{"data":{"id":17445,"title":"Star Citizen Monthly Report: January 2020","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/17445-Star-Citizen-Monthly-Report-January-2020","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/17445","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/17445","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly Reports","images":[{"id":23861,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_ClioProgress.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/53ccr8elr052zr\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_ClioProgress.png","alt":"","size":6980106,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T22:44:21+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23861","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23861\/similar"},{"id":23862,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_CalliopeProgress.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/1c4p9hlgaq3cjr\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_CalliopeProgress.png","alt":"","size":9147346,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T22:44:01+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23862","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23862\/similar"},{"id":23863,"name":"MCDaymar.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/o254n409oov1cr\/source\/MCDaymar.jpg","alt":"","size":595771,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-01-30T15:02:07+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23863","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23863\/similar"},{"id":23864,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_LevskiLighting1.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/6uybszmjolkpzr\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_LevskiLighting1.png","alt":"","size":7212278,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T22:44:33+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23864","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23864\/similar"},{"id":23865,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_LevskiLighting2.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/npya7qhjs141mr\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_LevskiLighting2.png","alt":"","size":7458142,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T22:44:08+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23865","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23865\/similar"},{"id":23866,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_NewBabbageLightingPass.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/5pcm9h5n3rs0dr\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_NewBabbageLightingPass.png","alt":"","size":6344783,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T22:44:32+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23866","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23866\/similar"},{"id":23867,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_deposit_hopper.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/qfpylwqlj2dkor\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_deposit_hopper.jpg","alt":"","size":4034655,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-02-03T23:53:00+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23867","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23867\/similar"},{"id":23868,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_OxygenMachine.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/e1r4jjrenvkzdr\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_OxygenMachine.png","alt":"","size":4299323,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T23:53:18+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23868","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23868\/similar"},{"id":23869,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_SoftDrinkMachine.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/ljp050d7hnz1vr\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_SoftDrinkMachine.png","alt":"","size":6641205,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T23:53:28+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23869","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23869\/similar"},{"id":23870,"name":"CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_Apples.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/hqlyxfi6tne3or\/source\/CloudImperiumGames_StarCitizen_Apples.png","alt":"","size":5915393,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T23:53:24+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23870","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23870\/similar"},{"id":23871,"name":"CutlassRed_platform.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/ybb67wzlkvnmjr\/source\/CutlassRed_platform.png","alt":"","size":2170607,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2020-02-03T22:43:42+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23871","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/23871\/similar"},{"id":30963,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/vjhp2njbokvxb\/source.png","alt":"","size":4895804,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-05-02T18:53:45+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/30963","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/30963\/similar"},{"id":31194,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/dyu8i559admn1\/source.png","alt":"","size":3831731,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-06-06T16:13:24+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31194","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31194\/similar"},{"id":31403,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/p34sp3q2kl01b\/source.png","alt":"","size":3014864,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-07-04T13:35:01+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31403","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31403\/similar"},{"id":31536,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/6u5x9e23ftrw7\/source.png","alt":"","size":3531870,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-08-01T14:29:26+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31536","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31536\/similar"},{"id":31783,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/gaazjx0n1kop2\/source.png","alt":"","size":3223870,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-09-12T14:59:52+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31783","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31783\/similar"},{"id":32961,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/8m2c1vusdb0hj\/source.png","alt":"","size":4757052,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-10-03T12:11:38+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32961","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32961\/similar"},{"id":32962,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/4x3lw5w4vk3o4\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":584749,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2023-10-31T19:13:02+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32962","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32962\/similar"},{"id":38000,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/x5aus9nndxu4s\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":1186506,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2025-02-05T13:01:54+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38000","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38000\/similar"},{"id":38060,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/fe6j2ifv3ash4\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":1773870,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2025-03-04T15:04:48+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38060","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38060\/similar"},{"id":38084,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/pgmk7f9gt3j9y\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":2091105,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2025-04-01T17:29:16+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38084","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38084\/similar"},{"id":40391,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/svep7j1purh1f\/source.png","alt":"","size":5543040,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2025-07-01T15:37:40+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/40391","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/40391\/similar"}],"images_count":53,"translations":{"en_EN":"The year kicked off with a wealth of features and innovations planned and developed. Naturally, there\u2019s a lot we can\u2019t mention just yet, but this month\u2019s report should be enough to whet your appetites for what is certain to be the most exciting year in Stanton (and beyond) so far.