MOON COLLIDER
February has been quite a heavy planning month for Moon Collider. With the Cloud Imperium Frankfurt studio taking on some new members focused on FPS and AI, we spent quite a bit of time helping them get up to speed with the current state of things, figuring out new processes, and reworking our roadmap for features that we will be delivering for the various modules this year.
A lot of our time gets spent in planning and communication, and as you can imagine, with quite a small team here in Edinburgh that can have quite an impact on the amount of time we have to work on cool features. So the addition of Todd Papy and Francesco Roccucci means more dedicated resources at Cloud Imperium to help with the very difficult job of planning and prioritizing all of the AI features needed by the different Star Citizen modules.
We’re also expecting Francesco and Chris Nolan, both veteran AI behavior designers, to help get our FPS character behaviors up to an awesome level of polish over the coming months. Getting character combat behaviors right can be really time consuming, so we’re thrilled to have such talented people added to the Cloud Imperium team.
So, while we got a bit less engineering work done this month than we normally do, we think these additional AI resources for Star Citizen are going to make a huge difference in the coming months, allowing us to deliver higher quality AI faster, and that’s good news for all of us!
Design
We had a brief AI summit in Manchester this month to get Todd, Francesco and Chris up to speed on the current state of the AI. During that time we also took the opportunity to have discussions with designers for Squadron 42 and Arena Commander to figure out which AI features they’re needing most. It’s always really rewarding to sit down in the same room with designers and play through a level to see what is and isn’t working from their point of view.
Following the summit we had Francesco visit our Edinburgh office for several days for a lot of discussions about our feature roadmap and how best to prioritize across the different modules. This was also an important opportunity to help him get an in-depth understanding of our Kythera AI framework so that he will be able to help providing support to the rest of the Cloud Imperium team.
A lot of specific design discussions happened to look at ways to improve some areas of our AI framework, such as our behavior tree and higher level tasks systems; improvements to our cover system and how to streamline the workflow for level designers when setting up new areas; how to link different parts of a level together to allow AI to navigate with things like ladders or climbing up and jumping down; and a lot more. Expect to hear more about these features as we move from design to implementation over the next few months.
Engineering
Replacing our prototype smart object system with the more fully featured Usables system has been a big focus since the start of the year, and this month we got the first version of the new system into the hands of designers. The feedback so far has been good and you will be seeing the first results of this in the upcoming Social Module. Whenever you see NPCs interacting with objects in the world, that’s the Usables system in action, so keep an eye out for it!
Speaking of the Social Module, we’ve also been doing some work on improving the performance of our AI code to allow huge numbers of characters to be active at once while still retaining a good framerate. We did a bunch of profiling to see where the slowest parts of the code were, and luckily we’ve had a few easy wins so far that gave some pretty nice performance gains. It’s still early days for the persistent universe so we expect to be doing a lot more of this in the future as features progress, but for programmers, it’s always a joy to make a change to the code and see those milliseconds go down rather than up!
We’ve been making various improvements and doing fixes for Arena Commander 1.1, with a particular focus on the upcoming tutorial. Because of the semi-scripted nature of a tutorial, we’ve found designers needing to do things with ships that they haven’t had to do previously, and so we did some work to allow the designers to get the results they were after. For example, you’d think that if you’ve got well tuned AI flight behavior for ship to ship combat, then just making a ship fly slowly inside a hangar would be a piece of cake, right? Well, it turns out that AI tuned for high speed evasive maneuvers doesn’t do so well trying to fly really slow in a confined space, at least not without a bit of persuading.
For the tutorial, we also found that we needed to implement some special attack modes for ships that need to do something very specific in order to teach the player how to perform certain actions. So for example, we created a behavior that makes a ship just sit on the spot and aim at the player’s ship, and another that makes the AI fire a single missile. It’s not something you’d want to see in a frantic session of Vanduul Swarm, but in a tutorial context it’s just what you need.
We’re quite happy with what the ships are now able to do in the AC 1.1 tutorial, and we think the community are really going to enjoy this release.
The Wonderful World of Star Citizen Episode 1
COMMUNITY
Hello everybody! Assistant Community Manager Will here to bring you this month’s Community Report! February has been quite busy for the Communiteam. Based on your feedback we have continued to tweak all of our weekly shows, and have even created an entirely new one! We’ve also introduced new initiatives such as our #HelpTheHerald campaign. We are always listening to your feedback and appreciate it as we continue to try new things.
Shows
Each episode of Around the Verse we aim to try new things to improve the show. This month we changed our News from Around the Verse segment to include each studio discussing their weekly contributions. In addition, we’ve added two new segments titled Sandi Goes to Flight School and Empire Report. We are happy that these have been received well and we plan on making both Empire Report and Sandi Goes to Flight School re-occurring segments.
In our weekly stream, Reverse the Verse, we realized that our discussions focused on the Santa Monica team which wasn’t fair to our other offices. So we’ve now integrated the Austin and UK offices to take turns appearing on the show. This has led to a more diverse set of questions and we are happy to bring a new element to the stream.
Don’t worry, we didn’t forget 10 for the Chairman! We realized that you enjoyed seeing the images during our news segment in Around the Verse, so we’ve integrated that format into Chris’ answers. Additionally, the Sneak Peek segment in Around the Verse is a fan favorite so we’ve doubled our effort and we are proud to say that 10FTC now features a sneak peek as well.
This month we also debuted Wonderful World of Star Citizen. Hosted by the community’s own Disco Lando, this monthly show highlights videos, podcasts, and other amazing creations from the community. Feedback for the first episode has exceeded our expectations and we are certain that you will all enjoy the next episode.
Fan Videos
February has been an amazing month for fan videos. FiendishFeather has begun a new series titled Bulkheads. Inspired from the popular Red vs. Blue series, Bulkheads will feature two hapless citizens as the traverse the verse. While a bit sillier than his popular pirate video Pieces of Eight, we can’t wait to watch this series unfold.
Yearsonehundred, the creator of the original Imagine trailer, has returned and once again blown us away with his new video, The Fighter Pilot. The first entry in his new Star Citizen Career video series, The Fighter Pilot is a collaboration between multiple community members, including our favorite voice actor Trendane and musical guru Pedro Camacho. At less than one and a half minutes, this video is a must see for any Star Citizen out there.
February was quite a busy month for us, but we have much more planned for you all in March. We value your feedback and we continue use it to get better each and every week. Thanks and we’ll see you next month!
-Assistant Community Manager Will!
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