
    JULY 3RD 2014

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    Greetings Citizens,
    We launched patch 12.4 last night. This update brings a couple of new additions to the table. First off, as I’m sure many of you will be glad to hear, we’ll be rolling multiplayer out to everyone up to #60,000 in this update. A big thank-you to everyone who has been helping us out by playing the game so far (we hope you’ve been having fun too!), it’s really coming along and we’ll get the game out to everyone over #60,000 as soon as we can.

    The other big news in that, as of this morning, the update adds a brand new shiny game mode: Squadron Battle! In Squadron Battle you can team up with three other players and take on an opposing team in a head-to-head deathmatch. Each team starts with 100000 ‘tickets’ and as your team takes damage/loses you’ll lose tickets! Lose all your tickets and the game will enter Final Kill mode. When that happens all the enemy have to do is take out one of your team and they win, so you’ll have to work hard as a team to make sure that doesn’t happen, take their remaining tickets and put them down before they can put you down. It’s our take on Team Deathmatch and we’ve been having great fun in the office playing it, we hope you will too. Squadron Battle is available to all #60,000 backers as soon as the update goes live so team up and get playing!
     
  8. UPDATE: IMPROVING MULTIPLAYER
    JULY 8TH 2014

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    Greetings Citizens,

    [​IMG]

    On Thursday, we opened Arena Commander’s multiplayer modes to a much larger segment of backers. Over the holiday weekend, our engineers kept careful track of server stats: number of successful connections, number of failed attempts, number of competed games, average latency and the like. We also spent time watching your Twitch feeds, which have proven to be an incredibly valuable tool for helping compare the real world experience to what we test in-house.

    By releasing a new version of the game with many changes and also upping the number of simultaneous players, we exposed a variety of load cases and bugs we hadn’t seen before: ship movement and prediction issues, matchmaking bugs that include assigning excessive player counts to game servers and other tracking edge cases, and existing unused engine features causing problems.

    The result is that with Patch 12.4, there is an unacceptable amount of lag and occurrence of rubber-banding (the effect when ships seem to ‘jump back’ in space.) While all of you know that Arena Commander is a pre-alpha module and that our aim is to determine and fix exactly these problems, they seem significant enough with this patch that we should take a moment to talk about how we’re aiming to repair them in the upcoming weeks.

    [​IMG]

    I want to stress that this is part of our shared process, and it’s one of the things that makes Star Citizen’s development so unique. We hear about games that launch with dismal multiplayer issues every day. Unlike a traditionally published game, which launches fully formed into the wild, Arena Commander is letting us do real load balancing tests with the help of the community to flush out multiplayer and connectivity issues at this early stage. Getting this right now means having it right going forward; you’re helping ensure that future updates and modules improve on something that works instead of publish to a complete unknown.

    The team was already preparing patch 12.5 for launch, which will add both fixes and a new surprise or two. With the rise of the new latency and rubber-banding issues, though, we knew we needed to up our focus. We had not seen these issues with the 60,000 players who had access to the previous patch, so our immediate thought was that one of our server-side changes may have caused them. On Monday morning, production sat down and developed a ‘to investigate’ checklist of possible causes of (and improvements for) for the issues we were seeing. Here’s a short sampling:

    On Monday morning, the team went into action to determine the root cause for the issue. There were dozens of possibilities, all (or none) of which could be part of the issues we were observing. Bug reports submitted by dedicated backers were our first point for analysis. Like doctors trying to identify a mysterious illness, we looked for common environmental factors. Was there a significant geographic distance between players? Surprisingly, no: in many cases, players with almost no latency between them were still having issues.

    The team moved on to examining our own code. Several possibilities presented themselves: leftover code was causing the game to attempt to connect to Crynetwork chat with each session, missing movement smoothing code that had been developed but not implemented in 12.4 and there were potential issues with the servers not correctly recognizing when they were full. Each of these possibilities became a JIRA task instructing Star Citizen’s engineers to investigate and repair a given item for the next patch.

    [​IMG]

    We’ve already implemented a number of fixes which we believe will improve the multiplayer experience in 12.5, and we’re continuing investigating several other possibilities that we hope will improve the experience. Was one of these items the ‘magic bullet’ that fixes the multiplayer experience? Our tests are promising, but we won’t know for sure until we’ve patched Arena Commander and seen how it impacts players around the world. We know it can be frustrating not to see a ‘one button’ fix, but kind of extended process is necessary to preparing for the future launch of the Persistent Universe. Expect to see an improvement in 12.5, and greater improvements as we continue our work!

