{"data":{"id":17432,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: November & December 2019","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/17432-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-November-December-2019","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/17432","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/17432","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly 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is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We\u2019re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.\nAttention Recruits,\n\nWhat you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).\nOperatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Through their efforts, we\u2019ve uncovered information on AI improvements, a hefty debrief on cinematics, and an as-needed UI display element.\n\nThe information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.\n\nUEE Naval High Command\n\nAI\nShip AI had a busy couple of months working on NPC planetside traversal:\n\u201cFlying on the surface of a planet is definitely different from open space; the expectation is that ships fly straight at a level altitude and bank when steering to different headings.\u201d -Ship AI\n\n\nThe first iteration involved creating a flight path suitable for the terrain height and local slope. The information generated is used to correct the path to ensure ships always have a specified minimal clearance to the terrain below while steering according to the inclination of the terrain. For example, a ship will favor a flight path through a valley rather than over a ridge. Hand-placed and procedurally generated objects (rocks, buildings, etc.) are not part of the terrain elevation information and are obtained by a different query. In the next iteration, the team will integrate this information so spaceships can adapt their flight paths accordingly.\n\n\nThe same considerations apply to in-atmosphere dogfighting. The prototype of this was shown during the recent CitizenCon playthrough, with three security ships engaging the fugitive Carrack. The team also experimented with a stunt maneuver to add flair and personality to AI behavior.\nWork was also completed on Collision Avoidance. This system runs in the background during AI flight and provides steering correction if a collision is likely to happen within a given time horizon. In the current development version, the system considers the collision resolution of all piloted vehicles, vehicles without a pilot (abandoned vehicles, derelicts), static obstacles, and procedurally generated asteroids.\n\n\nRecently, the system was heavily reworked to minimize its impact on performance. This included ensuring all vehicles and obstacles were organized in memory according to their current host zone to make the search for the surrounding participants faster. It also makes sure the collision avoidance update never gets an exclusive lock on the cached information when creating and processing individual AI collision problems. This is a critical aspect, as the updates of all AI entities run concurrently, so having an exclusive lock can heavily impact performance.\n\n\nAI (Social)\nThe Social AI Team made several improvements to path following, including the ability to specify movement speed when following a path edge, add branching paths, wait at a path point continually playing any function until events have fired, trigger a random Subsumption function from a weighted list, and enable\/disable Subsumption secondary activities when following a path edge.\nWork also continued on the bartender, with the first iteration of mixing station tech added. This extends the character\u2019s ability to not only pick up and serve items from the fridge, but to prepare new drinks at the mixing station. Several other small improvements were also made to make the overall experience smoother.\n\n\nFinally for Social AI, the base idle system in the actor state machine was improved by moving all decision-making to the control state. This should make the whole system more robust and stable over the network, potentially avoiding the desync issues seen in the past as well as helping the team debug potential issues more efficiently. Further on the optimization, the usable caching has been updated to listen for tile-created events from navigation meshes.\nAI (Character Combat)\nThe team\u2019s primary focus over the past few months was on the overall player vs. NPC combat experience. This involved implementing new behavior tactics for shotgun-wielding NPCs, giving them the tactical choice to get much closer to the target than before to make proper use of the weapon. They also began improving vision perception so that the designers can more easily adjust the size of vision cones and how fast a target is perceived inside them.\nThey also made improvements to the system that generates cover location and usage to enable NPCs to choose to only partially cover themselves. Small optimizations were also made to AI hearing perception and specific designer movement requests.\n\n\n\nAudio\nThe Audio Team worked on and reviewed all sound for chapter four, paying particular attention to the Idris, improving mark-up and SFX where required.\n\nCinematics\nThe pre-holiday period was a busy one for the Cinematics Team and included story scene implementation and production quality passes for the camera, staging, and lighting (most scenes received their third of four planned passes).\nAlongside the usual pipeline tasks, they worked on upcoming tech developments, specifically enabling players to interrupt certain scenes and NPC conversations. They kicked this off by marking-up scenes with a number of interrupt points to indicate where a scene could stop and resume and considered how it would do so if the player doesn\u2019t \u2018behave\u2019. The goal is to do this with minimal (or no) additional animation fragments.\n\n\nCinematics also tested new animation code from Engineering that will allow performance-captured scenes to work from other directions than they were intially directed for. For example, if the actor representing the player character approached a bridge officer from the right, this code allows the performance of the bridge officer to mirror in real-time should the player approach from a different angle. Most games either use a locomotion solution (where the NPC constantly turns to face the player via a systemic set of motions) or use rigid performance capture data that only works from a specific direction. This solution bridges that gap as much as possible. Of course, there are limitations; the team are currently testing the restrictions, performance implications, and the authenticity vs. player agency trade-off.\n\n\nCinematics also worked with Character Art and Engineering to elevate character quality to the final production level. Character Art are finalizing the bridge officer, using Executive Officer Sofia Kelly as the testbed for the new skin and hair. This led to the prioritization of scenes and where the character and camera move around a lot to test the temporal anti-aliasing (TSAA) stability.