\n\nAI\nWe start January\u2019s report with Combat AI, who improved the cover generation and NPC cover-use mentioned last month. This involved voxelizing the area around the cover locator to better understand which locations have clearance and adequate protection. Behaviour-wise, feedback on shotgun tactics was implemented; now AI actors will find more tactically advantageous positions when shooting. The ability for NPCs to change between locomotion speeds while using a single path was also implemented. For example, NPCs relocating to a new cover location can slowly move and shoot before turning to run without recalculating their path.\nThe Ship AI Team finalized the last implementation of the new 3D navigation system. This uses a 3D pathfinder and collision avoidance system, with the goal to make AI pilots fully aware of their physical environments. Each environment offers a different challenge: In open space, pilots need to take into account asteroids, communication arrays, and space stations. When flying close to planetary surfaces, pilots need to be aware of the local terrain elevation and physical structures that don\u2019t belong to the procedurally generated surface, such as rocks, buildings, refineries, and towers. In order to obtain and effectively use this information, the AI systems need to query physics in an extremely detailed way and model the information in abstractions that can be processed by their algorithms.\nAlso, time was dedicated to the routine code clean-up that\u2019s crucial to keeping the ever-growing code base efficient and readable. This clean-up focused mostly on the flight-related Subsumption tasks with heavily repeated (or \u2018boilerplate\u2019) code that could be abstracted away to reduce the likelihood of errors when implementing new tasks.\nThe final days of January saw Ship AI prototyping a new AI system \u2013 Tactical Target Selection. Mission requirements (for the PU and SQ42) are getting more sophisticated and the current selection system, based on filters, is not able to fulfill all requested scenarios.\nThe Social Team are currently focusing on a bar location where players and NPCs can purchase bottled and draft drinks and ask the bartender to mix a cocktail. Players will be able to drink at a table, booth, or the bar itself.\nArt (Environment)\nEnvironment Art kicked off the year in earnest, finalizing microTech\u2019s moons and updating their geology assets. The moons will be some of the harshest environments in Stanton and will offer high risk\/reward opportunities for players daring enough to tackle them. With all the recent planet tech improvements, the team wanted to give geology the same treatment to improve the visual quality and create more dynamic assets that better integrate with the various surfaces and biomes.\n\n\nArt (Ships)\nIn the US, Ship Art finalized art for the upcoming Esperia Prowler. Once the Drake Cutlass Red was released, they moved onto the white box for the Cutlass Blue.\nIn the UK, the team started production on two new ships, which will be announced later this year. The Anvil Carrack is also nearing completion, with the final touches being added to the medical bay, cartography room, and cargo pods. They\u2019re currently tweaking the lighting and making a final polish pass.\nArt (Weapons)\nJanuary saw the FPS Weapons Team kicking off two new weapons \u2013 the Lightning Bolt Co.\u2019s Atzkav sniper rifle and Yubarev pistol. A new anti-personnel turret archetype was started this month. While it shares similarities with the ship-weapon pipeline, it has a more realistic scale and works well from a gameplay point of view. While they\u2019ll initially be used as deterrents in prisons, players can expect to see them cropping up around the rest of the \u2018verse soon. Finally, the team fixed a few bugs for the next Alpha release and put the finishing touches on some of the assets mentioned last month.\nAudio\nAudio started off January by spending time scheduling for the quarter. They worked with Game Support in the US to improve their patch notes and started a spectrum thread looking for audio feedback that they\u2019re analyzing and breaking down into actionable tasks. They also began composing music and creating ambient sounds for prisons, worked on new weapon and tail sounds for the Prowler, and recorded dialogue and vocals for the actor status feature.\nBackend Services\nBackend Engineering spent early January planning and scheduling for the next quarter\u2019s development. They finished the advanced querying system for iCache and defined the optimal way of working with the game server and star hash services. Changes were also made to the hub server, which will optimize the service-to-client traffic path. Additionally, they supported the account reset tool, wallet changes, and the ongoing development of long-term persistence. Bugs relating to insurance claims, store purchases, and rental ships were fixed too.\nCharacters\nThe Character Team spent most of the month working on assets for the PU. They\u2019re currently texturing two outfits for microTech and wrapping up the tech implementation for two more, with a focus on cold-weather theming and variation. They\u2019re also creating shop props and finalizing the implementation of the Caldera suit seen at CitizenCon.\nCommunity\nThe Community Team kicked off 2020 with the Red Festival. A celebration of renewal and remembrance, the festival has its origins in old Earth customs and observes the end of the Lunar New Year. Evoking the real-world event, red envelopes were hidden around major hubs throughout the \u2018verse, which fortunate players were able to find and sell.\nThe team thoroughly enjoyed this year\u2019s community-organized Daymar Rally. The \u201cfilthiest race in the \u2018verse\u201d wouldn\u2019t have been possible without the 72 teams and countless support craft guiding and guarding the 275 competitors.\n\u201cThanks are due to the amazing organizers, cameramen, give-away providers, Twitch hosts, and VIP 890 Jump crew and guests. For the Community Team, it was this month\u2019s highlight to see the results of game development and community dedication come together in this magnificent event!\u201d \u2013 The Community Team\nFinally, the Cutlass Red was welcomed into the \u2018verse alongside the first iteration of medical gameplay.\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to seeing what everyone will use this new mechanic for, so please share your adventures on the Community Hub!\u201d\n\nDesign\nAlongside planning and bug fixing, last month saw Design setting up the new shops coming in Alpha 3.9. Higher-level design work began around event-driven content; the goal being to pair up with the USPU Team moving forward. Although more can be said, it\u2019ll be worth the wait\u2026\nTony Zurovec and team also started on the deliverables for the new Quantum editor recently seen at CitizenCon.