    We’re learning how to make the investigative process better, too. On Tuesday, two of our programmers updated the server software to provide more detailed concurrency numbers. Knowing more specifically how many players are in the game in a given interval will be a valuable tool for investigating how the server behaves where changes are introduced in the future. Next, QA will use this tool to test 12.3 compared to 12.4 to try and discover where the performance changes were introduced.

    In the meantime, I’d like to thank you all for your efforts in helping us discover these issues, both those waiting to play and those who have been dogfighting in less-than-ideal conditions. We’re working to make this the best possible experience, and that’s something we couldn’t do without the support and help of all of our backers. There will be bumps along the road as we improve the technology behind Star Citizen and the balance of the game itself… but we’re going to share the process by which we deal with all of these issues with you as it happens.

    I’ve also had questions from several backers about international servers, expanding to places like Australia and Europe. Current indications is that this isn’t the cause of the problems we’re seeing with 12.4… but it is something on our roadmap, with plans to enable these servers by the time Arena Commander 1.0 launches!

    — Chris Roberts
     
  9. Aegis Gladius Declassified!
    JULY 11TH 2014
    Available for civilians for a one week sale!

    CLASSIFIED UEE GLADIUS

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    Greetings Citizens,
    The Gladius is the United Empire of Earth’s current front-line light fighter, serving against the Vanduul onboard Bengal carriers and elsewhere.

    [​IMG]
    Classified UEE Blueprint: Gladius Rear

    Built by Aegis Dynamics, the Gladius is an older design which has been updated over the years to keep up with modern technology. In military circles, the Gladius is beloved for its performance and its simplicity. A fast, light fighter with a laser-focus on dogfighting, the Gladius is an ideal interceptor or escort ship. Fewer moving parts than the Hornet means new pilots can adapt to the ship more quickly and ground crews can keep them flying more easily.

    Now, the Gladius is available for civilians! With some Gladius squadrons converting to the wider deployment of the F7C Hornet and the introduction of the F8 Lightning to elite units, the Navy has begun to auction older Gladii to planetary governments and qualified mercenaries.

    [​IMG]
    Classified UEE Blueprint: Gladius Cockpit
    [​IMG]
    Classified UEE Blueprint: Gladius Cockpit

    The spacecraft available to civilians are retired military models, with the same specifications and upgrade potential. Classified weapons technologies have been removed from the spaceframes, but they can be outfitted with a variety of civilian-grade weapons. The decommissioning process has also made room for civilian standard upgrades such as jump drives.

    Known specifications
    Here are the currently known specifications from the classified blueprint:

    LENGTH20m
    BEAM16m
    HEIGHT4m
    NULL-CARGO MASS9700 Kg
    CARGO CAPACITY0 freight units
    MAX CREW1 person
    MAX POWER PLANTSIZE1
    FACTORY POWERPLANTAegis K-5b Starwalk
    MAX ENGINE(PRIMARYTHRUSTER)2x TR2
    FACTORY ENGINETBA
    MANEUVERINGTHRUSTERS8xTR1
    FACTORYMANEUVERINGTHRUSTERSHydra Propulsion M1-16
    MAX SHIELD1
    SHIELDAscension Astro Soloshield
    CLASS-12x S1 (wings) – 2x Behring – M3A Laser Cannon
    CLASS-21x S1 (nose) – 1x Gallenson Tactical Systems Scorpion GT-215 Gatling


    GLADIUS CONCEPT SALE

    [​IMG]
    Gladius light military escort fighter by Aegis Dynamics $80.00 USD

    Buy yours now
    Pick yours up fast; the sale ends Friday, July 18th!
    Please note: this is a concept sale, the Gladius is not yet available in your Hangar. As soon as the in-game model is finished, it will be added to the Hangar and then Arena Commander! Your purchase goes to support Star Citizen’s development and it does not promise a special advantage in the finished game; any ship available through the RSI website will also be earnable in the finished game.


    What is the Gladius?

    The Gladius was built by the team at Foundry 42, designed to take part in Squadron 42’s epic single-player campaign. In Star Citizen’s persistent universe, the Gladius will be a fast, light fighter capable of dogfighting with the best of them. The Gladius exists solely thanks to our backers: funding to add the Gladius to the game was made available to the team with the $42 million stretch goal!

    Why sell the Gladius?
    The short answer is that it’s because we want to dogfight with it! We showed the Gladius on an episode of Around the Verse and the reaction seemed to be very positive. With our current focus on dogfighting and the Gladius being fast-tracked for development to meet Squadron 42’s needs, it seemed like a win-win situation to offer it to backers who would prefer a more military experience as Arena Commander expands!

    The broader answer is that sales like this help keep Star Citizen’s development going strong! The team currently employs over 260 people around the world building the Best Damn Space Sim Ever; continuing to expand the game means offering ships like the Gladius to those who are interested in further supporting the project.
     