\n\n\nSince last year, the TSAA solution has advanced considerably and now creates a highly stable final image that intelligently smooths harsh white pixels, such as specular flicker. However, it was also smoothing out carefully crafted character eye-lights. So, Engineering delivered a solution to ensure eye-light reflections in character eyeballs are not smoothed out and the bright dots are kept alive, which is vital to giving characters an additional flicker of life. Currently, characters as lit as if on a movie set, with something similar to a virtual dedolight employed to cast eye-light.\n\n\nAnother area that received a quality push was comms calls. Squadron 42 features real-time render-to-texture comm feeds from NPCs. So, if the player has a comms call with Old Man, the wing leader will actually be in his cockpit and \u2018filmed live\u2019 when responding. The team wanted to determine a \u2018gold standard\u2019 for key video comms partners the player will interact with, including their wing leader, air traffic control, and an Idris captain.\n\nThese comms calls have several steps: Figuring out where the camera that films the NPC would be located. For the best possible framing, they want to ground the camera as much as possible and avoid it floating in a seemingly magical way.\n\nLighting that area well while keeping it \u2018cheap\u2019 to avoid dozens of shadows and performance-affecting variables.\n\nSetting interference FX, such as comms call line \u2018open\u2019 and \u2018closed\u2019.\n\nOn the animation side, this required R&D to figure out what to keep from the motion-captured cockpit performances (all actors were sitting down in cockpit mock-ups on set) and when to apply the piloting inverse kinematics to have the characters hold the throttle and flight stick. They\u2019re still exploring whether they want g-force on those conversation partners on top of the actor performances.\n\nEngineering\nIn the UK, the Actor Team began implementing the new personal inner thought system. This now-radial menu allows all player functionality to be accessed more easily than the current iteration (such as taking off a helmet or equipping weapons). It\u2019s context sensitive too, so the options will change depending on the location or available actions. For example, in a cockpit, additional options such as exiting the seat or engaging landing gear become available. They also added a \u2018favorites\u2019 section for commonly used commands and enabled keyboard\/button shortcuts to be assigned to any command.\nRegarding melee combat, the team moved onto body dragging, starting with interacting with the body, repositioning it, and basic player movement. For actor status, they finished the temperature system and moved onto hunger and thirst, setting up the initial stats.\n\n\nOver in Frankfurt, Engineering spent time in December and January on game physics. This including exposing a linear air and water resistance scale, making damping linear (and not step dependent), using the box pruner to accelerate tri-mesh collisions, and general optimization. Regarding attachment support, they moved boundary brushes and entities to the object container entity and added the ability to query for the attached points during a previous attachment. They also exposed the surface area on geometries and optimized loading times and calculations while verifying parts.\n\n\nThe team continued with the new graphics pipeline and render interface (Gen12), made robust changes to the Vulkan layer to prepare for use with scene objects, added PSO and layout cache, improved API validation, and ported tiled shading light volume rasterization to the new pipeline. They also continued the parallel refactor of existing render code in support of the new graphics pipeline and APIs and worked on the global render state removal and device texture code refactor.\n\n\nFor planet terrain shadows, multi-cascade and blending support was added to improve detail and range. This will also eliminate various existing shadow artifacts. Development continued on volumetric terrain shadow support for fog, with the teaming coming up with a multi-scattered ambient lighting solution that ties into unified raymarching.\n\n\nMulti-scattering improvements via a specialized sky irradiance LUT was made to improve unified raymarching. Updates were made to the jittered lookup and TSAA to vastly improve quality and reduce the number of raymarching steps. They also made lighting consistent so that planet atmosphere affects ground fog layers and vice versa, experimented with ozone layer support in-atmosphere, and added support for scattering queries (transparent objects).\n\n\nFinally, work continued on planetary clouds, ocean rendering, frozen oceans, and wind bending for static brushes.\n\n\n\nGraphics\nIn the final weeks of 2019 the Graphics Team focused on stability, with great progress made on profiling and optimizing the renderer. This work will continue into the first quarter of 2020.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Social Team continued work on the narrative interactions, applying additional polish to the various scenes in the form of gestures, head turns, and eye-looks to make them appear as natural as possible. This ongoing process will take a while to complete as there are several hours of conversations throughout Squadron 42 that allow the player to feel a part of the world, rather than just a spectator.\nThe Level Design Team are focused on the FPS-heavy sections of the game, working alonside the various feature teams to make sure AI behavior is realistic in all encounters. The pre-combat behaviors were also worked on, such as patrolling, investigation, and reactions to audio attenuation on differing materials.\n\n\nThe space and dogfight teams progressed with the AI behaviors of specific types of ship. Combat maneuvers are constantly being iterated on, while AI awareness of its own ship emissions, remaining ordinance, component damage, etc. is in progress. The team are also delivering level prototypes for some of the \u2018exotic\u2019 gameplay puzzles specific to Squadron 42 that rely on underlying core mechanics.\n\n\n\nNarrative\nWith CitizenCon wrapped up, the Narrative finished off the year focusing on SQ42. Alongside ongoing text requirements for mission objectives and UI, they reviewed progress on the various levels and synced with Design on the overall game experience. They also worked with the Animation Team to provide additional material for background NPC scenes. For example, they added moments where named characters interact with random NPCs to create additional character or story flavor.