There are some interesting embedded videos e.g. with Levski Station NPC animations. And of course some 20 pages of detailed descriptions what they various studios are working on.
With the SQ42 stuff to be shown in October it looks like a lot of things are coming together.
Cleaned this thread up. Let's stay on topic. Attacking others with accusations of being a shill (or troll) is not allowed. If you've got an issue with a user, get in touch with me privately.
Anyway, on the update 2.6 stuff, the evocati group was expanded today but they aren't with 2.6 on their hands yet. Usually once they get it, the PTU is 1-2 weeks away.
Anyway, on the update 2.6 stuff, the evocati group was expanded today but they aren't with 2.6 on their hands yet. Usually once they get it, the PTU is 1-2 weeks away.
Maybe, but they didn't get it yet, so 2.6 could be months away. As a wise man said once: "It's a matter of weeks not months".
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it. The cake is a lie.
Anyway, on the update 2.6 stuff, the evocati group was expanded today but they aren't with 2.6 on their hands yet. Usually once they get it, the PTU is 1-2 weeks away.
It could be a year. SQ42 was predicted in 2016 (after SC was predicted in 2014). Obviously 2016 was a farce (or possibly a lie to sell ships). Will 2017 be another farce to sell ships?
This past week has been a very busy one, with everyone across the company heads down with the push to get Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 released to you. The help of the Evocati has been invaluable, identifying bugs for us to smash and giving us critical game balance feedback. We had hoped to able to go to Live today but there are still some final UI elements that need to be finished and we still have a few serious bugs being tracked down and fixed.
We're circling a PTU candidate which will go to the Evocati later today, and, if this is successful, we will be pushing it out to a wider PTU test over the weekend so we aren’t too far off!
If you’re interested in the remaining tasks and how we tracked from last week please visit the project schedule page for a more detailed breakdown.
Today is our Holiday Livestream, where we will dive a bit deeper in what’s in 2.6, including showing the bigger Star Marine map in an epic faceoff between our US and EU studios!
There’s a huge amount of new functionality and content in 2.6. It represents a good portion of the last 4 months of the work that the entire company has been doing in our main development branch and moves us significantly closer towards 3.0.
Star Marine, the dedicated FPS game mode, is the big headline, but we also revamped the whole flight model in Star Citizen. This makes it more accessible for new players, but maintains nuance and complexity for veteran pilots. Eight new ships are flyable in 2.6, including the massive Caterpillar, which is a sight to behold! Arena Commander has been given some love too, with tweaks to the scoring, new pickups and VFX. There is a completely new front-end and UI that improves lobby flow for Arena Commander and Star Marine and introduces the ability to customize loadouts for your character and ships, as well as check out where you stand on the Community leaderboards. Finally, there are quite a few new missions in the mini PU, a ship graveyard to explore and a bar in Grim HEX to hang out in!
In anticipation of today's Live Stream, I did want to address one thing that I have been seeing speculation on in the forums: whether or not today's Live Stream will feature the Squadron 42 Vertical Slice.
After we made the decision before CitizenCon that the Squadron 42 vertical slice wasn’t ready to be shown publically, we spent some time on reviewing how far off we were and what we wanted to achieve in order to be comfortable showing a full chapter of S42 gameplay. After all the effort we expended for CitizenCon, we didn’t want to spend additional developer time polishing intermediate solutions if it wasn’t going towards the final product. A slick demo isn’t that helpful if it pushes back the finished game, so we decided that the priority should be completing full systems over getting the vertical slice into a showable state.
Item 2.0, Subsumption AI, Subsumption Mission System and asynchronous Object Container Streaming are all core systems that will power Squadron 42. In addition, there is some significant low level animation and lighting tech that we need to finish up to realize the goal of real time player interactions and conversations at a level that would previously only be possible with pre-rendered cinematics. We want moving around and talking to the crew to be as fluid and look as good as pre-rendered cut scenes from other games.
Finally, we wanted to be able to focus the team on getting 2.6 out the door and knew we didn’t have much time left in the year to do this (as hard as it is to believe CitizenCon was only 9 weeks ago, which isn’t very long in development terms). One of the lessons we learned from the last CitizenCon was that by attempting to show both the VS and Homestead, we overloaded our pipeline. Even with a team of our size, working on two big deliverables for the same release window becomes problematic because things can take longer or turn out more complicated than expected, and when there are tricky-to-solve bugs or performance issues, we need to assign our top developers, which usually ends up being longer than we like and takes them away from core tech development, pushing back the schedule on later releases. Last year’s release of 2.0 and the 3.0 preview at Gamescom worked so well, because there was a clear priority and everyone came together with a singular focus to deliver them on the ascribed dates.