  10. DOGTAGS AVAILABLE!
    JULY 11TH 2014

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    Join the UEE Navy, see the galaxy… and then prove it with your customized limited edition Star Citizen dog tag key ring! These high quality metal dog tags are identical to those worn by UEE combat forces and feature your name!

    This run of tags is limited to 3,000. You can pre-order yours here!
     
  11. LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN: $48 MILLION
    JULY 14TH 2014


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    Greetings Citizens,
    It looks like the recent Gladius and dogtags sales have pushed us over $48 million in crowd funding! The Gladius is going to be a great addition to Arena Commander; if you picked one up and helped push us to hit this goal, you won’t be disappointed! The Gladius isn’t as heavily armed as the Hornet and it can’t carry cargo like the Aurora… but it’s fast and light and should be a new way to take on Arena Commander’s head-to-head mechanic.

    [​IMG]
    Stanton III - Casaba Outlet
    [​IMG]
    Stanton III - Dumper's Depot
    [​IMG]
    Stanton III - Abernathy Interiors

    The $48 million stretch goal was the user-voted Retaliator commercial! I’m pleased to announce that David Haddock has started scripting the Retaliator commercial. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but we’re going in a different direction with this one!

    • Retaliator Commercial – It was a close race but The Retaliator pulled ahead. The Avenger was a close second. The symbol of the United Empire of Earth’s power is the next ship to receive a slick commercial. Aegis Dynamics is in dire need of good publicity since the end of the of the Messer era. We currently have the Cutlass and the Constellation commercials in production and now the Retaliator will be added to that list.
    Today, much the team is hard at work on patch 12.5, hunting down the bugs responsible for the latency and rubber-banding currently affecting Arena Commander. The Engineering team has eliminated server CPU and network traffic as likely causes of the jumping and poor network gameplay. They have narrowed the issue’s introduction down to one of eleven possible change lists… it can’t hide from us much longer! We are adding additional debugging tools and metrics while homing in on the problem, and we’re currently digging into possible differences between remote and local simulation of ship movement which could lead to the jumping.

    But Arena Commander is just the first step on the journey to Star Citizen, and we’re also continuing to look ahead and expand on the inner working of our universe. In today’s post, you can see some of the work we’ve been doing on locations. All of these stores are located on Stanton III, which the team at BHVR is building as a baseline for our planetside content.

    As we promised last time, we’re going to return to our tradition of stretch goals that improve the core game. The ongoing funding keeps the project running on the scale it is today… but we’re also eager to find ways to improve what we’ve already planned. We’ve come up with one for the $50 million goal that we think will truly improve the immersion, and help make Star Citizen a living, breathing world:

    • Alien Languages – Do you speak Banu? We will work with real-world linguists to create distinctive and realistic alien languages for Star Citizen’s three biggest alien races, the Vanduul, the Xi’An and the Banu. No universal translators, no garbled animal noises: Star Citizen’s aliens will be speaking their own authentic languages!
    I’m excited about this one… and looking forward to meeting the first fan who learns to speak one of our languages! As always, thank you for your support. Star Citizen would not exist without our backers. Keep spreading the word!

    — Chris Roberts

    P.S. A special additional congratulations to our German backers for their team’s World Cup victory. Well played!
     
  12. AWESOME stretch goal!! This is the kind of stuff that truly makes a world feel like it lives and breathes.

    When thinking about what parts of past games I'd love to see brought into the future I always think back to the original Everquest and the role language played in it. Learning a new language, whether from reading books or sitting around conversing in it with other players put me in the world in a way that few games have since. The fact that the languages were more than just window dressing and actually provided needed information for finishing quests made the system all the better.
     
  13. To be honest, I am kinda surprised there aren't languages made for the alien races, even if it's just the Xi'An.
     
  14. SHIRTS & PATCHES NOW AVAILABLE!
    JULY 18TH 2014

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    Greetings Citizens,

    We have some new physical merchandise available today! Two varieties of Star Citizen t-shirt are now available in the pledge store: one featuring the Anvil Aerospace Hornet and one featuring the Arena Commander logo. Shirts are $25 each, which includes worldwide shipping. You can select your design and shirt size here!

    We have also brought back three of our most popular cloth patches in a special set. If you missed out last time, you can now get the UEE sigil, the Navy logo and the Advocacy emblem for $19. The new patches are improved, featuring better stitching and iron-on backs! Pick up your set here.

