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PU Monthly Report
Welcome to July’s PU Report! Last month saw continued progress across a wide range of development areas, from new vehicles and characters to backend tech and planet generation. Read on for all the details.
AI Content
Last month, AI Tech supported content for Alpha 4.9 and 4.10, including the reintroduction of Recco Battaglia. This created a number of challenges, including the setup and maintenance of repeatable mission comm calls for the initial release and content to support her upcoming instanced gameplay.
Considerable work was also put into supporting the new Siege of Orison content, including filling social spaces in the lead up to the shuttle, the addition of a new mission provider, and new enemies. Various bugs were tackled too.
Outside of content releases, the team continued to push forward on initiatives that were kicked off last month and supported a performance-capture shoot to provide additional content for upcoming releases.
AI (Features & Tech)
Last month, AI Features & Tech enhanced the ‘FlyTo’ behavior. Now, heavy fighter NPCs have distinct flight behavior parameters to ensure they strafe more quickly, as it was too slow before.
For creatures, work began on the initial animations for a new creature and its variants.
Development of the valakkar continued, with the team fixing an issue with the creature failing to hear while underground. A bug causing the irradiated variant to not immediately emerge was fixed too.
The valakkar now also targets players correctly, has increased line of sight and spitting range, and if the player stays within this range and moves, the creature will track them and spit more accurately.
The juvenile sentry valakkar will now prefer to avoid close combat - if the player enters melee range, it won’t bite and instead retreats by submerging underground until the player moves further away. However, if the player enters melee range of a non-sentry juvenile valakkar, it will bite once and try to avoid the player by submerging and repositioning. It will then resurface and resume spitting.
Comparatively, the adult sentry valakkar is not afraid of the player. In close combat, it will bite without retreating, though the bite attack does occur less often than the spit attack. The non-sentry adult valakkar bites and spits and, once the player inflicts enough damage, enters a triggered state, chasing and biting the player relentlessly.
For the yormandi, the creature no longer gets stuck or fails to perform the ‘major pain reaction’ after blowing up a shock barrel in its mouth. A partial fix was also submitted for the second yormandi not spawning from an AI perspective. However, the bug persists and requires further investigation.
The kopion now no longer gets stuck if it cannot hit its target. It also no longer fails to give up combat if it doesn't have a target, can’t perceive targets through walls, and will correctly circle targets when required.
For Human combat, the devs fixed issues with mounted-weapon AI failing to fire due to incorrectly thinking there was something in the way and fire logic checking if the player was on the gun too early. It also no longer gets stuck in a failure loop if an NPC fails to get on a mounted weapon.
An issue with the super heavy HMG backpack ammo feeders not working was solved, as was an issue causing NPCs who finished their clip just before getting onto a ladder to surrender when they reached the bottom. Super heavy NPCs also no longer try to use cover.
Another issue was fixed where, if an NPC used single-fire mode, they’d gradually take longer and longer between shots until they were taking over 10 secs between shots, causing them to appear unresponsive.
A bug related to beam weapons was solved too, which prevented impact sound events from registering on surfaces, meaning AI wouldn’t respond to laser beams being fired meters away from their heads.
Elsewhere, weapon-selection failure debug output was improved, and reaction animations were improved across the board, too.
Animation
Animation continued to work on the apex valakkar and its gameplay attacks alongside creating enter and exit animations for new vehicles.
Art (Characters)
In July, the Character Art team polished the upcoming super-heavy armor and supported the creation of ‘loadouts.’ They’re currently progressing with new armor sets and mission reward items for later in the year.
Art (Ships)
In the UK, Ships finalized the Grey’s Market Basher and released it into the ’verse. While they’ve moved on to other vehicles, the team are looking forward to implementing a range of cosmetic items to the Basher later this year.
Work progressed on the Anvil Liberator, with the devs wrapping up the whitebox ahead of its review at the end of the month. This specific whitebox phase took longer than planned, as the team wanted to ensure the ship utilized as much as possible from existing ships to set a strong foundation for future stages; the time invested in July should be returned in later stages.
Further development was done on the RSI Galaxy, which passed its whitebox gate review earlier in the month.
Additional art resources helped various areas of the ship progress significantly, including the lower engineering area, upper corridors, modular lower section, and rear hangar.
The upcoming Kruger Stingray continued to move swiftly through development, and with rapid progress from all teams, it was decided to do a combined LOD0/Final Gate review at the end of July, which the Stingray successfully passed.
Two other vehicles continued down the pipeline. One is essentially art and design-complete and awaiting the availability of downstream teams, while the other received further art and design work before passing its LOD0 review on the day this report was published.
