Welcome to the PU Monthly Report! May saw Alpha 4.8 and DefenseCon hitting the ’verse, with many teams spending the month finalizing features for these major releases. Following this, tasks began and continued for the exciting content coming over the next few patches. Read on for all the details.
AI Content
Following the launch of Alpha 4.8, the AI Content team began closing out tasks for Alpha 4.9 and beyond. Alongside the usual bug fixes and ongoing initiatives from the previous months, the team looked into technical fixes to help streamline the process for adding content into the game.
“The Alpha 4.9 patch is going to be a very important one for the narrative design of the game, as the team is contributing to two very large elements that will lay important foundations for developing narrative in the ultimate 1.0 vision.” AI Content Team
AI (Features & Tech)
On the animation side, significant work went toward the mass retargeting of male-to-female combat AI assets, with additional support for unconscious and bleeding-out behaviors. The devs also made TrackViews for an upcoming event and restructured how melee attacks are tweaked for NPCs with large attack sets.
Prototypes were then implemented for the valakkar. For example, the team simplified the setup of burrowing animation types, fixed the path patching to improve movement along dynamically generated positions, and improved the API for tracking damage to NPCs to trigger motive actions. They also refactored how AI-triggered states work and improved debug shortcuts for controlling time and teleporting.
Animation
Last month, the Animation team progressed with the apex valakkar, fleshing out various additional attacks and animations. They also captured new enter and exit animations for upcoming ships alongside work for a new full-body mission giver, who will have her own place in the ’verse.
The Facial Animation team processed a significant amount of new content from April’s performance-capture shoot, which will appear in Alpha 4.9. As this content will be split across comms calls and in-person interactions, it was processed at different quality tiers to ensure that everything players see close up will really shine.
The team are excited to see players’ reactions to the return of Recco Battaglia, as this will be the first instance of an old character returning to the ’verse with new content and missions. A lot has changed within the pipeline since her debut, so this will be the first time players will be able to draw immediate comparisons.
Facial Animation also held two performance-capture shoots with the Narrative and the Motion Capture teams, which will cover content for Alpha 4.9 and 4.10.
Art (Ships)
May’s DefenseCon saw many of the Ships team’s recent projects flyable in the PU, including the Aegis Tiburon and Hammerhead ’gold standard,’ the Origin M80, the MISC Starlite, and the Drake Pitbull, Ironclad, Ironclad Assault, and Command Module. The team also delivered the Vanduul Mauler as part of Tactical Strike Groups alongside numerous flight blades and weapon kits.
Elsewhere, the Gatac Railen passed its greybox review before progressing into LOD0, with a combined LOD0 and Final Gate review scheduled for early June. Significant progress was also made on a related-yet-unannounced ship.
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Four other upcoming vehicles continued development, too. The first received custom mo-cap for its enter and exit animations, creating unique challenges due to its scale, before its greybox review at the end of the month.
Production on the second kicked off, with a small team starting work toward the whitebox gate planned for the middle of June.
The third continued down the pipeline, while the fourth saw the UK team collaborating with their North American counterparts to ensure the art direction aligns with the brand’s other new releases.
With resources freed up following DefenseCon, pre-production picked up for the Anvil Liberator, with the start of whitebox scheduled for the end of the month. As part of this, an update was made to the interior to allow for quicker entry and exit to the landing pads.
Lastly on the UK side, the RSI Galaxy continued through whitebox as further revisions were made to the layout around the central docking collar, habs, bridge, and lift area to ensure clear flow from any direction.
As mentioned above, the North American team progressed with an unannounced ship, which passed its greybox gate review with flying colors. Following this, the LOD0 phase began, with the ship coming together following a preliminary lighting pass.
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Finally, the Drake Kraken continued through its greybox phase, with further changes to the hero rooms to utilize more of the Drake kit used in the Ironclad. This will save both production time and increase the optimization of this huge ship.
