#& then are reworked by a named male artist and move back into the art world

[dozydawn]

Needlepoint embroidery (found works made from hobby kits, unpicked and reworked) by Matt Smith.

[bedlamgames]

No Haven 0.861

To say this update scaled way, way out of what I had originally planned is quite the understatement to put it lightly.

Download links can be found on the No Haven page. Patch notes can be found under the break.

If you don’t have RAGS and you need a copy to run it there’s one on the help page here. If RAGS has never worked on your system despite the help page suggestions then it might be worth trying with one of the alternate players. There’s also improvements on there to the RAGS player that can also help with performance.

Update notes under the break:

-New assignment to allow a safer way to dispose of slaves. Going yourself gives a number of potential options along the way to both change up the rewards, change the risk, and give the chance for some roleplay if you fancy. Each of these options has its own set of crit/succ/fail/disaster outcomes effectively making each one a mini-assignment in their own right. I've also added many alternate vignettes in those outcomes when referring to specific races you encounter with common, uncommon, and rare versions to make the world seem bigger and more varied. Going to try to do more of that in future.

-New mechanic where certain slavers and bed warmer slaves will if they have the right traits, your reputation is on the Alluring path, and other checks like morale if they are a slaver are met then they will force a sexual encounter with you. These encounters will have increasing consequences depending on how often it happens. (Note: If you are already a puppet-leader or are forming a line every night either of those will disable this one.)

-New encampment role in the head slave.

-Expanded and reworked the starting race bonuses. Every start now has six new favoured and five unfavoured selections of which can be traits, assignment types, regions, other races, and attire (Kreen are missing one unfavoured due to leaving a space open for planned content). Includes every currently playable race and subtype even the ones only available usually in scenarios or with a promoted slaver. Some races have other special bonuses like the old additional gold or supplies.

-Due to this there are now more options of races to outcast into that replace your current set of bonuses as before.  

-To reflect the reworked starting bonuses I've expanded the Ori'Nek, Akir, Amazons, Marlsune, Kitsune, Lizardman, Asanei, Drow, Draki, Draenei, Kreen, Fancy, Harpy, Trolls, and Cathayan lore pages.

-Lizardmen now get Perceptive by default and some other races have also had some traits added and/or altered.

-New commission for Wrapped in Webs. An alternate cum splattered version will now be used for Nethemir slaves. Also used a crop for a new Nethemir portrait start.

-New commission for Raid High Elven Dwelling. Will be also used for a new portrait to replace the old High Elf Sentinel one. The clothed and unclothed versions will also be used for High Elf female slaver and slave examines respectively.

-New commission to be used for Scout the City and Drider examine. Option in the preferences for a more zoomed in version for those that don't want the full spider-gal experience.

-New commissions with No Haven specific design for both Trolls and Abyss Trolls. Will replace the examines for males and females, used for male and female/futa starts, and due to this I've removed some of the old portraits along with moving some of the traits around.

-New commissions for Seduction of the Light, with an alternate version for the Akir examine and a new portrait start.

-Can now start as an ooze as standard with three playable options. Includes a patron provided one with a new aspect. Oozes now come with a racial (though I do mean to add to this in a later update).

-Now there are three female demi-angel human choosable options. Includes a patron provided one with a new aspect, a lore page, and not one but two different commissions for her.

-Due to the change of the reworked starting bonuses Fallen can now choose their heritage for all genders, while there now more male Demi-Angel options than just humans. These are mainly placeholder images for now until I can work out a way to get so many varied portraits done in a way that's both affordable and doesn't bore the artist(s) rigid with repetitive variations.  

-Other new patron funded content in slavers can now force a sexual encounter with you based on your reputation and their traits, virginity tracking being partially unlinked from the Innocent trait, a new fae start, a new drow start, a new unique drow, and a new unique werewolf guy.

-Being Beloved will protect for getting more feared while being Dreaded will protect you from being more liked. Made some more adjustments so that while being feared is still easier to lose the fall will be less harsh when messing up assignments compared to say them being your bed warmer or walking around while wearing something super slutty. Being Popular or Beloved will be far less likely to get onto the obsessed over path. Same for Feared or Dreaded for the being disliked path. Failures will be less likely to cause changes than before. Being Liked or Popular will be less likely to switch over to the Respected path.  

-New playable Fancy, new playable Nethemir, and two new unique slaver Succubi. One of which has her own specific lore page.

-Thank you to the patron requested the new Demi-Angel as now she has a new commission to replace her portrait and examine for when she loses her aspect.

-The biomancy reward Lago'Mae unique no longer requires you to have a guard, and has her own new nightly flavour text to reflect this. She also now has specific art to reflect her status as a unique.

-With the reworked starting bonuses Shun the Other has more effects than it does before making other races less effective than they would normally.

-Dominated and Obedient now override will checking for the purposes of assignments so high or low it will still be good for you.

-The Pyromancer aspect has been improved. Now it works as before and has the additional effect where Unhinged and Elementalist: Fire will no longer count as negative traits for that slaver.

-New general order to allow you to prefer to recruit inexperienced slavers. Also comes with new results on the Standard Scour recruitment assignment.

-There's now a chance for your reputation to improve when you level the encampment up.

-Fallen skin colours now reflect their heritage so no more fair skinned orc fallen for one example.

-All the fully embedded hypnotic mantras now have a value.

-Updated the troll skin colours to reflect the new look.

-Updated the portrait collage with some of the new ones.

-Centaurs now mostly use the Horned One name generator.

-Legion now have properly demonic names.

-Sissies should now also have the gender lock preferences.

-The denial mantra can now also remove defiant and stubborn. For all mantras slowed down the final embedding a bit.

-Having a slave bedwarmer requires you now to have at least one guard.

-Added Flat Chested as an option for females and sissies in full custom.

-Added a check in the rare case of no-race characters being generated

-The disaster for Pursuit of Arrogance now has an appropriate chance to leave some corruptions.

-Attempted fix for slaves being correctly limited in how many that can use them per night based on role, training, etc.

-Fix for Elementalist: Water slavers not getting the option to take Tentacles on level up.

-Fix for the Reduce ass biomancy option only existing for the shorter races.

-Fix for Life in Coiled Tentacles having placeholder text on the altered crit with beastmaster version.

-Fix for certain larger races not getting mounts when I'd added some special variations for them before.

-Fix for events going mad with generosity.

-Fix for your character not getting the descriptions from beautiful and the like.

-Fix for the Promoted Icewyld harpy having the Carakarr portrait.

