[heading]Monthly Report: January 2015[/heading]
Greetings Citizens,
New year, same job: make the Best Damn Space Sim Ever! In January, Star Citizen’s teams worked on all aspects of the game, with a focus on improving Arena Commander and preparing to launch First Person Shooter and the first ‘social module’ piece of the persistent universe (oh, wait: and Squadron 42! It’s the first month of a BIG year.)
We also held our first ever backer ‘town hall’ in San Antonio, and couldn’t be happier with how it went. You can see all five of the panels below, and the feedback we collected is already impacting Star Citizen’s long term plans.
Please read on for the latest from Cloud Imperium’s studios and outsource partners around the world.
[subheading]Engineering[/subheading]
With Engineering in January there was a fair amount of long term planning that was covered during a Technology Summit in the UK involving several members of the LA team. During the month of January our LA Engineering team has been working on quite a few things you will see being released over the next couple of months.
We’ve finalized our implementation of the paint system for all vehicles including the buggy. As many of you saw we released swappable buggy paint jobs during January. This was an important step because it finished off our implementation of the first pass of the vehicle paint system. Now that this technology has been finished, tested, and proven on the buggy the Art team can proceed with implementing swappable custom paint jobs for all of our ships which you’ll be seeing very soon. This was very important to us as it allows us to begin delivering on many of the custom skins sold or included with various packages during the original campaign.
Development has also continued on the missiles, countermeasures, and signals system. With the first introduction of this system in December there were some features that we weren’t able to quite finish such as emissive sources that can obscure sensors in a generalized area or direction. Things like nebulas or a star having impact in a broader way. For example you may in the future see that it is much harder to get an Heat lock on an enemy who is flying directly at the molten core on Dying Star because the of the heat from the core blinding the heat sensors on your ship and missiles relative to the lower output of the enemy ship you are attempting to target.
In addition to the features that weren’t quite ready for primetime there are also a fair number of gameplay balance issues and bugs that we’ve been working to resolve within these systems that were highlighted by players in 1.0.0 and 1.0.1. We’re continuing to improve and refine the system in Arena Commander so that by the time the PU comes about its polished and well balanced.
Another important focus for the Engineering team has been a refactor of the item port system. Sounds exciting right? Well it is! As you may or may not know we wrote a custom item way back towards the beginning of Star Citizens development. It is a system for handling networked, animating, and data driven items that are attached to other items or ship parts through what are called item ports. Stated differently, this is the system that makes it possible for your weapons, items, and ships to all attach to one another, update each other with their data (how much energy they draw, etc.), animate, and exhibit the same behavior on all clients over the network. This system is pretty cool and in use already, so why does it need a refactor you might ask… Well let’s explain!
As we’ve continued development on Star Citizen and moved on from the days when this system we’ve added a lot of new features that weren’t around back then. One of the things that we’re adapting the item port system for is all the player characters. So when you’re Heavy Marine is running around in the upcoming FPS release he will be using the same unified system for his items and attachments as your ship. We’re defining item ports on the character just like ships that have rules about what size things can attach to them and hook up into the player’s data driven entity. So for example if you equip an energy pack to port 24 it feeds into the suit energy which can be drawn down by a personal shield in slot 15. This is just an example for illustrative purposes but it should convey the basic principles.
Where this gets really cool is as we move towards the integration of FPS and ship combat with things like multicrew ships. Because the characters and ships both use a unified item port system they can interact in ways that were never before possible. So for example now when you sit down in the cockpit of your Hornet we can plug in your character and attached items to the ship. I.E. if your EVA suit is low on power we can charge your suit off of your ships reactor via a plug in the cockpit. If you sit down into a turret that is supposed to display a physical screen if you don’t have a helmet the ship can now query your characters item ports and check against the presence of a helmet. If you have one it can pipe in the relevant targeting data from the ship to your visor or it can decide it needs to bring up a physical display instead. Pretty cool, right?
Speaking of the visor we’ve also been refactoring the current implementation of the HUD visor for ships so it is much more extensible, optimized, and completely unified and interchangeable with the FPS HUD. The idea being that you can now toggle between visor modes yourself or the game can switch you contextually based on what you are doing. Sitting in your ship and the ships HUD will pop up in your visor. Hop out and pull out your gun and the visor will flip over to FPS combat mode and bring up a different set of information within the same framework. All in all this will be a much more robust and optimized implementation of the HUD that supports the seamlessness that so critical for the immersion of Star Citizen.
[subheading]Design[/subheading] On the Design side, January saw the hiring of two additional Technical Designers here in LA, Matt Sherman and Kirk Tome. They’ve already proved invaluable at freeing up Design bandwidth to tackle some longer term goals without sacrificing continued iteration and polish on the currently released content. We’ve tackled the design and prototyping of several of the longer term systems during this month such as how cargo will work, not just a paper design but actual in-engine prototyping of the core principles of the system working based off the paper design. There has also been a fair amount of design focus on working with Engineering on the polish and development happening on the signature, missile, and countermeasure system that we covered above.
