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.
With that said, let’s go ahead and dive into this week’s Roadmap Roundup!
-CIG Community Team
Notable Changes for March 16, 2022
Progress Tracker
Similar to the combining of the Live Mission Content Team and the Modular location team last year to create the EU Sandbox 1 team, another change is being made and a new team is being added to the Progress Tracker. Historically, content produced by Star Citizen Location teams has been comprised of Environment Art and Level Design disciplines. This has changed as of August last year, adding the Mission Design discipline as well as additional support from the AI Content team to the locations pipeline. They will be working together with level design and art to bring spaces to life with moment-to-moment gameplay.
What will be changing with this publish is the addition of Planet Content to these disciplines. The Planet Content Team is now being merged with EU Sandbox 2, which is newly added as of this publish. The Planet Content Team’s data will now end in Q1 2022, but will be maintained on the roadmap as a reference. Their deliverables have also been moved over to EU Sandbox 2, and this new team has also been added under Upstream on the Roadmap Companion Guide.
Planet Tech Team
A higher priority was placed on the continuing work on the internal tools that allow for far quicker generation of planet terrain, foliage, bodies of water, and more, mentioned in a recent Inside Star Citizen episode, in addition to the two new deliverables added below. To accommodate this, the following deliverables are being taken off of the Progress Tracker until they are properly prioritized and rescheduled for production:
- Terrain Snow Displacement
- Destructible Environments
- Unified Login Queue
The following deliverables have been added to the Progress Tracker:
Foliage Shader
Creating the ability to replace most current vegetation assets’ materials with foliage shader versions as needed. This will both improve the general quality of foliage and vegetation, as well as allow for variation between seasons and climate conditions. This deliverable has been added to the Planet Tech Team’s schedule.
Ocean Shader Improvements
Reworking the Ocean shader to use more physically accurate refraction and reflection with energy conservation, unifying the feature set with other water shaders, and balancing performance between orbital and close-up situations. This deliverable has been added to the Planet Tech Team’s schedule.
Crusader Genesis Starliner
Building, implementing, and balancing Crusader’s passenger transport, the Genesis Starliner, as a flight-ready vehicle.
2022-10-02 => 2022-11-17
MISC Hull B
Building, implementing, and balancing the MISC Hull-B as a flight-ready ship.
2022-10-23 => 2022-11-17
Unannounced
Unannounced Vehicle
2022-07-22 => 2022-08-17
The following deliverables have been updated to the Progress Tracker:
Bug Fixing & Tech Debt
2020-12-31 => 2023-01-03
- Vehicle Content – US freed up 25 days of work
x3 Tech Content devs with 29 tasks (42% => 39% load)
x2 Design devs with 4 tasks (63% load)
x2 => 1 Art dev with 3 tasks (67% => 152% load)
Cave Archetypes
2021-04-01 => 2022-10-04
- End date has moved closer from Tue Dec 20 2022 to Tue Oct 04 2022
- EU Sandbox 2 was assigned, revealing 182 days of work
x4 Art devs with 7 tasks (2% load) - Planet Content Team freed up 279 days of work
Commodity Kiosk
2021-01-17 => 2022-06-02
- End date has been extended from Thu Apr 07 2022 to Thu Jun 02 2022
- US PU Gameplay Feature Team added 22 days of work
x3 Art devs with 34 tasks (28% => 29% load)
x3 Design devs with 24 tasks (24% => 25% load)
Destructible Environments
2022-03-15 => 2022-03-28
- End date has moved closer from Tue Aug 02 2022 to Mon Mar 28 2022
Drake Corsair
2021-04-11 => 2022-08-17
- Vehicle Content – US added 42 days of work
x5 Art devs with 48 tasks (27% load)
x2 Design devs with 11 tasks (81% => 41% load)
Ecosystem Enhancements
2022-03-15 => 2022-11-08
- End date has been extended from Tue Sep 13 2022 to Tue Nov 08 2022
- Planet Tech Team added 126 days of work
x1 Engineering dev with 24 tasks (104% => 87% load)
Lava Tech
2022-11-09 => 2022-12-30
- Start date has pushed back from Tue Feb 15 2022 to Wed Nov 09 2022
- End date has been extended from Mon Mar 14 2022 to Fri Dec 30 2022
- Planet Tech Team added 2 days of work
x1 Engineering dev with 7 tasks (101% => 76% load)
Lorville Cityscape
2022-01-03 => 2022-12-07
- End date has been extended from Thu Jun 30 2022 to Wed Dec 07 2022
- MTL Sandbox 1 was assigned, adding 138 days of work
x3 Art devs with 25 tasks (32% load)
Miscellaneous Support
2020-12-31 => 2022-12-30
- Planet Content Team freed up 37 days of work
x9 Art devs with 29 tasks (12% load)
Move Planet to Compute
2021-10-12 => 2022-05-10
- End date has been extended from Tue Apr 26 2022 to Tue May 10 2022
- Planet Tech Team added 14 days of work
x1 Engineering dev with 28 tasks (94% => 100% load)
NPC Scheduler Service
2021-02-28 => 2022-08-31
- Systemic Services and Tools Team added 25 days of work
x2 Engineering devs with 15 tasks (34% => 36% load)
Origin X1
2022-01-30 => 2022-07-21
- End date has been extended from Thu Jul 14 2022 to Thu Jul 21 2022
- Vehicle Content – EU added 7 days of work
x1 Design dev with 32 tasks (95% => 130% load)
x1 Art dev with 45 tasks (255% => 309% load)
Pyro System, Planet, and Mission Setup
2021-01-03 => 2022-08-25
- EU Sandbox 2 was assigned, adding 14 days of work
x3 Art devs with 3 tasks (40% load)
Reststop Hangar Replacements
2021-04-01 => 2022-05-19
- Start date has been corrected from Tue Jul 13 2021 to Thu Apr 01 2021
- End date has been extended from Mon Dec 20 2021 to Thu May 19 2022
- EU Landing Zone Team added 86 days of work
x1 Design dev with 12 tasks (60% => 13% load)
Rivers and Basins
2021-07-06 => 2022-03-14
- End date has been extended from Mon Jan 31 2022 to Mon Mar 14 2022
- Planet Tech Team added 42 days of work
x1 Engineering dev with 37 tasks (82% => 89% load)
Roads
2021-12-07 => 2021-12-20
- End date has moved earlier (time allocation removal(s) or priority up likely)
from Tue Apr 12 2022 to Mon Dec 20 2021
RSI Apollo
2022-08-18 => 2022-12-30
- Start date has pushed back from Thu Aug 04 2022 to Thu Aug 18 2022
- Vehicle Content – US freed up 14 days of work
x3 Art devs with 19 tasks (32% => 27% load)
Salvage T0
2021-04-19 => 2022-06-21
- End date has been extended from Thu Apr 14 2022 to Tue Jun 21 2022
- EU PU Gameplay Feature Team was assigned, adding 69 days of work
x1 Engineering dev with 5 tasks (77% load)
That’s all for this week!