-Fix for the cock sucking mantra wiping a lot of the target's description.  

-Fix for flying on Cutprice Roses only reducing the time reduction by one day.

-Fix for the Spiritual Leader getting stuck if they would be permanently removed such as by dismissal.

-Fix for Adherents of Pain gaining Resilient again from the various corrupted armours.

-Fix for Cumsluts gaining slutty from advanced lesbian training.

-Fix for encampment role slavers who do some healing and then go back to being a slaver while still being in their role.

-Fix for slavers being removed/wounded and legging it on Toll Bridge.  

-Fix for Scout the Deep Mountains checking the old corrupt trait instead of Depraved.

-Fix for submissives gain sub again from escape attempts.

-Fix for being able to just cancel out of the leadership challenges.

-Fix for biomancy not taking account for supported assets, bimboborn, and so on like corruption does.

-Fix for certain encampment roles not clearing the slave's blindfold like they should.

-Fix for Driders and Oozes still being counted as Monsters in terms of adding Disasters on Tyrannical Legacy.

-Fix for the unique matriarch from Sable Masquerade missing her substantial cock.

-Fix for reputation from encampment level ups up not showing.

-Fix for on levelling up getting the wrong kind of tentacles.

-Fix for when you get Cumslut getting an Obedient with the wrong abbreviated trait description.

-Fix for the denial mantra morphing into the bimbo mantra.

-Some text fixes.

[talhaghafoor2019-blog]

Fans Of John Anderson’s ‘Swingin”…You Must Hear LeAnn Rimes’ Sultry Remake | Classic Country Music

John Anderson Swings To Chart’s Top Spot

Whenever someone thinks of country music legend John Anderson, one of the first songs that comes to mind is “Swingin’.”

Co-written by Anderson, the rockin’ love song has the narrator reflecting on his childhood and the moment he fell in love with a little girl named Charlotte Johnson. Their romance blossomed after the two sat together on the front porch swing, and they were head over heels for each other from that moment on.

The groovy tune was quite the success, and ended up topping the U.S. Hot Country Songs chart. It was also a major crossover hit, climbings as high as the 43rd spot on the Billboard Hot 100.

As if all of that didn’t make the song prestigious enough, it was also awarded the Single of the Year Award from the CMA.

— Tara (@Tarahinkley_38) December 27, 2018

Anderson first released “Swingin'” way back in 1983. Because of the song’s success, he eventually recorded it a second time for his 1994 album Country til’ I Die. He released the song as the B-side to the album’s title track, which was its first single.

Then 16 years later, yet another recording of “Swingin'” hit the radio, but this one didn’t come from Anderson.

LeAnn Brings New Takes To Male Artists’ Hit Songs

In 2010, LeAnn Rimes took the country music world by storm by releasing the second cover album of her career. With Rimes, Vince Gill, and Darrell Brown as co-producers, the album was crafted into a unique piece of art that put a spin on many beloved country classics.

Titled Lady & Gentlemen, the record had Rimes reworking classic and traditional country hits originally made famous by male artists. Lyrics and titles were altered to fit her new, female perspective, with one of the most notable changes being to Waylon Jennings‘ “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.”

Rimes’ rendition was renamed for her female voice, and was titled “Only Mama That’ll Walk the Line.”

In addition to covering that Jennings classic, Rimes also offered the female spin on songs such as George Jones‘ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and Gill’s “When I Call Your Name.”

She Took On “Swingin'” Too

Another song that Rimes reinvented for the album was Anderson’s “Swingin’.” Her version of the song was released as the first single off of Lady & Gentlemen, and performed quite well, peaking at the 57th spot on the chart.

The song also earned some recognition from the Grammys, as Rimes was nominated for Best Female Country Vocal performance in 2011.

While Anderson’s original version of the song has an upbeat, literally “swinging” sound, Rimes upped the ante with her rendition. There’s even more fire behind her recording, which picks up the pace a smidge from Anderson’s.

A Smokin’ Hot  Video

On top of that, Rimes took a slightly more sultry approach to her rendition, which was further enhanced by its red-hot music video.

The video features Rimes performing along with a band at an old-school dance marathon, as she sings about how madly in love she is with boy named “Charlie Johnson.” Eventually, Rimes enters the competition herself, and wins thanks to her stamina and steamy dance moves.

Watching this video, it’s easy to see why Rimes’ spin on “Swingin'” was such a hit. If you’ve never seen or heard her rendition before, you must check it out in the video below!

We love it when talented artists like Rimes artists reinvent the classics like this. Some good stuff comes out of it!

This content was originally published here.

[pointofgeeks]

New Post has been published on https://www.pointofgeeks.com/gambit-thieves-assassins-casting-breakdown-for-upcoming-x-men-spin-off/

GAMBIT: Thieves & Assassins Casting Breakdown for Upcoming X-MEN Spin-Off

There has been a lot of movement over at 20th Century Fox in regards to their X-Men cinematic universe that continues to blaze ahead in many surprising and inspired ways. Yet, no project can claim to be as unlikely as the Gambit film, which has managed to find new life over on the studio lot.

The upcoming X-Men spin-off movie still has Channing Tatum officially signed on as the lead, as well as in the role of producer on the movie. It’s equally encouraging that the film found a new director in Pirates of the Caribbean’s Gore Verbinski, following the musical chair departure of previous directors, Rupert Wyatt and Doug Liman. Last week the studio planted their flag with the announcement of a February 2019 release date, which signals that pre-production is firmly in motion and now we have obtained the latest on the development of Gambit.

A few days ago Omega Underground uncovered audition tapes for the Gambit movie, which is covertly going by its working title of Chess. The tapes seemed to indicate that the producers are looking to cast the female lead and Gambit’s love interest in the upcoming movie, Bella Donna Boudreaux. Back in 2015, the trades had reported that Léa Seydoux (Spectre) had won the role, but with a new director and script in tow, the role is currently being recast for the spin-off film. However, this was a clear indication that the casting process is moving full speed ahead, which was a impetus for further investigation.

Bella Donna isn’t the only role currently being cast and gotten some info that may shed a little more light on the direction of the picture. Casting for Gambit is steaming forward and we have gotten some timely character breakdowns that should give our best indication yet of what direction the production is moving in. As is usual, the true identity of the roles have been obscured with code names, so we simply gave our best guesses on who from the world of Marvel Comics may be joining the upcoming movie. Take a look:

[MARIYA] Female, Caucasian, mid 20s – early 30s. Must be 5’11’+. Tall, stunning and willowy, a Parisian glamour girl. Must speak fluent French or do a perfect French accent. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTIONS.

