Star Citizen Monthly Report July/August 2024

Ship Updates – Last month we learnt that CIG were working on 7 unannounced ships/vehicles this month they said: Ship Art have been working toward new milestones for the vehicles currently in production, including the RSI Polaris, Zeus, and three unannounced ships.
Production of three new vehicles kicked off too alongside two new concepts.

We are expecting the Zeus (at least CL & ES) as part of 4.0’s release.
The Polaris is also planned to be here later this year.
Expect that most of those ships will be for 4.0 OR the IAE.
Tho we expect a new Aegis Ship for 3.24.

The Gameplay Features teams progressed with a wide variety of features, beginning with ‘charge and drain.’ They added networking support to the wider feature & for bringing unpowered items back to life, implemented weapon rollback, and supported UI implementation. Progress was made on the ‘overheat’ mechanic, improving ways to tune heat values. All energy weapons will have the potential to overheat.

Tasks were also completed for light amplification (basically night vision), adding control hints to toggle it on/off on supported scopes, while bugs were fixed for the fire extinguisher and quantum travel for Server Meshing.

Gameplay Features continued improving control surfaces, addressing various tuning issues, while zero-g traversal markers were implemented.

For the multi-function display (MFD) rework, comms list, hail target, and comm-call functionality were added. Work also began on weapon groups to allow players to switch between group presets.

Significant progress was made on jump points, with Gameplay Features providing Design with the ability to define exit locations, which will also have a physics force to push players away from the exit. Players will now also get pulled into the tunnel one by one when making a jump.

Improvements were also made to tunnel generation. For example, the team now has radial control over eight-way logic, better control-point tension parameters, more accurate section probability, and improved stability. The tunnels are less prone to self-intersection at corners too. Alongside this, updates were made to the jump UI.

Engineering gameplay also saw progress, including making fully distorted items consume resources despite not being functional. Support was added for Master Modes too, with quantum drives now going fully offline in SMC mode and shields going offline in NAV mode. The Engineering screens and MFD progressed, with tasks beginning on power presets and the assignment UI. Life support and fuel information were added, while the power display was improved.

The Radar & Scanning feature progressed, with Gameplay Features adding delta signatures to the HUD and MFD and moving the jammer from the signature system to the radar component for easier integration with other systems.

More info was added to the charge-scan UI, including maximum held charge, a notification when attempting to scan during cooldown, and fadeout and collapse animations. The overall HUD was polished and decluttered too. For example, nameplates only show for targeted ships, distance only appears for targeted and pinned ships, target information shows for scanned targets, and how long target information is shown was decreased.

Audio signature emissions were added, while the devs began implementing FPS ping counter-play, with players being detected and highlighted if they FPS ping depending on various factors.

The new vehicle annunciator system was added, which supports power, weapons, thrusters, shields, proximity, radar, quantum, missiles, coolers, and shots.

Work continues on the mission refactor, the team added the option to spawn objectives at random points near planets, both inside and outside the atmosphere. Alongside this, the ability to attach objectives to players was added, contract generation was improved, and the new Contract Broker service was implemented. The latter was created by the Online Services team and enables full contract details and properties to be procedurally generated client-side from contract definition.

Further support was given to Blockade Runner, while various issues with the UI were fixed. The contract manager’s abandoned button behavior was extended to hauling missions too.

Various updates were made for the upcoming cargo release. For example, they added search functionality to the item bank and freight-elevator kiosk, adjustments to auto-loading times based on box size, and debugging functionality to the instanced interior system.

Mission Design continued working on unannounced content alongside a suite that uses individual features to create a complex form of repair missions. For the latter, they identified key structures that would be used to ensure a location stays up and running and made them breakable.

Using information gathered from cargo gameplay, work began on resource gathering. The current focus is on emergent gameplay that pulls resources from the verse, starting with mining. For example, if a location requests a specific resource, the player can choose how to acquire it, be it mining, buying, or piracy.

Alongside this, progress was made on the mission-system refactor, which will change how missions are offered and futureproof the wider system. It also creates an opportunity to fix legacy issues and folder structures and reassess existing missions. They’ll also be able to implement new features into the mission system to allow greater control and create more MMO-style features and content.

The Economy team have been progressing with their tasks for Pyro, including the outer rings. They also worked on a refactor that will allow them to create and modify shops in a more scalable manner.

For cargo, balancing was done to the price and time of autoloading to give players the choice between manually loading or paying for convenience and speed. A balance pass was also done on vehicle components, including new life-support systems and jump drives.

Finally, the devs continued to develop their understanding of player profiles to ensure that each career is profitable according to the long-term vision of the economy.

The Narrative team have been working to support development for Alpha 4.0. This included a mixture of mission text, brainstorming ideas for additional mission content, and delving into some of the various locations being placed by the Environment and Design teams.