\n\nQA\nThe QA Team provided dedicated tools support for the Cinematics Team. This mainly involved investigating various crashes from loading cutscene levels and DataCore issues within the editor roll-up bar. They also set up a new track view checklist to better maintain and test the editor. They\u2019re planning to run these tests weekly and whenever a track-view-specific QA test is required. Finally for QA, cinematic client captures of different scene playthroughs for review by the designers and animators are ongoing and will continue into the new year.\n\nTech Animation\nNovember and December saw Tech Animation rework Mannequin setups to clean up older usable iterations and address bugs. They worked with the animation and code teams on the updated bartender and implemented socket\/attach point tech for props in Maya. They created multiple prop rigs for the usable and cinematics teams, including plates, trays, maintenance ladders, and ship turrets. Support was given to the Weapons Team along with new rigs, updates to older rigs, and in-engine bug fixes. The necessary rig additions for the new real digital acting tech were completed too.\nNew toolsets were authored to help visualize the complex engine-side attachment systems inside Maya. These assist the animators in their daily workflow and makes it infinitely easier to author props too. Development continued on the facial rigging pipelines; this lengthy initiative will ultimately yield great things when the team authors their own in-house face rigs compatible with the DNA systems. They also worked on the comms calls with Cinematics.\n\nTech Art\nFrankfurt\u2019s Tech Art Team worked closely with the UK\u2019s Tech Animation on the design and implementation of the new runtime Rig Logic plugin for Maya. In contrast to previous hard-coded versions, the new plugin is entirely data-driven and utilizes so-called rig definition files that can be changed as needed without the assistance of an engine programmer. The removal of this bottleneck will give more creative freedom to the artists and significantly shorten iteration times. While the Maya runtime node is responsible for driving rigs based on facial and\/or body animation, a bespoke command was also implemented. This allows the convenient querying and editing of all parts of the rig definition data and forms the foundation of the team\u2019s new rigging pipeline and tools.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nThe UI Team\u2019s main SQ42 focus of the past couple of months was the actor status display. This is one of the first UI elements that will hide when not in use, meaning the screen isn\u2019t cluttered with things players don\u2019t need immediate knowledge of. They also continuing creating visual targets and concepts for the final looks of various UI elements, including the visor the player wears throughout much of the game and target selection. The logo for an important faction in the SQ42 narrative was completed too.\n\nVFX\nVFX continued to work with Art and Design to flesh out key locations and gameplay loops. This included revisiting some of the older effects and making use of the more recent GPU particle collision improvements. The artists also iterated on the workflow for gas clouds, with several improvements coming online to improve the overall process. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026","de_DE":"Dies ist ein Querverweis auf den Bericht, der k\u00fcrzlich \u00fcber den monatlichen Squadron 42-Newsletter verschickt wurde. Wir ver\u00f6ffentlichen dies ein zweites Mal als Comm-Link, um es der Gemeinschaft zu erleichtern, sich auf diese zu beziehen.\nAchtung Rekruten,\n\nWas Sie gleich lesen werden, sind die neuesten Informationen \u00fcber die weitere Entwicklung der Staffel 42 (SCI des: SQ42).\nMitarbeiter in aller Welt haben die Informationen gesammelt, die Sie f\u00fcr diesen Fortschrittsbericht ben\u00f6tigen. Durch ihre Bem\u00fchungen haben wir Informationen \u00fcber KI-Verbesserungen, eine umfangreiche Nachbesprechung \u00fcber Kinematik und ein bedarfsorientiertes UI-Anzeigeelement aufgedeckt.\n\nDie in dieser Mitteilung enthaltenen Informationen sind \u00e4u\u00dferst sensibel, und es ist von gr\u00f6\u00dfter Wichtigkeit, dass sie nicht in die falschen H\u00e4nde gelangen. L\u00f6schen Sie alle Datens\u00e4tze nach dem Lesen.\n\nOberkommando der UEE-Marine\n\nKI\nDas Schiff AI hatte einige Monate lang viel zu tun, um die NPC-Planetendurchquerung durchzuf\u00fchren:\n\"Das Fliegen auf der Oberfl\u00e4che eines Planeten unterscheidet sich definitiv vom offenen Raum; es wird erwartet, dass die Schiffe gerade auf einer ebenen H\u00f6he und in einer Querlage fliegen, wenn sie auf unterschiedliche Kursrichtungen steuern. -Schiff KI\n\n\nDie erste Iteration umfasste die Erstellung einer Flugbahn, die f\u00fcr die H\u00f6he des Gel\u00e4ndes und die lokale Neigung geeignet war. Die generierten Informationen werden zur Korrektur des Pfades verwendet, um sicherzustellen, dass die Schiffe immer einen bestimmten Mindestabstand zum darunter liegenden Gel\u00e4nde haben, w\u00e4hrend sie entsprechend der Neigung des Gel\u00e4ndes steuern. So wird ein Schiff beispielsweise eine Flugroute durch ein Tal statt \u00fcber einen Bergr\u00fccken bevorzugen. Von Hand platzierte und prozedural erzeugte Objekte (Felsen, Geb\u00e4ude usw.) sind nicht Teil der Gel\u00e4ndeh\u00f6heninformationen und werden durch eine andere Abfrage ermittelt. In der n\u00e4chsten Iteration wird das Team diese Informationen integrieren, damit die Raumschiffe ihre Flugwege entsprechend anpassen k\u00f6nnen.\n\n\nDieselben \u00dcberlegungen gelten f\u00fcr den Luftkampf in der Atmosph\u00e4re. Der Prototyp davon wurde w\u00e4hrend des j\u00fcngsten CitizenCon-Spiels gezeigt, bei dem drei Sicherheitsschiffe den fl\u00fcchtigen Carrack angriffen. Das Team experimentierte auch mit einem Stuntman\u00f6ver, um dem Verhalten der KI Flair und Pers\u00f6nlichkeit zu verleihen.\nAuch die Arbeiten zur Kollisionsvermeidung wurden abgeschlossen. Dieses System l\u00e4uft w\u00e4hrend des KI-Fluges im Hintergrund und sorgt f\u00fcr eine Lenkkorrektur, wenn innerhalb eines bestimmten Zeithorizonts eine Kollision wahrscheinlich ist. In der aktuellen Entwicklungsversion ber\u00fccksichtigt das System die Kollisionsaufl\u00f6sung aller gesteuerten Fahrzeuge, Fahrzeuge ohne Pilot (verlassene Fahrzeuge, Wrackteile), statische Hindernisse und prozedural erzeugte Asteroiden.\n\n\nK\u00fcrzlich wurde das System stark \u00fcberarbeitet, um die Auswirkungen auf die Leistung zu minimieren. Dazu geh\u00f6rte auch, dass alle Fahrzeuge und Hindernisse entsprechend ihrer aktuellen Gastgeberzone im Speicher organisiert wurden, um die Suche nach den umliegenden Teilnehmern zu beschleunigen. Au\u00dferdem wird sichergestellt, dass die Aktualisierung der Kollisionsvermeidung bei der Erstellung und Verarbeitung einzelner KI-Kollisionsprobleme niemals eine exklusive Sperre auf die zwischengespeicherten Informationen erh\u00e4lt. Dies ist ein kritischer Aspekt, da die Aktualisierungen aller KI-Einheiten gleichzeitig laufen, so dass eine exklusive Sperre die Leistung stark beeintr\u00e4chtigen kann.