This is clearly for the role of Bella Donna Boudreaux. She is the love interest and inspiration for Gambit in his younger years and their relationship has enough source material to fuel a trilogy on its own. In the comics, the character goes in some frightening and unexpected directions, which should keep audiences off guard.

  [LEWIS] Male, any ethnicity, 40s-50s. Elegant and intelligent. An appealing entrepreneur with an unexpected dark side. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

According to Splash Report the role of Dr. Nathaniel Essex, aka Mr. Sinister, is Daniel Craig’s role to refuse. We haven’t gotten word on who else may be on the shortlist, however the inclusion of the character has the potential to change the entire complexion of the X-Men universe.

  [NASH] Male, any ethnicity, mid 20s-early 30s. A potent threat. Heir to his mother’s business. Malevolent.

This role seems pretty straight forward, as it’s most likely Julien Boudreaux. He is the brother to Bella Donna, who comes into direct conflict with Gambit when he challenges the mutant to a deadly duel. During their confrontation, Gambit’s mutant power manifests which leads the future X-Men closer to his destiny.

  [MAGNUS/WOLFGANG] Male, authentic French. 40s. A French criminal. Must speak fluent French.

This role could potentially be that of Bella Donna’s father, Marius Boudreaux, the one-time leader of the Assassin’s clan. He helped to engineer the arranged marriage between Remy and Bella Donna, which was meant to spur a truce between the Assassins and Thieves. The character is thinly sketched in the comics and would potentially have a small but pivotal role.

  [FRITZ] Male, any ethnicity, 40s-50s. A professional thief. Charismatic con-artist. Warm hearted but untrustworthy. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

This role is a great fit for Gambit’s mentor and adopted father, Jean Luc LeBeau. The master thief found Remy as a young pickpocket on the streets of New Orleans and quickly took him under his wing as his own. Jean Luc is responsible for much of the flair that the future X-Men goes on to be known for, including a proclivity for trench coats, as well as training Remy with his trademark weapon, the bo staff.

  [WESLEY] Male, any ethnicity, mid 20s-mid 30s. Aspirational but weak minded. Soulful and sensitive. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

This role seems to be a great fit for Emil Lapin. Lapin is a cousin and lifelong friend of Gambit, who is a master thief and one of the crew’s most capable engineers.

  [BORIS] Male, mid-20s-30s, Hispanic. Tough, menacing, with a dangerous, craggy character face. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTIONS.  

From the description of the role, the production is seemingly searching for the next Edward James Olmos. If we are following the comic’s origin story, Boris could actually be the Pig, a mutant slave trader who comes into conflict with Gambit as a kid. It would seem that the Pig could also have direct connection to Mr. Sinister as well, judging by his line of work.

  [JOE] Male, any ethnicity, 30-50 years old. We are looking for actors 5’6” and under. He’s a gun for hire. He is the black sheep of his family. Not from good breeding but from a working class family. Short. Puck-like, with an interesting character face. REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTIONS.

Could this actually be the infamous Puck from Alpha Flight? It’s unclear how interconnected the spin-off will be and if it will be opening the door to the Canadian superteam, however the description is very “inside baseball” and presumes that the casting director has in-depth comic knowledge. However, there are literally hundreds of characters that could fit that description.

  [PIA] Female, Native American, early 20s. Street, tough, punk. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTIONS.

Could this be the first crossover for the New Mutants? It would seem to be a good fit for Dani Moonstar and could also be a signal that the Gambit movie could have an edge to it. Actress Blu Hunt was heavily featured in the recent trailer for The New Mutants and her possible inclusion could help the interconnectivity of the next wave of Fox’s X-Men films. However, this is far from a lock.

  [CARISSA]Female, mixed race, 10-12 years old. Ethereal and other-worldly. Very expressive. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

The role of Carissa seems sneakily similar to Candra, a mutant whose powers of telekinesis can actually awaken the mutant gene in individuals. If this is indeed that character, Candra has an important function in helping to realize certain characters’ potential in the storyline from the comics. However, it seems that they are casting young for the role, so she could be a reach.

Next we have a collection of roles that seem to fit directly into the conflict between the Assassin and Thieves’ Guild. Both warring guilds have a variety of supporting characters that are either friends or blood relatives of Gambit or Bella Donna, along with other mutants that weave their way into the narrative in the comics. So it would seem likely that characters such as Jacques LeBeau, Henri LeBeau, Etienne Marceaux, and Mercy LeBeau, all fit the roles being cast below.

[MRS. STANTON] Female, Caucasian, 50s. An elegant older woman with a French accent. Must speak fluent French.

Possibly the mother of Bella Donna and a de facto head of the Assassin’s Guild, who runs her criminal empire with her literal family of killers.

[WILHELM] Male, any ethnicity, 30s. Dangerous street criminal. Protective and loyal to his family. Intensely loyal and violent.

[GARY] Male, any ethnicity, mid 20s-early 30s. A little simple; dim-witted and passive.

[NONA] Female, any ethnicity, mid 20s-30 years old. Uptight, corporate, vicious, sexual. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

[FRANKLIN] Male, any ethnicity, 20s. An appealing street kid. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

[BEN] Male, any ethnicity, 20s. Just reaching adulthood. A street kid, a disaffected outsider, an orphan. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

[HOWARD] Male, Caucasian. 50s. A refined European mobster who speaks fluent French.

[VERA] Female, any ethnicity, mid 20s-early 30s. Beautiful, smart, tough, fiery and unpredictable. ROLE REQUIRES SEQUEL OPTION.

In the comics Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit, grew up a master thief in the New Orleans bayou. His origin story is a reworking of Romeo and Juliet, set against the seedy underworld of Assassins and Thieves. LeBeau gets involved with an heir to the Assassin’s Guild in an arranged marriage that sets a bloody war between the factions into motion. Splash Report previously reported that the film’s plot will also involve a huge heist that Gambit is forced to perform, due to the influence of Mr. Sinister. A mutant geneticist who has made his name by experimenting on mutant-kind and whose history intertwines with many popular X-Men.

However, even with all of this casting news, there still isn’t word on the tone or approach to Gambit. The success of Logan and Deadpool, along with the growing buzz for the unorthodox adaptation of The New Mutants has given Fox’s X-Men universe new life. Gambit’s story doesn’t need an Avengers’ level of scale and has the opportunity to operate on an emotional and dramatic level that other X-Men movies might not have lent themselves to in the past. With the film’s release date set just a little over a year away, we will be sure to bring you much more on Gambit.