The narrative designers spent time overseeing the presence of social AI in various locations, making sure the areas are not only marked up correctly but the general “vibe” and feeling of the area is accurately represented. An initiative was also started within the team to overhaul some of the social spaces to better reflect the intended tone of the location.

On the Star Citizen 1.0 front, Narrative worked closely with Design to define mission providers and aspects of reputation. Work also started on the initial scripting and development of additional location stories for players to discover.

A variety of lore content was published to the website, including a pair of Whitley’s Guides for the Vulcan and the Carrack, as well as another batch of Galactapedia entries.

In-Game Branding continued wrapping up tasks for jump points and the Pyro system, polishing content and ensuring everything fits the environment.

The UI designers and artists worked on the in-game visuals and functionality for the resource network UI and completed the final polishing tasks for jump points. For vehicles, the team replaced the old Flash MFDs and set up new HUDs, resulting in a cleaner and less cluttered flight experience.

The UI team’s tech programmers worked on performance improvements to speed up the frame rate on various parts of the UI.

The VFX team continued to support several effects-heavy features, including jump points and dynamic fire.

They also continued to work on acidic caves and completed their tasks for the RSI Zeus and another unnamed vehicle. Tasks were also kicked off for two new weapons.

The Online Services team collaborated intensively with the Gameplay and UI teams to introduce a significant quality-of-life enhancement to freight kiosks: a search bar. This new feature allows for quick item searches by name, improving the efficiency of locating items within large inventories. They also implemented optimizations to hangar and shard stow mechanics to prevent issues and facilitate recovery processes.

The team working on potential mission and marker system features for Alpha 4.0 visited the Manchester studio, where they collaborated with the gameplay teams to ensure the seamless integration of these upcoming features.

In preparation for Alpha 4.0, Online Services began developing a new player-trade service. This will enable players to transfer funds amongst themselves without being subject to the same game server’s authority, paving the way for Server Meshing.

Lastly, the team focused on bug fixes, stabilizing the Alpha 3.24 release, and finalizing the social-services refactor. This extensive project, which Online Services have been working on for the past few months, is now ready to go live, marking a significant milestone for the team.

The Live Tools team worked on new core features for the Hex tool. The main goal of this is to provide better management of roles and permissions, streamline workflows between different tools, and enable the ability to perform bulk actions.

The team is also improving other internal tools, such as the error-reporting pipeline, with the implementation of new technical architecture. They’re currently providing the necessary support and maintenance to its users.

The AI Features team worked on a combination of fixes and new functionality, including an issue requiring a usable to have an interactable component. A problem was also solved with stance not being updated, causing issues with AI exiting cover. This bug was caused by conflicting changes between Squadron 42 and Star Citizen when merging features.

The team solved problems with tactical-query system conditions silently failing without setting results, which led to uninitialized memory bugs. For example, when running the ‘reachable,’ condition, it occasionally returned a ‘true’ result when the point was not reachable because the result variable had not been initialized as false. This was blocking the testing of the cover hit-reactions test level.

An issue with vison raycasting allowing NPCs to see through buildings was rectified alongside bugs with NPCs using the Multi-Tool, including one giving them infinite ammunition in Repair mode. The team also added dynamic object handling to the vision component to fix vision raycasts and entities from being blocked when doors change states. The handling of situation changes during ‘aimed at’ events were improved too.

New functionality was developed to support and restrict movement within assigned schedule combat areas, including being able to set up schedule areas and tags through the editor rather than just through the schedule. This allows the designers to more carefully control fights by giving the AI areas of interest, in a similar way to the existing tech for defend and attack areas, but on a broader scale.

The AI team also added a significant piece of new functionality – AI groups. This enables perception data to be shared between AI within the same group, giving the designers more control over how NPCs are brought into fights and how they work together.

Elsewhere, the team reviewed and made improvements to how AI use wildlines, including adding new combat-communication wildlines, such as surrendering, grenade reactions and throwing, investigation, hit reactions, reloading, and perception reactions.

A script was created to check duplicate and unused communication names in pursuit of the gold-standard wildline setup.

For AI Tech, the team continued working on the AI vision and movement systems for Server Meshing. This will allow NPCs to transition from one server to another without losing their previous context.

Various optimizations were made too, including to the ‘observable’ and ‘vision’ components and to collision avoidance when NPCs fly ships and drive ground vehicles. Updates were also made to the tactical-point system queries used by Ship AI behaviours.

Character Art team begin work on utility armour. They also progressed with specialist armors, supported requests for the Character Customizer, and worked through art debt for loot items.

The Character Concept Art team explored new designs for fauna, while the Hair team progressed with additional hairstyles.