\nEngineering\nJanuary saw the Engineering Team continue with physics threading and performance improvements. This involved increasing concurrency by adding an option to specify the number of worker threads to a maximum of 30. Currently, they overlap with the job system\u2019s worker threads. However, job workers are optimized for latency, so there are always points within a frame where it isn\u2019t entirely busy. Long term, they plan to move the in-thread physics workload to the job system directly, which will require further changes to negate the potential for frequent stalls.\nThe team also implemented concurrent\/immediate queuing for physics, support for fences and barriers to synchronize physics actions\/params, and added physics step data to the FPS heartbeat to monitor high-level load. The signed distance field (SDF) system was further developed to accelerate collision checks on complex geometry and increase precision. Support was also given to NPC death reaction animations regarding actor and ragdoll body dragging.\nJanuary\u2019s engine work included optimizing the job manager, which is required for entity-component scheduler improvements, and modifying it to run all component updates in batches. The responsiveness of the batch worker was also improved by removing the polling behavior to find jobs done (using direct signals instead), replacing the signaling mechanism with WaitOnAddress functionality for more efficient wake-ups, introducing clusters to prevent unnecessary wakeup for small batches, and replacing work-stealing code with simple atomic decrements.\nFor the zone system, they implemented support for proximity volumes and moved SZoneHandle data from client objects into the zone system. They also supported the transition to Visual Studio 2019.\nEngineering also supported the Gen12 renderer and Vulkan. This involved porting the buffer management code to the Gen12 renderer, generalizing texture views, creating support for LoadOp, changing Map API to make it more C++11-friendly using RAII, and ensuring the UpdateResourceBuffer legacy pipeline now correctly takes in byte offsets in the backend rather than per element-offset.\nWork on new experimental hair features began, including a hair color model with base melanin and bleach\/dye layers. Ocean rendering moved from a forward to a deferred pass to allow more consistent shading; shadow application is now free and cube map reflections were improved. The unified raymarcher continued development too.\nFor planet lighting and atmosphere, they added combined planet color LUT to evaluate the local ground albedo and take it into account during irradiance computations. They also applied scene irradiance computations and cloud shading, introduced new sky irradiance LUT for a better approximation of light scattering events within atmosphere, and added support for an alternative jitter method that works alongside TSAA.\nRegarding ground fog, they implemented a strictly compute-based method to build the ground height map. This means they\u2019ll be able to ditch fog volume proxy mesh generations which, after a lot of improvements, were still subject to artifacts. This move will save on memory resources as well. They also removed the peel buffer (in preparation to drop the proxy mesh) and fog bounds are now evaluated analytically.\nFeatures (Gameplay)\nWith the quarterly plans locked, the team provided engineering support for the upcoming prison mission feature. They also spent time addressing a few critical crash bugs for Alpha 3.8.1. They\u2019re currently adding functionality for multiple cargo manifests per ship that will allow for more variety when collecting cargo from NPCs. Finally, they started converting the existing shop UI system to the new building blocks tech, which will be a multi-quarter initiative throughout 2020.\nFeatures (Vehicles)\nThe US-based Feature Team began improving radar and ping detection, including simplifying entity detection, reworking the A\/R marker display, and allowing low-signature entities. They also implemented vehicle-to-vehicle loadout spawning, which will enable players to store and spawn vehicles within the cargo bays of other vehicles. They worked on sub-targeting improvements to allow players to specifically target weapons and turrets after fully scanning vehicles. Ongoing work to the SDF shields will improve hit detection and effects, including extending shield gameplay to non-vehicle entities.\nGraphics\nWith the bulk of Planet Tech v4 complete, the Graphics Team began looking into improvements to the organic shader to enable it to take advantage of physical-based shading. This will allow the much wider reuse of assets as they will automatically adapt to the local biome (rock color, surface textures, snow\/sand build-up, etc.). The final paint and tint system changes are complete, with the system currently in use by the Environment Team. It\u2019ll be handed over to other teams shortly for them to decide how and when to incorporate it. Work also went into the Gen12\/Vulkan renderer, specifically the conversion of post effects to the new system.\nLevel Design\nLevel Design\u2019s January started with location planning, identifying dependencies, and organizing schedules. Most of that work is handled by the leads and production, so the rest of the team can focus on building content. As such, New Babbage is almost complete, with only a few additions and final polish to come. The team continued to work on the modular space stations. The stations currently in-game are known as Tier 0 \u2013 a concept to prove the feasibility of the design, approach, and procedural generation. Next, more structured and easily navigable layouts will be created along with procedural signage and future additions.\nLighting\nLast month, the Lighting Team tackled several bugs and polish tasks that had been put on the backburner while release work was prioritized. This involved updating Lorville\u2019s lighting with a city-wide glow previously used on ArcCorp to help give the feeling of light pollution scattering into the atmosphere. This is a subtle effect, but it helps connect the city to the wider atmosphere. The team also updated Levski\u2019s exterior to remove some legacy rot and make better use of prefab objects, which allows for much quicker iteration and large-scale changes. They also took the opportunity to improve the overall quality of the location\u2019s lighting by slightly simplifying the color scheme to make it less visually chaotic.\nThe team is currently focusing on New Babbage.\n\u201cThere are lots of visually interesting and distinct areas in the landing zone where we can take advantage of all our latest lighting features and optimizations for the best quality and most dynamic lighting in a landing zone to date.\u201d \u2013 The Lighting Team\nWork has already been completed on improving the overall city lighting experience, especially during nighttime and when player are in transit.\n\n\n\n\n\nPlayer Relations\nIn addition to supporting various promotions and events, Player Relations worked to stabilize the incremental Alpha 3.8 patches, with focus currently on Alpha 3.8.2.\nProps\nThe Props Team started the year off cleaning up bugs and taking stock of materials and textures in the ongoing process of improving asset quality. Work continued on the prison props, with the oxygen and ore machinery finalized. A boxing ring was also completed that will allow for some much-needed entertainment while the inmates serve their time. Small stashes were also hidden in the prison locations, so incarcerated players should keep an eye out for extra supplies. Some of the team continued work on the hi-tech dressings for New Babbage, this time focusing on the bar and furniture sets and dressing for the many food outlets. Finally, they started on new food assets required for the actor status feature.