Since CitizenCon we’ve been working towards 2.6 as our priority, with Squadron 42 core tech being second priority, followed by 3.0 development. Almost all Squadron 42 core tech is also needed for 3.0 and the aspects that aren’t, like Networking, have their own team who don’t get distracted by Squadron as it’s a single player game.
So while it may be disappointing not to see something this year on Squadron 42, I believe it’s the best choice for the long term good of both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. It’s critical that we focus on finishing up the core systems we’ve designed to handle the needs of both games, as without them, other parts of the development team are blocked from finalizing key gameplay.
It is all of your support and patience that allows us to make difficult decisions like this and we greatly appreciate it as it is allowing us to create what we believe will be a very special set of games in Squadron 42 and Star Citizen.
One thing that I think helps to understand the challenges of working on such a big complex project in the open is the visibility into our internal schedules. Sharing the 2.6 schedule was an experiment that a lot of people internally were very worried about but now everyone agrees it was the right move as transparency helps build trust.
As such we will be applying the same visibility to 3.0 and ultimately Squadron 42, although it will take a little time to get them ready for public consumption. We are still in the process of finalizing sub tasks and getting updated bids on the tasks from the appropriate team members, and this in turn has been slowed down by their focus on getting 2.6 finished.
For now, please join us for the live stream to have some fun with the devs and let’s celebrate all the great stuff we have now in Star Citizen 2.6, as there’s a lot of it! -- Chris Roberts
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
The rest of the bits on the procedural terrain / base, it's looking very good. Hopefully they get a nice variety of spawns on planets to have a decent exploration. GG Germans!
Comments
The new Monthly Studio Report June 2016 is available.
Pictures of each team of all 4 studios included.
Have fun
Monthly Report for July 2016 is out there now.
Plans for Alpha 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 laid out, as well as GamesCom news.
Have fun
Monthly Report for August 2016
There are some interesting embedded videos e.g. with Levski Station NPC animations.
And of course some 20 pages of detailed descriptions what they various studios are working on.
With the SQ42 stuff to be shown in October it looks like a lot of things are coming together.
Have fun
Have fun
So one could expect the October update between 4th-9th Nov.
Have fun
Anyway, on the update 2.6 stuff, the evocati group was expanded today but they aren't with 2.6 on their hands yet. Usually once they get it, the PTU is 1-2 weeks away.
When you have cake, it is not the cake that creates the most magnificent of experiences, but it is the emotions attached to it.
The cake is a lie.
More in depth information on procedural generation, biomes, water, 64 bit universe etc.
Have fun
Monthly CIG studio report October 2016
Interesting info on planetary surface outposts included.
Have fun
So It may be safe to assume 3.0 is to implement Arccorp on the PU without separate loadings.
Monthly CIG studio report November 2016
Have fun
Greetings Citizen.
This past week has been a very busy one, with everyone across the company heads down with the push to get Star Citizen Alpha 2.6 released to you. The help of the Evocati has been invaluable, identifying bugs for us to smash and giving us critical game balance feedback. We had hoped to able to go to Live today but there are still some final UI elements that need to be finished and we still have a few serious bugs being tracked down and fixed.
We're circling a PTU candidate which will go to the Evocati later today, and, if this is successful, we will be pushing it out to a wider PTU test over the weekend so we aren’t too far off!
If you’re interested in the remaining tasks and how we tracked from last week please visit the project schedule page for a more detailed breakdown.
Today is our Holiday Livestream, where we will dive a bit deeper in what’s in 2.6, including showing the bigger Star Marine map in an epic faceoff between our US and EU studios!
There’s a huge amount of new functionality and content in 2.6. It represents a good portion of the last 4 months of the work that the entire company has been doing in our main development branch and moves us significantly closer towards 3.0.
