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PU Monthly Report
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PU Monthly Report
June was a busy month at CIG, with most teams making final updates toward Alpha 4.2 and upcoming content. Read on for all the details of last month’s development, including the latest from the Ships, AI Tech, and Core Gameplay teams.
AI Content
June saw AI Content meeting with the directors and Combat AI team to keep pushing the development of the updated combatant wildline script. This new line set covers both FPS and dogfighting NPCs and provides a much-needed update to the enemies players have been fighting for years.
The team is currently looking into leveraging dynamic conversations (while keeping the line sets concise enough) to potentially offer gang-specific voicepacks. However, conversations and prototyping are required before they can begin capturing this content.
Outside of combat, the team updated civilian behaviors to utilize additional lines that haven’t been used yet and to make them feel more reactive in more environments. Finally, AI Tech supported the integration of new mission providers into upcoming content.
AI (Features)
Last month, AI Features completed their tasks for the irradiated valakkar, which made its debut in the PU. This was the culmination of months of hard work by cross-disciplinary teams, including AI Features and Tech, Animation, Gameplay Programming, Art, VFX, Audio, Design, and Weapons.
“We’re really enjoying the lovely feedback that the community has given fighting this giant. It’s making us very excited for future creatures and encounters to come.” AI Features
The latter part of the month was focused on bug fixing, including edge cases where valakkar didn’t emerge, despawned too soon, or failed to spit during its emerge animation.
Improvements were also made to the juvenile and adult valakkar, including changes to their positioning to prevent overlap and the better handling of unreachable targets. This also informed a fix for kopion chasing targets that become unreachable. The team then continued to develop upcoming creatures, the details of which will be shared in the coming months.
Major and minor bugs were fixed for Human combat alongside additional behavior work. This included aiming improvements to consider what part of the enemy is visible. For example, aiming specifically at the head if the chest is obstructed. Support was also added for NPCs using advanced weapon types, such as beam weapons or lasers that can overheat.
Updates were made to NPCs searching and looting ammo and weapons, the medical animation flow was polished to remove ‘pops,’ and more control was given to the designers over friendly-fire parameters.
Fixes were made to perception, audio propagation, combat investigation, and grenades. For the latter, updates were made to the targeting cooldown timer and collision checks when throwing grenades, while a fix was made to ensure that dropped grenades always explode.
AI (Game Intelligence Development Team)
The Game Intelligence Development team started the month with meetings relating to StarScript, Mission System 2.0, the commentator model, the density profiler, entity scripting, Mannequin, and the animation system.
Progress was also made on the prototype for Mission System v2 - implementation of the outline header and dashboard began. The visuals are evolving and adapting gradually to the limitations of Qt programming. As part of this, more icons were created to represent each mission component.
Additionally, the team continued to fix small bugs and work on some of the features requested by the game designers to improve StarScript.
AI (Tech)
Throughout June, the AI tech team provided bug fixes and support for the Alpha 4.2 release, including optimizing how navigation-mesh regeneration accounts for navigation links.
Since last year, the ‘island’ calculation (a way to determine which areas are reachable from the perspective of an NPC) was split into chunks for use by the planetary navmesh. Related bugs were investigated that caused some NPCs to not be able to find a path from an individual zone to planetary terrain. They also massively optimized the searching of navmesh around a point.
AI Tech converted the internal data structure that points at exclusion volumes or cost modifiers into AABBTree to quickly access and exclude unnecessary elements from the queries.
They then increased the radius used by NPCs to generate navmesh on planets to provide a better valakkar fight experience. For example, each variant of the creature needs to be able to move large distances around the world, with the recent amends providing improved generation granularity.
A way to mark up brushes (geometries that aren’t entities) was implemented to ensure they aren’t walkable for NPCs. This was necessary to avoid the use of unnecessary navigation exclusion volumes when artists want to prevent NPCs from walking over specific objects.
Ongoing work continued to update 3D pathfinding to use the new voxelizer approach. Alongside this, the team now has full support for quantum-boosting energy usage to efficiently use speeds when flying in space.
For StarScript, the ‘export as image’ functionality now supports exporting multiple graphs at the same time. Numerous other features progressed that will eventually be used directly in StarScript too.