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nQA\nDevelopment-wise, QA tested the key elements of the incremental Alpha 3.8 patches, including the Drake Cutlass Red and Anvil Carrack. Some of the team moved back to game dev to test upcoming features, while planning began for the upcoming testing and current best-practice review.\nSystem Design\nSystem Design spent time in January finishing mining consumables. Once live, players will be able to activate a consumable to make mining jobs easier or correct mistakes made in the process. Work on volatile cargo progressed too; when extracted, it will need to be taken to a refining kiosk quickly and carefully to prevent it from detonating inside the ship.\nResource distribution is another significant feature currently under development. This will create a unified way to handle resources (power, heat, shields, CPU, etc.) inside a ship, station, or planetary settlement. The ultimate aim is to make the engineer role critical to large ships and to allow attackers to take out (or even sabotage) components.\nTech Animation\nTech Animation fixed several small bugs in the animation pipeline and reworked the PlayBlast animation tool in Maya to improve efficiency. They also supported Social AI with Mannequin tasks, implementing animations for the bartender, railings, and bar patron.\nTech Art\nTech Art continued to flesh out the runtime Rig Logic tools for Maya. The previously monolithic code and related data structures were broken down into generic building blocks known as rig components. These components can be chained together almost arbitrarily to provide the functionality required by specific rigs, such as a human body or space whale. BlendShape, linear joint offset, PSD, wrinkle map, and more are currently viable. In the future, support will be extended to RBF, look IK, and other more complex variants. This will allow the team to better develop new runtime rigs, which they\u2019ll need when they start creating the complex rigs for alien races and fauna.\nAnother important goal is to transition human body rigs from a fully-baked form (where the movement of joints and bones is exported into the game engine from Maya) to a workflow that only bakes and exports the primary joints. This will use a custom body runtime rig logic to determine the translation and rotation of all deformation helper joints. These joints ensure that, regardless of what clothing a character wears or what pose they\u2019re in, attachments always deform correctly without artifacts. By driving them via a runtime rig logic, the memory footprint of the thousands of body animation clips will become much smaller. Also, procedural animation of the primary joints via physicalized ragdolls, runtime IK, and others will not break deformation as the rig logic will adjust the deformation joints according to the final pose.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent supported the release of the Cutlass Red, working with in-house teams to build the web page and manage the backend. They also supported the Lunar New Year promotion, which gave backers the final chance to pick up (amongst other things) an Anvil Carrack before it becomes flyable.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nMuch of the UI Art Team\u2019s January focus was on hi-tech environmental screens for New Babbage and developing the visual style of the prison UI screens, which have a more retro-inspired functional look. Final polish was also given to the Actor Status display. The visuals for the personal inner thought made progress too. This popup radial menu lets players perform quick actions (such as turning on a torch) without having to remember keyboard shortcuts.\nThe UI Tech Team started work on 3D building blocks, which will support multi-layered screens and make it easier to add 3D icons. They also expanded reusability and restyling, which will help implement the new vehicle UI.\nVFX\nThe VFX Team further improved Planet Tech v4, specifically wind strength values across each location. This includes a new option to clamp a maximum wind strength for each planet, which allows the team to use fewer wind textures rather than a bespoke asset per location. They\u2019re currently adding effects to several new locations in the Stanton system. Work also continued on effects for New Babbage, mining attachments, the Cutlass Red, and the Carrack. They began looking into atmospheric entry improvements using the anticipated vehicle-specific SDF too. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026","de_DE":"Das Jahr begann mit einer F\u00fclle von geplanten und entwickelten Features und Innovationen. Nat\u00fcrlich gibt es vieles, was wir noch nicht erw\u00e4hnen k\u00f6nnen, aber der Bericht dieses Monats sollte ausreichen, um Ihren Appetit auf das sicherlich aufregendste Jahr in Stanton (und dar\u00fcber hinaus) zu wecken, das wir bisher erlebt haben.\n\nKI\nWir beginnen den Januar-Bericht mit Combat AI, der die im letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnte Cover-Generierung und NPC-Cover-Verwendung verbessert hat. Dies beinhaltete eine Voxelierung des Bereichs um den Deckungssucher, um besser zu verstehen, welche Orte \u00fcber eine Freigabe und einen angemessenen Schutz verf\u00fcgen. In Bezug auf das Verhalten wurde ein Feedback zur Schrotflintentaktik implementiert; jetzt werden KI-Akteure beim Schie\u00dfen taktisch vorteilhaftere Positionen finden. Die M\u00f6glichkeit f\u00fcr NPCs, zwischen den Fortbewegungsgeschwindigkeiten zu wechseln, w\u00e4hrend sie eine einzige Bahn benutzen, wurde ebenfalls implementiert. Beispielsweise k\u00f6nnen sich NSCs, die sich an einen neuen Deckungsort verlagern, langsam bewegen und schie\u00dfen, bevor sie sich zum Laufen umdrehen, ohne ihren Weg neu zu berechnen.\nDas Schiffs-KI-Team hat die letzte Implementierung des neuen 3D-Navigationssystems abgeschlossen. Dabei wird ein 3D-Pfadfinder- und Kollisionsvermeidungssystem eingesetzt, mit dem Ziel, den KI-Piloten ihre physische Umgebung vollst\u00e4ndig bewusst zu machen. Jede Umgebung bietet eine andere Herausforderung: Im offenen Raum m\u00fcssen die Piloten Asteroiden, Kommunikationsanordnungen und Raumstationen ber\u00fccksichtigen. Beim Fliegen in der N\u00e4he von Planetenoberfl\u00e4chen m\u00fcssen die Piloten die lokale Gel\u00e4ndeh\u00f6he und die physischen Strukturen, die nicht zu der verfahrenstechnisch erzeugten Oberfl\u00e4che geh\u00f6ren, wie Felsen, Geb\u00e4ude, Raffinerien und T\u00fcrme, kennen. Um diese Informationen zu erhalten und effektiv zu nutzen, m\u00fcssen die KI-Systeme die Physik auf sehr detaillierte Weise abfragen und die Informationen in Abstraktionen modellieren, die von ihren Algorithmen verarbeitet werden k\u00f6nnen.\nAu\u00dferdem wurde Zeit f\u00fcr die routinem\u00e4\u00dfige Code-Bereinigung aufgewendet, die entscheidend daf\u00fcr ist, die st\u00e4ndig wachsende Code-Basis effizient und lesbar zu halten. Diese Bereinigung konzentrierte sich vor allem auf die flugbezogenen Subsumtionsaufgaben mit stark wiederholtem (oder \"Boilerplate\"-)Code, der weg abstrahiert werden konnte, um die Wahrscheinlichkeit von Fehlern bei der Implementierung neuer Aufgaben zu verringern.\nIn den letzten Januartagen wurde ein Schiffs-KI-Prototyp eines neuen KI-Systems entwickelt - die taktische Zielauswahl. Die Einsatzanforderungen (f\u00fcr die PU und SQ42) werden immer anspruchsvoller, und das derzeitige Auswahlsystem, das auf Filtern basiert, ist nicht in der Lage, alle geforderten Szenarien zu erf\u00fcllen.\nDas Sozialteam konzentriert sich derzeit auf eine Bar, in der Spieler und NPCs Flaschen- und Fassgetr\u00e4nke kaufen und den Barkeeper bitten k\u00f6nnen, einen Cocktail zu mixen. Die Spieler k\u00f6nnen am Tisch, am Stand oder an der Bar selbst etwas trinken.