Welcome to June’s PU Monthly Report! Many teams progressed with their final tasks toward Alpha 3.24, while others are forging ahead with work on exciting features and content for Alpha 4.0 (and in some cases beyond). Read on for all the details, and we’ll see you again this time next month.
AI (Features)
June saw AI Features improving the behaviors of grouped NPCS for a more consistent combat experience. To do this, they added an object representing the group that shares perception information about targets at the appropriate time. This allows the designers to tailor combat experiences to the specific demands of the mission by deciding who is and isn’t drawn into combat when it starts. It also allows them to ‘cheat’ a behavior for situations where communication between group members would be expected, e.g. via radio, preventing NPCs from doing a full first reaction when they would already know about the fight.
This is the first implementation of the system and the team will be playtesting and balancing it to make sure it presents a realistic but understandable challenge. Without the behavior, perception and entering combat would be more haphazard and not work well across the wide range of level and mission scenarios.
AI (Game Intelligence Development Tools)
June saw the creation of a new team within the AI group, Game Intelligence Development Tools (GIDT).
One of the team’s objectives is to focus on evaluating and improving tools and processes. For example, they’re currently working with AI Tech to improve the Apollo Subsumption editor with improved UX. Following a successful prototype, the team are currently implementing some of the features directly in-engine. This new visual paradigm is known as Apollo StarScript.
Other improvements include a new tool that enables the devs to group or ungroup task functions automatically, allowing them to easily add comments and visualize them when collapsed or expanded.
Another upcoming objective is to implement different service solutions for long-term AI functionalities, including the Quantum simulation, the Battle System, and the Commentator model.
AI (Tech)
June saw AI Tech optimizing parts of the Vision system used by NPCs, which involved moving parts of NPC-visibility-check computation to the client. This will help when there are multiple players on the same server, giving improvements to reaction time and frame rate.
They’re also investigating better ways to synchronize AI data between servers and clients in preparation for Server Meshing, which will allow for smoother transitions by keeping the same context when NPCs move from one server to another. As a test, they serialized more data into AI components, like path and movement requests.
On the ship AI side, functionality was added to point-defense cannons that allows them to track and shoot missiles. Improvements were also made to NPCs following leaders in formation by utilizing a PID controller for matching leader speed and adjusting roll based on the leader and NPC ship orientation.
Alongside this, the AI Tools team began unifying functionality and fixed bugs in preparation for the Apollo UI redesign.
Animation
The Animation team continued to fix technical issues with the kopion, animate assets, and create new animations for numerous creatures.
Art (Characters)
In June, the Character Art team progressed with three specialist armors, finalized the update to the utility armor, and supported requests for the Character Customizer. Art debt for looting items was worked on too.
The Character Concept Art team continued exploring designs for utility armors and completed handoff sheets for specialist armors, while the Hair team kicked off new beards and hairstyles.
Art (Ships)
Last month, the Ships team progressed with the RSI Polaris, getting close to finishing the interior for the greybox review. The exterior is heading toward final content, with the parallax occlusion mapping (POM) and lighting being completed. The RSI Zeus Mk II is also approaching its final content review.
Seven unannounced vehicles were worked on too. Four are approaching the whitebox review stage, two are heading toward greybox review, and the last is nearly finished.
Community
The Community team kicked off the month with May’s PU Monthly Report, alongside the Drake Ironclad Q&A.
The team then supported Alien Week, which was followed by the return of XenoThreat. A New Player Guide was published alongside two contests, Show Us Your Colors and Supergalactic Xeno-Treat Smackdown.
)/75/show-us-your-colors-2024-winners.png)
The Community team is currently preparing for the Alpha 3.24 release as well as the upcoming Foundation Festival and Ship Showdown events.
The Bar Citizen World Tour continued, with team members visiting local events to meet with the community and share new loot, including the new Hui’a Puzzle.
)/ibcw-2024-2.png)
The team also spent time with the vibrant community in Asia, where we recently had the pleasure of attending two unforgettable events. First, our team traveled to Taipei for an incredibly immersive Bar Citizen (the decor was awesome!). There, we were treated to a handful of excellent presentations, including a live demonstration and tutorial by Morphologis, a racing tournaments that had us all on the edge of our seats (and screaming at the top of our lungs), and even some lively singalongs of pirate shanties courtesy of Drake Interplanetary.
)/75/bar-citizen-taipei-2.jpg)
Then, last Saturday, we had the privilege of connecting with our community in Shenzhen, China, at their largest gathering yet (over 2,000 attendees!). We participated in a lively Q&A session, enjoyed a variety of tournaments, giveaways, cosplay, and much more. Events like these, especially on the opposite side of the globe, serve as a powerful reminder of the diversity and global reach of our community. What's most inspiring is that our shared passion for the universe we are building transcends all language and cultural barriers – whether you're in Shenzhen, France, Antarctica (you never know) or anywhere else on the planet, a Bar Citizen event always feels like home among like-minded pilots.