Art (Weapons)
In May, the Weapons team ensured their content was ready for Alpha 4.8, including the Kastak Arms plasma grenade and UltiFlex Novian crossbow, and a handful of skins for upcoming events.
Meanwhile, the team progressed with a new large-caliber weapon, which is currently in greybox. New tech is also in the works that will require cross-team collaboration over the next couple of months. Material polish passes and updates to existing weapons continued to progress, too.
Community
The Community team began May by preparing for the launches of Alpha 4.8: Tactical Strike and DefenseCon 2956. Early in the month, they published the April PU Monthly Report followed by an Org Spotlight that presented players with a variety of organizations they could team up with to tackle upcoming content. They also shared updates on the changes to vehicle insurance coming in Alpha 4.8 and announced that the Novian crossbow would arrive with this update.
The team supported the release of Alpha 4.8 with a catch-all thread highlighting all the features of this major update, along with an FAQ for Tactical Strike Groups. They also launched the latest Twitch Drops for DefenseCon, alongside a dedicated page and an FAQ alerting the community to what to expect at Drake’s big show. As the event drew near, they followed up with a comm-link informing players of the DefenseCon Schedule as well as a Countdown to DefenseCon to keep the community updated.
As DefenseCon began, the Community team published a Referral Bonus comm-link and hosted a screenshot contest. They also created a Q&A for all the new ships debuting at the event, which was updated as new ships were released, and a catch-all thread keeping the community informed throughout the event.
Both DefenseCon 2956 and Alpha 4.8 included updates to the New Player Guide and Welcome Back, Pilot pages, keeping players informed of all the recent changes. As always, the team kept up their regular cadence of This Week in Star Citizen and bi-weekly Roadmap updates.
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In addition to all the other events last month, the Bar Citizen World Tour continued in May, with staff attending events in China, France, Korea, Switzerland, and TwitchCon in the Netherlands. The team also invited the community to join them for the International Bar Citizen Weekend in June.
“It’s been an absolute blast seeing everyone and hearing your starfaring stories! We hope to get to know more of you at other upcoming events, such as the International Bar Citizen Weekend, kicking off on June 13!” Community Team
Throughout May, the team closely monitored community sentiment and feedback to ensure development teams had the latest word from players to help shape improvements to both current content and future events. The Community team is also currently working closely with other teams to relaunch a refreshed Welcome Hub for new players, as well as further updates to the Guide System and Spectrum.
Economy
Alpha 4.8 saw the introduction of two major economy features: ship insurance adjustments and player-crafted items. Consumable prices were also adjusted and components now have a wider price range, with prices of grade ’A’ military components in particular being adjusted upwards to give more of a sense of progression. The devs also increased the sale price of components so that salvagers can capitalize on any high-tier components they come across.
The data aggregation pipelines were broadened, resulting in several mission archetypes receiving a balance pass based on player behavior data.
To support future economy updates, the team began standardizing the price and volume brackets of crafting resources. They’re also working on new ways to make the resource, commodity, and trading systems more intuitive and transparent for players.
On the shop implementation side, the team supported DefenseCon by setting up new shop items, including commemorative hats and t-shirts, ship weapons, flight blades, flight suits, and vehicles. This allowed all the items on display within the expo halls and lobby to physically spawn and be interactive and purchasable. The team even redressed the Coffee-to-Go concession stand to fit the DefenseCon theme.
Lastly, with the introduction of flight suits, a pass was done on some of the existing shops across the PU to ensure two of them could be purchased.
Graphics, VFX Programming & Planet Tech
The majority of the Graphics team focused on optimization throughout May, making significant improvements that will come at a later date. Alongside this, the team further optimized and refined the visuals for the Global Illumination system, in addition to adding depth-output support to all parallax mapped surfaces which allows them to benefit from our full rendering feature-set, such as screen space shadows, reflections and directional occlusion.