\nKunst (Umwelt)\nEnvironment Art startete das Jahr ernsthaft, indem sie die Monde von microTech abschloss und ihre geologischen Ressourcen aktualisierte. Die Monde geh\u00f6ren zu den h\u00e4rtesten Umgebungen in Stanton und bieten hohe Risiken\/Belohnungen f\u00fcr Spieler, die sich trauen, sie anzugehen. Bei all den j\u00fcngsten technischen Verbesserungen des Planeten wollte das Team die Geologie gleich behandeln, um die visuelle Qualit\u00e4t zu verbessern und dynamischere Anlagen zu schaffen, die sich besser in die verschiedenen Oberfl\u00e4chen und Biome integrieren.\n\n\nKunst (Schiffe)\nIn den USA hat Ship Art die Kunst f\u00fcr den kommenden Esperia Prowler fertiggestellt. Nachdem der Drake Cutlass Red freigegeben wurde, gingen sie auf die wei\u00dfe Schachtel f\u00fcr den Cutlass Blue \u00fcber.\nIm Vereinigten K\u00f6nigreich hat das Team die Produktion von zwei neuen Schiffen aufgenommen, die im Laufe dieses Jahres bekannt gegeben werden sollen. Auch der Amboss-Carrack steht kurz vor der Fertigstellung, wobei die medizinische Abteilung, der Kartographie-Raum und die Frachtkapseln den letzten Schliff erhalten. Derzeit wird an der Beleuchtung gefeilt und der letzte Schliff vorgenommen.\nKunst (Waffen)\nIm Januar brachte das FPS-Waffenteam zwei neue Waffen auf den Markt - das Atzkav-Scharfsch\u00fctzengewehr von Lightning Bolt Co. und die Yubarev-Pistole. In diesem Monat wurde ein neuer Archetyp von Anti-Personen-T\u00fcrmen gestartet. Sie hat zwar \u00c4hnlichkeiten mit der Schiffswaffen-Pipeline, aber sie hat einen realistischeren Ma\u00dfstab und funktioniert vom Standpunkt des Gameplays aus gesehen gut. W\u00e4hrend sie zun\u00e4chst als Abschreckung in den Gef\u00e4ngnissen eingesetzt werden, k\u00f6nnen die Spieler damit rechnen, dass sie bald um den Rest der \"Strophe\" herum auftauchen werden. Schlie\u00dflich hat das Team einige Fehler f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chste Alpha-Version behoben und einigen der im letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnten Assets den letzten Schliff gegeben.\nAudio\nAudio begann im Januar mit der Zeitplanung f\u00fcr das Quartal. Sie arbeiteten mit dem Game Support in den USA zusammen, um ihre Patch-Notizen zu verbessern, und starteten einen Spektrum-Thread, um nach Audio-Feedback zu suchen, das sie analysieren und in verwertbare Aufgaben zerlegen. Sie begannen auch, Musik zu komponieren und Umgebungsger\u00e4usche f\u00fcr Gef\u00e4ngnisse zu kreieren, arbeiteten an neuen Waffen- und Schwanzger\u00e4uschen f\u00fcr den Prowler und nahmen Dialoge und Gesang f\u00fcr das Schauspieler-Status-Feature auf.\nBackend-Dienste\nDas Backend Engineering verbrachte Anfang Januar mit der Planung und Terminierung der Entwicklung des n\u00e4chsten Quartals. Sie stellten das erweiterte Abfragesystem f\u00fcr iCache fertig und definierten die optimale Arbeitsweise mit dem Spielserver und den Star-Hash-Diensten. Auch am Hub-Server wurden \u00c4nderungen vorgenommen, die den Pfad f\u00fcr den Service-Client-Verkehr optimieren werden. Dar\u00fcber hinaus unterst\u00fctzten sie das Tool zum Zur\u00fccksetzen von Konten, \u00c4nderungen an der Brieftasche und die laufende Entwicklung der langfristigen Persistenz. Auch Fehler in Bezug auf Versicherungsanspr\u00fcche, Ladenk\u00e4ufe und Mietschiffe wurden behoben.\nZeichen\nDas Charakterteam verbrachte den gr\u00f6\u00dften Teil des Monats mit der Arbeit an Verm\u00f6genswerten f\u00fcr die PU. Derzeit texturieren sie zwei Outfits f\u00fcr microTech und packen die technische Umsetzung f\u00fcr zwei weitere ein, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf der Thematisierung und Variation von Kaltwetter liegt. Sie erstellen auch Ladenrequisiten und schlie\u00dfen die Umsetzung des Caldera-Anzuges ab, den sie auf der CitizenCon gesehen haben.\nGemeinschaft\nDas Community Team startete das Jahr 2020 mit dem Roten Festival. Das Fest ist ein Fest der Erneuerung und des Gedenkens, das seinen Ursprung in alten Erdbr\u00e4uchen hat und das Ende des Mondneujahrs feiert. In Anlehnung an das reale Ereignis wurden w\u00e4hrend der gesamten \"Strophe\" rote Umschl\u00e4ge um wichtige Knotenpunkte herum versteckt, die die gl\u00fccklichen Spieler finden und verkaufen konnten.\nDas Team hat die diesj\u00e4hrige, von der Gemeinde organisierte Daymar-Rallye sehr genossen. Das \"schmutzigste Rennen der 'Verse' w\u00e4re ohne die 72 Teams und unz\u00e4hlige Begleitfahrzeuge, die die 275 Teilnehmer f\u00fchren und bewachen, nicht m\u00f6glich gewesen.\n\"Dank geb\u00fchrt den erstaunlichen Organisatoren, Kameram\u00e4nnern, Give-away-Anbietern, Twitch-Gastgebern und der VIP 890 Jump-Crew und den G\u00e4sten. F\u00fcr das Community Team war es der H\u00f6hepunkt dieses Monats, die Ergebnisse der Spielentwicklung und des Engagements der Community in dieser gro\u00dfartigen Veranstaltung zusammenzuf\u00fchren! - Das Gemeinschaftsteam\nSchlie\u00dflich wurde der Cutlass Red neben der ersten Iteration des medizinischen Spiels in der 'Strophe' begr\u00fc\u00dft.\n\"Wir freuen uns darauf zu sehen, wof\u00fcr jeder diese neue Mechanik verwenden wird, also teilen Sie bitte Ihre Abenteuer im Community Hub mit uns!\n\nGestaltung\nNeben der Planung und Fehlerbehebung hat Design im letzten Monat die neuen Gesch\u00e4fte in Alpha 3.9 eingerichtet. Die \u00fcbergeordnete Designarbeit begann mit ereignisgesteuerten Inhalten; das Ziel war es, sich mit dem USPU-Team zusammenzuschlie\u00dfen und vorw\u00e4rts zu kommen. Obwohl man noch mehr sagen kann, wird es das Warten wert sein...\nTony Zurovec und sein Team begannen auch mit der Arbeit an den Ergebnissen f\u00fcr den neuen Quantum-Editor, der k\u00fcrzlich auf der CitizenCon vorgestellt wurde.\nTechnik\nIm Januar setzte das Ingenieurteam das Einf\u00e4deln der Physik und die Leistungsverbesserung fort. Dies beinhaltete die Erh\u00f6hung der Gleichzeitigkeit durch Hinzuf\u00fcgen einer Option zur Angabe der Anzahl der Worker-Threads auf maximal 30. Gegenw\u00e4rtig \u00fcberschneiden sie sich mit den Arbeitsf\u00e4den des Arbeitssystems. Allerdings sind die Mitarbeiter auf Latenzzeiten optimiert, so dass es immer Punkte innerhalb eines Rahmens gibt, an denen er nicht vollst\u00e4ndig ausgelastet ist. Langfristig planen sie, die in der Physik anfallende Arbeitsbelastung direkt auf das Job-System zu verlagern, was weitere \u00c4nderungen erfordert, um das Potenzial f\u00fcr h\u00e4ufige Str\u00f6mungsabrisse zu negieren.\nDas Team implementierte auch gleichzeitige\/sofortige Warteschlangen f\u00fcr die Physik, Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Z\u00e4une und Barrieren, um die physikalischen Aktionen\/Parameter zu synchronisieren, und f\u00fcgte dem FPS-Herzschlag physikalische Schrittdaten hinzu, um die Belastung auf hoher Ebene zu \u00fcberwachen. Das SDF-System (Signed Distance Field) wurde weiterentwickelt, um die Kollisionspr\u00fcfung komplexer Geometrien zu beschleunigen und die Pr\u00e4zision zu erh\u00f6hen. Unterst\u00fctzt wurden auch Animationen der NPC-Todesreaktion bez\u00fcglich des Schleppens von Schauspielern und Ragdoll-K\u00f6rpern.\nDie Arbeit an der Engine im Januar beinhaltete die Optimierung des Job-Managers, der f\u00fcr Verbesserungen des Entity-Komponenten-Schedulers erforderlich ist, sowie die Modifizierung des Job-Managers, um alle Komponenten-Updates in Batches auszuf\u00fchren. Die Reaktionsf\u00e4higkeit des Batch-Workers wurde ebenfalls verbessert, indem das Polling-Verhalten zum Auffinden erledigter Jobs entfernt wurde (stattdessen wurden direkte Signale verwendet), der Signalisierungsmechanismus durch die WaitOnAddress-Funktionalit\u00e4t f\u00fcr effizientere Aufweckvorg\u00e4nge ersetzt wurde, Cluster eingef\u00fchrt wurden, um unn\u00f6tiges Aufwecken bei kleinen Batches zu verhindern, und der arbeitsteilige Code durch einfache atomare Dekremente ersetzt wurde.\nF\u00fcr das Zonensystem implementierten sie die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Proximity-Volumes und verschoben SZoneHandle-Daten von Kundenobjekten in das Zonensystem. Sie unterst\u00fctzten auch den \u00dcbergang zu Visual Studio 2019.