CLOUD IMPERIUM AUSTIN
Hi everyone!
February has absolutely flown by as the Austin team has been hard at work preparing multiple launches to Live and burning the midnight oil in preparation for March and April. We are looking forward to a variety of SXSW events here in Austin this month and spending time with the community who will be attending. Stay tuned for lots of exciting content coming your way in upcoming weeks and months. There are too many things to report in a summary, so here’s some real detail from the team!
Persistent Universe Team:
ART:
The month of February saw the art team in Austin get a lot of love. Our character team was featured on Around the Verse AND Meet the Devs, so everyone got to see just how awesome those guys are. Not only are they awesome people, but they are awesome artists as well! David and Billy have been polishing our characters for the upcoming FPS and Social Module releases while Megan has been working on defining the look and feel of what our NPC’s will look like on Terra Prime. We’ve also got a few new faces you’ll get to meet in the game come March. Look forward to seeing some pretty swanky styles when you land on this truly awesome landing zone.
Speaking of Terra, the legend himself Mark Skelton has been working with Behaviour to provide art direction for the ArcCorp, Terra, and Nyx landing zones. All three of these locations are extremely different from one another and it’s exciting to see the variety of locations taking shape. Mark has also been defining new architectural styles that will add even more diversity and flavor to the Persistent Universe in the future.
We’re all about props this month. With hundreds of props being created by RedHotCG, Virtuos, and our own internal artists, it is amazing to see the difference filling an environment with props makes. With the help of our artists, pretty soon our NPCs will be able to sit in chairs, drink from mugs, move crates, admire sculptures, play shuffleboard, and even mop a floor.
For every prop an NPC requires an animation to go along with it, and our animators have been working hard on implementing animations received from Imaginarium. We’ve got NPCs dancing, chilling against the wall, and chatting it up at the bar, among other things. Our animation team has also been fixing up the ship cockpits, as our recent skeleton improvements have required adjustments to the cockpits to allow for our character to fit properly. We’ve made progress in standardizing our cockpit layouts, bringing the total cockpit types down from 17 to 7! This will help us build ship cockpits more efficiently in the future.
DESIGN:
This month our artists and designers have been working on a major part of the Persistent Universe which many of you are chomping at the bit to try out: MINING! We’ve made major strides in solidifying the design for how mining will work in the PU and Tony Zurovec wrote up an awesome doc on the minutia of the occupation. If you missed the post on the website a while ago, you can find it HERE. Thanks to artwork from Ken Fairclough and Chris Olivia, as well as the concepts for the Orion created by George Hull; we are now able to visualize our first occupation to be developed by the PU team here in Austin.
Our design team has also been setting up NPC activities for the Social Module, fleshing out the shopping experience for Cubby Blast and Astro Armada, and making major updates to the Thruster Calculator, which will make it much easier to – you guessed it – calculate the thrust of our ships going forward. David Ladyman has received some major progress back from our linguists developing the alien languages for Star Citizen and is planning on running the first draft of the Vanduul language by Chris Roberts fairly soon.
ENGINEERING:
It was another great month for the PU programming team. The team braved a few days of freezing weather to ensure they did not miss a beat in working to bring you all one step closer to visiting your friends in our upcoming Social Module. And although they spent Valentine’s Days with their sweeties, many of them have reported that their hearts were elsewhere… infatuated with the awesome Star Citizen Community!
Working with our friends at Wyrmbyte we got an early iteration of our Universe Simulator up and running. Chris Roberts was “wowed” when we shared an early demo with him. The programming team also worked very closely with our DevOps team on our process manager. Never before have team members come together in such a well-oiled manner, and as a result an exciting revamp of our process manager spec is now in hand.
Progress towards the first iteration of multiplayer hangars is also looking swell. Our programmers have been working closely with our pals at Behaviour to get the first iteration of this feature up and running. While this will continue being improved upon and polished, we have reached the point where players can now visit their friends’ hangars! And if that’s not enough, we also have chat and emotes incoming. The boys here in ATX have co-mingled their efforts with Behaviour to get the base chat service in place, which they will continue to work on until we have a solid first iteration to provide to you.
Let’s make sure not forget our amazing programmers working on our AI tool sets. They have been working feverishly to create some of the most stunning AI tools out there, all in order to bring the Persistent Universe to life!
Finally, as an added bonus, the team has been able to get the ball really rolling in putting our plan together for real Player Persistence! The final week of this month we had an engineering “Meeting of the Minds” between our Austin and Santa Monica studios. March will be the month where the explosion of ideas that came out of this historic sync will begin to come to fruition.
Stay tuned for more updates next month, and until then be sure to enjoy the Star Citizen presentations at PAX East and SXSW—brought to you by the one and only Chris Roberts!
Live Operations:
QA :
Star Citizen QA has been keeping very busy this month testing releases 1.0.2 and 1.0.3. We are excited that we we’re able to include so many fixes and updates in these releases. We have also been busy testing the upcoming FPS Module. Glenn Kneale in our Manchester studio and Tyler Witkin in our Austin studio have done a great job ensuring the FPS Module is continually tested by the QA team. At the end of each day, they provide a full report on the state of the FPS Module, report any new issues found and provide relevant feedback. With help from DevOps, a new process was created to ensure that builds available to development are stable and able to be worked on. This process will help maintain developments’ ability to continue working without being hindered by an unstable build. QA has also been testing new features such as Matthew Delanty who has been working very closely with designer Luke Pressley on a new tutorial mode. Jeffrey Pease, Andrew Hesse and Melissa Estrada continued their tests with the lobby, ships, and the Sandbox Editor respectively while Steven Brennon has continued to gather very valuable feedback from all of you guys. This feedback is incredibly helpful to the team.
We have made an important change in the Austin team: Gerard Manzanares has officially been promoted to QA Lead in the Austin studio. Gerard will be responsible for leading QA operations in Austin as well as maintaining Austin QA coordination with our counterpart QA teams around the globe.
For the month of March, QA is looking forward to PAX East, SXSW, and releasing Arena Commander 1.1.0. Some of us from our Austin studio will be present at the SXSW Gaming Expo. If you happen to see us feel free to stop by and say hi.
IT/Operations:
February marks another awesome month for the IT/Operations team. IT was able to complete a major internet upgrade for our office in Germany. This project was headed up by our UK IT Manager, Hassan with support from members of the Austin, TX IT staff. Upgrades included bringing in a much needed fiber upgrade providing them with increased bandwidth and a major improvement to their firewall and VPN capabilities. Additional work was done to improve the studio’s internal network and server infrastructure.
In Santa Monica, IT Manager, Dennis has been hard at work deploying new hardware and software upgrades to his team while at the same time evaluating and documenting numerous hardware solutions ensuring that all aspects of Star Citizen function correctly on the new technology. Throughout his testing Dennis enjoys going in game and shooting it out with anyone who’s playing in Arena Commander at the time. Keep an eye out for him.
The Austin team continued its relentless pursuit for better performance in the build/development cycle. Storage was expanded again to keep up with the furious pace of the rock star development team and this allowed IT to implement new methods of optimizing storage utilization by the build servers for performance. By poring through stacks of analytics we’re already able to see marked improvements, but, we’re still not finished. Testing of new data layouts and storage formats are showing some very interesting results. Working in concert with the DevOps team, IT also deployed a completely revamped game delivery system which allows us to get test builds out to all the connected studios in North America and Europe in a fraction of the time it took before. What used to take hours to transfer now takes minutes.
February has been exciting but we can’t wait to get out and meet some of the citizens at PAX East and SXSW in March.