Gambit is set for release on February 14th, 2019.

What do you think of the latest on Gambit? Let us know on the comment boards, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter! Share our stories by simply clicking your favorite social media below!

Source: That Hashtag Show

Art by: BossLogic

[inexcon]

RSI Comm-Link: Monthly Studio Report: June 2017

Monthly Studio Report: June 2017

Greetings Citizens!

Welcome to the Monthly Report for June 2017, our collection of studio reports and videos from our offices around the world showcasing the progress we’ve made over the past month.

CIG Los Angeles

CLOUD IMPERIUM: LOS ANGELES

ENGINEERING

As part of the upcoming 3.0 release, we’re very excited to introduce cargo as a mechanic. To ensure your ship is technically equipped to handle this, we’ve created cargo grids to provide the visual element of transporting commodities like minerals, scrap, and food. The number of commodities you have will manifest as stacks of crates located within the ship’s cargo hold and will be limited in capacity by the dimensions of the grid your ship can use. This system will also allow you to park vehicles and other loose items into the cargo hold, but will limit the amount of grid space you have available for bought or scavenged commodities. Code wrapped up on this feature and design has implemented the new cargo grids into all the ships that can carry cargo.

Engineering also finished implementing the solar system content (or what we’ve been calling object containers) into a hierarchy to ensure that outposts on a moon or planet, as well as space stations in near orbit, are all in the correct planetary grid at all times.

The team also just provided the much-needed Object Container editing. When creating a gameplay level, we build the level with a combination of Assets and Object Containers. Originally, Object Containers had to be built in the dedicated Object Container level, which, unfortunately, made the contents of the Object Container only editable in the actual Object Container level.

In the previous system, when designers used to build levels with Object Containers, if they wanted to modify the contents of that ObjectContainer, they would need to exit the current level, open the Object Container level, do some tuning, save, export, and then move back to the level. This new tool will allow the designer to edit the contents of an Object Container, save and export all while inside the level. This new workflow will save Design a lot of time.

The engineers have created a new debug and setup process to help handle vehicle interior damage states. Interior damage states will be changed based on the cumulative health of a ship. The old method was written in flowgraph, but now the process has been integrated into a vehicle component, so that it can be used in various places. This new process should help us find the problem quickly, solve it fast, and get the team back to working on features.

The update process of the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS) for our ships has now been converted to a batch update. Because IFCS is very isolated from the physics engine, taking in values like velocity, mass, center-of-mass, etc., and outputting one linear and one angular impulse, there’s no reason IFCS needs to be updated in lockstep with the physics thread. This change will be more efficient, but also hopefully allow a larger number of players on the servers.

The team has now completed the new quantum drive 2.0. We’ve removed the old code that controlled things like VFX and sound FX playback, as well as obstruction detection and alignment code, and moved the targeting of a QT point to the Target Selector on the ship, so the drive only cares about the travel point itself. This made the drive code much simpler and should make it run smoother. Aside from bugfixing, the team also added some features that attach to the quantum drive, such as automatically closing all external doors when doing a jump to prevent accidents by jumping out of a ship traveling at high fractions of the speed of light.

This updated quantum drive is now ready for design and art to start tweaking and implementing on all the ships, as well as for UI to start creating a more realistic feel for how such an event should be handled in-game and incorporate other features like the star map.

SHIP TEAM

The RSI Aurora went through a final art check this week, so the only remaining work will be from any incoming bugs that pop up while going through design implementation, animation updating, sound, VFX, etc. The team also created fourteen different skins for designers to utilize as well. We’re excited to get this updated version of Star Citizen’s most prolific ship into your hands, and the team here is working hard to make make this a reality.

The Anvil Terrapin is finalizing its greybox phase, which included setting up the exterior hierarchy, polishing the proxies, baked and migrated animations. For the interior, the artists are polishing the geometry in the cockpit and habitation, and moving into the final art phase. The Terrapin was also sent over to Tech Design to begin their greybox pass on the ship.

Now that the ships are being converted to Item 2.0, the team has also completely reworked the ship stats page on the website to allow for up-to-the-minute stats. The design has now been finalized, the icons finished with refined meaning and everything is currently being updated on the web.

TECH ART

The team implemented the first iteration of the landing springs technology to allow for a more cushioned landing experience on uneven terrain. From here, they will move on to the next step of full visible landing compression on the landing gear, which is slated for after 3.0’s release.

Tech Art’s role tends to increase the closer you get to a major release as performance begins to take priority over features and asset developments, so they have been reviewing the release builds to identify code and content fixes that would dramatically improve performance. One in particular is called Statoscope. It plots graphs from data logged on a per-frame basis, and provides a way of recording values (e.g. fps, number of drawcalls, etc.) from Star Citizen and showing how they change over the course of a play-through. This really helps our development team find ways to improve performance by identifying massive frame time offenders.

Tech animation improved the format that animations are saved as and then reloaded into other scenes. Due to the amount of characters and lengths of the scenes, they could formerly take up to 50 minutes to load in Maya, but with this improvement, the worst load time has been drastically reduced by over 82%, meaning cinematics won’t be waiting long to make quick iterations.

On the skinning front, a female transfer mesh has been created and the male transfer mesh has been massively updated. These transfer meshes are used with our skinning tools to automate basic skinning of all new characters. Tech animators can now spend time perfecting the weighting of the mesh allowing for a higher quality and more accurate deformation in less time.

Our tech art team identified an issue where the eyelids on many of the heads had vertex normal issues. They ultimately determined that because the vertices of the eyelids were so close together, the normal would get flipped but only on a few verts. This has now been fixed and characters can now sleep with ease.

CHARACTER TEAM

The team has been knocking out countless costumes for Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. Currently in production, the male Navy medical corpsman has entered the high poly phase. Once that’s complete, he will then go on to in-game modeling. Another female character is finishing up her in-game asset then will be sent over to get textured and rigged along with our OMC Undersuits, which have also finished up in-game modeling.

The civilians and the miners of Levski are currently being textured before heading over to rigging and implementation into their final resting place in-game on Delamar.

The team updated some of the legacy UEE and Pirate armors to not only bring them up to the visual quality of our current assets but allow them to be swappable with all newer armor pieces. We’ve officially started high-poly on some of your favorites and then will be moving onto the in-game modeling and texturing pass.