\nDie Technik unterst\u00fctzte auch den Gen12-Renderer und Vulkan. Dies beinhaltete die Portierung des Puffermanagement-Codes auf den Gen12-Renderer, die Verallgemeinerung von Texturansichten, die Schaffung von Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr LoadOp, die \u00c4nderung der Map-API, um sie mit RAII C++11-freundlicher zu machen, und die Sicherstellung, dass die UpdateResourceBuffer-Legacy-Pipeline jetzt Byte-Offsets im Backend statt pro Element-Offset korrekt aufnimmt.\nDie Arbeit an neuen experimentellen Haarmerkmalen begann, darunter ein Haarfarbenmodell mit Melaninbasis und Bleich-\/Farbschichten. Das Ozean-Rendering wurde von einem Vorw\u00e4rts- zu einem verz\u00f6gerten Durchgang verschoben, um eine konsistentere Schattierung zu erm\u00f6glichen; die Schattenanwendung ist jetzt frei und die W\u00fcrfelkartenreflexionen wurden verbessert. Auch der vereinigte Raymarcher entwickelte sich weiter.\nF\u00fcr die Planetenbeleuchtung und Atmosph\u00e4re f\u00fcgten sie eine kombinierte Planetenfarben-LUT hinzu, um die lokale Bodenalbedo zu bewerten und bei den Bestrahlungsst\u00e4rke-Berechnungen zu ber\u00fccksichtigen. Sie wandten auch Berechnungen der Szenenbestrahlungsst\u00e4rke und Wolkenschattierungen an, f\u00fchrten eine neue Himmelsbestrahlungsst\u00e4rke LUT f\u00fcr eine bessere Ann\u00e4herung an Lichtstreuungsereignisse in der Atmosph\u00e4re ein und f\u00fcgten die Unterst\u00fctzung einer alternativen Jitter-Methode hinzu, die neben TSAA funktioniert.\nWas den Bodennebel betrifft, so haben sie eine streng rechnergest\u00fctzte Methode zur Erstellung der Bodenh\u00f6henkarte eingef\u00fchrt. Das bedeutet, dass sie in der Lage sein werden, die Nebelvolumen-Proxy-Mesh-Generationen, die nach vielen Verbesserungen immer noch mit Artefakten behaftet waren, zu beseitigen. Dieser Schritt spart auch Speicherressourcen. Sie entfernten auch den Sch\u00e4lpuffer (in Vorbereitung auf den Verzicht auf das Proxy-Mesh), und die Nebelgrenzen werden nun analytisch ausgewertet.\nFunktionen (Spielablauf)\nNachdem die Quartalspl\u00e4ne abgeschlossen waren, leistete das Team technische Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die bevorstehende Gef\u00e4ngnismission. Sie verbrachten auch Zeit mit der Behebung einiger kritischer Absturz-Fehler f\u00fcr Alpha 3.8.1. Sie f\u00fcgen derzeit Funktionen f\u00fcr mehrere Frachtverzeichnisse pro Schiff hinzu, die mehr Vielfalt bei der Abholung der Fracht von den NPCs erm\u00f6glichen. Schlie\u00dflich begannen sie mit der Umstellung des bestehenden Shop-UI-Systems auf die neuen Bausteine der Technologie, die im Laufe des Jahres 2020 eine mehrteilige Initiative sein wird.\nMerkmale (Fahrzeuge)\nDas in den USA ans\u00e4ssige Feature Team begann mit der Verbesserung der Radar- und Ping-Erkennung, einschlie\u00dflich der Vereinfachung der Entit\u00e4tserkennung, der \u00dcberarbeitung der Anzeige der A\/R-Marker und der Zulassung von Entit\u00e4ten mit geringer Signatur. Sie f\u00fchrten auch das \"Vehicle-to-Vehicle Loadout Spawning\" ein, das es den Spielern erm\u00f6glichen wird, Fahrzeuge in den Lader\u00e4umen anderer Fahrzeuge zu lagern und zu laichen. Sie arbeiteten an Verbesserungen im Bereich der Unterzielerfassung, um den Spielern die M\u00f6glichkeit zu geben, nach dem vollst\u00e4ndigen Scannen der Fahrzeuge gezielt Waffen und Gesch\u00fctzt\u00fcrme zu zielen. Die laufenden Arbeiten an den SDF-Schilden werden die Treffererkennung und -wirkung verbessern, einschlie\u00dflich der Ausweitung des Schildgameplays auf nicht-fahrzeuggebundene Einheiten.\nGrafiken\nNachdem der gr\u00f6\u00dfte Teil von Planet Tech v4 fertig gestellt war, begann das Grafikteam mit der Suche nach Verbesserungen des organischen Schattierers, um die Vorteile physikalisch basierter Schattierungen nutzen zu k\u00f6nnen. Dies erm\u00f6glicht eine viel breitere Wiederverwendung von Verm\u00f6genswerten, da sie sich automatisch an das lokale Biom (Gesteinsfarbe, Oberfl\u00e4chenbeschaffenheit, Schnee-\/Sandaufbau usw.) anpassen. Die letzten \u00c4nderungen am Farb- und Abt\u00f6nungssystem sind abgeschlossen, wobei das System derzeit vom Umweltteam verwendet wird. Sie wird in K\u00fcrze an andere Teams \u00fcbergeben, damit diese entscheiden k\u00f6nnen, wie und wann sie sie einbauen. Die Arbeiten gingen auch in den Gen12\/Vulkan-Renderer, insbesondere die Konvertierung von Post-Effekten in das neue System.\nLevel-Entwurf\nDer Januar von Level Design begann mit der Standortplanung, der Identifizierung von Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten und der Organisation von Zeitpl\u00e4nen. Der Gro\u00dfteil dieser Arbeit wird von den Leads und der Produktion erledigt, so dass sich der Rest des Teams auf die Erstellung der Inhalte konzentrieren kann. Damit ist New Babbage fast vollst\u00e4ndig, nur noch einige wenige Erg\u00e4nzungen und der letzte Schliff stehen noch aus. Das Team setzte die Arbeit an den modularen Raumstationen fort. Die Stationen, die sich derzeit im Spiel befinden, sind als Tier 0 bekannt - ein Konzept, mit dem die Machbarkeit des Designs, des Ansatzes und der Verfahrensgenerierung nachgewiesen werden soll. Als n\u00e4chstes werden strukturiertere und leichter navigierbare Layouts sowie Verfahrensbeschilderungen und zuk\u00fcnftige Erg\u00e4nzungen erstellt.\nBeleuchtung\nIm vergangenen Monat hat das Beleuchtungsteam mehrere Fehler behoben und Aufgaben aufpoliert, die bei der Priorisierung der Ver\u00f6ffentlichungsarbeit auf die lange Bank geschoben worden waren. Dies beinhaltete die Aktualisierung der Beleuchtung von Lorville mit einem stadtweiten Gl\u00fchen, das zuvor bei ArcCorp verwendet wurde, um das Gef\u00fchl zu vermitteln, dass die Lichtverschmutzung in die Atmosph\u00e4re gestreut wird. Dies ist ein subtiler Effekt, aber er tr\u00e4gt dazu bei, die Stadt mit der breiteren Atmosph\u00e4re zu verbinden. Das Team aktualisierte auch das \u00c4u\u00dfere von Levski, um einige Altlasten zu beseitigen und vorgefertigte Objekte besser zu nutzen, was eine viel schnellere Iteration und gro\u00df angelegte \u00c4nderungen erm\u00f6glicht. Sie nutzten auch die Gelegenheit, die Gesamtqualit\u00e4t der Beleuchtung des Ortes zu verbessern, indem sie das Farbschema etwas vereinfachten, um es optisch weniger chaotisch zu gestalten.\nDas Team konzentriert sich derzeit auf New Babbage.\n\n\n\"Es gibt viele visuell interessante und ausgepr\u00e4gte Bereiche in der Landezone, in denen wir all unsere neuesten Beleuchtungsfunktionen und Optimierungen f\u00fcr die beste Qualit\u00e4t und die dynamischste Beleuchtung in einer Landezone bisher nutzen k\u00f6nnen. - Das Beleuchtungsteam\n\n\nDie Arbeit an der Verbesserung der gesamten Stadtbeleuchtung, insbesondere w\u00e4hrend der Nacht und w\u00e4hrend des Spiels, ist bereits abgeschlossen.\n\n\n\nSpieler-Beziehungen\nZus\u00e4tzlich zur Unterst\u00fctzung verschiedener Werbeaktionen und Veranstaltungen arbeitete Player Relations an der Stabilisierung der inkrementellen Alpha 3.8-Patches, wobei der Schwerpunkt derzeit auf Alpha 3.8.2 liegt.\nRequisiten\nDas Requisiten-Team begann das Jahr mit der Beseitigung von Fehlern und der Bestandsaufnahme von Materialien und Texturen im laufenden Prozess der Verbesserung der Qualit\u00e4t der Anlagen. Die Arbeit an den Gef\u00e4ngnisrequisiten wurde fortgesetzt und die Sauerstoff- und Erzmaschinen fertiggestellt. Auch ein Boxring wurde fertiggestellt, der f\u00fcr die dringend ben\u00f6tigte Unterhaltung sorgt, w\u00e4hrend die Insassen ihre Zeit absitzen. Au\u00dferdem wurden kleine Verstecke in den Gef\u00e4ngnissen versteckt, so dass die inhaftierten Spieler nach zus\u00e4tzlichen Vorr\u00e4ten Ausschau halten sollten. Ein Teil des Teams setzte die Arbeit an den Hightech-Dressings f\u00fcr New Babbage fort, diesmal mit Schwerpunkt auf der Bar und den M\u00f6belsets sowie den Dressings f\u00fcr die vielen Lebensmittelgesch\u00e4fte. Schlie\u00dflich begannen sie mit neuen Nahrungsmitteln, die f\u00fcr das Schauspieler-Statusmerkmal ben\u00f6tigt werden.