“We kicked off another year of Bar Citizen events around the globe. As always, you all showed up in spades! It was wonderful meeting each and every one of you, hosting trivia challenges, enjoying good drinks, and great company. We can't wait to see you all again at upcoming events during PAX, TwitchCon, Gamescom, and more! So, if you're nearby, come on down and get your hands on an exclusive Hui'a! We would also like to say thank you to everyone supporting the development of Star Citizen and our recent updates, Tech Preview, and other PTU tests. We are committed to delivering a world-class game, for a world-class community, and your feedback is instrumentally important to us!” - Community Team
)/75/bar-citizen-shenzhen-4.jpg)
The Community team continued detailing the weekly publishes with This Week in Star Citizen, and updated the Arena Commander Schedule.
With CitizenCon 2954 less than four months away, the team is working hard to deliver the most packed and exciting event to date. The CitizenCon Cosplay Contest is also back, with the team planning to share more details closer to the event.
Core Gameplay
For Maelstrom, the development stream was recently published to the main internal branch. This provides a fresh set of features, such as a new unified-mesh-format grid with OC support per Maelstrom node for large vehicle destruction. It also provides tools to link gameplay events with destruction sequences, such as shatter, break, and integrity changes.
The unified mesh format brings numerous improvements to the Vulkan pipeline and internal code coverage alongside a flexible pipeline to bake supplementary data required for Maelstrom destruction. The ability to link internal Maelstrom sequences to game logic advances the devs' ability to easily build complex destruction sequences. Further development will bring Maelstrom destruction entities past the existing legacy destruction and harden the existing pipeline.
Following a full task breakdown, implementation of the transit refactor began. This included setting up basic component and entity classes for destinations, gateways, and gateway peripherals. A new DebugGUI transport-network visualizer was created to assist the initial set up and inform Design of the setup of each transport network. The transit engineers also continued supporting the upcoming Alpha 3.24 release.
For Radar & Scanning, work was completed to allow FPS ping to be used from certain seats - the first being in vehicles that lack their own radar. Alongside this, the team resolved several issues when using an FPS radar within vehicle zones to detect things outside. Work continued on the highlighting effect caused by FPS ping, with the devs now able to apply different colors for different factors, such as hostility. Several other parameters were added to the highlight effect to allow the finetuning of visuals, including fade, timeout, occlusions, fill, and outline.
Support began for new vehicle brackets, including nameplate and distance, and parameters were added to control when and how they should show in different states, such as targeted and pinned. The removal of Scan Operator Mode started too, which will be replaced with ADS Scanning.
The team submitted the framework for a system that will allow Design to begin tagging which scan-producers specific radars run. For example, medical scanners may see health information, while police scanners can detect contraband. An improvement was made to the radar system, allowing faster scan speeds while maintaining performance. Support continued for radar with the Room Query System that allows the occlusion of people behind locked doors.
Finally for Radar & Scanning, a new mechanic was implemented - Delta Signatures. This mechanic has vehicles emit signatures when certain actions are performed, such as ping activation, the activation of quantum boost, and the changing of Master Modes. UI to notify players when they detect a delta signature was implemented too.
For Arena Commander, the team focused on the new frontend style, the FPS horde mode, and backend support.
The implementation of the frontend restyle is nearly complete, with the majority now utilizing the new style and art direction. Several feature requests were sent to the Service teams after review, including a way to query game module and mode population and additional information for friends lists, such as the game mode and map.
For the FPS horde mode, the team implemented the Subsumption mission alongside a way to define spawn wave data. Design will soon begin reviewing the map and marking it up for AI ahead of the spawn-closet engineers becoming available post-Alpha 3.24.
A playtest was conducted on an EVA-only map, Gundo. Due to limitations with the location causing balance concerns, this map will not be released and will instead be used for rapid in-situ developer iteration of the EVA system.
Finally, the team began improving how badges are defined in the game code. This is due to limitations of the system as more teams utilize it. Improvements include giving designers more control over badges and their information by moving what was previously hardcoded to DataForge as well as adding several quality-of-life improvements for developers.
Economy
The Economy team progressed with tasks for Pyro, including setting up the shops and sorting out any related issues.
They also continued implementing the effort-vs-reward algorithm so that mission rewards are balanced according to the risk and time invested by the player. Support was provided for the coming changes to cargo and cargo missions too.
As mentioned in last month’s report, the team worked to rebalance the prices for entire sets of items, including vehicle components (power plants, coolers, shields, quantum drives, weapons, etc.), FPS weapon attachments, ammunition, consumables, and commodities.
The team’s ongoing work involves a new economy for quantum and hydrogen fuel to ensure that refueling isn’t a chore while maintaining the narrative feel of a large universe with unique economies spread across different star systems.
They’re also creating player profiles to better understand how different careers gain and use resources.
Graphics, VFX Programming & Planet Tech
Last month, the stability, performance, and memory usage of Vulkan continued to improve and is now much closer to being the default choice for Star Citizen. The team have also been in contact with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel to diagnose and fix various driver issues.