In other work, the ability for NPCs to react to radar pings was added. Now, they will either consider a ping as a disturbance to investigate or an active event to bring them into combat.
Finally for AI Tech, fixes for NPCs driving vehicles were added, which is a feature the team hope to add to the PU at some point.
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Animation
Animation spent the month supporting the irradiated valakkar alongside another new creature for later this year. They also progressed with animations for pre-combat and social-area usables that will promote more stealth gameplay opportunities against NPCs.
Facial Animation supported multiple releases throughout June. They began by finalizing the content required for Alpha 4.2.1, including new lines for Stows, Walton, and the additional NPCs in the defend-location missions. They then worked alongside the Narrative and Mo-cap teams to capture new mission-giver content for Alpha 4.3 and 4.3.1. The team are currently processing the recorded content as the release dates approach.
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Art (Ships)
In the UK, the Anvil Paladin continued through greybox, with additional artists being moved onto it as their other tasks were completed to help prepare for its July gate review.
Pre-production began on the Gatac Railen, which will continue between other tasks ahead of the ship officially entering production later this year.
Some of the team moved onto the Drake Ironclad, with some areas receiving layout alterations to improve traversal alongside refinement to the modular Drake kit.
Work progressed on five unannounced vehicles: two completed their whitebox phase and are now well into greybox, with focus on details around the hull. Another is in the final stages of production and is receiving the finishing touches and bug fixes ahead of its release. Another vehicle from a prominent manufacturer entered production and is currently approaching its whitebox review. A new variant also entered pre-production, which the team states “may have the record for the fastest vehicle through the production pipeline.”
In North America, the RSI Apollo Medivac and Triage reached the LOD0 phase, with the devs ensuring the modular medical bays swap out and behave as expected.
Following the release of the Esperia Prowler Utility, the team tackled some bugs, with fixes due to land in Alpha 4.2.1.
The RSI Perseus approached its greybox gate review. As such, a lot of work was done to prepare anything that animates, such as the torpedo launchers, for the downstream teams.
Lastly for Ships, the Drake Kraken entered pre-production, with the team identifying areas from the original concept that need further attention to bring to modern standards. Full production will begin later this year.
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Community
June began with a celebration of diversity and culture as the team launched Show Us Your Colors 2025. This was followed by support for Alien Week 2955, which included a Q&A for the Esperia Prowler Utility and the Wikelo’s Nine Tastes Contest, where players embraced Banu culinary traditions through imaginative alien-inspired dishes.
The team also supported the launch of Alpha 4.2, publishing a Patch Watch to spotlight important updates not covered on the Roadmap along with a catch-all post.
June also marked International Bar Citizen Weekend, where the team celebrated with the community across Frankfurt, Montreal, Austin, and Manchester. Attendees received this year's exclusive Bar Citizen gift, the Holographic Vanduul Skull. This exclusive in-game gift will be available at every Bar Citizen World Tour stop later this year.
“A huge thank you to everyone who joined us! Meeting so many passionate and creative members in person was truly inspiring. Your stories and support continue to drive us forward.” Community Team
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Bar Citizen World Tour then made stops in Lyon, Toronto, and Copenhagen, as the team continued to meet and engage with local communities around the globe. The team also collected and reviewed CitizenCon Direct Watch Party submissions from those planning to host a watch party on October 11. More details will be shared soon as the list is finalized.
Evergreen tasks continued, including This Week in Star Citizen, the Roadmap Update and Roundup, the Arena Commander schedule update, and collating several mountains of feedback and ensuring they were delivered to appropriate developers. The team also completed tasks to prepare for the Foundation Festival and Ship Showdown, both set to begin in July, alongside ongoing work for CitizenCon Direct this October. In addition, submissions were collected for the Org Spotlight Comm-Link, which highlights player organizations during Foundation Festival.
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Core Gameplay
With the new Storm Breaker content, the Core Gameplay teams added several updates to radiation, hazard areas, and damage-over-time handling. New IFCS logic was also added for storm clouds.
Most of the teams contributed to the apex valakkar encounter, including its appearance and how it interacts with the players. The teams were also involved in the new Argo ATLS IKTI, including enabling freight elevators to support the various power suit variants.