As you may know from the write up on the ship pipeline the Design team plays in important role in the development of every single ship that goes into the game from ideation all the way to final implementation. To that end we’ve kicked off a fair number of ships at the beginning of this year. Ships like the [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and [REDACTED] were all kicked off this month and are moving forward in the Concept phase and still more were greenlit to start moving into the Hangar and Flight Ready phases. The design team has been working diligently on whiteboxes and nailing down metrics for virtually every item onboard ships. This was a step that we added to the Ship Pipeline when we took it over here in LA back in September and it’s already been paying dividends in less mistakes and reworks down the pipe. It’s also proving to be one of the most important stages in ship development!
We’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about the ship pipeline but what are ships without items? To this end the Design team has begun the large undertaking of mapping out the entirety of the long term plan for ship items. Not only all the functionality of each ship item/weapon but also what different items or weapons of the same type will do differently and mapping that to a particular manufacturer from brand consistency. So not only do we have a lot of new items and weapons designed coming out of January but there is a lot more focus on making them feel different from one another and have distinct advantages and disadvantages and having those relate to the various manufacturers across all the types of items and weapons they make. If it sounds like a massive undertaking, it has been, but we’re already seeing this time spent paying off as it creates a much more unified and interesting framework for items within Star Citizen.
Last but not least is the tuning! Virtually every day our Design team and QA team are discussing balance changes, scouring the forums reviewing player feedback, and discussing action plans for addressing the issues that are identified. It cannot be oversold how important this time spent iterating and collaborating with QA and the community is. During January there has been a lot of adjusting, tweaking, and tuning happening some of which you saw in 1.0.1 and a lot more that will be releasing with 1.0.2. The play experience of space combat is very important to us and very important to the game so just remember, if you don’t like something or have an idea for how we could improve something, voice your opinion and let us know. It may take some time to get feedback addressed but we are always changing and improving it.
[subheading]Art[/subheading] Our Art team has had an exciting January! This month we hosted all the global members of the ship team in LA for our first ever “Ship Summit”. It was a great opportunity for our global Art, Design, Animation, and Engineering leads on ships to get together and discuss the current pipeline, improvements/changes, best practices/techniques standardization and for some of them to meet in person for the first time. Coming out of the summit we’ve further refined our pipeline and established common gold standards and techniques around which everyone can align globally.
The fruits of this standardization and improvements to our modeling techniques are born out in the new items that are being introduced into the game. The new shield generators were all bit using the new pipeline for ship items/weapons and use the latest modeling and Tech Art techniques we’ve begun employing for all ship parts potentially other parts of the game as well. Our items have really come a long way from where they started and the visual improvement is pretty apparent, even for those who aren’t artistically inclined.
Furthering that our Art team has also been busy making use of the new paint system and the work done by Engineering and Design to get it so players can swap paintjobs. This is actually a great example of what makes open development so cool both for players and for developers. With the paint system you’ve actually seen the first implementation for 1.0 with some ships having bespoke paintjobs using the new system. Then we iterated and for 1.0.1 added them to the buggy to prove the system was extensible and used that as an opportunity to put in the capability for swapping the paintjob at runtime. Once all that was complete we moved on to adding that swapping ability for players on the Aurora with some of the skins that we’ve promised as well as a fun one for the community in 1.0.2.
We’ve also begun concept, modeling, and flight readiness work on a number of upcoming ships. Some fan favorites like [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] are high on our list and progressing well towards hangar ready and flight ready respectively. Suffice to say that while January did not see the release of a new ship there are a lot of them running through the pipe right now and we’re excited to show them off once they’re ready!
Art, Design, and Engineering have been working collaboratively on some upcoming improvements to our damage system for ships that we look forward to sharing with you all once they’re all up and running. These improvements will vastly improve the fidelity of damage to ships while actually optimizing performance from the current state of the system. Coming out of the ship summit our internal team is looking forward to using the new system.
Last but certainly not least on the Art front are Characters. Following the Ship Summit we’ve been working on putting together a demo for the character team of where we can apply some of the best practices and techniques used by the Ship team to the character armors and other hard surface clothing/materials to continue to push the bar even higher for the visuals in Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
[subheading]Animation[/subheading] As many of you may already know, towards the end of last year we shot a lot of motion capture and performance capture at Imaginarium in London. What you may not know is that we’ve also created an entirely new and greatly improved rig for our characters this rig was created by the aptly named, John Riggs here in LA in close collaboration with the other members of the Character team globally. So, in the month of January we’ve spent a lot of time refining that rig with the new characters and new animation data from our recent shooting. So far progress has been great and the new visuals are looking very promising and we look forward to improving the animations in the game substantially for everyone as soon work concludes on this.
Well, that wraps up the department updates for this month and covers much of the progress that we’ve made this month. Before we let you go we just wanted to say that it is important to note that while each studio provides the community with a separate studio report much of what we’ve covered above wouldn’t be possible without our comrades around the globe. It cannot be stated enough that while there are multiple studios working on this project there is one team working together and it is only with each other that we’re able to make this the BDSSE.
