Under the Bonnet | Patch 10

Written by Parias on . Posted in Scattered Chatter, Under The Bonnet

With each new build of the hangar module, I’ve been keeping my own dumps of the game folders, running diffs against the varying versions, and making internal notes just out of nerdy curiosity for what’s actually being changed under the hood. I figured I’d start sharing some of these results, as others might find this interesting too. I plan to make this a recurring thing with each new patch until it becomes impractical.

This won’t cover each and every single byte difference between builds – just major points of interest that I find in doing diff-comparisons; in particular things which might not have been directly mentioned in the patch notes. There’s also a LOT to manually go through between builds, so it’s likely that I’ll miss some things.

This will generally be a bit of a disorganized mess as it’s more or less a brain dump as I go, but I’ll try to keep things as neat as I can. Bear in mind as well that 99% of this document will be my own conjecture – I may (and likely will) be wrong about my interpretation of a lot of things.

Summary:

(As per \CitizenClient\Client_Release.id)

The dev team has clearly been hard at work – we’ve gone up a huge number of builds this time (the last patch jumped only from build 12 to build 15 for the couple of months between releases). It’s hard to gauge anything definitive from this of course as their process for logging build numbers may be arbitrary – or maybe it reflects that they hit an unexpected number of bugs this time and had to do a large number of iterations before getting something usable.

Regardless, this was a pretty tremendous update. Under the hood, the development team has been continuing to leak bits and pieces of actual gameplay into the hangar module files – we’re now seeing new sound and item resources for shield effects for example, and even more code related to the AI back-end (and the spawning of ships therein). There are also some new models to play with, and an all-new hidden Hornet variant!

Read on for the specific details. Expect this to be a big one.

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Scattered Chatter #1 – Insurance As A Game Mechanic

Written by guardfrequency on . Posted in Scattered Chatter

Don’t you judge me.  I swear there’s more to this than a guy with a clipboard and a digital camera who asks insulting questions about how exactly that tree branch landed just the way it did.

Think about all the ways insurance affects your daily life.  Medical, Auto, Life, Home, Business, Malpractice, Flood.  The cold-calling telemarketer inside me trembles at the prospect of translating all those possibilities into a 30th-century interstellar civilization.  “Don’t you want to protect yourself from the uncertainties of life?  What about the children?”

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Under the Bonnet | Patch 9

Written by Parias on . Posted in Scattered Chatter, Under The Bonnet

With each new build of the hangar module, I’ve been keeping my own dumps of the game folders, running diffs against the varying versions, and making internal notes just out of nerdy curiosity for what’s actually being changed under the hood. I figured I’d start sharing some of these results, as others might find this interesting too. I plan to make this a recurring thing with each new patch until it becomes impractical.

This won’t cover each and every single byte difference between builds – just major points of interest that I find in doing diff-comparisons; in particular things which might not have been directly mentioned in the patch notes. There’s also a LOT to manually go through between builds, so it’s likely that I’ll miss some things.

This will generally be a bit of a disorganized mess as it’s more or less a brain dump as I go, but I’ll try to keep things as neat as I can. Bear in mind as well that 99% of this document will be my own conjecture – I may (and likely will) be wrong about my interpretation of a lot of things.

Summary:

  • CURRENT BUILD: 12-12-2013 – Build 15
  • PREVIOUS BUILD: 10-22-2013 – Build 12

(As per \CitizenClient\Client_Release.id)

LOTS of exciting stuff this time under the hood – we’re seeing original code for AI-driven ships (not just leftover Cryengine code) which likely relates to the DFM, initial working models for HUD and UI objects, an initial implementation of facial animations libraries for the player character (LiveDriver-related!) , updates to the weapon mount for the upcoming firing range, and so much more!

Read on for my findings so far.

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