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]
     
  15. ARENA COMMANDER PATCH UPDATE
    JULY 18TH 2014


    [​IMG]



    [​IMG]
    Greetings Citizens,

    Last week, we posted about our process for solving the lag and rubber banding issues currently impacting Arena Commander’s multiplayer mode. As you know, we increased the player base by eight fold when we released patch 12.4. Doing so exposed variety of emergent issues within the game client, game servers, and backend infrastructure that only became apparent under the increased player load. We’ve made a lot of progress in addressing these issues and have seen great improvement on all three fronts, but the patch is not ready for release today. This kind of testing is exactly the reason why we chose to pursue the open development model. The discovery of these kinds of issues this early in the process are going to greatly improve the player experience in the long run and increase our efficiency by getting it right from the beginning.

    Patch 12.5 is responsible for adding the jukebox, pictured here, to the Hangars’ of current subscribers so they can liven up their hangars with their favorite music. Your jukeboxes have been attributed to your accounts, but will not appear in your Hangars until the patch goes live. Additionally, on this week’s Around the Verse, we talked about a mysterious new Vanduul threat destroying UEE ships. This threat will be added with 12.5, at which point Citizens are encouraged to go hunting for it!

    While there will not be a patch today, we would like to share what we’ve been working on so far and how we’ve been approaching the problem. The QA Team has been hard at work investigating the lag that is being experienced on the public servers. We know that this has been a huge frustration, and QA has thrown its full weight against isolating and reproducing this problem so that engineers can solve these issues.

    In Arena Commander multiplayer your client is receiving updates from remote clients via the server and, in the case of movement, your local client’s IFCS is actually simulating the physics of each remote client that you see based on these updates. Your client is then reporting back to the server all the positional and orientation data for each of the remote clients that you are simulating. The server is authoritatively checking this against its own calculations and those being reported by the remote clients themselves. If there is divergence in the reported numbers the server will provide your client with how far its remote client simulations are off and inject that into the IFCS physics calculations to nudge the remote clients you see back to their proper positions as they fly. If the divergence becomes too large for IFCS to gently nudge the remote clients then they are warped to their proper position and the simulation commences again. As we have been investigating this issue it has all revolved around discovering what is causing the simulations of remote clients to sometimes for some people become so divergent from the server and the remote clients themselves that the server is forcing a warp.

    We first investigated potential issues with the game servers by performing some optimizations to load balancing and by reducing the number of servers on a physical machine from 8 to 2, which dramatically decreased network traffic from each machine and reduced CPU pegging but did not reduce the lag players were seeing. It did however result in increased stability and minimizes server CPU frame spikes which will generally improve performance for players across the board.

    We then approached the situation from the client side, creating a controlled environment in which no one shot any weapons or used any boost, and then began increasing the number of players over time. Noticing that this yielded no lag, we then started to introduce more variables into the match.

    Shooting weapons without hitting any players caused no issue, but once ships began to fire on each other, lag began to crop up with players skipping around. We were able to reproduce that lag, but we needed a more specific cause, so we attempted to narrow it down.

    Speaking with the engineering team, they speculated that the power drain caused by firing weapons and absorbing shield impacts could in turn be reducing the available power to thrusters. It was possible that due to lag or CPU spikes the amount of power available for thrusters wasn’t being properly propagated from the remote client to the server to your machine for your physics simulation to account for. This would cause synchronization of thrusters across players to have been off, causing positional jumping when performing erratic maneuvers. Engineering then armed QA with a version of the game that allowed us to have greater control over the thrusters so that we could pinpoint the problem.

    Once we disabled all energy fluctuations to the thrusters and enabled maximum power to each, we were still able to get the problem to occur, although less frequently. This testing exposed an issue in the way that the shields consume power in giant spikes and resulted in some balance improvements and code hardening..

    Our networking team investigated packet size and bandwidth issues. Their efforts also seemed to have improved the player experience and drastically reduced packet size and thusly network traffic however it did not entirely resolve the issue.

    Concurrently, we introduced some additional changes to the way that servers are logging and storing information. We first discovered that certain non-critical errors were spamming the server logging and causing performance drops which can lead simulation discrepancies. We’ve adjusted setting to the logging system to eliminate spam and we are going to be moving the logging function off the main thread entirely as well so that its impact is lessened. Again, this has seemed to have improved the issues but not eliminate them entirely. It has had the knock on effect of improving server stability and performance.

    We are generating a build tonight that introduces changes to the way that we synchronize physics calculations. These changes to help better keep all clients and the server in better synch on physics time steps should greatly reduce the incidence of divergence between client, server, and remote client physics simulations and give us better tools to catch and correct for it without warping.

    Now, as I am writing this we have just uncovered a new potential issue that could contribute to the incidence of poor multiplayer synchronization having to do with improperly handled client disconnections. We’ll have to investigate this over the weekend.

