View source for Comm-Link:Monthly Report - June 2015

Summer is here (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) but we aren’t on vacation: big things are happening at CIG! Watching from the inside, it’s gratifying to see the moving parts that will form Star Citizen starting to come together. Important pieces of long-talked-about technology, like large world maps, are coming online internally and there’s an air of excitement among the development teams as the reality that a lot of what we’ve been planning for and working towards is finally happening sets in. We’re eager to share our progress with you, which means a push to get not just the Star Marine FPS module out, but to start sharing more about multicrew and the persistent world. Watch this space! As always, we’ve asked our project leads to put together individual reports for the community to let you know exactly what every part of the company has been doing. Read on!

== CIG SANTA MONICA ==

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Hey everyone! It’s been an amazing month chalked full of exciting work here in sunny Santa Monica. We love sharing with you everything we’ve been working on so enjoy and always let us know if you have any questions or thoughts!

=== Engineering ===

Our engineering team has been really busy this month. Everything from datastore clean up to the new character material system creation to large world updates. So let’s dig in:

We did some early implementation of the vehicle parameters where we were off loading the vehicles from parsing an xml on every spawn to parsing a single xml once and using it from then on to build a vehicle. Also, the only way we knew how to build a ship is to spawn it then look at what it contains. Now, other systems can just look up the parameters to build out a ship. We no longer need to spawn every ship below the hangar which was a massive change. We also had lots of integration bug fixes for FPS & Arena Commander. We continued working on the Radar 2.0 system where we moved the system from entity-only-based to practically anything the designers need to show on the HUD. The back end work is built, now we need to change HUD and other vehicle components to handle those objects so the designers can go nuts! We also did a lot of vehicle code clean up by deleting unused code which sped up a lot of the slow bits but this is going to be an ongoing process.

UI has been working tremendously hard on upcoming ship designs and implementation. Specifically, the glitch effects and boot up for the Vanduul. We reviewed a proposal for improved cockpit interaction and began preparation for HUD to support different seat actions and roles.

We’ve been doing some datastore cleanup, removing duplicated code, unifying different spread out code into single pass, and began preparation for Multicrew spawning/MP hangars. We separated object spawning from player spawning to move Hangar loading into level loading phase.

We’ve also been working on multi-layer material system. The goal is to end up with a fixed library of base materials that are blended together (up to 4 layers) to create more complex materials with minimal draw calls. Texture library and core shader functionality are mostly done, now working on the base material library that would bridge the render resources with the blended materials.

On the AI side, we’ve been doing a lot of ship bug fixing, particularly in regards to the pilot an AI ship creates and maintains. We also did a bit of work on the “defend target” wingmen command, creating an AI ship aspect that keeps track of nearby threats so that escorting ships will know what to attack.

On the Large World side, we fixed various trigger area issues in LW maps such as removed the +/- 16km limit for all the trigger areas and additional boundary conditions fix-up. We did a bit of interface clean-up for Matrix34 / Quat and established the prerequisite to make the rotational part of all those primitives to float. We also fixed the position info bar and GOTO position dialog and increased camera move speed in Sandbox while authoring LW maps. Lastly, we finished thread-safe texture loading with thread-safe shader parsing and thread-safe shader resource creation almost done. Phew, we had a great month and are looking forward to more!

=== Design ===

The design team here are keeping incredibly busy with all the upcoming ships, modes, gameplay needs, and so on. One of the bigger focuses for us was on the Genesis Starliner. We wanted to make sure we thought everything through to be ready to bring this awesome ship to you. We had a lot of work to get through this month such as establishing the initial gameplay balance plan which includes potential updates to stats, features, game modes, hud, controls, missiles, etc. Here are some of the in-depth details of this month: