Around The 'Verse

Misc Information

Chris is back from the European studios

Monthly Report came out last week.

First ever Valentines Sale is on right now including a free fly event.

2.6.1 will feature the launch of Spectrum.

Studio Update

200 staff at Foundry 42 UK

Shield generator, storage console, and mining module images

Damage states for the Dragonfly

Map of the Stanton system

Asteroid, nebula, satellite, and space station images

Ship Shape: Hornet to Super Hornet

The original Hornet paid homage to the Hornet from Wing Commander which was a light fighter you started out in.

At first the Hornet was to be a light fighter, but then after designs came back with it being heavily armed and beefy, Chris Roberts like it so much that it became the standard medium fighter for the UEE.

The first Hornet came out in 2806 and replaced the Aegis Avenger.

The goal has always for a player to feel as if the ship and everything about is it real, down to the buttons on cockpit and Chris feels this is was a big draw for a lot of people to the project.

With the help of CGbot studios, Jim Martin, Ryan Churches, and Dave Haddock they created the demo shown at GDC and Kickstarter.

The first pass of the Hornet was in 2013 for the Hangar Module by Chris Smith.

The next was in 2014 with updating it to PBR

2016 involved a complete upgrade to the Hornet and variants to bring them to the current standards

The new Super Hornet will be in patch 2.6.1.

The old damage system was hand crafted and had states of 25, 50, 75, and 100. The new shader system dynamically applies the artist’s designs across any part of the ship as it’s destroyed, making it much easier to create damage models that look and feel realistic and varied.

Behind the Scenes: Multi-Region Servers

Game and platform run on public cloud, as has almost always been the case

Evaluated different public clouds to determine best option short term and long term

Huge overhead with running your own servers, cloud allows for lower cost and much greater flexibility

Cloud also allows you to have servers close to your players rather than centrally located

Three main types of virtual machines (hub, core, and game)

Current model allows for many hubs, many game servers, but singleton core services.

Core services currently being revamped and redesigned to become stateless and easy to scale to allow them to cope with any load they get. *Original build machine was a single computer which produced 1 build per day, now CIG uses an internal cloud as a build system that can scale based on need.

Ahmed and his team worked on multi-region servers through part of December, January, and early February

Happy that they have a feature done that can be seen and enjoyed by the player base directly

One database for all servers in the world, means you carry your game over when switching regions

Current servers in North Virginia (US), Frankfurt (Europe), and Sydney (Australia)

Players will be sent to closest load balancer, then closest hub server, then will be marked with a region ID and assigned to a game server. This can then be changed if the player wants. *They did the work in 2 months but the previous 18 months of work was crucial to getting it done so quickly.

Planning for failures and getting the network back up quickly

All networks are laid out and they are ready to expand to all 14 or 15 regions from the current 3.

Looking towards the long term and possibly having as many as 10,000 VMs reporting at the same time. Planning for that scale.

Automation systems are done and they can scale with high reliability.

Happy Hour

Today's guests were Senior Writer, Will Wiessbaum, QA Tester, Michael Falkland

The Xi'An apparently have different tastes when it comes to food, some of it would be considered not edible to humans, but delicious to Xi'An. Also the Xi'An favour texture more so than flavour.

Also Will couldn't go into detail, but they seem to be planning some gameplay around how the Xi'An hold things in comparison to humans

Artemis was referenced in the show, asking if it'll ever be findable. Artemis was a ship that was piloted by an AI which held a crew in deep sleep. They lost contact with the ship and it's been missing ever since, if you can find it, that's a question you might have to answer yourself.

The next concept sale is the Hurricane which goes on sale next Friday. Price is unknown.

If Imperator Kastigan and Messer were pitted against each other in a game of BopIT, Messer would win says Will.

The Squadron 42 Script is hovering around 1200 pages and is still being tweaked.