    The great news is that even when we’ve pursued an avenue that hasn’t directly fixed the rubberbanding, we’ve still ended up improving the game. The work that’s going into 12.5 isn’t just going to fix this specific issue, it’s going to enhance the Arena Commander experience all around. We’ve also worked directly to on some other fixes for 12.5 that should bring more stability to the multiplayer experience and correct issues backers have been seeing. As follows:

    Joining a Game: Currently when joining a server, a large spike of data is transmitted, which can cause lag and some teleporting. Our network engineers have been working on ways to compress this data which will reduce the size of these connection packets by 40%. You can see the current bandwidth usage in the included data graph.

    Attempts to join full servers: Servers currently have a bit of a delay marking that a max player count has been hit. This means that a server can be almost full, and any number of players can try and join, with only one of them getting in, and the rest getting kicked back to hangar. With players leaving, making the server almost full again, this issue can consistently occur throughout the match, and coupled with the high bandwidth of a player connection cause some serious lag. Our server engineers are working on a fix for this right now.

    Kicked back to hangar: Our as of yet implemented VOIP system was connecting to all players, but not disconnecting when a player dropped unexpectedly, causing the majority of kick back to hangar issues on public. A fix for this has been created.​

    Thank you for engaging in the development and testing process with us, your efforts exposing and cataloging these types of issues has been immensely helpful and we wouldn’t be able to find them all without your participation! We fixing these multiplayer issues as quickly as possible and look forward to further expanding the testing of Arena Commander to all Citizens as soon as we can. As you can see there has been an awful lot of work going into improving the multiplayer across the board from the client to the server to the backend infrastructure and we feel that the 12.5 patch will greatly improve the player experience once it is ready. We’ll let you know how we’re doing next week, and will issue patch 12.5 as soon as we’re confident that it offers a broad improvement to the Arena Commander Multiplayer experience.
     
  16. Arena Commander Patch Update
    JULY 25TH 2014

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    Greetings Citizens,
    We’ve been dedicating a great deal of energy and pursuing so many different angles in the quest to fix rubber-banding that we have gone beyond simply smashing the intended bugs. The process has helped us make dozens of improvements to Arena Commander; we can confidently say that the next patch will greatly improve the dogfighting experience.

    This week, we made a concerted effort to improve the debugging experience so that this process will be easier in the future. Arena Commander now produces greater and more relevant debug information for our QA team. We’ve learned how to zero in on the current problem and we’ve built the tools we’ll need to react more quickly next time. We’ve also focused on updating Arena Commander’s physics and particularly how the game reports to the server on ship position.

    We’ve a several video to this post showing the new debug mode. As you can see, our QA team now has a colorful graphical interface that indicates where and how things are going wrong! Note that there’s a single ship in the video affected by the dreaded rubber-banding bug (with yellow and red trails) while others are working as intended!

    But the bigger story is that we’re very, very close to a public Star Citizen 12.5 patch. The last round of fixes to the physics engine introduced an additional bug that we’re wrapping up now. But instead of pushing to potentially patch late tonight (assuming the issue is resolved in the next few hours) we are opting to wait until early next week.

    That’s because the most valuable part of this process is observing the impact of our updates “in the wild.” The rubber-banding introduced in 12.4 is something we weren’t able to see in our internal testing; it took the QA and development teams watching your streams and talking with players around the world to identify and zero in on. If we patch over the weekend, we’ll miss the most active “backer testing” period and have to play catchup on Monday.

    If all goes as planned, we will launch 12.5 next week… and if it survives contact with 200,000 Star Citizen backers then we can start to expand multiplayer access again! Until then, thank you for your patience and most importantly your part in improving Arena Commander. It’s not just your funding that makes Star Citizen possible, it’s your involvement in this process!

     
  17. ARENA COMMANDER PATCH 12.5 RELEASED!
    JULY 31ST 2014

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    Greetings Citizens,
    Last week we wrote to update you all on our work towards patch 12.5 and shared details about how we are going about solving the current multiplayer rubber banding, matchmaking, and connectivity issues. It is with a happy heart that we are able to announce today that patch 12.5 has been reviewed internally and is approved for release to the community. Before we get into what’s new, changed, or otherwise different about 12.5 we would like to express our appreciation to the community. So, thank you for your assistance in finding and reporting on these issues as well as your patience and enthusiasm as we worked through the problems. Without further ado, here is what you can expect from patch 12.5…

    All ships and items have undergone heavy internal testing, we’ve reviewed a bevy of player feedback, and we’ve iterated on changes a number of times. Keep in mind that game balance is an ongoing process and will never be hit perfectly the first time, especially with the complexity of our ships and their simulated systems. With top to bottom changes of virtually every tweak-able value on every ship and item what we’ve ended up with is the most balanced multiplayer dogfighting that we’ve had to date and we look forward to your continued feedback on this.

