Happy Monday, everyone!

Every year, Ship Showdown challenges the community to champion their favorite vehicle. With more than 100 flyable ships in the ‘verse, there’s no shortage of passionate opinions! After thousands of creative submissions (screenshots, videos, Lego™ miniatures, original songs, 3D models, and more), and 2 rounds of epic head-to-head battles, we’ve finally entered the FINAL FOUR!

If you’re still undecided about who to support, you should activate your Free Fly Code now and put the four contenders for the championship title through their paces. But hurry up, ‘cause the duel between C2 Hercules and MPUV Cargo has already begun!

Now, let’s see what’s going on this week:

On Tuesday, the Narrative team will release a special Lore Makers article explaining the concept and lore of regeneration in the ‘verse.

Wednesday will bring you the bi-weekly Roadmap Update and Roadmap Roundup. We’ll also dive into some fun data on the XenoThreat event in our latest infographic.

Thursday sees the return of our weekly episodic behind-the-scenes series, Inside Star Citizen. This week, it’s one episode-long Sprint Report. Yep.

On Friday, you’ll see updates to the Subscriber Vault and the weekly RSI Newsletter will be delivered to your inbox. Subscribers will find the latest issue of Jump Point in their account section. We’ll also welcome a new Star Citizen Live episode, which will broadcast on our Star Citizen Twitch channel. We’ll update you with the details on the guest and time later this week. Also Friday, our Subscribers will find the latest issue of Jump Point in their account section.

Last but certainly not least, Digital CitizenCon approaches! This week we’ll be revealing all the details, including panels, upcoming contests and giveaways, and more… Keep an eye out on Friday for all the info.

Have a great week!

Christian ‘Wayne-CIG’ Schmitt
Community Manager

Image by Trinity-Star

The Weekly Community Content Schedule

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2
Ship Showdown Free Fly
This Week in Star Citizen

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2
Ship Showdown Free Fly
Lore Makers Guide: Three Generations

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2021
Ship Showdown – Finals
Ship Showdown Free Fly
Roadmap Update
Roadmap Roundup
XenoThreat Infographic

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2021
Ship Showdown Free Fly
Inside Star Citizen (youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2021
Ship Showdown Free Fly
Digital CitizenCon Details
Star Citizen Live (twitch.tv/starcitizen)
Jump Point September Issue for Subscribers
Subscriber Vault Update
Weekly Newsletter

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2021
Ship Showdown Free Fly

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2021
Ship Showdown Free Fly

Community MVP: September 20, 2021

It’s time for your favorite four ships to face off in an epic clash of titans!

Choose between a variety of ships perfectly suited to life in the ‘verse.

A pirate captain’s only as good as their trusty ship. Drake has some of their finest available for a limited time.

TFP continues the Developer Stream series Sept. 22nd at 9 PM CST. Join the Character, Animation and Special FX Team with Host & Senior Developer Lathan (@fubar_prime) for an in-depth look at the new HD Characters, Animations & Special FX Tech.

https://www.twitch.tv/fubar_prime

* Rebalanced hp/stamina on most foods ( more stamina on hp foods and more hp on stamina foods etc )
* Fixed tar-pit not spawning on dedicated-server worlds
* Slightly lower hp on Fulings & Fuling shamans
* Slightly easier to stagger Fulings
* Fixed issue with pressing I in server list while trying to filter servers
* Lower bow stamina use
* Cage wall 1x1 physics fix ( Already placed pieces will probably need to be repositioned )
* Boars now also eat blueberries, raspberries & mushrooms
* Chinese translation fix

Where the grass grows underfoot,
And the sky is blue overhead.
There will always be a
Hearth & Home.

(Spoilers ahead! If you want to discover the rest of the content yourself, you might not want to read this post just yet.)

Another month has passed since we spoke to you last, and what a month it’s been. First of all, the feedback from our cinematic trailer was incredible, and it has been great to see so many excited comments ahead of the update!

But now the wait is finally over, Vikings – Hearth & Home releases today. We’re incredibly excited to bring our first major update to you all, as well as a new video to show off some new gameplay!



As many of you will now know from the series of short spotlight videos, the Hearth & Home update brings plenty of new content to Valheim, expanding your gameplay options by introducing new mechanics, furniture, building pieces, food, weapons, optimizations and more.

The name of the update is Hearth & Home, which means that the cooking and the building got a bit of extra attention. For all the builders out there we have added a whole bunch of new build pieces and furniture, ranging everywhere from sturdy shingle roofs to a mighty stone throne.


We’ve also done our best to listen to community feedback, and several highly-requested features have made their way into this update. You’ll now be able to share map data with other vikings in your world, find seeds to plant more types of trees, and finally destroy your unwanted items with the new obliterator.


If taming animals is your thing, you’ll now find that you can name your favorite pets. We also suggest that you spend some extra time with your Lox...


While many features introduced in Hearth & Home have already been revealed, not even Odin has spied some of the new features being added with the update, including something dark and mysterious that seems to spread across the plains… Brave vikings should go and find out for themselves!

We hope you all enjoy the new content and want to thank you all again for your continued support as we continue our journey through Early Access together.

Skål!

The Iron Gate Team


Discord: {LINK REMOVED}https://discord.com/invite/valheim
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Valheimgame
Facebook: {LINK REMOVED}https://www.facebook.com/valheimgame
Instagram: {LINK REMOVED}https://www.instagram.com/valheim_official/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/valheim/

Patch 0.202.14 (HEARTH & HOME)General improvements
* Weapons rebalanced (All weapons have been rebalanced to be more viable as main weapon and also have more unique playstyles)
* Blocking system overhauled (Current maximum hp now greatly affects your ability to block attacks, stagger bar gui added)
* Naming tamed creatures
* Gamepad sensitivity settings
* Auto-pickup toggle button added
* Graphics settings (Active point lights & Active point light shadows)
* Tamed creatures affected by friendly fire setting (i.e you can’t hurt a tamed creature unless you enable friendly fire or use the new Butcher knife item)
* Various other improvements and bugfixes

Food
* Food rebalance (Most food items now give mainly stamina or mainly health to make food choices more interesting)
* Food GUI overhauled to work better with the rebalanced food
* Over 10 new things to eat (Actually 12)

World
* Tamed Lox now have a purpose
* Slimy locations & creatures added to plains
* New plantable seeds: Birch, Oak & Onions

Items
* New weapons: Crystal battleaxe, Silver knife
* New shields: Bone tower shield, Iron buckler
* Butcher knife (Special weapon for butchering tamed animals)
* Thunder stone (Sold by trader)
* Lox accessory

Building
* New Darkwood building pieces like shingle roofs, beams, decorations and more
* New types of furniture, including but not limited to a mighty stone throne and a steamy viking hot tub
* Crystal walls
* New types of stacks to show off your treasure and resources
* Cauldron improvements: Spice rack, Butcher’s table, Pots and pans
* Cartography table (For sharing map-data with other players)
* Oven added (For baking bread and pie)
* Obliterator added (Items be gone)
* Iron cooking station (Required to cook some types of meat)
... and more!

Currency Hotfix and Upcoming Wipes

With the Marines struggling to define their role during the Second Tevarin War, Operation Oberon gave them the chance to prove their worth to High Command. Read all about the operation in this exert from the definitive history of the UEE Marines.

This article originally appeared in Jump Point 7.12.

Chapter 3: Operation Oberon

With the recent trend of military defeats, High-Command knew the UEE was losing the Second Tevarin War. Corath’Thal’s guerillas proved too agile and elusive for the lumbering military war machine, and forced civilians to pay the heaviest price. Desperate to turn the tide, Navy officials met with spacecraft manufacturers and offered lucrative contracts for technology that could overcome the Tevarin’s upgraded phalanx shields. The UEE placed thousands of new proximity sensors throughout high-risk systems in an attempt to track roving Tevarin forces and, following Bremen’s lead, worked with the Senate to legislate the creation of local militias to patrol and protect their home systems. While the Army and Navy scrambled to counter the Tevarin’s successful strategy, they at least had a clear purpose. Meanwhile, the Marines struggled to define their role in the war. Their difficulties, however, didn’t exclusively lie with the enemy.

The Army, still stung that the Marines were removed from their command structure decades earlier, argued that they were best suited to battle the Tevarin on land, and repeatedly referenced their victory at Koren Pass as proof. As such, High Command passed any land engagements and operations to the Army to execute. Meanwhile, the Navy refused to provide the small Marine fleet with any new fighters, claiming that their combat pilots needed them, and often assigned old and outdated ships to take Marines into battle. Even Marine numbers were proving difficult to fill. The Army and Navy understood an ascendant Marine force would drain resources and talent from them, so they bitterly fought the Marines’ right to recruit top-tier soldiers from their ranks. Both branches begrudgingly worked with the Marines but remained determined to prove they were the key defenders of the Empire.

This conflict over the Marines’ role came to a head in mid-April 2605 when reports out of Oberon described an attack on Uriel that wasn’t a typical hit-and-run operation. A Tevarin force had captured a sizable landing zone and the accompanying warrens near a quantum fuel refinery. Until then, the Tevarin had forgone establishing groundbases in favor of keeping their forces mobile. Military officials feared this meant that the Tevarin had entered the next phase in their war strategy; one that could see them taking land away from Humanity and using the existing infrastructure to establish resupply points. Such a spot in Oberon could be used to aid attacks on Vega and the UEE’s primary food producers in Bremen. Worse still would be if the Tevarin slipped through Bremen and entered the Perry Line. Military strategists deemed a Tevarin and Xi’an alliance a ‘Human Doomsday’ scenario that must be avoided at all costs.

Yet, when Marine General Russ Adachi presented to the joint fleet command a plan to attack the Tevarin base on Uriel, Army and Navy leadership balked at the operation. Oberon was unclaimed and Army and Navy officials believed that the war’s limited resources should only be deployed to defend UEE systems. Furthermore, they felt that the occupation was an obvious feint, designed to attract UEE forces. Raising the proposal to High Command, General Adachi underlined the strategic importance of denying the Tevarin a safe haven near UEE space and protecting Humanity from Tevarin aggression on every front. He feared that ignoring Oberon would only encourage the Tevarin to take more systems.

When High Command prioritized eliminating the Tevarin base, the Army and Navy argued that their combined force would be more effective than the Marines alone. Projection models of the proposed attack showed that a large scale engagement by Army and Navy forces would lead to considerable casualties and the destruction of a significant number of ships. Making matters worse, mobilizing forces for the assault would leave other areas of the Empire vulnerable to counterattack. High Command careful analyzed the collected data and decided on a surgical strike, clearing the way for the Marines to show the Tevarin what they were about.

The Marines were ready for the challenge. Special forces from the 1st Marine Combat Battalion had been training for weeks when word came down that High Command had authorized Operation Oberon. In preperation, they trained in an advanced combat style that could neutralize the infamous hand-to-hand expertise of the Tevarin’s elite soldiers, and used schematics and scans to build a replica of the landing zone’s warrens on Corin. Now an official go, they tirelessly drilled the assault before boarding a secretive Navy transport to Oberon.

The Marines knew they would be outnumbered and outgunned, so they needed to get to the planet without alerting the Tevarin. This involved waiting days until weather conditions provided enough cover for the deployment of “Nails” to quickly and covertly deliver the troops planetside. The Marines spent several anxious days waiting aboard a ship in Vega until getting word in the middle of the night that conditions were right. Their transport set out for Oberon, cautiously evading Tevarin patrols buzzing around the planet.

In the early hours of June 24, 2605, Marine commandos touched down on Uriel near a decommissioned maintenance enclosure that provided access to the subterranean tunnels connected to the quantum fuel refinery. The Marines believed that eliminating the facility’s strategic importance would drive the Tevarin to abandon the landing zone, so they advanced toward the refinery’s control room intent on destroying it.

The first stage of the mission went as planned. The Marines carefully avoided engagement until they entered the control room and killed all the Tevarin inside. While setting explosives, a contingent of Tevarin soldiers approached and engaged the Marines. The ensuing firefight and ever growing number of Tevarin troops prevented the Marines from planting the final charges. Seeing no alternative, they resorted to an improvised demolition strategy as they fled.

The Marines raced through the tunnels to their secondary exfiltration point, assuming that their original entry point had been compromised. They successfully reached the planetside only to receive word that Tevarin ships had engaged and chased away their approaching rescue ship. They were now stranded.

Filled with uncertainty regarding the success of their mission and unsure if they would ever leave Uriel, the Marines fled through the snow-covered mountains surrounding the landing zone. Thus beginning an epic and often unbelievable journey across harsh terrain with better supplied Tevarin forces nipping at their heels. When military analysts received word of the situation, they put their chances of survival at 3.8%. As General Adachi famously said, “They’ve obviously never met my Marines.”

He was right. Despite the drastic odds, this incredible journey through Uriel’s mountains would become legendary and inspire generations of young soldiers to sign up. Yet, the truth behind what actually occurred is even more unbelievable than the stories would lead you to believe.

EXCERPT FROM ALWAYS FORWARD REPRINTED BY PERMISSION.
COPYRIGHT MERITUS PRESS

RSI Launcher 1.5.0 Release Notes

Happy Monday, everyone!

Ship Showdown is well underway! The heated tournament of vehicles is now on Day 5, and we’ve already seen incredible participation from the community. The ARGO MPUV has made it to Round 2, and the Cutlass was dethroned by the 600i in the closest battle Ship Showdown has ever seen!

Want to make sure your favorite ship makes it to the top? Be sure to cast your vote on the Ship Showdown tournament page to push your choice to the next round. The battles change every day at 9am Pacific, so don’t wait to get your votes in!

We also just wrapped up the CitizenCon Community Video Contest! We’ve received a mountain of submissions and are now going through to determine which ones will broadcast live during the big show!

Speaking of CitizenCon, keep a close eye on the website as we we’ll aim to reveal more details, including a full schedule, next week!

Now, let’s see what’s going on this week:

On Tuesday, the Narrative team will release an excerpt from the book “Always Forward: A UEE Marine History”, which originally premiered in an issue of Jump Point magazine.

Thursday, we’re back with another episode of Inside Star Citizen. Continuing our look at the major features of Alpha 3.15, this episode tackles all things inventory as we take another step toward fully physicalized items and inventory management.

On Friday, you’ll see an update to the Subscriber Vault and the weekly RSI Newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Now, we did cancel Star Citizen Live last week due to CitizenCon filming going long – and trust me when I say we were bummed out about this. We committed to coming back strong this week, but now have to admit that was premature. Due to some last minute changes, the video team will be in Manchester wrapping up the final shoot for CitizenCon. This means we’re going to have to sideline Star Citizen Live one more time. We are sorry about that!

In lighter news, if we miss one more episode, Lando has agreed to wear a tropical shirt, hand picked by Zyloh for 6 months straight.

Side-note, for those that will inevitably ask what we’re filming, CitizenCon will have both live and pre-recorded elements. This year’s show is super unique for us given the pandemic, so we’ve had to get a bit creative! As mentioned above, stay tuned for the full schedule next week!

Have a great week!

Jake Bradley
Associate Community Manager

Lego Mustang by Mannok

The Weekly Community Content Schedule

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2
This Week in Star Citizen

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2
Lore Post: Always Forward: A UEE Marine History

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2
Inside Star Citizen (youtube.com/user/RobertsSpaceInd)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2
Subscriber Vault Update
Weekly Newsletter

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2021
Ship Showdown – Phase 2

Community MVP: September 13, 2021

Greetings, Exiles!

In April 2020 we first released our Official Server Rules of Conduct and Guidelines overhaul, with a more detailed and comprehensive set of rules and guidelines for our Official Servers. With the release and adoption of our Zendesk platform a few months later, we’ve been able to focus and streamline the enforcement of our rules and our processes.

With that in mind, we’ve been working on an update to our Official Servers Terms and Conducts to make them clearer to understand, more comprehensive and aiming to cover the majority of situations where the previous ruleset would prove ineffective, cause confusion or omit possible infractions.

On September 27, 2021, we will start enforcing these updated rules on our Official Servers. Until then and if you play in an Official Server, please take some time to read and understand our new Terms and Conducts here:

https://forums.funcom.com/t/official-servers-terms-of-conduct-guidelines-and-procedures/112678

We believe this new revision will be an improvement towards making our Official Servers a more inclusive and safer place to survive, build and dominate.

Stay safe.

TFP continues the Developer Stream series Sept. 15 at 9 PM CST. Join Eric, Allan, & the level design team with Host & Senior Developer Lathan (@fubar_prime) for an in-depth look at new POIs, the new player build menu & the new Restore Power quests.

https://www.twitch.tv/fubar_prime

Dynamic Events AMA Recap

Each month we host an open submission live Q&A on Spectrum joined by developers from various specialties across CIG. These questions and answers were collected from the Spectrum AMA on September 8, 2021.

This time, we welcomed four guests from different departments who answered players’ most burning questions on how our Dynamic Events and providing insights into the decisions we made.

This AMA is complete but keep an eye out for upcoming threads for your chance to ask us anything!

The trading stock and replenish rate can be painfully slow. For Jumptown 2, what potential changes (if any) without spoilers have been considered following similar indications from NineTails Lockdown where players were unable to adequately resupply Medical Supplies? This sometimes slowed the event to a boring stall, which negatively affected its quality, pace and the work that has been done by the team to make this event work

Ben Dorsey:

I’m going to answer this question in two parts, Jumptown 2 and Ninetails.

For JT2, I’m actually (disclaimer: barring any unforeseen bugs) spawning the drugs physically, rather than having you buy them from a shop. The “inventory” then is less “300 boxes becomes available across all servers” and more “A box will be made available to spawn every 30 seconds on each server”.
I felt this was both more interesting gameplay-wise as carrying the cargo out to your ship adds a layer of complexity (physicalized cargo will make this more standard across the game, but I didn’t want to wait for that) and I felt that in a PVP-centered event, players on another server being able to take the boxes you are trying to defend/steal defeated a large amount of the gameplay.

For Ninetails Lockdown, some of you who participated in the very first Evocati test might actually remember there were shop mods that made it so the shops selling medical supplies had their sell inventories boosted, much like the station has its buy inventory capacity boosted. I was asked to remove those mods to emphasize the derelicts due to XenoThreat feedback. Thanks to the Ninetails feedback that has come in, I was able to re-hash that conversation and I have hooked the shop mods for sell locations back up for 3.15.

[Follow-up reply:] I covered this very briefly in the ISC segment, but I also have shop mods for sell locations in JT2 to increase the shops’ buy capacity.

Exploits/Quick attacks that break the events. Currently, for Xeno Threat, a soon-I’m-sure-to-be-overcome issue was seen where destroying/attacking the enemy Idris in Phase 3 before the Javelin arrived in the cloud broke the event. Without spoilers, have there been any design changes you’ve had to make for Jumptown 2 in order to mitigate the chances of event breaking or long stalls?

Luke Pressley:

We saw lots of backers stating this as being the cause, but the Javelin’s arrival has no bearing on the spawning of the Idris in logic. The hotfix we attempted was to fix an issue we recognised whereby we attempted to spawn the two Idris within a 1km radius of the wreck of the previous Idris and if that failed no Idris were spawned and the mission became incompletable. We had thought this an extremely rare situation as we never encountered it in testing, but then we saw 50 players in large ships mobbing the Idris at the moment of its destruction and we realised it was a likely culprit of the mission becoming stuck. To prevent this possibility, if the 1km radius fails, we gradually increase the radius until the spawn succeeds. This fix affects spawns game-wide so will not be a problem anywhere, NineTails included.
However, this was only our best guess for how to fix the Idris not spawning and the mission becoming stuck, but it seems from player feedback that this has not solved the issue (may have improved it) so further analytics will need to be added to get to the bottom of it.

[Follow-up reply:] I was in two minds about trying to answer this because I am not a coder so I’m unable to follow up in greater detail, but I’ve verified my explanation and I think it’s worth posting.

Knowing when things happen is easy because you get a callback telling you it happened. Knowing when things don’t happen is not easy because you never get the callback. The best you can do is put in a timer and if you don’t receive the callback after that time assume you never will and abort the mission.
The event ran for not even two weeks and first the issue had to happen enough that it became clear it was a serious issue. Then we had to investigate and, because we were unable to reproduce the issue internally, in the end we made our best guess fix (a valuable one to the rest of the game also) rather than add a timer. In hindsight this may have been a mistake, but we intend to add the analytics we need to catch this issue and solve it properly as it is likely not limited to this event.

Simultaneous Dynamic Events? Currently, pre-alert broadcasts occur across the channel regarding one event so it doesn’t conflict with another announcement from another dynamic event as XT and Ninetails did not occur simultaneously. But what is the thought process behind simultaneously occurring dynamic events being transmitted to players within the same star system (i.e. Stanton) or star system sector (i.e. around Pyro IV)? e.g. Will only selecting a mission in the contracts manager under “Dynamic Events” allow you to hear Dulli speak (as opposed to how she broadcasts across the whole area) or will flying into the area where the event is occurring automatically trigger the mission acceptance and pre-alert announcements?

Rob Reininger:

Ultimately, the intention is that there could be any number of things happening in the ‘verse at any given time. We acknowledge that we’re currently being extremely heavy handed with the broadcasting of events because we are using the tools we have at the moment. Ideally, we need to expand our notification system such that it can handle multiple events, queuing messages, and other player driven controls like controlling the types of messaging they receive. Also keep in mind that we are in the early stages of this tech and this will continue to evolve as we move forward with not only the Dynamic Event system, but other complimentary systems as well.

So far all dynamic events have been primarily space oriented. Other than Jumptown 2 are there any plans for a ground based dynamic event?

Rob Reininger:

Dynamic events will ultimately trigger all over the ‘verse based on various conditions being hit that are relevant to the specific mission. This could be at something as small as an outpost or a UGF, to comm arrays, stations, and even major landing zones. (Requiring FPS gameplay OR spaceships.) TZ’s upcoming Citizen Con presentation will get into some additional details, but rest assured, we want this type of content happening all over the universe, not just for larger scale space battles.

Edward Fuller:

Yes! We want to incorporate more ground-based scenarios once we have AI capable of navigating on the planet’s surfaces.

Will future Dynamic Events offer reputation-based rewards for players choosing to side with the Xenothreat to fight the CDF?

Luke Pressley:

Whenever it is we next run the XenoThreat event it is my personal hope and intent that we have the necessary clarity of markers to deliver it with a counter mission for XenoThreat supporters. So if the assumption is we get a counter mission, my assumption would be that rewards based on rep would be available. This is not mine to promise, but I do see it as the next big and exciting thing to properly tackle.

Plans have been made on improving the way we communicate things like hostility, lawful right to attack and ally status (based on tracked mission) which will make these epic counter mission possible.

Any plans for a non-combat profession centered dynamic event ie: involving mining/refining?

Rob Reininger:

Ideally, we will have dynamic events that cover the entire breadth of our content/feature sets. As soon as we have mining functional within the core missions, something you can take from a mission giver or the contract manager, I would expect us to look for ways to incorporate that into our dynamic content.

How will the future of Dynamic Events take advantage of all the space and interesting locations in Stanton and not be subjected to one particular area in the corner?

Rob Reininger:

One thing to keep in mind is that we are using the current events that we have to build out necessary tech and prove out a scenario for a single location before we try and trigger them in “any” of the locations in the ‘verse. This helps us zero in on issues related to mission logic as well as identify any location markup that the mission may need. (IE, there’s no reason to mark up every possible location until you know exactly what the setup needs are.) Often times we refine the experience as we go as well, so what we initially implement might not be the final experience and there’s no sense going wide until we’re happy with it. That said, these will ultimately be something that can happen in as many locations as possible so as our technology continues to grow I would expect that more and more of our locations get utilized with the content we’re pushing forward with.

In the future will there be a mechanism which uses RNG to determine which dynamic event will become active?

Rob Reininger:

We are working extremely hard to build a system that can, and will, react to conditions that are running on a backend simulation. While this still involves some level of probabilistic math here, the intent is that some benchmark was hit through either 1) the player’s interaction within the world, or 2) through some level of virtual AI decisions that have caused some level of imbalance in the world. While RNGs are used here and there, it’s often for things like “which cluster of enemies to throw at you during a random (or not so random) encounter”. But the bottom line is that we want the world to be something that the players can understand and potentially learn what warning signs to look out for or else “X” or “Y” will likely happen. That said, this won’t prohibit us from randomly triggering things.

Are Dynamic Events really necessary with the current state of the game servers (lag, desync…) ?

Edward Fuller:

Building Dynamic Events and running them now is absolutely necessary and beneficial as an important part of our development of the game. They act as test beds that expose problems in both the events mission system and the interplay of other gameplay systems as well as back-end systems. The features, discoveries and leanings that we take from building and running these events now leads to even better events further down the line.

What things have you learned and are going to change with regards to crime stats for LAWFUL players during these events?

Luke Pressley:

We have learned a lot from the current run of XenoThreat, as well as from the first release which was our first attempt at a large-scale fleet battle and, as such, we learned a lot about the kind of issues that only present when many players and AI get together in one place to fight.

The major standouts we wanted to address for the second release were our simplistic friendly-fire system which led to unfair CrimeStats. We made major strides in friendly-fire arbitration which drastically cut down the number of unfair CrimeStats awarded according to the feedback and analytics we received on the event, and it allowed us to more accurately identify the remaining edge-cases. What’s great is this kind of change improves the whole game, not just the event and paves the way for more large-scale space battles in the future.

Now that the system is generally fairer, a lot of the noise has been cut out and we are now able to identify the specific remaining issues. I can see there is still work to do on the collision side so that will be our next focus as well as some changes I’m sure backers will love, but I can’t yet go into.

Are Dynamic Events triggered manually or is there some logic in place that triggers the event based on a condition (for example if there is a high density of crimestats on a server)?

Ben Dorsey:

Currently, these events are triggered manually. It’s absolutely planned to have these events be driven by Quanta and player actions.
We will be talking about this a bit in Digital CitizenCon, so tune into that for more info.

Can we expect to see video feeds via mobiglas instead of still images during events ?

Edward Fuller:

YES you will get to see Dulli’s face in missions comms one day.

Technically there is always going to be some scenarios in which an NPC is supposed to comms call a player and that NPC is not yet streamed in on the clients machine. So we may still, under certain conditions need to not show their face for this period (maybe with static or an image placeholder instead) that then gets replaced by their face when they stream in. So, we would always try to show the face if we can.

What do you feel was missing in the Nine Tails event that made it less engaging than the Xenothreat?

Ben Dorsey:

So many things. I’ll take this opportunity to do a sort of mini postmortem.

