Welcome to April’s PU Monthly Report! With the UEEN Invictus fleet currently preparing to make the jump to Stanton, most teams touched on the upcoming festivities throughout the month. However, a lot of work was also done toward features and content coming later this year - read on for more details.
AI (Content)
AI Content spent the majority of April preparing the release of Alpha 4.1.1, including the communications that players can now receive from mission givers. Although seemingly straightforward, the underlying tech required to implement this within the various connected systems was highly complicated. The team also supported this development by preparing the captured audio and animation files in DataForge so the designers could implement them into the mission logic.
In keeping with the general directive of looking for more ways to convey the PU’s overarching stories, the team worked on a new approach that, when implemented, will be an exciting new way to update players on storylines and events.
AI Content also continued to refine NPC behavior packs and prototype lines for Design to incorporate into future mission events. Once refined, these scripts will be approved for capture.
AI (Features)
Last month, AI Features focused on refining the juvenile valakkar. Improvements included changes to its idle roam behavior and navigation mesh to reduce the likelihood of it getting stuck. A cooldown was added to its melee attacks, with the creature now reevaluating targets during the cooldown. Issues were fixed with the valakkar not looking at its target when emerging from the ground too.
Technology developed for the juvenile valakkar also proved useful throughout April. Now, values can be set up in DataForge (general purpose data editing tool) and passed to Subsumption (behavior scripting engine). Previously, these values would be set up in Subsumption itself, meaning that it was hard for the designers to adjust the setup and create variations. By exposing more behavior values, such as attack ranges, timeouts, and the use of specific melee and projectile attacks, the designers can rapidly create variants for specific scenarios and gameplay needs.
For Human combat AI, focus was on first reactions and escalation, including resolving bugs with the new system, adding and refining new reaction wildlines, and implementing new methods for controlling which events NPCs respond to. The latter is useful for specific combat scenarios where NPCs are required to focus on a particular task rather than getting drawn into combat.
Refinement and polish continued on compromised cover reactions, while new prototype technology was implemented to lower weapons when friendly fire is detected.
AI (Game Intelligence Development Team)
In April, the Game Intelligence Development (GID) team worked on various StarScript improvements, including allowing users to ‘right click’ task-extension links and search for an existing task to connect it to. They also added edge scrolling to the editor when dragging links and implemented the ability to add a task between two others without manually reconnecting them.
For StarScript, the first pass on MasterGraph visualization and editing was completed.
GID also delivered their vision for a new tool currently called the ‘density profiler.’ This prototype will help validate the visual presentation of the tool, the use of thresholds on metrics, and how to interact with multi-resolutions.
Finally, the team continued their research discussions on the ‘mission system.’ The objective remains to provide the designers with tools to help them easily create entertaining missions for players.
AI (Tech)
AI Tech progressed with the pathfinder system, making various improvements and cleaning up requests involving multiple start and end locations. Based on a path’s start orientation, the devs can now readjust the initial animation for better continuation when exiting a usable.
For the movement system, AI Tech are improving ‘chase target’ requests to allow the chasing of ground-vehicle targets alongside NPCs. The challenge with this is that the position of a ground vehicle could be outside of a navigation mesh triangle.
Multiple improvements were also made to both triangle mesh-based navigation and voxel 3D-based navigation. For triangle mesh, triangle generation issues were fixed that were propagating problems into pathfinding and navigation raycasts. For 3D voxel-based navigation, the team began utilizing the resulted voxels and mesh to improve Ship AI collision avoidance.
On the Subsumption side, the team continued to create a synchronizing and serializing Subsumption behavior state and behavior variables.
Various bugs were fixed for Ship AI (some relating to newly exposed functionality, like Flight Mode) and the spawning/despawning of boids.
Improvements were made to cover generation too, such as excluding door entities from the cover-generation process and reducing the amount generated for long walls. The team is currently checking ground surface inclination to discard cover in areas that are not almost flat.
A new ‘NavSpline creator’ tool was implemented that will allow the designers to record player ship movements and transform the captured data into a nav spline that can be utilized by Ship AI. StarScript functionality was also extended as requested by the designers creating new missions and behaviors.
Animation
Last month, the Animation team continued to support the studio-wide initiative of focusing on content for the PU. They also progressed with the valakkar, supported various new mission givers and world NPCs, and began working on a new creature.
Art (Ships)
In the EU, the team focused on closing out tasks for Invictus Launch Week, including three new ships planned for release at the event. The MISC Starlancer TAC was also completed for its upcoming flyable release.
Progress was also made on four unannounced vehicles. The first is progressing through whitebox toward full production, while the second is approaching its greybox review and LOD0-complete. The third, which was briefly shown on a recent episode of Inside Star Citizen, is progressing through concept. The fourth vehicle, the first in a while from an existing manufacturer, has been formally kicked off.