\n\n\nKI (sozial)\n\nDas Team f\u00fcr soziale KI hat mehrere Verbesserungen an der Pfadverfolgung vorgenommen, darunter die M\u00f6glichkeit, die Bewegungsgeschwindigkeit beim Verfolgen einer Pfadkante zu spezifizieren, Verzweigungspfade hinzuzuf\u00fcgen, an einem Pfadpunkt zu warten und kontinuierlich eine beliebige Funktion abzuspielen, bis Ereignisse ausgel\u00f6st wurden, eine zuf\u00e4llige Subsumtionsfunktion aus einer gewichteten Liste auszul\u00f6sen und Subsumptions-Nebenaktivit\u00e4ten zu aktivieren\/deaktivieren, wenn man einer Pfadkante folgt.\nAuch die Arbeit am Barkeeper wurde fortgesetzt, wobei die erste Iteration der Mischstationstechnik hinzugef\u00fcgt wurde. Dies erweitert die F\u00e4higkeit der Figur, nicht nur Gegenst\u00e4nde aus dem K\u00fchlschrank zu holen und zu servieren, sondern auch neue Getr\u00e4nke an der Mischstation zuzubereiten. Es wurden auch mehrere andere kleine Verbesserungen vorgenommen, um die Erfahrung insgesamt reibungsloser zu gestalten.\n\n\nF\u00fcr die soziale KI schlie\u00dflich wurde das grundlegende Leerlaufsystem im Akteurszentralstaat verbessert, indem alle Entscheidungen in den Kontrollstaat verlagert wurden. Dies sollte das gesamte System im Netzwerk robuster und stabiler machen, wodurch die in der Vergangenheit aufgetretenen Desynchronisationsprobleme vermieden werden k\u00f6nnten und das Team potenzielle Probleme effizienter debuggen kann. Im Zuge der weiteren Optimierung wurde das nutzbare Caching aktualisiert, um auf von Kacheln erzeugte Ereignisse aus Navigationsnetzen zu h\u00f6ren.\n\n\n\nAI (Charakterkampf)\n\nIn den letzten Monaten lag der Schwerpunkt des Teams auf der Gesamtkampferfahrung der Spieler gegen NPC. Dies beinhaltete die Einf\u00fchrung neuer Verhaltenstaktiken f\u00fcr Schrotflinten schwingende NSCs, die die taktische Wahl haben, viel n\u00e4her an das Ziel heranzukommen als bisher, um die Waffe richtig einzusetzen. Sie begannen auch, die Sehwahrnehmung zu verbessern, so dass die Designer die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe der Sehkegel und die Geschwindigkeit, mit der ein Ziel in ihnen wahrgenommen wird, leichter einstellen k\u00f6nnen.\nSie haben auch Verbesserungen am System vorgenommen, das den Ort und die Nutzung der Deckung generiert, so dass die NVKs w\u00e4hlen k\u00f6nnen, ob sie sich nur teilweise selbst decken wollen. Kleine Optimierungen wurden auch an der KI-H\u00f6rwahrnehmung und an spezifischen Bewegungsw\u00fcnschen der Designer vorgenommen.\n\n\nAudio\nDas Audioteam arbeitete an allen T\u00f6nen f\u00fcr Kapitel vier und \u00fcberpr\u00fcfte sie, wobei es besonderes Augenmerk auf den Idris legte und, wo erforderlich, die Tonaufzeichnung und SFX verbesserte.\nKinematographie\nDie Zeit vor den Ferien war f\u00fcr das Filmteam sehr arbeitsreich und beinhaltete die Umsetzung der Story und die Qualit\u00e4tsp\u00e4sse f\u00fcr Kamera, Inszenierung und Beleuchtung (die meisten Szenen erhielten ihren dritten von vier geplanten P\u00e4ssen).\nNeben den \u00fcblichen Pipeline-T\u00e4tigkeiten arbeiteten sie an bevorstehenden technischen Entwicklungen, wobei sie den Spielern insbesondere die M\u00f6glichkeit gaben, bestimmte Szenen und NPC-Gespr\u00e4che zu unterbrechen. Sie begannen damit, Szenen mit einer Reihe von Unterbrechungspunkten zu markieren, um anzuzeigen, wo eine Szene anhalten und wieder aufgenommen werden k\u00f6nnte, und \u00fcberlegten, wie sie dies tun w\u00fcrde, wenn sich der Spieler nicht \"benehmen\" w\u00fcrde. Ziel ist es, dies mit minimalen (oder keinen) zus\u00e4tzlichen Animationsfragmenten zu tun.\n\n\nDie Filmemacher testeten auch einen neuen Animationscode aus der Technik, der es erm\u00f6glicht, die aufgenommenen Szenen aus anderen Richtungen zu drehen, als sie urspr\u00fcnglich vorgesehen waren. Wenn sich beispielsweise der Schauspieler, der die Figur des Spielers darstellt, von rechts an einen Br\u00fcckenoffizier n\u00e4hert, erm\u00f6glicht dieser Code die Darstellung des Br\u00fcckenoffiziers in Echtzeit zu spiegeln, falls sich der Spieler aus einem anderen Winkel n\u00e4hert. Die meisten Spiele verwenden entweder eine Fortbewegungsl\u00f6sung (bei der sich der NPC \u00fcber einen systemischen Bewegungssatz st\u00e4ndig dem Spieler zuwendet) oder sie verwenden starre Leistungserfassungsdaten, die nur aus einer bestimmten Richtung funktionieren. Diese L\u00f6sung \u00fcberbr\u00fcckt diese L\u00fccke so weit wie m\u00f6glich. Nat\u00fcrlich gibt es Einschr\u00e4nkungen; das Team testet derzeit die Einschr\u00e4nkungen, die Auswirkungen auf die Leistung und den Kompromiss zwischen Authentizit\u00e4t und Spieleragentur.\n\n\nDie Filmemacher arbeiteten auch mit Character Art and Engineering zusammen, um die Qualit\u00e4t der Charaktere auf das endg\u00fcltige Produktionsniveau zu heben. Character Art stellen den Br\u00fcckenoffizier fertig, wobei Executive Officer Sofia Kelly als Testbett f\u00fcr die neue Haut und die neuen Haare dient. Dies f\u00fchrte zur Priorisierung von Szenen, in denen sich die Figur und die Kamera viel bewegen, um die zeitliche Antialiasing-Stabilit\u00e4t (TSAA) zu testen.\n\n\nSeit dem letzten Jahr hat sich die TSAA-L\u00f6sung erheblich weiterentwickelt und erzeugt nun ein \u00e4u\u00dferst stabiles Endbild, das auf intelligente Weise raue wei\u00dfe Pixel, wie z.B. spiegelndes Flimmern, gl\u00e4ttet. Es war aber auch eine Gl\u00e4ttung sorgf\u00e4ltig ausgearbeiteter Charakteraugen. So lieferte die Technik eine L\u00f6sung, die sicherstellt, dass die Lichtreflexionen in den Aug\u00e4pfeln der Charaktere nicht gegl\u00e4ttet werden und die hellen Punkte am Leben erhalten bleiben, was entscheidend ist, um den Charakteren ein zus\u00e4tzliches Lebensflimmern zu verleihen. Zurzeit werden die Figuren wie auf einem Filmset beleuchtet, wobei etwas \u00c4hnliches wie ein virtuelles Dedolight eingesetzt wird, um das Augenlicht zu werfen.\n\n\nEin weiterer Bereich, der einen Qualit\u00e4tsschub erhielt, waren die Comms-Anrufe. Squadron 42 verf\u00fcgt \u00fcber Echtzeit-Rendering-zu-Textur-Kommando-Feeds von NPCs. Wenn der Spieler also ein Gespr\u00e4ch mit dem alten Mann hat, befindet sich der Fl\u00fcgelf\u00fchrer tats\u00e4chlich in seinem Cockpit und wird bei der Antwort \"live gefilmt\". Das Team wollte einen \"Goldstandard\" f\u00fcr die wichtigsten Videokommunikationspartner festlegen, mit denen der Spieler interagieren wird, darunter sein Fl\u00fcgelf\u00fchrer, die Flugsicherung und ein Idris-Kapit\u00e4n.\nDiese Kommunikationsaufrufe umfassen mehrere Schritte:\n\n\n\nHerauszufinden, wo sich die Kamera, die den NPC filmt, befinden w\u00fcrde. F\u00fcr die bestm\u00f6gliche Einstellung wollen sie die Kamera so weit wie m\u00f6glich erden und vermeiden, dass sie auf eine scheinbar magische Weise schwebt.\nDiesen Bereich gut beleuchten und gleichzeitig \"billig\" halten, um Dutzende von Schatten und leistungsbeeinflussenden Variablen zu vermeiden.\nEinstellung von Interferenz-FX, wie z.B. die Kommunikationsverbindung 'offen' und 'geschlossen'.