The Global Illumination team worked across a variety of areas. For example, they improved radiance cache resolution, made stability improvements, and optimized various areas with Fidelity FX. They also provided rough-specular support, improved motion-and-depth-complexity handling for the screen-space light cache, and updated the cascaded light grid to allow for a greater range of global illumination.
Gas-cloud color-processing volumes were added to allow the artists to vary the appearance of large gas clouds as players traverse them. The team also made the first pass at hooking up the required VFX to jump points alongside a new shader for the tunnel and a bespoke lighting and shadowing solution for ships inside it.
Support for fire hazards continued, which involved adding directionality to the generalized burn and dirt shader effect for entities. This allows localized burning, such as on one side of a door. Visual improvements were also added to creatures, such as the ability to spawn decals from GPU particles.
A new managed-entity-region system was designed and entered development. The goal of this is to manage the lifetime of the many procedurally spawned entities, such as creatures and mineable rocks. This is critical to the introduction of persistent entities, server recovery, and server meshing, as these systems require very strict and careful management of entity lifetimes.
GPU terrain generation was implemented as a stepping stone to the team’s plans for fully GPU-generated virtualized terrain, which will be utilized in Planet Tech v5.
Finally, an efficient query mechanism is being designed and added to planets. This will be used by the new location-scatter tool that will help populate planets for Star Citizen 1.0.
In-Game Branding
The In-Game Branding team made significant progress across various projects throughout June, including new navigational signage for Pyro and graffiti for Ruin Station. They also started work on a new location alongside the Landing Zone team.
Interactables
June saw the Interactables team finishing off liquid containers, which will be used in the upcoming Blockade Runner missions. Hazardous containers were worked on too, with the team taking all sizes to final following destructibility tests.
)/interactables.png)
Lighting
The Lighting team focused on work for Alpha 4.0, including tasks for the new acidic cave archetype, Pyro station modules, and outpost locations.
They’re currently dialing in the atmospheres for all of Pyro’s planets and moons to give each a unique look and feel.
Locations
The Landing Zone team spent part of the month fixing bugs for cargo alongside adding to the variety of modules available for Pyro’s stations.
Alongside this, the Organics team progressed with asset creation for new biomes that will go on new planets in the future. They also closed out the acidic cave archetype.
)/75/locations.png)
Narrative
One of the Narrative team’s bigger focuses in June was their continued support of the upcoming cargo gameplay, which included writing new mission text. The team also dedicated time toward Star Citizen 1.0, diving deeper into the new content that patch will bring. Part of this will fall onto Narrative Design, who further expand the presence of Social AI in the universe.
Additionally, Narrative began building out the lore and mission text for a future large-scale event mission. They also provided the Branding team with several company bios that will be used to flesh out style guides.
“This month also saw another edition of Loremakers: Community Questions go live, so be sure to check it out and then add your own questions to the Narrative Team Ask A Dev Spectrum page for a chance to have your question answered next time.” Narrative Team
The team also published a fresh batch of Galactapedia entries alongside a story of Banu Divestment in honor of Alien Week.
Online Technology
In June, the Online Services team worked toward completing the Social Services backend overhaul. This will boost the performance and scalability of social functionalities, including chat, friends, and groups, and will enable the service to support a higher volume of concurrent users and requests. Additionally, it will simplify the integration of new features. For example, making things like creating and joining a party from within the Spectrum web portal possible.
The team also integrated a new version of Easy Anti-Cheat and will soon begin testing for false positives as well as testing the boot check feature on a limited sample size.
Furthermore, the team progressed with potential features for Alpha 4.0. This included significant overhauls to the mission and marker systems as well as the development of the player-trade functionality, which align with the overarching objective of achieving Server Meshing.
The Networking team continued to work toward the first version of Server Meshing. This included testing various configurations for the mesh and the underlying cloud infrastructure while capturing critical performance information to help finetune and target bottlenecks.
Tech Art/Animation
The Technical Animation team continued to invest in a wide range of long-term tasks, facilitating improvements across both projects.
For example, work progressed on the ‘Put On, Take Off’ initiative, which is close to completion. These animations will soon be integrated into the game and will significantly enhance the realism of character interactions and provide a more engaging player experience. Several creatures for Alpha 4.0 were finalized too.
Enhancements were also made to the Character Customizer, including the successful integration of new heads. This enhancement will offer players more variety and customization options, further enriching personalization.
“Our ongoing collaboration with the SST and Cinematics departments remains strong. The focus on ensuring the technical implementation of animations and scene content is of the highest quality is unwavering. This synergy is crucial in maintaining the seamless integration of animations and ensuring a top-tier visual experience for our audience. The achievements of the Technical Animation team this past month are a testament to their hard work and dedication. As we move forward, we are confident that we will continue to reach new heights and deliver exceptional content for our players.” Tech Animation Team
VFX
Last month, the VFX team supported teams on deliverables planned for Alpha 3.24 and 4.0, including the RSI Zeus Mk II.
VFX also supported Locations on new biome archetypes, including acidic caves, alongside new modules for Pyro.
Finally, VFX progressed with tasks for several upcoming features, such as fire hazards, the resource network, and Pyro.