Along with the new eye options, the team began work on a multitude of hairstyles. These are all in various states of production, but a select group will be ready for 3.0.0.

An assortment of new characters, like the Male Marine BDU and Male Deckcrew, have been rigged and implemented. They can now be found on the bridge of the Idris or completing their work on the exterior of a ship in the vacuum of space. Lastly, the Female Light Marine armor and Female Explorer Suit have finished up their implementation passes.

NARRATIVE

Our narrative team has had a jam-packed month as well. With Item 2.0 coming online, they have been knocking out a massive amount of component and item descriptions needed for 3.0, everything from coolers and quantum drives to armor sets and shirts. They have been getting trained up on handling the localizations of these names and descriptions into DataForge directly, giving them a bit more oversight in making sure that the latest text is appearing in the game. The team wrote approximately 2800 lines worth of generic NPCs to liven up the universe then recorded them in a VO booth down in London. To help keep track of these assets, the team started building a Persistent Universe character tracking sheet to create a single consolidated reference for lines, file names (for all the departments like audio, animation), overall status, and priority for the massive amounts of dialogue for Mission Givers, Generic NPCs and more.

Lastly, the team has been walking through the locations of both Squadron 42 and the PU and writing up documentation of props, posters, signs, branding, and set dressing for more immersive environmental storytelling.

CIG Austin

CLOUD IMPERIUM: AUSTIN

DESIGN

Eckhart was the big challenge this month. As the first real dynamic Mission Giver, getting Eckhart into the game required collaboration and work from several different teams. The Usables Team created the tech that allowed us to link extraneous objects such as the barstool to other usables like the high bar table, while still registering items on the table properly like the glass in Eckhart’s hand. The Mission System Team created the ability to look for missions with the “Eckhart” tag, figure out what is currently available for players, and pass those via subsumption to the player’s mission log for acceptance/rejection. Between the AI and FPS Programmers, they created an animation technique we’re calling “feather blending” that will allow blending between usable object animations such as a generic sitting animation for a barstool and the animations related to the Mission Giver conversations. And of course, the Subsumption tech/programming team facilitated all of this through the Subsumption tools and the game code that goes with it.

The team has been tackling 3.0 tasks on a variety of fronts; Pete Mackay worked on a new pass of the master excel where the pricing structure is laid out, called PriceFixer. Pete added all the new ships, ship items, armor suits and some other FPS goodies, and balanced their pricing to fall in line with the most recent design pass of the items. Since the overall design of the items is much further along than before, the gameplay implications of the items are much clearer. Although this required another pass through the items, the team is now able to more accurately predict where their base prices should sit. On top of this, he did an additional pass on mission rewards, insurance prices and respawn timers to accommodate the new missions that are coming online.

Robert Gaither worked on getting NPC’s into some of the main hub areas of our PU landing zones. He started with Grim HEX to prove out the behaviors, but the current plan is to extend these general behaviors to the other landing zones with the goal of giving a general sense of ambiance and life to the levels.

SHIP TEAM

Josh Coons, in conjunction with Tech Art finished creating the LODs and the damage pass of the Cutlass Black. He also made tweaks to the cockpit area and the rotating nacelles, based on the Tech Art feedback, and has now moved onto creating renders and videos for the website and potential marketing needs.

Chris Smith finished working on modeling and texturing the Aopoa Nox bike. Once the model was complete, he worked with many team members to provide materials for the brochure and release video.

IT/DEVOPS

Server engineering worked closely with DevOps to integrate and test Diffusion in a QA environment. The team started working with gameplay engineering to show them how to best utilize the features Diffusion offers and will continue over the next few months to identify new and old gameplay features that will be best suited as Diffusion services. The eventual goal will move more of the feature logic in Diffusion services to result in higher scalability and optimal performance.

The DevOps team quietly added more hardware to increase network capacity to handle the increasing demands on the build system due to work connected to 3.0. Meanwhile the LiveOps team has completed the build out of the latest server side expansion supporting the latest revision of shopping and subsumption. They’re still tuning and making adjustments but it’s always exciting to see the new services coming on line.

ANIMATION

This month, the animation team started on the NPC usable for counters including shopkeepers and bartenders to help bring these elements to life. Once these are complete a player will be able to walk into a shop to buy weapons, space suits, clothing, ship parts and other such things from NPCs. This will incorporate our wild line system as well, with face animation and audio captured at our mocap shoots. To complete these features, we had to capture a few transition elements that were missing, so we set up a quick mocap shoot in our office to get what we needed. Along with the bartender, we are also implementing the bar stool, so the player will be able to go, sit at a bar stool and order a drink. Finally, we finished the carry system animations. As a player, you can now pick up a standard size box and walk around with it, which means that we have all the needed tech to expand this to a variety of uses.

The Austin Ship Animation team wrapped up establishing the standard for the cockpit experience, as well as polishing and creating new, improved animations for our next release. In addition to various bug fixes, they worked with the design and programming teams to bring the same level of interactions you get in the cockpit to ship turrets, which includes g-force reactions, hit reactions, as well as g-loc pass out and wake up sequences when you pull too many g’s.

QA

For June, Austin QA has been testing new features and preparing for 3.0, specifically new and overhauled Star Marine weapons, the Crusader moons, Levski, new Missions, the improved mobiGlas interface and apps (particularly StarMap). Now that many more ships have been converted for Item 2.0, each one requires a complete sweep for issues, as well as a review of old issues such as animation and ship idling to see what may have carried over in the new implementations. Stability and performance were also a major focus as well, with Austin QA working closely with our UK counterparts to conduct regular playtests and captures for the state of the game. Squadron 42 testing groups worked closely with the rest of team as well, as new tech means new bugs that are often shared between both groups of testers.

The team also provided additional support for the animation team; handling mocap file cleanup, supporting setup and teardown for pick-up shoots and other tasks that free up the animators to handle important items. New tools and tech are being developed in all four studios, so the team is constantly checking shelved check-ins and binaries for problems and making sure everything is ready before it gets checked in for the rest of the company to use. In the past month, this has included changes to resource management for objects and planets, new build distribution tools, server changes to support subsumption, as well as network code improvements and a refactor of the material manager.

PLAYER RELATIONS

The Player Relations team continued to prepare for upcoming 3.0 work, and can’t wait to give backers the New Player Experience that will go on the website to match the new content coming in game. The Evocati ranks will expand in the coming weeks, and the team welcomed two new hires to expand the team’s overall headcount.