Two unannounced vehicles progressed well throughout July, too. The first is in greybox, with Art and Design continuing to refine the setup on some of the more complicated moving parts. The second is in the whitebox phases after various teams sanity checked the ship’s complex landing state to rule out future problems before the Art team moved further into production. Luckily, a few issues that were expected were proven to not be as severe as thought and were efficiently resolved.
For the North American team, further progress was made on the Drake Kraken, which passed its greybox gate review after a major push from the team and remains on track for its planned release next year. The main callout from the review was to resolve how some of the capital-sized components are integrated into their rooms.
Community
The Community Team began July by publishing the June PU Monthly Report and announcing the winners of the Show Us Your Colors Celebration and Xeno Craft Challenge contests.
They also supported the release of Star Citizen Alpha 4.9 by creating a central information post on Spectrum where players could easily find the latest updates, information, and relevant links. Alongside this, the Welcome Back, Pilot and New Player Guide pages were also updated.
Following the release of Alpha 4.9, the Community Team worked closely with Development, QA, Player Experience, and senior leadership to surface player concerns, share community feedback, and communicate updates through Spectrum, Hotfix Central, the RSI Status page, and other channels.
On July 18, the Bar Citizen World Tour touched down in Chicago, Illinois, to a fantastic turnout. Members of the team got together with local players, swapped stories, heard about their favorite ’verse moments, and met some familiar faces from Spectrum in person. The team is looking forward to the next stops in Denver, Colorado, on August 15 and at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, on August 28.
Ship Showdown 2956 also returned in July, currently in Phase 1, with players submitting original creations to the Community Hub and X to champion their favorite flyable and drivable vehicles and help them earn a place in the Top 16.
"Ship Showdown really brings out the competitive side of the community, with players showing up in support of their favorite ships. The rivalry and excitement are what make this event one of our favorites throughout the whole year." — Community Team
July also saw the Community Team support the return of Foundation Festival and its accompanying Free Fly. At its core, the event is about helping new and returning players find their footing while celebrating the community members who make that journey easier. The team published a Spectrum catch-all post covering activities, rewards, participation details, and Guide System updates introduced as part of this year’s event. Alongside these updates came a revamp of the Welcome Hub, a Community Team-championed initiative that makes information, resources, and guidance easier to discover.
As part of the broader Foundation Festival efforts, the team also launched a Twitch Drops campaign, rewarding players for tuning in to participating Star Citizen creators, while discovering new channels and supporting those who inform, entertain, and welcome audiences across the community. A dedicated page for the latest Referral Bonus was also prepared.
Throughout the month, the Community Team continued monitoring player feedback, answering questions, and sharing updates. They also continued publishing recurring communications, including This Week in Star Citizen, biweekly Roadmap Updates and Roadmap Roundups, as well as regular Community Hub spotlights highlighting standout contributions.
Economy
Chawla's Beach and Ashland commodity runs have landed well with the community, and the Economy team is looking forward to introducing more opportunities in the future that result in similar emergent gameplay.
In July, they worked hard on mission and commodity balance. They’re currently adding a batch of long-awaited ships to the in-game stores for purchase in Alpha 4.10, including the Kruger L-22 Alpha Wolf, Drake Golem OX, and the RSI Aurora Mk II and its modules, as requested by the community.
Graphics, VFX Programming & Planet Tech
July saw the Graphics team comparing GI and reflections to an offline path-traced reference and making various improvements. For example, the ray-traced reflection denoiser now preserves finer material roughness details whilst simultaneously being faster on the GPU. The near-range occlusion of both diffuse and rough specular reflections now accounts for radiance cache cell size, resulting in a closer match to the path-traced reference. An accuracy issue with glancing angle reflections was resolved too, leading to brighter and more convincing reflections.
Narrative
Throughout July, the Narrative team worked on several major projects that serve to highlight the different ways that gameplay and story align. These will hopefully be in players’ hands over the next few patches.
Narrative supported the recent Siege of Orison polishing, which features a new mission provider representing Northrock Services, who will help mercenaries pit their skills against the Nine Tails’ infamous Mendo Ren. There was also extensive collaboration with the mission and narrative designers to ensure the expanded Battaglia mission set delivers an engaging story with more face-to-face NPC interactions than before.
Beyond that, multiple writers worked on missions for the incoming Starchitect locations. This new technology will allow for more places to visit than ever before, and the team is helping to make sure there are new contracts to experience.
Additionally, Narrative worked on missions for a new guild that will be introduced alongside an all-new gameplay style. Finally for July, the team wrote several scripts for a performance-capture session that included bringing back several faction representatives to record updated line sets to match the current mission system.
Online Technology
July saw the Network team focusing on two major areas. Firstly, making the game’s server infrastructure smarter and more reliable and, secondly, laying the groundwork for more dynamic server management in the future.