\nAuf der Animationsseite erforderte dies Forschung und Entwicklung, um herauszufinden, was man von den bewegungsgefangenen Cockpit-Darstellungen (alle Schauspieler sa\u00dfen in Cockpit-Mock-ups am Set) fernhalten sollte und wann die inverse Kinematik des Piloten angewendet werden sollte, damit die Figuren Gas und Steuerkn\u00fcppel halten konnten. Sie pr\u00fcfen noch, ob sie zus\u00e4tzlich zu den Schauspielerleistungen auch noch G-Kraft auf diese Gespr\u00e4chspartner aus\u00fcben wollen.\nTechnik\nIn Gro\u00dfbritannien begann das Schauspieler-Team mit der Umsetzung des neuen pers\u00f6nlichen inneren Denksystems. Dieses jetzt radiale Men\u00fc erm\u00f6glicht einen leichteren Zugang zu allen Spielerfunktionen als die aktuelle Iteration (wie das Abnehmen eines Helms oder das Ausr\u00fcsten von Waffen). Es ist auch kontextsensitiv, so dass sich die Optionen je nach Standort oder verf\u00fcgbaren Aktionen \u00e4ndern. In einem Cockpit beispielsweise werden zus\u00e4tzliche Optionen wie das Verlassen des Sitzes oder das Einlegen des Fahrwerks verf\u00fcgbar. Sie f\u00fcgten auch einen \"Favoriten\"-Abschnitt f\u00fcr h\u00e4ufig verwendete Befehle hinzu und erm\u00f6glichten die Zuweisung von Tastatur-\/Tastenk\u00fcrzeln zu jedem Befehl.\nIm Nahkampf ging das Team zum Body Dragging \u00fcber, beginnend mit der Interaktion mit dem K\u00f6rper, der Neupositionierung des K\u00f6rpers und den grundlegenden Spielerbewegungen. F\u00fcr den Schauspielerstatus beendeten sie das Temperatursystem und gingen auf Hunger und Durst \u00fcber, wobei sie die anf\u00e4nglichen Werte aufstellten.\n\n\nDr\u00fcben in Frankfurt verbrachte die Technik im Dezember und Januar Zeit mit der Spielphysik. Dazu geh\u00f6ren die Belichtung einer linearen Luft- und Wasserwiderstands-Skala, die lineare (und nicht stufenabh\u00e4ngige) D\u00e4mpfung, die Verwendung des Kastenbeschneiders zur Beschleunigung von Dreimaschen-Kollisionen und die allgemeine Optimierung. Was die Unterst\u00fctzung von Anh\u00e4ngen betrifft, so wurden Grenzb\u00fcrsten und Entit\u00e4ten zur Objektcontainerentit\u00e4t verschoben und die M\u00f6glichkeit hinzugef\u00fcgt, nach den angeh\u00e4ngten Punkten w\u00e4hrend einer vorherigen Anlage zu fragen. Sie setzten auch die Oberfl\u00e4che auf Geometrien aus und optimierten die Ladezeiten und Berechnungen w\u00e4hrend der Verifizierung der Teile.\n\n\nDas Team fuhr mit der neuen Grafik-Pipeline und der neuen Rendering-Schnittstelle (Gen12) fort, nahm robuste \u00c4nderungen an der Vulkan-Ebene vor, um sie f\u00fcr die Verwendung mit Szenenobjekten vorzubereiten, f\u00fcgte PSO und Layout-Cache hinzu, verbesserte die API-Validierung und portierte die Rasterung des Lichtvolumens der Kacheln in die neue Pipeline. Sie setzten auch die parallele \u00dcberarbeitung des bestehenden Rendering-Codes zur Unterst\u00fctzung der neuen Grafik-Pipeline und APIs fort und arbeiteten an der globalen Entfernung des Render-Status und dem Refactoring des Ger\u00e4tetextur-Codes.\n\n\nF\u00fcr die Schatten des Planetengel\u00e4ndes wurde die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Mehrfachkaskaden und \u00dcberblendungen hinzugef\u00fcgt, um die Detailgenauigkeit und Reichweite zu verbessern. Dadurch werden auch verschiedene vorhandene Schattenartefakte beseitigt. Die Entwicklung der volumetrischen Gel\u00e4ndeschatten-Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Nebel wurde fortgesetzt, wobei das Team eine mehrfach gestreute Umgebungslichtl\u00f6sung entwickelte, die in ein einheitliches Raymarching eingebunden ist.\n\n\nVerbesserungen der Mehrfachstreuung durch eine spezialisierte Himmelsbestrahlungs-LUT wurden vorgenommen, um das einheitliche Raymarching zu verbessern. Es wurden Aktualisierungen des jittered lookup und TSAA vorgenommen, um die Qualit\u00e4t erheblich zu verbessern und die Anzahl der Raymarching-Schritte zu reduzieren. Sie machten auch die Beleuchtung konsistent, so dass die Planetenatmosph\u00e4re die Bodennebelschichten beeinflusst und umgekehrt, experimentierten mit der Unterst\u00fctzung der Ozonschicht in der Atmosph\u00e4re und f\u00fcgten die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Streuabfragen (transparente Objekte) hinzu.\n\n\nSchlie\u00dflich wurde die Arbeit an den Themen Planetenwolken, Ozean-Rendering, gefrorene Ozeane und Windverbiegung f\u00fcr statische Pinsel fortgesetzt.\n\n\nGrafiken\nIn den letzten Wochen des Jahres 2019 konzentrierte sich das Grafikteam auf die Stabilit\u00e4t, wobei gro\u00dfe Fortschritte bei der Profilierung und Optimierung des Renderers erzielt wurden. Diese Arbeit wird im ersten Quartal 2020 fortgesetzt.\nLevel-Entwurf\nDas Sozialteam setzte die Arbeit an den narrativen Interaktionen fort und verpasste den verschiedenen Szenen zus\u00e4tzlichen Glanz in Form von Gesten, Kopfdrehungen und Augenaufschl\u00e4gen, um sie so nat\u00fcrlich wie m\u00f6glich erscheinen zu lassen. Dieser fortlaufende Prozess wird eine Weile dauern, da es im gesamten Geschwader 42 mehrere Stunden lang Gespr\u00e4che gibt, die es dem Spieler erm\u00f6glichen, sich als Teil der Welt und nicht nur als Zuschauer zu f\u00fchlen.\nDas Level Design Team konzentriert sich auf die FPS-lastigen Abschnitte des Spiels und arbeitet mit den verschiedenen Feature-Teams zusammen, um sicherzustellen, dass das Verhalten der KI in allen Begegnungen realistisch ist. Es wurde auch an den Verhaltensweisen vor dem Kampf gearbeitet, wie z.B. Patrouillenfahrten, Untersuchungen und Reaktionen auf die Audioabschw\u00e4chung bei verschiedenen Materialien.\n\n\nDie Raum- und Luftkampfteams machten Fortschritte mit dem KI-Verhalten bestimmter Schiffstypen. Kampfman\u00f6ver werden st\u00e4ndig wiederholt, w\u00e4hrend die KI sich ihrer eigenen Schiffsemissionen, der verbleibenden Vorschriften, der Sch\u00e4den an Komponenten usw. bewusst ist. Das Team liefert auch Level-Prototypen f\u00fcr einige der \"exotischen\" Gameplay-R\u00e4tsel, die f\u00fcr Squadron 42 spezifisch sind und auf der zugrunde liegenden Kernmechanik beruhen.\n\n\nErz\u00e4hlung\nMit dem Abschluss der CitizenCon beendete die Erz\u00e4hlung das Jahr mit dem Schwerpunkt auf SQ42. Neben den laufenden Textanforderungen f\u00fcr die Missionsziele und die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che \u00fcberpr\u00fcften sie die Fortschritte auf den verschiedenen Ebenen und stimmten sich im Hinblick auf das gesamte Spielerlebnis mit dem Design ab. Sie arbeiteten auch mit dem Animationsteam zusammen, um zus\u00e4tzliches Material f\u00fcr NPC-Hintergrundszenen zu liefern. Sie f\u00fcgten beispielsweise Momente hinzu, in denen benannte Charaktere mit zuf\u00e4lligen NPCs interagieren, um einen zus\u00e4tzlichen Charakter oder eine zus\u00e4tzliche Story zu schaffen.