Foundry 42 UK

FOUNDRY 42: UK

SPRINTS

On the programming side, the team continued to support the cockpit experience sprint, with the goal of making it more dynamic. This included incorporating the physiological effects, such as the black-out and red-out, into the actor status system. That way it is all controlled by one system and can influence other things like the player’s breathing and stamina. This sprint has also improved the g-force animations, and player hit reactions when the ship gets a dynamic impulse.

We also made improvements to the close combat gameplay. We worked on numerous knife-based and unarmed takedowns, and collaborated with design and animation to make it both look and feel satisfying.

Over the past month, the team has nearly completed converting all the old player and actor code over to the new Actor 2.0 system. Whereas the previous setup just inferred actor states from other variables, the system now has a cleaner interface for serializing between the server and all the clients, which makes writing new player features much more straightforward and makes the code much more reliable.

The brand-new patching system has been incorporated into the internal CopyBuild 3 tool that was developed in Frankfurt and Austin. Now that it’s passed QA’s approval, there has been a limited rollout to the dev team to carry on flushing out any issues with it. So far, it’s looking pretty good, and the people using it are really appreciating the reduced time it now takes to grab the latest build.

GRAPHICS

Moving onto the Graphics team, the new render-to-texture system was the key focus this month. This tech has been a major part of the hologram system which will be used for mission briefings, comms calls, mobiGlas and many other situations. The render-to-texture system will also be used for all our new user interfaces and for live-rendering of video-comms from other players.

The team upgraded our exposure-control system to deal with the enormous contrast of lighting in space. The system now takes light from your peripheral vision into account and won’t overly brighten the screen when you are near bright objects and looking into space. The graphics team also added a host of new features to the GPU particle system such as lighting, turbulence and anti-aliasing, the effects of which you’ll be seeing in 3.0.

WEAPON ART

The weapons team focused on ship weapons this month, working on the Amon & Reese laser cannons, S1 to S6, and the Klaus and Werner Laser repeater, S1 to S6, along with some associated VFX. On a smaller scale, but just as important, they created a slick looking Heavy Machine gun from Gemini, complete with the iconic cooling system seen on other Gemini guns.

ENVIRONMENT ART

This month, the concept team added another member to its ranks. Their first task will be to look at Orison while also supporting any additional needs for S42 locations.

The Environment art team built some exciting prototypes for procedural cities which will allow us to create vast cities and landing zones on planet surfaces for the Stanton System and beyond. The first test will be to help us integrate Area18 into the sprawling industrial planet of ArcCorp.

Work continued to flesh out the ‘texture of space,’ and create a greater palette for the artists to make space travel more interesting and will help support the narrative in both the PU and S42. One specific element is our new SpaceDust Shader, which creates large volumes of space dust to help provide a sense of motion. This will be added to the Stanton System for the 3.0 release. Yela’s asteroid belt has also been improved with this new shader type.

Outpost clusters and additional exterior elements have been finalized, including outpost landing pads, paths, power modules, water collectors, weather stations, relay stations and exterior lighting. The team also completed a branding and dressing pass for different corporate and independent companies who own the outposts for various functions such as mining, hydroponics, habitation and storage. The team also made unique varieties like emergency shelters, abandoned outposts and gang-owned outposts to position around the moons.

The outpost doors and airlocks were switched to the Doors 2.0 system, which allows them to incorporate the different rooms, power systems, oxygen, overrides and hazards.

The team finalized Sand, Dust and Frost materials to help blend the outposts into the moons. Decals have been used to add an extra layer of dirt buildup to help integrate the exterior landing pads and props.

The team finished all pre-polish and optimization work on the exterior truck-stop pieces and have moved on to finish the interior. They are currently working on the main hub, based off concepts from art direction, developing additional pieces to add more character to the truck-stop, and completing a first pass on the side shops and corridors. Platinum Bay landing services is having its own building set made, so it looks more distinctive; and an Admin office has been created so players have a location to drop off mission related packages. The team blocked out an observation room facing the landings pads, so players can watch ships take off and land from the interior of the station.

Finally, Admin offices were added to other Stanton locations, such as Port Olisar and Grim HEX. All the 3.0 locations were updated with the new door and airlocks 2.0 system and two new shops have been added to Grim HEX; an independent ship parts trader, and Technotic, an old electronics store that may house a mysterious character.

UI

The UI team has been cracking along on the new mobiGlas UI and all the various apps that will become available for 3.0. They also worked with the VFX team to combine particle effects and lighting to help ground the UI projection in the game-world environment.

The team drove the second multi-disciplinary sprint for the Starmap app to implement the remaining functional requirements for the 3.0 release. This involved focused collaboration between art, VFX, audio, and engineering teams to help improve the visual fidelity and user experience.

Basic functional requirements for the new Mission Manager app were implemented this month. This app allows players to view information on available missions, as well as provide the ability to accept, track, and abandon missions which have been accepted, while keeping a log of the previous missions which have been completed or attempted.

Along with the work on the item 2.0 ship conversion, they started implementing the new pilot multi-function displays (MFD) which refines the previous UI setup and adds new information and functionality like managing your ship’s systems.

Finally, the team contributed to the most recent doors and airlocks sprint, where they helped design and implement new status displays for the various airlocks throughout the system utilizing the new render-to-texture tech.

AUDIO

The Audio team has been involved in lots of different sprints and pipelines this month. The team helped to finish up the actor status system, so that the breathing from the player works alongside dialogue more intelligently, and a new outlaw music logic set was completed which will be reflective of the player’s reputation system. The team also revised the environmental and ambient sound for various locations for the 3.0 release with members of the audio team even attending a character-based sound recording at Shepperton Studios.

Weapon audio completed work on the rail gun and have made steady progress on derelict ship audio and the interior ship audio for the Javelin.

ANIMATION

The Animation team worked closely with gameplay programming to continue developing the take down kill mechanics.

They continued to tweak weapon improvements and created a more flexible system for the jump mechanic to handle more environments and gravity states.

The mobiGlas has been moved from a lookpose to an aimpose, which will allow increased functionality, and had some extra animation added to the enter and exit states to make it feel more connected to the player.

The team continued to export and test AI combat assets as well as cinematic scenes for design to implement in engine.

The Derby Studio has been busy on 3.0 Mission Givers’ face and body animation and continued to turn around facial animation for SQ42 and future PU releases.

The Mo-Cap team set up the Optitrack system for a quick shoot in the new office space. It was great to see such a quick turnaround of data, from shoot to in-game in a matter of days.