Insufficient Medical Supplies:
There aren’t enough medical supplies available for haulers to participate freely in the event. For Ninetails Lockdown, some of you who participated in the very first Evocati test might actually remember there were shop mods that made it so the shops selling medical supplies had their sell inventories boosted, much like the station has its buy inventory capacity boosted. We decided to remove those mods to emphasize the derelicts due to XenoThreat feedback. Thanks to the Ninetails feedback that has come in, I was able to rehash that conversation and I have hooked the shop mods for sell locations back up for 3.15.
We’re a bit worried this will be too profitable, but an enjoyable experience is worth a little temporary economic destabilization, and this is something that can be tuned. Longer-term, improvements to the shop system should also help this.

Players not playing the Nine Tail’s side:
This is the most painful one for me. Based on our analytics, for every 1 Nine Tails-aligned player there were 20 Crusader-aligned players. Short term, I’m looking to increase the rewards for the Nine Tails, but if I’m being honest, I expect this to have very little impact.
Longer-term, I’ve requested some tech to deal with Nine Tails-aligned players being sent to jail, and once players can obtain Nine Tails reputation, my hope is that I can move away from using CrimeStats as a determiner for participation, and thus have players be a bit more long-term in what sides they want to align with.

Event was too short:
Many players were unable to participate in the event due to it ending before they could log in. Mea culpa on this one. I had set the prologue phase to one hour, thinking that would be sufficient. This number is dynamically tunable whenever we launch the event, so we will probably extend the prologue a bit in the future.
I also have asked that, in the future, at least until we have a large enough stable of these events to allow players to regularly log in and find something available, we give a bit more outside-the-game warning for Nine Tails, so people can plan to log in.

Event was too long/repetitive:
As other systems come into place throughout the game, my hope is that this will naturally evolve a bit. For instance, one of my least favorite pieces of the event right now is that I send out AI scanner ships for players to defend. I would vastly prefer that I offer this job to players as well, once long-distance scanning becomes more of thing.

Doesn’t Feel like a blockade:
While flying in, you are not attacked nearly enough by Nine Tails AI. This was one we saw coming, but its not fixable in the short-term. It’s actually a performance problem combined with a few AI problems. The ships are taking a long time to spawn (so you’ve already flown by), they spawn standing still, and they cannot currently fly fast enough to catch up to you/don’t have a way to stop you. Performance will be an ongoing fight, the rest are things that have active discussions about solutions going.

Will we see more Nine-tails events pop up now that Xenothreat is over? I think the community wants more of these random events popping up, but I haven’t see any Nine-tails events pop up in the past few weeks. Thanks for all the hard work!

Ben Dorsey:

Likely yes, though running these is always a conversation with several other departments.
We might hold off until after 3.15 (I would like to get some minor fixes in).
That being said, Nine Tails Lockdown is an Evergreen Event. It is intended to run occasionally forever. (We just want to avoid burning you all out on it, particularly when there are known issues.)

I noticed that during the Xeno Threat and the Ninetails Lockdown, the enemy used a lot of military spec/grade ships: military spec Idris-M, Anvil Arrow, vanguard warden, etc. Was this to balance the battles or should we be worried that the UEE Navy’s shipyards are being hijacked?

Luke Pressley:

The XenoThreat’s lore is that they are mostly ex-Navy so it is reasonable to assume that they have access to Navy shipyards that others would not. Also, they would prefer to fly ships they were accustomed to. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it :)

As for the Nine Tails flying military ships, I just reviewed the ships available with the Nine Tails paint job and the majority are not military ships, so I assume you’re referring to the Idris M which I agree, it might have been better to replace that with an Idris P. However, the instruction for development of the event was to make it as efficiently as possible which meant relying on existing assets and the Idris M was proven working.

Thus far the dynamic events are based on performing the same actions over and over to build up rep and earn aUEC. Will there be events in the future that are true events that we only participate in once and reap staggering rewards or fail and the event ends without allowing us to try again. Making it a very high risk/high reward scenario?

Edward Fuller:

Yes we want to be able to do this. Currently we replay events to get as much data as possible and help us to refine the implementations of the systems and mechanics that are the focus of those events.

Also as we build our mission logic in a modular way and as our array of modules increases we will be able to build these events faster. The story elements and locations of any given event can then be one of the aspects we focus on to make them more unique and one offs.

Disclaimer

The answers accurately reflect development’s intentions at the time of writing, but the company and development team reserve the right to adapt, improve, or change feature and ship designs in response to feedback, playtesting, design revisions, or other considerations to improve balance or the quality of the game overall.

Squadron 42 Monthly Report: August 2021

This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We’re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.

TO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS
SUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 09:01:2021
REF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX

FAO Squadron 42 recruits.