\nQA\nDas QA-Team stellte dem Cinematics-Team spezielle Werkzeuge zur Verf\u00fcgung. Dabei wurden haupts\u00e4chlich verschiedene Abst\u00fcrze beim Laden von Cutscene-Ebenen und DataCore-Problemen innerhalb der Editor-Rollup-Leiste untersucht. Sie haben auch eine neue Checkliste f\u00fcr die Streckenansicht erstellt, um den Editor besser pflegen und testen zu k\u00f6nnen. Sie planen, diese Tests w\u00f6chentlich und immer dann durchzuf\u00fchren, wenn ein streckenansichtsspezifischer QA-Test erforderlich ist. F\u00fcr die Qualit\u00e4tssicherung schlie\u00dflich sind die filmischen Kundenaufnahmen von verschiedenen Szenendurchspielen zur \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung durch die Designer und Animatoren im Gange und werden auch im neuen Jahr fortgesetzt.\nTechnische Animation\nIm November und Dezember \u00fcberarbeitete Tech Animation die Mannequin-Setups, um \u00e4ltere nutzbare Iterationen zu bereinigen und Fehler zu beheben. Sie arbeiteten mit den Animations- und Code-Teams an der Aktualisierung des Barkeepers und implementierten Steckdosen- und Befestigungstechnik f\u00fcr Requisiten in Maya. Sie schufen mehrere Requisiten f\u00fcr die Nutz- und Filmteams, einschlie\u00dflich Platten, Ablagen, Wartungsleitern und Schiffst\u00fcrme. Das Waffenteam erhielt Unterst\u00fctzung, zusammen mit neuen Anlagen, Aktualisierungen \u00e4lterer Anlagen und Fehlerbehebungen in der Maschine. Auch die notwendigen Rigg-Erg\u00e4nzungen f\u00fcr die neue echte digitale Schauspieltechnik wurden abgeschlossen.\nEs wurden neue Werkzeugs\u00e4tze erstellt, um die komplexen motorseitigen Befestigungssysteme innerhalb der Maya zu visualisieren. Diese unterst\u00fctzen die Animateure in ihrem t\u00e4glichen Arbeitsablauf und machen es unendlich einfach, auch Requisiten zu erstellen. Die Entwicklung der Pipeline f\u00fcr die Gesichtsmanipulation wurde fortgesetzt; diese langwierige Initiative wird letztendlich gro\u00dfe Dinge hervorbringen, wenn das Team ihre eigenen internen Gesichtsmanipulationen erstellt, die mit den DNA-Systemen kompatibel sind. Sie arbeiteten auch an den Kommunikationsgespr\u00e4chen mit Cinematics.\nTechnische Kunst\nDas Frankfurter Tech-Art-Team arbeitete eng mit der britischen Tech Animation am Design und der Implementierung des neuen Rig Logic-Plugins f\u00fcr Maya zusammen. Im Gegensatz zu fr\u00fcheren, fest programmierten Versionen ist das neue Plugin vollst\u00e4ndig datengesteuert und verwendet so genannte Rig-Definitionsdateien, die bei Bedarf ohne die Hilfe eines Engine-Programmierers ge\u00e4ndert werden k\u00f6nnen. Die Beseitigung dieses Engpasses wird den K\u00fcnstlern mehr kreative Freiheit geben und die Iterationszeiten deutlich verk\u00fcrzen. W\u00e4hrend der Maya-Laufzeitknoten f\u00fcr das Fahren von Rigs auf der Grundlage von Gesichts- und\/oder K\u00f6rperanimation verantwortlich ist, wurde auch ein ma\u00dfgeschneiderter Befehl implementiert. Dies erm\u00f6glicht das bequeme Abfragen und Bearbeiten aller Teile der Rig-Definitionsdaten und bildet die Grundlage der neuen Rigging-Pipeline und der Werkzeuge des Teams.\nBenutzerschnittstelle (UI)\nDer Hauptschwerpunkt des UI-Teams in SQ42 war in den letzten Monaten die Anzeige des Schauspieler-Status. Dies ist eines der ersten UI-Elemente, das sich bei Nichtbenutzung ausblendet, so dass der Bildschirm nicht mit Dingen \u00fcberladen wird, \u00fcber die die Spieler keine unmittelbaren Kenntnisse ben\u00f6tigen. Sie erstellen auch weiterhin visuelle Ziele und Konzepte f\u00fcr das endg\u00fcltige Aussehen der verschiedenen UI-Elemente, einschlie\u00dflich des Visiers, das der Spieler w\u00e4hrend eines Gro\u00dfteils des Spiels und der Zielauswahl tr\u00e4gt. Das Logo f\u00fcr eine wichtige Fraktion in der SQ42-Erz\u00e4hlung wurde ebenfalls fertiggestellt.\nVFX\nVFX arbeitete weiterhin mit Kunst und Design zusammen, um wichtige Orte und Spielabl\u00e4ufe zu gestalten. Dazu geh\u00f6rte die \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung einiger \u00e4lterer Effekte und die Nutzung der neueren Verbesserungen bei der GPU-Teilchenkollision. Die K\u00fcnstler wiederholten auch den Arbeitsablauf f\u00fcr Gaswolken, wobei mehrere Verbesserungen zur Verbesserung des Gesamtprozesses online gestellt wurden. WIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT...","zh_CN":"This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We\u2019re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.\nAttention Recruits,\n\nWhat you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).\nOperatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Through their efforts, we\u2019ve uncovered information on AI improvements, a hefty debrief on cinematics, and an as-needed UI display element.\n\nThe information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.\n\nUEE Naval High Command\n\nAI\nShip AI had a busy couple of months working on NPC planetside traversal:\n\u201cFlying on the surface of a planet is definitely different from open space; the expectation is that ships fly straight at a level altitude and bank when steering to different headings.\u201d -Ship AI\n\n\nThe first iteration involved creating a flight path suitable for the terrain height and local slope. The information generated is used to correct the path to ensure ships always have a specified minimal clearance to the terrain below while steering according to the inclination of the terrain. For example, a ship will favor a flight path through a valley rather than over a ridge. Hand-placed and procedurally generated objects (rocks, buildings, etc.) are not part of the terrain elevation information and are obtained by a different query. In the next iteration, the team will integrate this information so spaceships can adapt their flight paths accordingly.\n\n\nThe same considerations apply to in-atmosphere dogfighting. The prototype of this was shown during the recent CitizenCon playthrough, with three security ships engaging the fugitive Carrack. The team also experimented with a stunt maneuver to add flair and personality to AI behavior.\nWork was also completed on Collision Avoidance. This system runs in the background during AI flight and provides steering correction if a collision is likely to happen within a given time horizon. In the current development version, the system considers the collision resolution of all piloted vehicles, vehicles without a pilot (abandoned vehicles, derelicts), static obstacles, and procedurally generated asteroids.\n\n\nRecently, the system was heavily reworked to minimize its impact on performance. This included ensuring all vehicles and obstacles were organized in memory according to their current host zone to make the search for the surrounding participants faster. It also makes sure the collision avoidance update never gets an exclusive lock on the cached information when creating and processing individual AI collision problems. This is a critical aspect, as the updates of all AI entities run concurrently, so having an exclusive lock can heavily impact performance.\n\n\nAI (Social)\nThe Social AI Team made several improvements to path following, including the ability to specify movement speed when following a path edge, add branching paths, wait at a path point continually playing any function until events have fired, trigger a random Subsumption function from a weighted list, and enable\/disable Subsumption secondary activities when following a path edge.