    As many of you know, when we released patch 12.4 we increased the number of backers participating in multiplayer testing eight fold. When we did, the increased community participation exposed many weaknesses in our nascent backend and matchmaking systems that did not manifest until we reached much higher numbers of concurrent players. For patch 12.5 we’ve diagnosed and addressed most every problem that the increase in players had exposed. For players this means that you will connect successfully to a match much more often, experience far fewer random disconnects, and in the event you are disconnected you will be able to rejoin the match much more readily. On top of this we’ve also better stabilized the game servers and resolved most all of the known crashes. Suffice to say that 12.5 should bring a much more stable and reliable multiplayer experience for you.

    Surely if you’ve been reading our updates on 12.5 you’ll know that one of our major focuses for this patch has been to resolve the persistent rubber banding issues that players are encountering in multiplayer. In our quest to resolve this particular issue we’ve investigated down many paths and put in place many potential fixes. Over the course of the past weeks we’ve been all through the IFCS code, network code, game server code, and many of the associated systems. We’ve been resolving issues and improving/hardening each system along with adding a menagerie of useful debug tools that we’ll carry into the future. While not all of these fixes have been successful at addressing rubber banding specifically, they are all included in the current patch and do in fact resolve issues or otherwise improve the multiplayer game and improve the resilience of the systems.

    Now specifically to the solution for rubber banding. We are now at a point where we feel like we have made such a significant improvement to the rubber banding (position/rotation/velocity divergence) that we want to get it into player’s hands. We’ve significantly reduced the occurrence of the divergence and also implemented systems to correct it much more quickly and seamlessly. Throughout this process we have also identified areas in which we could further improve synchronization for future iterations of Arena Commander and eventually the Persistent Universe. These future changes include dead reckoning to increase the visual quality of ship movement while simultaneously reducing the amount of data sent to the game clients, along with adding time synchronization to allow the client to display the current game state sent from the server more accurately. In addition, we plan to expand the physics based prediction for dead reckoning by adding spline based prediction, making remote ship movement look even better. Getting this perfect (as humanly possible) is our goal for our players and for Star Citizen. So while patch 12.5 greatly improves the rubber banding issue and for most should hopefully reduce it to a point of being unnoticeable we aren’t going to rest on our laurels.

    Now for some fun stuff! Patch 12.5 also includes the Jukebox for subscribers to listen to their favorite music in their hangar. There is also a new Vanduul to be on the lookout for, see if you can spot it. We have also included a variety of smaller bug fixes and tweaks to ship models, sound effects, damage states, and visual effects as well as hit/impact reactions to generally improve the overall feel and experience.

    You can find the full patch notes below and thank you again to all our community for your help in testing the game at such an early stage! Because of this amazing community we are not only able to build our collective dream game but also make sure that our game performs and lives up to our vision. We feel privileged to have a community that is so actively involved and truly appreciate everyone’s ongoing support throughout the development process. Patch 12.5 is now released we hope that everyone enjoys the update and we hope to get the rest of the community into the multiplayer testing as quickly as possible following these improvements.