The recently added points of interest uncovered several unexpected issues during internal playtests and the PTU, though the teams worked hard to resolve them for release. One major challenge was managing the new locations’ population and corpse control without causing a significant impact on performance.
Several freight elevator fixes were made across multiple missions, while improvements and bug fixes were made for radiation.
Mission Design
Last month, Mission Design worked to close out the Storm Breaker sandbox activity for release.
For the upcoming Alpha 4.2.1 patch, they expanded the ‘infiltrate and defend’ suite to only use Foxwell as the mission giver and expanded its location pool. They also fixed the ‘recover cargo’ archetype and created an FPS version.
Elsewhere, the team are looking to expand the ‘ship battles’ mission suite with a new escort-based archetype. For this, players will either escort a ship to a hangar or from a hangar to a safe range where it can quantum jump.
Work then continued on content for upcoming patches, including moving generic contracts over to guilds and factions, which is needed for Reputation v2.
Finally for Mission Design, the devs are investigating an issue with mission generation where it appears that there are not enough contracts for everyone, which is likely caused by Server Meshing.
Narrative
Following Alpha 4.2’s release, the Narrative team focused on the next two upcoming patches, which will feature a variety of new missions. This included creating new contracts, mission-provider dialogue, and environmental story detail for a narrative-rich gameplay location.
The team held a performance-capture session to record mission dialogue and numerous audio logs to be discovered by players. Additionally, the team supported the mission designers in adding several new combat contracts along with a refactor of several older missions.
Longer term, Narrative have been solidifying the next major story arc as the mission content comes more into focus - the team are striving to ensure that the stories the players will experience align closely with the gameplay objectives. Part of this new story will introduce a unique hostile faction.
In support of Alien Week, Narrative released a handful of new and expanded Galactapedia articles that focused on the strange fauna and lifeforms found in the PU.
Online Technology
The Online Services team continued to work on the ‘item imprint system’- design aspects are being discussed, technical documentation is being written, and service development began.
The team also began preliminary discussions for the upcoming ‘instancing service’ in collaboration with other teams. They’re currently defining the objectives and high-level technical details to estimate and plan the work properly.
Furthermore, the team discussed Inventory ID Enforcement on the Inventory API. The idea of this project is to ensure that the Inventory API only accepts calls that affect a specific inventory ID. This would set up the foundation for the upcoming Entitygraph Global Database Sharding.
The team also worked on various improvements and bug fixes to provide a better experience for players.
The Live Tools team reworked the filtering and sorting functionality of the moderation tool, significantly enhancing the overall user experience. They also addressed technical debt and introduced quality-of-life improvements, such as quick access to various tools linked directly to game instances.
In parallel, testing began for the new MTL development infrastructure, which offloads computational load from individual developer machines, making day-to-day work smoother and more efficient. Additionally, improvements continued for the crash handler, making it more reliable and less prone to errors.
The Network team focused on bug fixing and stability updates. Steady progress is currently being made toward Dynamic Server Meshing, which is also crucial for the successful implementation of instancing.
R&D
Gas cloud rendering was further refined based on the improvements implemented in March. To get additional detail and improve distance read, support for an extra erosion layer was added. Controls were also added to boost intermediate cloud density during the shaping and erosion process to prevent clouds from thinning out too much. The goal is to preserve the overall shape of the original VDB as much as possible with details added at the cloud interface. The previous density blending step was replaced by a new merging step that combines shaped and original VDB density. This fixes visual artifacts caused by the blending step and helps to preserve details. Lastly, edge albedo control was made aware of the cloud's density environment to limit darkening to shaped regions without the presence of density coming from the original VDB. All improvements were made available to both the PU and Squadron 42.
Elsewhere, the performance of planet cloud rendering for cameras in orbit was increased. Also, night-sky rendering was improved. Previously, it incorrectly included Mie scattering with regards to the fully occluded sun and produced undesired fake halos (especially when looking at the night sky from orbit). This is now fixed.
Furthermore, help was provided to fix the reflection of atmosphere content on water surfaces that was too dark under some conditions.
VFX
The VFX Code and Art teams worked on several things for Alpha 4.2. For example, the irradiated valakkar received bespoke animation and new irradiated VFX, while the weather VFX was refined and increased to make the event even more tense. The Argo ATLS IKTI also received new impact and surface effects.
Quelle:
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