The Consolidated Outland Pioneer continued through the pre-production and whitebox phases. The modular kits were solidified alongside some structural changes to improve the flow and movement through the ship. The team also continued to define the core visual elements to inject the Consolidated Outland art style.
Numerous paints were also created for new and existing ships for release in coming events.
The North American Content team began closing out two new variants with polishing and bug fixing. An all-new ship progressed too, with recent decisions being made on cargo capacity and tractor-beam placement.
The RSI Apollo continued through the greybox phase, with new concepts for the med-bay area and bridge.
Finally for Ships, work continued on the RSI Perseus to define the interior look and feel and ensure it functions as intended.
Community
The Community team began April supporting Triggerfish, including the parody patch notes for the scaled-down EZ Hab Arena Commander Map. They also supported the Spring Celebration and Free Fly.
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They then published the Alpha 4.0 Test Universe Champions, honoring the players whose testing efforts made the greatest impact during the PTU phase. The team then announced the first in a series of PTU Stress Tests, which provided valuable feedback to development as progress continued on the next major update. CitizenCon Direct was also announced, which will take the place of our traditional in-person event. The team is currently focused on planning and preparing for this exciting event alongside a variety of other events. Community continues to collaborate closely with Development, analyzing feedback from across channels and forwarding valuable insights to the appropriate teams. Meanwhile, efforts continue to provide general publishing support, ensuring cohesive messaging, consistency across public-facing channels, and the timely delivery of key beats.
In addition to evergreen tasks, such as This Week in Star Citizen, bi-weekly Roadmap Updates and Roundups, and the monthly refresh of the Arena Commander Schedule, the team also supported the ongoing System 7 race series presented by ATMO Esports.
Finally, Community supported the Squadron 42 Newsletter’s Vanduul Interpreter Contest, which yielded some truly creative (and terrifying) submissions as participants offered their best renditions of the Vanduul language.
Core Gameplay
Several of the Core Gameplay teams spent the month stabilizing and improving the new space-themed missions in Alpha 4.1.1. This included closing out the first iteration of several new features, such as communication notifications and new mission rewards.
Outside of new content, the team continued to monitor feedback from the PTU to address community concerns as quickly as possible.
“As always, we are infinitely thankful to the players who take their time to contribute to testing leading up to a release.” Core Gameplay Team
Recent tasks following feedback included investigating new issues with quantum travel and reoccurring problems with freight elevators, ship claiming, and inventory flow.
Elsewhere, the teams analyzed performance captures, seeing where gains could be made for both client and server frame rates, especially focusing on new content.
There are several more ongoing initiatives across the Core Gameplay teams that are either for the next few releases, longer-term, or for Squadron 42. However, much of the work done for Squadron 42 will also be relevant to Star Citizen, so these teams work across both projects.
Elsewhere, Core Gameplay added updates to the engineering UI screen, including countdown warnings for catastrophic explosions, and reinstated and advanced the diagnostic screen MFD.
Further improvements were then made to ship death. For example, fatal damage behaviors now require a significant impact. In addition, catastrophic misfires can now be triggered by nearby items failing due to severe damage. Improvements to deactivating soft death were also completed and its effects can be enabled separately.
For flight experience, the team enabled the new space flight mode in their feature streams. They’re currently resolving bugs related to AI ship motion alongside outstanding work on the takeoff and landing experience. Several new game modes were added to allow them to test the new flight model in the future. Due to the data setup, both the new and existing models can be tested separately without affecting each other.
An overhaul of control-surface tech began. As such, flying in atmosphere and especially gliding is now much more realistic thanks to believable aerodynamic behaviors, such as the nose falling in turns or accurate drag on large AOAs, especially in regards to changing atmospheric densities. There's still outstanding work on the control systems and interaction with thrusters and the AI systems.
April also saw an update to the new quantum tech. In addition to adding a slow-speed variant of quantum boosting, the devs resolved several bugs and improved reliability and performance. It also features improved ways for the mission designers to control the flow for AI ships. Further work will focus on improving the current experience and make it compatible with multiplayer.
Core Gameplay optimized the ScanWave mechanic to be as responsive as possible, with focus on overwhelming contact environments where hundreds or thousands of contacts are processed in a short period.
Alongside this, the team continued to polish FPS Radar & Scanning gameplay via regular playtests. April’s work included adjusting the detection formula, highlighting visuals, and disabling the ‘influence signature’ system to improve it to better serve the intended gameplay.
The team then made improvements to inclusion checks, such as adding a mechanic to skip checks for radar contacts within the same room. This allows for a smoother-flowing experience when searching for items or objectives out of direct line of sight, which would previously require a fully charged scan to detect.