    Cheers,
    Travis Day

    Additions/Improvements
    • Added subscriber jukebox
    • Adding visual and auditory feedback for incoming fire and weapon impacts
    • Missile sounds polished and improved
    • Additional shield sounds added (power down, power up, taking damage)
    • Added new Vanduul ship designated [REDACTED] by UEE Naval Command
    • Added Victory/Defeat/Draw messages on end of round scoreboard
    • Added voice over announcement to denote which team has won the round
    • Added additional Hornet top bar warning lights
    • Freelancer bunk beds can now be used
    • Freelancer bathroom and toilet can now be used
    • Revised for Aurora interior to increase fidelity
    • Added Aurora warning indicator lights
    Networking Improvements/Fixes
    • Fixed issues that resulted in being kicked back to hangar during match load
    • Positional correction fixes to reduce rubberbanding
    • Failed connection attempts to HubServer will now timeout after 10 seconds
    • Removed socket disconnections due to login timeouts
    • Networked physics is now independent of framerate
    • Reduced server load caused by console logging
    • Creation of http interface to capture server statistics
    • Fixed players not connecting to matchmaker
    • Added a handshake system to guarantee the correct initialization of servers
    • Server-to-server connection improvements
    • Adjusted ship network packet priorities
    • Fix for disconnections while in the hangar
    • Reworked network correction to use network sync’d packets and direct physics pushes instead of IFCSsystem
    • Greatly reduced hitching and performance issues associated with players joining or exiting a match
    Fixes
    • Mantis cannons no longer takes damage without overheating
    • Player can no longer zone into a match standing in the cockpit
    • Helmet is no longer invisible
    • Fixed 300i landing gear placement
    • Fixed rare crash when loading into Vanduul Swarm
    • Fixed crash when receiving connection error
    • Fixed crash caused by players spawning on top of each other at beginning of map
    • CPU optimizations to improve client performance
    • Gatling gun audio stops when no longer firing
    • Destroying an asteroid no longer counts as a final kill
    • Energy bolts now scale properly when fired to the side
    • Winning music no longer plays at match end for losing team. You get nothing, you lose, good day sir.
    • Fixed ships in holotable no longer showing hologram model
    • Notifications, points, scoreboard and timer should now be shown in third person
    • Player movement prevented when interacting with helmet stand
    • Friendly killed audio no longer plays Hostile Eliminated, Target Destroyed or Enemy down
    • Removed use icon on ladder
    • Correct game mode descriptions added in Arena Commander UI
    • Adjusted bloom of objects on radar
    • Projectiles scale properly when firing in decoupled mode
    • Particle emitters now properly destroy themselves, reducing lag
    • Ship Energy system optimizations
    • Fix for sound velocity/speed being calculated incorrectly if its position is changed multiple times per frame.
    Whew! And that’s the short list. You can find the complete list of updates and fixes in the official Release 12.5 patch notes.

    The Star Citizen team will be observing the impact of today’s patch on the general public over the weekend. If the improvement we’re hoping for translates to Arena Commander ‘in the wild’ then we will prepare to make the multiplayer portion of the game available to further users. If there are further issues, we’ll get to work patching them immediately. Until then… pilots, man your planes!
     
  18. Star Citizen Patch 12.5
    1210.48297
    JULY 31ST 2014

    • Additions/Improvements
      • Added subscriber jukebox
      • Adding cockpit shaking and sounds from damage and impacts
      • Missile sounds polished and improved
      • Additional shield sounds added (power down, power up, taking damage)
      • Added new Vanduul ship designated [REDACTED] by UEE Naval Command
      • Added Victory/Defeat/Draw message on end of round scoreboard
      • Added voice over announcement to denote which team has won the round
      • Added additional Hornet top bar warning lights
      • Freelancer bunk beds now interactable
      • Freelancer bathroom and toilet now interactable
      • Revised the Aurora interior to increase fidelity
      • Added Aurora warning indicator lights

    • Balancing
    • 300i
      • Power plant charge reduced
      • Thruster power drain decreased
      • Shield HP increased
      • Shield regen delay decreased
      • Hull piece health increased
    • Aurora
      • Shield HP reduced
      • Shield regen delay increased
      • Shield changed from bubble shield to a front/rear shield
      • Shield face power allocation rate reduced
    • Hornet
      • Thruster health increased
      • Shield regen delay increased
      • Health values for shield and ship parts modified to impart a sturdier feel
    • Mantis Gatling Gun
      • Damage decreased
      • Heat per shot increased
    • Bulldog Repeater
      • Power recharge rate has been decreased
      • Repeater fire rate increased
    • Badger Repeater
      • Increased rate of fire
    • Behring M3A
      • Rate of fire decreased
      • Damage increased
    • Omnisky VI
      • Damage decreased
      • Rate of fire decreased
      • Bullet mass increased (to knock around ships with more force)
    • Missiles
      • Damage decreased
      • Missiles now properly deal damage to the shields instead of going straight to the hull
    • Vanduul Scythe
      • Decreased shield regeneration

    • Networking Improvements
      • Fixed issues that resulted in being kicked back to hangar during match load
      • Positional correction fixes to reduce rubberbanding
      • Failed connection attempts to HubServer will now timeout after 10 seconds
      • Removed socket disconnections due to login timeouts
      • Networked physics is now independent of frame rate
      • Reduced server load caused by console logging
      • Creation of http interface to capture server statistics
      • Fixed players not connecting to matchmaker
      • Added a handshake system to guarantee the correct initialization of servers
      • Server-to-server connection improvements
      • Adjusted ship network packet priorities
      • Fix for disconnections while in the hangar
      • Reworked network correction to use network sync’d packets and direct physics pushes instead of IFCS system
      • Greatly reduced hitching and performance issues associated with players joining or exiting a match