\n\n\n\n\nQA\nEntwicklungstechnisch testete die Qualit\u00e4tssicherung die Schl\u00fcsselelemente der inkrementellen Alpha 3.8-Patches, einschlie\u00dflich des Drake Cutlass Red und Anvil Carrack. Ein Teil des Teams kehrte zur Spieleentwicklung zur\u00fcck, um kommende Funktionen zu testen, w\u00e4hrend die Planung f\u00fcr die bevorstehenden Tests und die aktuelle Best-Practice-\u00dcberpr\u00fcfung begann.\nSystem-Entwurf\nDas Systemdesign verbrachte im Januar Zeit mit der Fertigstellung von Verbrauchsmaterialien f\u00fcr den Bergbau. Sobald sie live sind, k\u00f6nnen die Spieler ein Verbrauchsmaterial aktivieren, um die Arbeit im Bergbau zu erleichtern oder Fehler zu korrigieren, die dabei gemacht wurden. Auch die Arbeiten an fl\u00fcchtiger Ladung kamen voran; wenn sie ausgeladen wird, muss sie schnell und vorsichtig zu einem Raffinerie-Kiosk gebracht werden, um zu verhindern, dass sie im Schiff explodiert.\nDie Ressourcenverteilung ist ein weiteres wichtiges Merkmal, das derzeit entwickelt wird. Dadurch wird ein einheitlicher Umgang mit Ressourcen (Strom, W\u00e4rme, Schilde, CPU usw.) innerhalb eines Schiffes, einer Station oder einer planetarischen Siedlung geschaffen. Das letztendliche Ziel ist es, die Rolle des Ingenieurs f\u00fcr gro\u00dfe Schiffe kritisch zu machen und Angreifern die M\u00f6glichkeit zu geben, Komponenten herauszunehmen (oder sogar zu sabotieren).\nTechnische Animation\nTech Animation hat mehrere kleine Fehler in der Animationspipeline behoben und das PlayBlast-Animationswerkzeug in Maya \u00fcberarbeitet, um die Effizienz zu verbessern. Sie unterst\u00fctzten auch die soziale KI mit Mannequin-Aufgaben, indem sie Animationen f\u00fcr den Barkeeper, die Gel\u00e4nder und den Bar-Patron implementierten.\nTechnische Kunst\nTech Art hat die Rig Logic-Tools zur Laufzeit f\u00fcr Maya weiter ausgebaut. Der zuvor monolithische Code und die damit verbundenen Datenstrukturen wurden in generische Bausteine, die als Rig-Komponenten bezeichnet werden, zerlegt. Diese Komponenten k\u00f6nnen fast beliebig miteinander verkettet werden, um die Funktionalit\u00e4t zu gew\u00e4hrleisten, die von bestimmten Rigs, wie z.B. einem menschlichen K\u00f6rper oder einem Weltraumwal, ben\u00f6tigt wird. BlendShape, linearer Gelenkausgleich, PSD, Faltenabbildung und mehr sind derzeit realisierbar. In Zukunft wird die Unterst\u00fctzung auf RBF, siehe IK, und andere komplexere Varianten ausgeweitet werden. Dies wird es dem Team erm\u00f6glichen, besser neue Runtime-Rigs zu entwickeln, die sie ben\u00f6tigen, wenn sie die komplexen Rigs f\u00fcr au\u00dferirdische Rassen und Fauna erstellen wollen.\nEin weiteres wichtiges Ziel ist es, menschliche K\u00f6rperger\u00e4te von einer vollst\u00e4ndig gebackenen Form (bei der die Bewegung der Gelenke und Knochen von Maya in die Spiel-Engine exportiert wird) auf einen Arbeitsablauf umzustellen, der nur die prim\u00e4ren Gelenke backt und exportiert. Dabei wird eine benutzerdefinierte Body-Runtime-Rig-Logik verwendet, um die Translation und Rotation aller Deformationshelfergelenke zu bestimmen. Diese Gelenke stellen sicher, dass sich die Anh\u00e4nge unabh\u00e4ngig von der Kleidung einer Figur oder ihrer Pose immer korrekt und ohne Artefakte verformen. Durch die Ansteuerung \u00fcber eine Laufzeit-Rig-Logik wird der Speicherbedarf der Tausenden von K\u00f6rperanimationsclips deutlich geringer. Auch die prozedurale Animation der Prim\u00e4rgelenke \u00fcber physikalisierte Ragdolls, Laufzeit-IK und andere wird die Verformung nicht brechen, da die Rig-Logik die Verformungsgelenke entsprechend der endg\u00fcltigen Pose anpasst.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent unterst\u00fctzte die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung des Cutlass Red und arbeitete mit internen Teams an der Erstellung der Webseite und der Verwaltung des Backends. Sie unterst\u00fctzten auch die Mondsilvester-Aktion, die den Unterst\u00fctzern die letzte Chance gab, (unter anderem) eine Ambosskarre zu holen, bevor sie flugf\u00e4hig wird.\n\nBenutzerschnittstelle (UI)\nEin Gro\u00dfteil des UI Art Teams konzentrierte sich im Januar auf Hightech-Umweltbildschirme f\u00fcr New Babbage und die Entwicklung des visuellen Stils der Gef\u00e4ngnis-UI-Bildschirme, die einen eher retro-inspirierten funktionalen Look haben. Auch der Anzeige des Schauspieler-Status wurde der letzte Schliff gegeben. Auch die Visuals f\u00fcr den pers\u00f6nlichen inneren Gedanken machten Fortschritte. Dieses Popup-Radialmen\u00fc erm\u00f6glicht es den Spielern, schnelle Aktionen (wie das Einschalten einer Taschenlampe) durchzuf\u00fchren, ohne sich Tastenkombinationen merken zu m\u00fcssen.\nDas UI-Tech-Team hat mit der Arbeit an 3D-Bausteinen begonnen, die mehrschichtige Bildschirme unterst\u00fctzen und das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von 3D-Symbolen erleichtern werden. Sie haben auch die Wiederverwendbarkeit und das Restyling erweitert, was die Implementierung der neuen Fahrzeug-UI erleichtern wird.\nVFX\nDas VFX-Team hat Planet Tech v4 weiter verbessert, insbesondere die Windst\u00e4rkewerte an jedem Standort. Dazu geh\u00f6rt eine neue Option zur Festlegung einer maximalen Windst\u00e4rke f\u00fcr jeden Planeten, die es dem Team erm\u00f6glicht, weniger Windtexturen zu verwenden als eine ma\u00dfgeschneiderte Anlage pro Standort. Sie f\u00fcgen derzeit Effekte an mehreren neuen Standorten im Stanton-System hinzu. Die Arbeit an den Auswirkungen auf New Babbage, die Anbauger\u00e4te f\u00fcr den Bergbau, den Cutlass Red und den Carrack wurde ebenfalls fortgesetzt. Sie begannen, sich mit der Verbesserung des atmosph\u00e4rischen Eintritts unter Verwendung der erwarteten fahrzeugspezifischen SDF zu befassen. WIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT...","zh_CN":"The year kicked off with a wealth of features and innovations planned and developed. Naturally, there\u2019s a lot we can\u2019t mention just yet, but this month\u2019s report should be enough to whet your appetites for what is certain to be the most exciting year in Stanton (and beyond) so far.\n\nAI\nWe start January\u2019s report with Combat AI, who improved the cover generation and NPC cover-use mentioned last month. This involved voxelizing the area around the cover locator to better understand which locations have clearance and adequate protection. Behaviour-wise, feedback on shotgun tactics was implemented; now AI actors will find more tactically advantageous positions when shooting. The ability for NPCs to change between locomotion speeds while using a single path was also implemented. For example, NPCs relocating to a new cover location can slowly move and shoot before turning to run without recalculating their path.\nThe Ship AI Team finalized the last implementation of the new 3D navigation system. This uses a 3D pathfinder and collision avoidance system, with the goal to make AI pilots fully aware of their physical environments. Each environment offers a different challenge: In open space, pilots need to take into account asteroids, communication arrays, and space stations. When flying close to planetary surfaces, pilots need to be aware of the local terrain elevation and physical structures that don\u2019t belong to the procedurally generated surface, such as rocks, buildings, refineries, and towers. In order to obtain and effectively use this information, the AI systems need to query physics in an extremely detailed way and model the information in abstractions that can be processed by their algorithms.\nAlso, time was dedicated to the routine code clean-up that\u2019s crucial to keeping the ever-growing code base efficient and readable. This clean-up focused mostly on the flight-related Subsumption tasks with heavily repeated (or \u2018boilerplate\u2019) code that could be abstracted away to reduce the likelihood of errors when implementing new tasks.