There was another quick Audio/Headcam shoot to pick up some last-minute requests for 3.0 and the team quick edited the facial data and put it into production.

SHIP TEAM

Derelict versions of the Starfarer, Caterpillar, Constellation and Freelancer are ready to be used in space and on planets for various missions. The team also implemented the necessary tools to correctly place these wrecks on planets so they all conform nicely to the terrain. In addition to this work, the team has been doing a bug-fixing pass to address collision issues and minor art tweaks.

Extensive work is being done on the Eclipse’s cockpit, specifically on the dashboard. The team worked closely with other departments to lock down the layout of the monitors to make sure that the design is appealing and legible. Layout is also an important factor for Item 2.0 as buttons and switches need to be specifically placed within the pilot’s reach to create further interactivity and immersion. The team also worked on the landing gears and the wings.

The team finalized geometry on the Hull C’s folding section and blocked in materials, then moved onto finishing the mechanical rig to make sure it operates without any collisions. The front of the interior went through an initial lighting pass and is now being polished to make the areas more cohesive. The rear of the interior has been blocked out and each room is now being modeled.

Fans of the Reclaimer will be pleased to hear that there are only 3 rooms left to go through final art. Over the past month, the team wrapped up final art on the cargo room and the main lift with the goal of maximizing the space to allow for easier transportation of cargo. For the cockpit, the team implemented retractable screens which fold around the player when seated to make the confined area more functional. The team continued work on the bridge area and bridge lift, which provides access to the lower deck, and were thrilled to see the tractor beam seats transition from concept to final art.

Foundry 42 DE

FOUNDRY 42: DE

LEVEL DESIGN

The Level Design team finished their work for the surface outposts and passed them along to the Environment Art team. They also turned over whiteboxes for both the modular hangars and garages to the art team for their visual exploration phase.

With the whiteboxing phase complete, they’re focused on implementing the markup required for all our locations, this involves everything from room systems (breathing), environment interactions (e.g. vaulting), elevators and consoles for spawning ships and vehicles. Levski will have a combination of hangars and garages to spawn ships, as well as vehicles to explore the planetary surface. With the bulk of the work completed on the previously mentioned locations they’re now moving over to the remaining Flagship Landing Zones for the Stanton system. The first ones they will tackle are Area18 and Lorville, followed by Orison and New Babbage.

ENGINE TEAM

The engine team worked on consistent capturing of both atmosphere and sky in cube maps so we can seamlessly blend between global atmosphere and local cube map based lighting. This new system will ultimately give the game a higher level of visual fidelity. They implemented an improved compression algorithm for the new pak file system to allow for more efficient data streaming due to reduced CPU overhead during decompression. This will be part of the new incremental patcher, which is designed to make patches and updates much more efficient.

They also worked on one of our internal tools called the Planet Editor (PlanEd). Artists and designers have several needs for marking areas on a planet (identify where specific objects should be spawned within an ecosystem, areas to be punched out to embed brushes or complex structures such as landing zones, etc.), so the code was unified to make it easier to reuse and extend in the future as more functionality is needed.

AI

The AI team has been busy as usual. This month, they worked on Buddy AI, where NPCs will intelligently follow a designated leader, and made progress on ship AI, getting it one step closer to be fully controlled via Subsumption.

The team also worked on a sprint that focused on Human Combat. They spent time refining behaviors for first reactions to enemies seen and events heard. The reactions vary in direction and speed, from casual situations, to quick reactions for loud events and so on. This was achieved by triggering the appropriate animation from a start pose to the action intended and once the behavior is verified, they’ll get fully hooked up in game. They also made progress on Friendly Fire to make sure Friendlies are identified correctly in combat situations.

VFX

The Frankfurt VFX team continued to work on effects for the various planet surface types, covering a wide range of effects, from simple footsteps, to weapon impacts, and vehicle tire effects.

They also did some early experimentation with rigid body simulations and the workflow for S42 cinematics. This will cover the many mesh destruction and deformation animations that are required for the S42 single player missions.

LIGHTING

The lighting team brought all surface outposts to final lighting, which included creating a consistent set of lighting fixtures, temperature charts, and rules which we can use to define how each type of outpost looks. The team also created a library of prefabs combining existing props with lighting elements which can be easily iterated on and propagated across all outposts.

TECH ART

The Tech Art team had a variety of tasks this month. They continued to create numerous Mannequin animation fragments for the Cinematic team.

They implemented the game Entity for the new Kastak Arms Custodian SMG energy weapon with the blocked-out mesh and rig. Now that it’s implemented, other departments like animation and VFX can start working with it in game.

The team added additional features to our internal Playblast tool to make it easier for the animators to create simple renders of their work, which are primarily used for animation reviews.

Finally, they also made great progress with new weapon dynamics and secondary motions using both in-game physics and simulation. The initial results were very promising, and the secondary animation will add one more level of subtle detail and realism to the verse.

ENVIRONMENT ART

This month, the Environment Art team worked on the updated material distribution, which will add a more varied breakup of the ecosystem ground materials on the surface of all three moons. The team nearly wrapped up work on the landing pads that will go with the surface outpost to give the players a stable solid landing point on what otherwise might be rough terrain. The surface of Delamar also received its final polish, with geology and materials being updated and fine-tuned. The surface is also getting an FX pass, adding an extra layer of visual interest to the environment and atmosphere. The area surrounding Levski will also have more areas of interest for players to explore.

In Levski, final touches are being put into the Customs area. All player traffic in and out of Levski will have to go through this checkpoint, so extra effort is being put in to make it both visually interesting and provide a potential deterrent for players trying to smuggle in unwanted goods.

The team also nearly completed work on the garages and will soon be ready to include them in the level. Once this work is completed, players will be able to request a vehicle in the garage and go out and explore Delamar’s surface. The elevators in Levski have also been updated with new models fitting the modular building set that we are using across the game.

GAME PROGRAMMING

The team finished up the remaining weapon features for 3.0 such as the Railgun cover animations, delayed recoils, and delayed ADS reticle.

They also completed the first iteration of the doors and airlocks and are now implementing the technical hooks for adding VFX and sound effects to make them available for the rest of the team to use. With the help of engineers from the UK and LA offices, the technical design for the network code of the new weapon system is being fleshed out and the overall research phase is coming to an end. The first test implementations will be started as soon as all other 3.0 tasks are completed.