Lastly, the team iterated on the boxout display for radar contacts, optimizing and refining the marker placement. Design also began setting up which objects will be detectable by radar and scanning in the PU.
Several major bugs were fixed, including one causing the MISC Hull C to spawn with its spindle extended, which prevented flight in certain ports. A commodities issue stopping ships being selectable as a destination was fixed too.
For refineries, the team added the location inventory to the list of sources and destinations, while refining no longer consumes the ore bag so that it can be reused. For cargo, items placed on grids now take item pivot into consideration if the data is available.
Economy
Last month, the Economy team were involved in the new content coming in Alpha 4.1.1, including items and vehicles for Invictus.
They also supported the design of several new mission archetypes, some of which have the chance to impact the universe in a more permanent manner.
The team then began looking into making the economy more dynamic, testing various things.
“We are studying different economic models from history and fiction to get a better impression of how the economy will feel when it is fully fledged.” Economy Team
The team also discussed the next iteration of Item Recovery and how it will influence the prices and exclusivity of different items. Work then continued on the backend shop refactor that will provide the tools to start building a better shopping experience.
Finally, the Economy and Data Solution teams continued to create a comprehensive data plan to provide better and faster information about what players like the most.
Mission Design
With most of their recent fundamental tech work complete, the team focused on improving mission quality. For example, players in the PTU will see the return of comms notifications. While the previous system (used for XenoThreat and Siege of Orison) was difficult to update and maintain, it’s now a lot easier to implement content into the game. The team are planning to slowly roll out this update across the game to globally improve mission quality.
Alpha 4.1.1 will see new mission types focused on PVE ship battles. These include ‘ambush,’ which sees players set up a trap to kill a priority target, and ‘patrol,’ where players travel between different coordinates and take on activities at each point.
Work on these missions also allowed the team to find and fix longstanding issues with spawning ship-based reinforcements, so ‘ship wave’ missions should now function better.
In April, a few of the designers began fixing missions that missed the Alpha 4.0 release.
“Hopefully some of these will be in a good enough state for a release soon, but we are committed to the quality and stability of the missions.” Mission Design
Updates were also made to Wikelo, including the things they are willing to trade. To prevent the farming of rare components, ships rewarded by Wikelo will now only feature their unique paint, while the components will be added to the Emporium.
Narrative
In April, the Narrative team’s main focus was on a suite of new missions and support for Invictus Launch Week.
Looking ahead, the team prepared for their next capture session, which involved confirming trigger lists with Design, writing scripts, casting actors, and coordinating with the various downstream departments tasked with processing the captured material. They will also be recording unique dialogue for an upcoming event as well as adding a new NPC archetype for use across multiple missions.
The team also entered the polish phase on locations that will be arriving later this year, improving the narrative flow of the area and helping the Branding team with the final signage pass to create a more immersive environment. Additionally, they continued to work on two new location archetypes, guiding the design and art with backstory elements to help drive the tone as well as establishing story details. Also, with 2025 well underway, the team dedicated time to progressing their 2026 planning, including new story opportunities.
Finally, the Narrative team made an appearance on Star Citizen Live to answer questions about this year’s ongoing storylines.
Online Technology
In April, the Live Tools team worked on various features, including new sanction types and improvements to scheduling global system messages.
The Network Team delivered the ‘entity teleport’ feature, which is used to move replicated entities that may or may not be streamed out. This enables systems, like respawn, to directly reparent a player to a medical bed without needing to wait for it to stream in, streamlining and simplifying the respawn process. The team is currently finalizing the related API.
R&D
In April, various improvements were made to the lightning evaluation that's part of the cloud and atmosphere raymarch. As such, the energy fall-off function was generalized and an extra highlight was added to separate the center of bright lightning from much dimmer long-range impact.
For dynamic weather, the temporal stability of the CPU-accessible weather map was improved, extra helpers for CPU weather queries were implemented, and robustness was improved when creating query contexts.
Work also began on adding texture streaming support for volumetric cloud and ground-fog rendering. Sun disc rendering behind sufficiently dense planetary clouds was improved and should result in softer transitions than before. Similarly, the sun disc behind gas clouds should occlude correctly again. This fix corrects animated noise and banding that was observable when looking at dense clouds with the sun shining through.
UI
Last month, the UI team worked to implement unique UI styles for several upcoming vehicles. They also supported upcoming events and created environmental UI to support the gameplay and storytelling.
VFX
Last month, VFX worked toward completing their tasks on vehicles and weapons for Invictus Launch Week.
Pre-production VFX work also began for an upcoming major release, including locations, creatures, and weather.