Welcome to August’s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you’ll find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to key cinematics, additions to essential vehicles, and engine developments that will benefit the whole project.

Thank you for you continued support of Squadron 42.

Sincerely,

CIG COMMUNICATIONS

AI (Content)

Throughout August, AI Content supported Level Design by creating a new ‘worker’ behavior. This enables the designers to apply traits to the various AI archetypes, refining which usables they use, such as sitting, leaning, inspecting, and cooking.

The team modified various usables to utilize the first reaction system, which allows NPCs to break out of usables during animations. For example, if an NPC is typing at a console and hears a gunshot or sees an enemy, they will stop typing and react appropriately. This was completed for the standing and sitting console, leans, seats, stairs, railings, search spots, attack spots, and more. They’re currently working with the Engine and Animation teams to improve the visuals.

Conclusion

WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…

Roadmap Roundup

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

Every two weeks, we accompany the Roadmap update with a brief explanatory note to give you insight into the decision-making that led to any changes. This is part of an effort to make our communications more transparent, more specific, and more insightful for all of you who help to make Star Citizen and Squadron 42 possible.

Last week on Star Citizen Live, Richard Tyrer outlined a few changes that are coming to the Core Gameplay Pillar’s release cadence (check the episode out if you haven’t).

To summarize, the Core Gameplay teams (Actor Feature, Actor Tech, Weapon Feature, Weapon Content) are shifting their focus to delivering their features for Squadron 42 first, before they are then released to the Persistent Universe. This has a two-fold benefit: Squadron 42 will benefit greatly from the additional resources, and the Persistent Universe will see features in a more complete state. This does however make an impact to the Release View of the Roadmap. While some features may shift, it’s important to remember that you can track progress of any given feature on the Progress Tracker, which will remain unchanged.

In addition, with this publish we are also adding the column for Q2 2022’s release window, Alpha 3.18. Additional features will be added as their schedules are further locked in.

With that said, let’s go ahead and dive into this week’s Roadmap Roundup!

-CIG Community Team

Notable Changes for September 8th, 2021

Release View

The following cards has been added to Release View:

Scoreboard UI Improvements
Convert the scoreboards in Arena Commander and Star Marine to work with Building Blocks. The new interface will give players real-time access to position, name, rank, score, objectives, kills, deaths, assists and ping.

Pirate Swarm / Vanduul Swarm Improvements
A detailed rebalance of the waves in Arena Commander’s Pirate Swarm and Vanduul swarm modes, aiming for a more engaging player experience in these modes.

——

These features have passed their final review for 3.15. For this reason, we have updated these cards to Committed and changed their color to blue.

——

Due to the aforementioned changes in release strategy, these features will require additional time from the Persistent Universe teams to implement. To learn more about these changes, make sure to watch the replay of last Friday’s Star Citizen Live with Richard Tyrer. Rich takes a deep-dive look into the Core Gameplay release cadence and sheds some light on how these changes positively impact the ‘verse.

Therefore the following features have been either moved to a new release window or removed temporarily while their schedules are locked down.

Moved to 3.18:

Removed Temporarily in order to reschedule:

——

That’s all for this week! Join the discussion on Spectrum

MPUV Cargo - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 50.4$ TTC

Gladius - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 129.6$ TTC

Cutlass Black - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 144$ TTC

Freelancer MAX - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 216$ TTC

Razor - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 208.8$ TTC

Retaliator Bomber - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 396$ TTC

Carrack - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 864$ TTC

600i Explorer - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 684$ TTC

Reclaimer - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 576$ TTC

Mole - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 453.6$ TTC

Mercury Star Runner - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 374.4$ TTC

Constellation Andromeda - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 345.6$ TTC

Defender - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 316.8$ TTC

Sabre - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 244.8$ TTC

Caterpillar - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 424.8$ TTC

C2 Hercules - 2951 Showdown Edition- Standalone Ship / Prix : 576$ TTC

Greetings Exiles,

We have a small update that addresses some of the exploits you’ve reported after the 2.5 patch.

We are always working on improving Conan Exiles so please feel free to share your feedback with us.



Chests that require a key to open can no longer be quick-looted.
Harpy’s Kiss and Black Ice arrows can no longer be dismantled.
Voidforge Bow no longer consumes glove durability and instead uses arrows normally. Damage is increased to compensate for this change (28, up from 22).
Significantly reduced the amount of bonus the Frenzied Bow (Regular and Epic versions) receives from Oil of Agony.

The Narrative team answers your questions about UEE military ranks, the Fair Chance Act, the pronunciation of Orison, and more.