    • Fixes
      • Mantis cannons no longer takes damage without overheating
      • Player can no longer zone into a match standing in the cockpit
      • Helmet is no longer invisible
      • Fixed 300i landing gear placement
      • Fixed rare crash when loading into Vanduul Swarm
      • Fixed crash when receiving connection error
      • Fixed crash caused by players spawning on top of each other at beginning of map
      • CPU optimizations to improve client performance
      • Gatling gun audio stops when no longer firing
      • Destroying an asteroid no longer counts as a final kill
      • Energy bolts now scale properly when fired to the side
      • Winning music no longer plays at match end for losing team. You get nothing, you lose, good day sir.
      • Fixed ships in holotable no longer showing hologram model
      • Notifications, points, scoreboard and timer should now show in third person
      • Player movement prevented when interacting with helmet stand
      • Friendly killed audio no longer plays Hostile Eliminated, Target Destroyed or Enemy down
      • Removed use icon on ladder
      • Correct game mode descriptions added in Arena Commander UI
      • Adjusted bloom of objects on radar
      • Projectiles scale properly when firing in decoupled mode
      • Particle emitters now properly destroy themselves, reducing lag
      • Ship Energy system optimizations
      • Fix for sound velocity/speed being calculated incorrectly if its position is changed multiple times per frame.

    • Known issues
      • Weapon ammo shown as missile rack models in holotable
      • Gap in geometry can be seen between the engine and fuselage on 325a, and 315p ships
      • Exiting the Freelancer variant starboard top bunk results in character becoming stuck in a falling state
      • After respawn a rare issue can occur where the character’s head shakes uncontrollably
      • After exiting a vehicle the third person camera can become slightly tilted
      • Unable to enter the Avenger ship
      • Avenger ship missing wheels
      • Arena Commander Menu lists the incorrect Hornet version
     
  19. HANGAR READY: ORIGIN M50
    AUGUST 2ND 2014


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    Greetings Citizens,
    The Origin M50 is HERE! The galaxy’s premiere dedicated racer, the M50 packs a lot of thrust into a small package. It’s the ship dedicating racing fans are betting can take home the next Murray Cup… and it’s compact frame and powerful engines also make it a great courier or interceptor! If you need to be somewhere in a hurry (or get out of a jam quickly) then the M50 is the ship for you.

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    M50 in the Asteroid Hangar

    Featuring supercharged engines (Hammer Propulsion) that counter a tiny weapons loadout, and a new flashy automotive paint job, the M50 is a ship for going FAST. The core spaceframe is used by both racing teams and for military courier missions, but the M50 is a luxury spacecraft like no other. Perfect for the mercenary who prefers speed over armor in a dogfight… or the weekend warrior looking to impress the ladies.

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    The M50 is officially ‘hangar ready’ in Star Citizen and will now appear alongside any other ships you own. If you purchased an M50 during Star Citizen’s initial campaign, it will now be visible in your hangar. If you’d like to add one to your fleet, they’re available again in the pledge store for the next seven days (ending Friday, August 8, 2014.) You can also view a detail of the M50 in the Holo Viewer further down this page

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    Hammer Propulsion engines
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    Whiteroom of the M50 racer

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    In the Asteroid Hangar

    Here is a recap of the M50 statistics as we know them today:

    M50 CHASSIS STATS
    BuilderOrigin Jumpworks
    Length/Beam/Height11/10/3 meters
    Crew (max)1
    Mass (empty)4,875 Kg
    RoleRacing
    STRUCTURE STATS
    Cargo Capacity4 cargo units
    Factory Power PlantACOM StarHeart III (S2)
    Factory Engine2x Hammer Propulsion HM 4 .3 (TR3; max TR4)
    Factory Maneuvering Thrusters6x Origin Scalpel Precision B, 2x Origin Omni Precision B (8x TR2)
    Factory ShieldGorgon Defender AllStop
    HARDPOINTS
    2 x Class 2 (size 3)2x Behring M5A Laser Cannon
    2 x Class 3 (size 2)4x Talon ASIM-20/c Stalker II
     
  20. ARENA COMMANDER MULTIPLAYER ACCESS EXPANDED


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    Greetings Citizens,
    On Wednesday, we published the long-awaited Star Citizen 12.5 patch aimed at improving Arena Commander’s multiplayer experience. For the past two days, we’ve been monitoring our servers, reviewing feedback and observing players around the world.

    And it’s all looking good! In addition to eliminating rubber-banding, it looks like the 12.5 fixes have dramatically increased the Arena Commander experience. Today, we made some additional fixes to our server from that data. We’re now comfortable beginning to expand the multiplayer rollout again!

    As we head into the weekend, we are expanding the multiplayer base by 50,000 additional Citizens. If your Citizen Number is 250,000 or below, you will now have access to Arena Commander’s multiplayer modes. The team will sit down next week to review the data and make a call on a larger expansion.

    This post will be updated as additional players are invited.
     

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