CINEMATICS

Cinematics worked with UK graphics engineering to test out a working version of our brand new “Holographic projection volume entity tech.” This essentially provides a target holographic volume with content, fed from a source scene, that gets rendered into the volume and will allow us to have characters communicating via hologram to characters in a scene or have the hologlobes switch to a scripted mode and show mission briefings, all in real-time without resorting to things like pre-rendered motion graphics. This tech, minus the holographic component, will also be used to stream comms from other ships (cockpits) onto cockpit MFDs or other displays, all in real-time. As usual, the team also made progress across multiple chapters for S42.

QA

The Frankfurt QA team started testing the new CigDataPatcher in May and testing has continued through into June. Patcher testing is done daily, as well as on the client, Editor, and dedicated game server copied via CigDataPatcher. The main goal is to make sure there are no differences between builds pulled via the new patcher and builds pulled with our current internal build tool, CopyBuild 2. CopyBuild 3 had also been rolled out to QA at the beginning of June and has been in its QA testing phase in conjunction with CigDataPatcher.

Subsumption Editor testing continued to be a regular part of their weekly tasks as new versions with new features become available. QA works closely with Tony Zurovec and Francesco Roccucci to ensure that each Subsumption Editor release is free of anything that could block the development process. The team also spent a good portion of time testing four player gameplay in the Stanton System Persistent Universe level.

SYSTEM DESIGN

The System Design team continued to expand the library of usables for both the PU and S42. The Air Traffic Control also made headway and you should be able to experience this in-game soon. They started work on the FPS companion/buddy AI, including all the orders you can give them and the behaviors needed for those orders to take effect. The Actor Status system is being internally tested right now and is going through its final tweaking and balancing. They also put some finishing touches to the conversation system to allow our Cinematics team to create the best experiences possible.

WEAPONS

The weapons team blocked out numerous universal grip and optics attachments and converted older blocked out items to work with our new attachment rail system. The team did a quick first pass to test them on the existing guns to see how well they work and if any of the designs need to be adjusted.

They also completed the first pass blockout for the Klaus & Werner “Demeco,” light energy machine gun. For ship weapons, they finished the Preacher Armaments Distortion S4-S6 and Upgrade Levels 1-3. They also did a first pass blockout including rough animations for the Klaus & Werner Laser Repeater S1-S3, the Neutron Repeater S1-S3 and the Apocalypse Arms Ballistic Scattergun S1-S3.

Turbulent

TURBULENT

This month we moved 0.3.6A version of Spectrum up to the PTU for regression testing which will test all the backend changes that we’ve made to prepare for the eventual desktop integration.

The team also worked on features that will be in the new 0.3.6 build. The first of which is the forum editor. The new version will be introducing drafts when creating thread posts. The system will save your progress and allow you to move to other threads before returning and finishing your post. The new forum editor will also allow you to do inline images and add more markdown support for increased styling options.

Another major feature in 0.3.6A is custom roles for your Organization. The team has created a system that will let you see member lists directly from your Spectrum or Management port and then allow you to change the roles of users by visiting their profile. These customs will also have a custom set of permissions in addition to the ones provided by the Org system. This should create flexibility in how Org leaders assign members to groups, how you let them see specific sub-forums or sub chats within your orgs.

Mini profiles are also going to be converted to a more compact setup with a dedicated set of actions. You will now be able to see post counts for all the users as well as their Karma. If you aren’t familiar, Karma is a system that gives you points when people upvote content that you’ve created. The mini profile will also include a hotlink to message people directly rather than navigating through several sub-menus.

In other news, the team laid some important groundwork on the backend for voice. The team worked on the transmission part of our voice infrastructure, specifically how servers will direct and route people to different voice servers and what kind of data channel will work best for transmitting voice along with game data.

Totally unrelated to Spectrum, the team built a system for 3.0 to handle crashes. Several years ago, the team created a system called Panic that tracks client crashes, so they integrated our Panic system with an UI tool called Sentry to track client crashes, see the repro counts, assign those to developers, link them to JIRA issues, and view regression notifications from the game crashes. The team developed a custom SDK integration with Sentry that’s going to help developers in the testing phases for 3.0.

Otherwise, the main teams continued to work on ‘Welcome to SC’, the new Star Citizen website revamp. Most of the design work is finished for mobile, tablets, and other platforms and have now entered full coding mode.

Community

Community

We were proud to introduce the next great space bike, the Aopoa Nox! The Nox is a sleek, alien ship design that takes the Dragonfly bike concept and presents it a little differently. We introduced the sale with small interactive RP sessions on Twitter and Spectrum, then followed it up with a cool racing brochure and a beautiful website from the team at Turbulent. We were so excited to see how happy everyone was with their bikes, and can’t wait to let you try them yourselves in Alpha 3.0.

This month’s community shows covered everything from bikes to … the parts that make bikes! Happy Hours included an in-depth look at Items 2.0 and a fun throwback stream to the days of Reverse the Verse. Loremakers opened up more of the galaxy and Bugsmashers showed you some of the first in-engine footage of the Nox.

This summer, Bar Citizens are taking off like a rocket! It seems like there are more of them every weekend, including one week in June where there was a meetup close enough to each of our studios that developers around the world were all able to attend! In Los Angeles, we were on hand to kick off the first ever Food Citizen at a Peruvian restaurant — great food and even better company!

Event planning for our big presentations later this year, Gamescom and CitizenCon, continued and tickets for both went on sale and were gone almost immediately! In the case of CitizenCon last weekend, batches of tickets sold out in under a minute. We’re looking at options for bigger venues for next year and will keep you updated.

Behind the screens, we continued work on the New Player Experience and the long-awaited ship stats updates. The former is aimed at helping new backers learn to fly and navigate the verse, while the latter will provide more accurate, up-to-date ship stats through the website.

We tried a new sort of article for Jump Point this month, turning a design document on thrusters into an article about… well, how we place thrusters. It’s a tribute to the depth of the systems the team is creating for Star Citizen that something so obscure could turn into a pretty interesting guide!

Subscribers had a couple of cool treats this month, including a holographic model of Port Olisar for their hangars, several vault updates covering the development of the Nox and a license to try the Caterpillar free of charge all June. We saw some pretty amazing tricks when the Cat fleets massed, including Caterpillar bowling!

Finally, the Subscriber Town Hall held this month starred the Star Citizen character tech team. Characters are going to be at the heart of Star Citizen, and it’s always great when we can highlight some of the team responsible for the tech that will allow you to create YOUR Star Citizen in the ‘Verse. So, thanks to everyone who participated and thank you especially to the Subscribers who provide the questions each and every month.

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

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