Star Marine, the dedicated FPS game mode, is the big headline, but we also revamped the whole flight model in Star Citizen. This makes it more accessible for new players, but maintains nuance and complexity for veteran pilots. Eight new ships are flyable in 2.6, including the massive Caterpillar, which is a sight to behold! Arena Commander has been given some love too, with tweaks to the scoring, new pickups and VFX. There is a completely new front-end and UI that improves lobby flow for Arena Commander and Star Marine and introduces the ability to customize loadouts for your character and ships, as well as check out where you stand on the Community leaderboards. Finally, there are quite a few new missions in the mini PU, a ship graveyard to explore and a bar in Grim HEX to hang out in!
In anticipation of today's Live Stream, I did want to address one thing that I have been seeing speculation on in the forums: whether or not today's Live Stream will feature the Squadron 42 Vertical Slice.
After we made the decision before CitizenCon that the Squadron 42 vertical slice wasn’t ready to be shown publically, we spent some time on reviewing how far off we were and what we wanted to achieve in order to be comfortable showing a full chapter of S42 gameplay. After all the effort we expended for CitizenCon, we didn’t want to spend additional developer time polishing intermediate solutions if it wasn’t going towards the final product. A slick demo isn’t that helpful if it pushes back the finished game, so we decided that the priority should be completing full systems over getting the vertical slice into a showable state.
Item 2.0, Subsumption AI, Subsumption Mission System and asynchronous Object Container Streaming are all core systems that will power Squadron 42. In addition, there is some significant low level animation and lighting tech that we need to finish up to realize the goal of real time player interactions and conversations at a level that would previously only be possible with pre-rendered cinematics. We want moving around and talking to the crew to be as fluid and look as good as pre-rendered cut scenes from other games.
Finally, we wanted to be able to focus the team on getting 2.6 out the door and knew we didn’t have much time left in the year to do this (as hard as it is to believe CitizenCon was only 9 weeks ago, which isn’t very long in development terms). One of the lessons we learned from the last CitizenCon was that by attempting to show both the VS and Homestead, we overloaded our pipeline. Even with a team of our size, working on two big deliverables for the same release window becomes problematic because things can take longer or turn out more complicated than expected, and when there are tricky-to-solve bugs or performance issues, we need to assign our top developers, which usually ends up being longer than we like and takes them away from core tech development, pushing back the schedule on later releases. Last year’s release of 2.0 and the 3.0 preview at Gamescom worked so well, because there was a clear priority and everyone came together with a singular focus to deliver them on the ascribed dates.
Since CitizenCon we’ve been working towards 2.6 as our priority, with Squadron 42 core tech being second priority, followed by 3.0 development. Almost all Squadron 42 core tech is also needed for 3.0 and the aspects that aren’t, like Networking, have their own team who don’t get distracted by Squadron as it’s a single player game.
So while it may be disappointing not to see something this year on Squadron 42, I believe it’s the best choice for the long term good of both Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. It’s critical that we focus on finishing up the core systems we’ve designed to handle the needs of both games, as without them, other parts of the development team are blocked from finalizing key gameplay.
It is all of your support and patience that allows us to make difficult decisions like this and we greatly appreciate it as it is allowing us to create what we believe will be a very special set of games in Squadron 42 and Star Citizen.
One thing that I think helps to understand the challenges of working on such a big complex project in the open is the visibility into our internal schedules. Sharing the 2.6 schedule was an experiment that a lot of people internally were very worried about but now everyone agrees it was the right move as transparency helps build trust.
As such we will be applying the same visibility to 3.0 and ultimately Squadron 42, although it will take a little time to get them ready for public consumption. We are still in the process of finalizing sub tasks and getting updated bids on the tasks from the appropriate team members, and this in turn has been slowed down by their focus on getting 2.6 finished.
For now, please join us for the live stream to have some fun with the devs and let’s celebrate all the great stuff we have now in Star Citizen 2.6, as there’s a lot of it!
-- Chris Roberts
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Everything's always just around the corner with Star Citizen...
Monthly Report for January 2017
Lots of activity to get Alpha 2.6.1 Update out of the door
Have fun
Monthly Report for March 2017
Lots of info on the Alpha 3.0 schedule, surface outposts, avatar customization and A.I. behaviour.
Have fun
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/15900-April-Monthly-Studio-Report
Monthly Report for April 2017
Lots of info on usability of items in game, on animations and tech art. Progress report on tech systems and the new webpage and forums.
Have fun
--> Have fun