The Planet Tech team made large strides with Genesis as they look to close-out the last elements of the core technology and move on to polish, performance, and stability tasks. Recent work focused on critical pieces of technology, like GPU object spawning, the virtual terrain cache, imposter rendering, and the spawning of creatures and mineables on V5 planets. Alongside this, the teams continued to iterate on visual quality while ensuring performance is kept in check.
Mission Design
Last month, the Mission Design team progressed with Recco Battaglia. They also worked closely with Narrative and Core Gameplay to ensure the mission-provider interaction flow is as desired for the initial release.
Progress was made on the redesign of an existing event that aims to push the boundaries of what is possible within a single instance. The original was designed around combat, but as the game has grown and matured, the team are now able to tap into new methods and gameplay choices.
The team also focused on creating a faction focused on non-combat gameplay from the Star Citizens 1.0 plan.
Elsewhere, the Municipal Works is currently going through mission blockouts to get it into a first-playable state. Once the design is signed off, full production can begin.
Narrative
As mentioned in last month’s report, the Narrative team held a performance-capture session, which not only brought back a familiar face but also recorded lines for a revamped existing mission. They also captured content for NPCs encountered during refueling gameplay to allow them to expand the variety of voices heard in those missions.
The Narrative team also began adding a variety of contracts that will bring more gameplay to the ’verse, not only for upcoming events but for some expanded evergreen missions as well.
Additionally, they created lore for new harvestable flora, wrote scripts for several new mission providers (including solidifying the narrative of their organizations), and provided support to both the UI and Environment Art teams.
“Thanks to all the players reporting issues as they find them. The team has been knocking out recently discovered narrative bugs as quickly as possible, with many small quality-of-life fixes expected to make their way into Alpha 4.9.” Narrative Team
Online Technology
In May, the Online Services team continued their work on several key player-facing features, including the Social Chat (MVP) feature, which is being built to enable in-game text communication between players. Alongside this, the social-systems pipeline continued to grow, with friends, online presence, party viewer, and orgs each formally tracked as upcoming deliverables for future milestones.
The first iteration of Item Recovery was included in Alpha 4.8. The team is currently supporting this feature, with more improvements coming in the future. Planning also kicked off for the Maglock system as part of the Item Recovery feature set.
A significant focus in May was to address live game stability issues tied to the contract system. The team identified that the current contract system generates far too many database entries, causing overloads and performance instability for players. Two critical tasks were created to reduce the number of database entries and improve how contracts are filtered.
The team also tackled reliability improvements to mission rewards and is putting better diagnostic tools in place, making it faster to identify and fix issues with missions and contracts not appearing.
The Live Tools team continued to deliver improvements across all of their key tools while also shipping several notable releases.
For Hex, the team released version 3.39, which introduces new player support capabilities. Updates include improved entitlement tracking, an expanded account ownership view, and more.
A follow-up release, 3.39.1, kept Hex's blueprint data in sync with the latest services. Throughout the month, work continued on the Hex 4.0 redesign, including a new design system and UX foundations that will shape all future Hex modules.
On the Bootstrap side, the team continued reliability work throughout the month, addressing developer-facing issues like server failures, performance bottlenecks, and configuration problems. Technical planning for a full Bootstrap client overhaul was kicked off and is now moving from research to design and implementation planning.
R&D
May saw the R&D team implement tweakable (approximate) multi-scattering in gas clouds, similar to the multi-scatter solution used for planet clouds. This smoothly blends between forward and backward scattering (driving the phase function) depending on the visibility of the light source of given sample points.
Support began for look-up tables in the raymarcher to recolor gas clouds based on their local density. The raymarcher loop was further optimized by skipping significant sampling and lighting work at locations where density amounts to zero. Additional optimizations will speed up noise LOD calculations, as well as making the target opacity threshold of clouds configurable.
Furthermore, numerous fixes and improvements were made to the integration of an experimental temporal upsampler borrowed from planet clouds. Lastly, out-of-bound writes in the gas cloud raymarchers were fixed for Vulkan alongside a sporadic GPU hang due to the introduction on non-linear stepping, which was mentioned in April’s PU Report.