\nWork also continued on the bartender, with the first iteration of mixing station tech added. This extends the character\u2019s ability to not only pick up and serve items from the fridge, but to prepare new drinks at the mixing station. Several other small improvements were also made to make the overall experience smoother.\n\n\nFinally for Social AI, the base idle system in the actor state machine was improved by moving all decision-making to the control state. This should make the whole system more robust and stable over the network, potentially avoiding the desync issues seen in the past as well as helping the team debug potential issues more efficiently. Further on the optimization, the usable caching has been updated to listen for tile-created events from navigation meshes.\nAI (Character Combat)\nThe team\u2019s primary focus over the past few months was on the overall player vs. NPC combat experience. This involved implementing new behavior tactics for shotgun-wielding NPCs, giving them the tactical choice to get much closer to the target than before to make proper use of the weapon. They also began improving vision perception so that the designers can more easily adjust the size of vision cones and how fast a target is perceived inside them.\nThey also made improvements to the system that generates cover location and usage to enable NPCs to choose to only partially cover themselves. Small optimizations were also made to AI hearing perception and specific designer movement requests.\n\n\n\nAudio\nThe Audio Team worked on and reviewed all sound for chapter four, paying particular attention to the Idris, improving mark-up and SFX where required.\n\nCinematics\nThe pre-holiday period was a busy one for the Cinematics Team and included story scene implementation and production quality passes for the camera, staging, and lighting (most scenes received their third of four planned passes).\nAlongside the usual pipeline tasks, they worked on upcoming tech developments, specifically enabling players to interrupt certain scenes and NPC conversations. They kicked this off by marking-up scenes with a number of interrupt points to indicate where a scene could stop and resume and considered how it would do so if the player doesn\u2019t \u2018behave\u2019. The goal is to do this with minimal (or no) additional animation fragments.\n\n\nCinematics also tested new animation code from Engineering that will allow performance-captured scenes to work from other directions than they were intially directed for. For example, if the actor representing the player character approached a bridge officer from the right, this code allows the performance of the bridge officer to mirror in real-time should the player approach from a different angle. Most games either use a locomotion solution (where the NPC constantly turns to face the player via a systemic set of motions) or use rigid performance capture data that only works from a specific direction. This solution bridges that gap as much as possible. Of course, there are limitations; the team are currently testing the restrictions, performance implications, and the authenticity vs. player agency trade-off.\n\n\nCinematics also worked with Character Art and Engineering to elevate character quality to the final production level. Character Art are finalizing the bridge officer, using Executive Officer Sofia Kelly as the testbed for the new skin and hair. This led to the prioritization of scenes and where the character and camera move around a lot to test the temporal anti-aliasing (TSAA) stability.\n\n\nSince last year, the TSAA solution has advanced considerably and now creates a highly stable final image that intelligently smooths harsh white pixels, such as specular flicker. However, it was also smoothing out carefully crafted character eye-lights. So, Engineering delivered a solution to ensure eye-light reflections in character eyeballs are not smoothed out and the bright dots are kept alive, which is vital to giving characters an additional flicker of life. Currently, characters as lit as if on a movie set, with something similar to a virtual dedolight employed to cast eye-light.\n\n\nAnother area that received a quality push was comms calls. Squadron 42 features real-time render-to-texture comm feeds from NPCs. So, if the player has a comms call with Old Man, the wing leader will actually be in his cockpit and \u2018filmed live\u2019 when responding. The team wanted to determine a \u2018gold standard\u2019 for key video comms partners the player will interact with, including their wing leader, air traffic control, and an Idris captain.\n\nThese comms calls have several steps: Figuring out where the camera that films the NPC would be located. For the best possible framing, they want to ground the camera as much as possible and avoid it floating in a seemingly magical way.\n\nLighting that area well while keeping it \u2018cheap\u2019 to avoid dozens of shadows and performance-affecting variables.\n\nSetting interference FX, such as comms call line \u2018open\u2019 and \u2018closed\u2019.\n\nOn the animation side, this required R&D to figure out what to keep from the motion-captured cockpit performances (all actors were sitting down in cockpit mock-ups on set) and when to apply the piloting inverse kinematics to have the characters hold the throttle and flight stick. They\u2019re still exploring whether they want g-force on those conversation partners on top of the actor performances.\n\nEngineering\nIn the UK, the Actor Team began implementing the new personal inner thought system. This now-radial menu allows all player functionality to be accessed more easily than the current iteration (such as taking off a helmet or equipping weapons). It\u2019s context sensitive too, so the options will change depending on the location or available actions. For example, in a cockpit, additional options such as exiting the seat or engaging landing gear become available. They also added a \u2018favorites\u2019 section for commonly used commands and enabled keyboard\/button shortcuts to be assigned to any command.\nRegarding melee combat, the team moved onto body dragging, starting with interacting with the body, repositioning it, and basic player movement. For actor status, they finished the temperature system and moved onto hunger and thirst, setting up the initial stats.\n\n\nOver in Frankfurt, Engineering spent time in December and January on game physics. This including exposing a linear air and water resistance scale, making damping linear (and not step dependent), using the box pruner to accelerate tri-mesh collisions, and general optimization. Regarding attachment support, they moved boundary brushes and entities to the object container entity and added the ability to query for the attached points during a previous attachment. They also exposed the surface area on geometries and optimized loading times and calculations while verifying parts.