On the server-load side, the team resolved several bugs affecting how the game servers measure and report how busy they were, delivering a fix that ensures this data is now captured and reported accurately. They also cleaned up the way load is calculated, removing an outdated component that didn't accurately reflect real server performance. Together, these changes provide a much clearer picture of how hard each server is working at any given moment.
On the server-distribution side, the devs have been developing and testing a system that allows servers to scale up and down based on demand. Work is underway to allow extra game servers to be requested automatically when a busy event puts heavy load on the network and then release them when no longer needed. Progress was also made on a smarter way to divide the game world into regions that can each be handled by their own server, including support for grid-based spatial mapping that makes it easier to pinpoint exactly which servers should be responsible for specific areas of space. Several fixes were also made to clean up the underlying codebase, removing old unused modes and outdated code to make the system simpler and more reliable going forward.
Throughout the month, the Online Services team resolved dozens of player-reported bugs while continuing work on several key features, with the biggest area of focus remaining Item Recovery. Current development includes various improvements that will let players reclaim items lost to bugs or crashes, while detailed planning was done with the UI designers on exactly how players will see and select which lost items to recover, including very large collections.
A major push also went into improving server stability tied to how missions and delivery contracts are generated behind the scenes. The team found that the current system was creating far too much background data, putting strain on the servers and contributing to instability players may have noticed in-game. Several dedicated design sessions were held to plan a proper rebuild of the system to make it faster and more reliable going forward.
The team also continued with early designs for Crafting and Refining, working through how crafted or upgraded items will interact with players' existing gear and protections, such as insurance.
In July, the Live Tools team wrapped up several major initiatives across all three of their internal tools.
The most significant was Hex, the internal platform for player support and operations staff. The first part of the Hex 4.0 feature parity effort was completed. This involved rebuilding the redesigned platform core investigation tools, including inventory and ownership records, sanction and infraction detail pages, and reputation and ledger views. A second round of user research wrapped up and is now feeding into pre-release UX work. Attention then turned to getting Hex 4.0 release-ready, alongside further Citadel work on role-based access.
On Bootstrap, the tool developers use to set up their local work environments, the team drafted a technical design document for a full client revamp, capturing the current pain points, a set of near-term improvements, and a longer-term front-end rewrite. Work then turned to finalizing the plan and starting the rebuild.
For error reporting, the team completed the automatic handling of crash reports tied to a known hardware fault affecting 13th and 14th-generation Intel processors, which will noticeably reduce manual triage for operations staff. Panic Switch also received post-launch polish, including a cleaner rule creation flow that handles stream and matcher rules separately and automatically detects malformed payloads.
R&D
The R&D team’s July work covered two areas: adding snow and expanded weather behavior to the planet simulation, and improving cloud rendering performance.
For weather and snow, the devs implemented a time-of-day-dependent local temperature model that draws on planetary conditions, such as elevation, humidity, wind, and broader climate properties. Precipitation is now driven by local temperature, precipitation probability, and said planetary conditions to determine where and how much it rains or snows. Snow accumulation will interoperate with rain accumulation, while rain accumulation runs stably over very long periods and mild precipitation without numerical precision issues. Snow accumulation will work similarly.
Additional weather work included a local precipitation and lightning probability model; this is driven by local climate conditions and an approximate cloud coverage calculation used to evaluate local temperature, precipitation, and lightning. Local temperature and snow amount were exposed in both CPU and GPU weather queries, and terrain debug visualization was updated to render temperature and snow-related attributes.
The temporal mode for clouds (and gas clouds) saw further progress to get it ready for release. The team also improved quality when viewing a planet from far orbit and optimized guide storage. Ongoing work is targeting the stability of the upsampled image under little or no motion, sharpness of results, and the removal of transmittance halos.
Tech Art/Animation
Last month, the Technical Animation team continued refining the DNA head pipeline that drives every character face in the ’verse, resolving alignment and expression issues across several background-character heads and restoring save-and-load support for hybrid DNA heads. Work also progressed on head exports for the Tumbril Cyclone's driver and passenger alongside fixes to the facial expression system that keep performances reading naturally.
New meshes for a new creature family progressed and are now ready for playtesting, while weakspot implementation moved forward on the apex sand valakkar.
Significant R&D went into cloth throughout July, including new tools for proximal face constraints and per-vertex goal weight painting that will let fabric react more naturally to a character’s movement. The team also refined the corrective-shape system behind facial rigs, including a fix for jaw movement bleeding into collar motion.
The Aegis Retaliator’s cockpit was re-rigged and re-exported following an interior redesign, keeping its animations working seamlessly with the ship's refreshed interior.
Work also continued on the game-wide usable refactor, covering door panels, buttons, and railings alongside grip fixes for one-handed carryable props, new rigging for collectible items, and a fully interactive arcade joystick prop.
Together, these efforts reflect the team’s ongoing focus on making every character, creature, and object in Star Citizen feel tactile and alive.
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