\n\n\nThe team continued with the new graphics pipeline and render interface (Gen12), made robust changes to the Vulkan layer to prepare for use with scene objects, added PSO and layout cache, improved API validation, and ported tiled shading light volume rasterization to the new pipeline. They also continued the parallel refactor of existing render code in support of the new graphics pipeline and APIs and worked on the global render state removal and device texture code refactor.\n\n\nFor planet terrain shadows, multi-cascade and blending support was added to improve detail and range. This will also eliminate various existing shadow artifacts. Development continued on volumetric terrain shadow support for fog, with the teaming coming up with a multi-scattered ambient lighting solution that ties into unified raymarching.\n\n\nMulti-scattering improvements via a specialized sky irradiance LUT was made to improve unified raymarching. Updates were made to the jittered lookup and TSAA to vastly improve quality and reduce the number of raymarching steps. They also made lighting consistent so that planet atmosphere affects ground fog layers and vice versa, experimented with ozone layer support in-atmosphere, and added support for scattering queries (transparent objects).\n\n\nFinally, work continued on planetary clouds, ocean rendering, frozen oceans, and wind bending for static brushes.\n\n\n\nGraphics\nIn the final weeks of 2019 the Graphics Team focused on stability, with great progress made on profiling and optimizing the renderer. This work will continue into the first quarter of 2020.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Social Team continued work on the narrative interactions, applying additional polish to the various scenes in the form of gestures, head turns, and eye-looks to make them appear as natural as possible. This ongoing process will take a while to complete as there are several hours of conversations throughout Squadron 42 that allow the player to feel a part of the world, rather than just a spectator.\nThe Level Design Team are focused on the FPS-heavy sections of the game, working alonside the various feature teams to make sure AI behavior is realistic in all encounters. The pre-combat behaviors were also worked on, such as patrolling, investigation, and reactions to audio attenuation on differing materials.\n\n\nThe space and dogfight teams progressed with the AI behaviors of specific types of ship. Combat maneuvers are constantly being iterated on, while AI awareness of its own ship emissions, remaining ordinance, component damage, etc. is in progress. The team are also delivering level prototypes for some of the \u2018exotic\u2019 gameplay puzzles specific to Squadron 42 that rely on underlying core mechanics.\n\n\n\nNarrative\nWith CitizenCon wrapped up, the Narrative finished off the year focusing on SQ42. Alongside ongoing text requirements for mission objectives and UI, they reviewed progress on the various levels and synced with Design on the overall game experience. They also worked with the Animation Team to provide additional material for background NPC scenes. For example, they added moments where named characters interact with random NPCs to create additional character or story flavor.\n\nQA\nThe QA Team provided dedicated tools support for the Cinematics Team. This mainly involved investigating various crashes from loading cutscene levels and DataCore issues within the editor roll-up bar. They also set up a new track view checklist to better maintain and test the editor. They\u2019re planning to run these tests weekly and whenever a track-view-specific QA test is required. Finally for QA, cinematic client captures of different scene playthroughs for review by the designers and animators are ongoing and will continue into the new year.\n\nTech Animation\nNovember and December saw Tech Animation rework Mannequin setups to clean up older usable iterations and address bugs. They worked with the animation and code teams on the updated bartender and implemented socket\/attach point tech for props in Maya. They created multiple prop rigs for the usable and cinematics teams, including plates, trays, maintenance ladders, and ship turrets. Support was given to the Weapons Team along with new rigs, updates to older rigs, and in-engine bug fixes. The necessary rig additions for the new real digital acting tech were completed too.\nNew toolsets were authored to help visualize the complex engine-side attachment systems inside Maya. These assist the animators in their daily workflow and makes it infinitely easier to author props too. Development continued on the facial rigging pipelines; this lengthy initiative will ultimately yield great things when the team authors their own in-house face rigs compatible with the DNA systems. They also worked on the comms calls with Cinematics.\n\nTech Art\nFrankfurt\u2019s Tech Art Team worked closely with the UK\u2019s Tech Animation on the design and implementation of the new runtime Rig Logic plugin for Maya. In contrast to previous hard-coded versions, the new plugin is entirely data-driven and utilizes so-called rig definition files that can be changed as needed without the assistance of an engine programmer. The removal of this bottleneck will give more creative freedom to the artists and significantly shorten iteration times. While the Maya runtime node is responsible for driving rigs based on facial and\/or body animation, a bespoke command was also implemented. This allows the convenient querying and editing of all parts of the rig definition data and forms the foundation of the team\u2019s new rigging pipeline and tools.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nThe UI Team\u2019s main SQ42 focus of the past couple of months was the actor status display. This is one of the first UI elements that will hide when not in use, meaning the screen isn\u2019t cluttered with things players don\u2019t need immediate knowledge of. They also continuing creating visual targets and concepts for the final looks of various UI elements, including the visor the player wears throughout much of the game and target selection. The logo for an important faction in the SQ42 narrative was completed too.\n\nVFX\nVFX continued to work with Art and Design to flesh out key locations and gameplay loops. This included revisiting some of the older effects and making use of the more recent GPU particle collision improvements. The artists also iterated on the workflow for gas clouds, with several improvements coming online to improve the overall process. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":21,"created_at":"2020-01-22T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"6 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 21:34:06","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":17431,"next_id":17433}}