\nThe final days of January saw Ship AI prototyping a new AI system \u2013 Tactical Target Selection. Mission requirements (for the PU and SQ42) are getting more sophisticated and the current selection system, based on filters, is not able to fulfill all requested scenarios.\nThe Social Team are currently focusing on a bar location where players and NPCs can purchase bottled and draft drinks and ask the bartender to mix a cocktail. Players will be able to drink at a table, booth, or the bar itself.\nArt (Environment)\nEnvironment Art kicked off the year in earnest, finalizing microTech\u2019s moons and updating their geology assets. The moons will be some of the harshest environments in Stanton and will offer high risk\/reward opportunities for players daring enough to tackle them. With all the recent planet tech improvements, the team wanted to give geology the same treatment to improve the visual quality and create more dynamic assets that better integrate with the various surfaces and biomes.\n\n\nArt (Ships)\nIn the US, Ship Art finalized art for the upcoming Esperia Prowler. Once the Drake Cutlass Red was released, they moved onto the white box for the Cutlass Blue.\nIn the UK, the team started production on two new ships, which will be announced later this year. The Anvil Carrack is also nearing completion, with the final touches being added to the medical bay, cartography room, and cargo pods. They\u2019re currently tweaking the lighting and making a final polish pass.\nArt (Weapons)\nJanuary saw the FPS Weapons Team kicking off two new weapons \u2013 the Lightning Bolt Co.\u2019s Atzkav sniper rifle and Yubarev pistol. A new anti-personnel turret archetype was started this month. While it shares similarities with the ship-weapon pipeline, it has a more realistic scale and works well from a gameplay point of view. While they\u2019ll initially be used as deterrents in prisons, players can expect to see them cropping up around the rest of the \u2018verse soon. Finally, the team fixed a few bugs for the next Alpha release and put the finishing touches on some of the assets mentioned last month.\nAudio\nAudio started off January by spending time scheduling for the quarter. They worked with Game Support in the US to improve their patch notes and started a spectrum thread looking for audio feedback that they\u2019re analyzing and breaking down into actionable tasks. They also began composing music and creating ambient sounds for prisons, worked on new weapon and tail sounds for the Prowler, and recorded dialogue and vocals for the actor status feature.\nBackend Services\nBackend Engineering spent early January planning and scheduling for the next quarter\u2019s development. They finished the advanced querying system for iCache and defined the optimal way of working with the game server and star hash services. Changes were also made to the hub server, which will optimize the service-to-client traffic path. Additionally, they supported the account reset tool, wallet changes, and the ongoing development of long-term persistence. Bugs relating to insurance claims, store purchases, and rental ships were fixed too.\nCharacters\nThe Character Team spent most of the month working on assets for the PU. They\u2019re currently texturing two outfits for microTech and wrapping up the tech implementation for two more, with a focus on cold-weather theming and variation. They\u2019re also creating shop props and finalizing the implementation of the Caldera suit seen at CitizenCon.\nCommunity\nThe Community Team kicked off 2020 with the Red Festival. A celebration of renewal and remembrance, the festival has its origins in old Earth customs and observes the end of the Lunar New Year. Evoking the real-world event, red envelopes were hidden around major hubs throughout the \u2018verse, which fortunate players were able to find and sell.\nThe team thoroughly enjoyed this year\u2019s community-organized Daymar Rally. The \u201cfilthiest race in the \u2018verse\u201d wouldn\u2019t have been possible without the 72 teams and countless support craft guiding and guarding the 275 competitors.\n\u201cThanks are due to the amazing organizers, cameramen, give-away providers, Twitch hosts, and VIP 890 Jump crew and guests. For the Community Team, it was this month\u2019s highlight to see the results of game development and community dedication come together in this magnificent event!\u201d \u2013 The Community Team\nFinally, the Cutlass Red was welcomed into the \u2018verse alongside the first iteration of medical gameplay.\n\u201cWe\u2019re looking forward to seeing what everyone will use this new mechanic for, so please share your adventures on the Community Hub!\u201d\n\nDesign\nAlongside planning and bug fixing, last month saw Design setting up the new shops coming in Alpha 3.9. Higher-level design work began around event-driven content; the goal being to pair up with the USPU Team moving forward. Although more can be said, it\u2019ll be worth the wait\u2026\nTony Zurovec and team also started on the deliverables for the new Quantum editor recently seen at CitizenCon.\nEngineering\nJanuary saw the Engineering Team continue with physics threading and performance improvements. This involved increasing concurrency by adding an option to specify the number of worker threads to a maximum of 30. Currently, they overlap with the job system\u2019s worker threads. However, job workers are optimized for latency, so there are always points within a frame where it isn\u2019t entirely busy. Long term, they plan to move the in-thread physics workload to the job system directly, which will require further changes to negate the potential for frequent stalls.\nThe team also implemented concurrent\/immediate queuing for physics, support for fences and barriers to synchronize physics actions\/params, and added physics step data to the FPS heartbeat to monitor high-level load. The signed distance field (SDF) system was further developed to accelerate collision checks on complex geometry and increase precision. Support was also given to NPC death reaction animations regarding actor and ragdoll body dragging.\nJanuary\u2019s engine work included optimizing the job manager, which is required for entity-component scheduler improvements, and modifying it to run all component updates in batches. The responsiveness of the batch worker was also improved by removing the polling behavior to find jobs done (using direct signals instead), replacing the signaling mechanism with WaitOnAddress functionality for more efficient wake-ups, introducing clusters to prevent unnecessary wakeup for small batches, and replacing work-stealing code with simple atomic decrements.\nFor the zone system, they implemented support for proximity volumes and moved SZoneHandle data from client objects into the zone system. They also supported the transition to Visual Studio 2019.\nEngineering also supported the Gen12 renderer and Vulkan. This involved porting the buffer management code to the Gen12 renderer, generalizing texture views, creating support for LoadOp, changing Map API to make it more C++11-friendly using RAII, and ensuring the UpdateResourceBuffer legacy pipeline now correctly takes in byte offsets in the backend rather than per element-offset.\nWork on new experimental hair features began, including a hair color model with base melanin and bleach\/dye layers. Ocean rendering moved from a forward to a deferred pass to allow more consistent shading; shadow application is now free and cube map reflections were improved. The unified raymarcher continued development too.\nFor planet lighting and atmosphere, they added combined planet color LUT to evaluate the local ground albedo and take it into account during irradiance computations. They also applied scene irradiance computations and cloud shading, introduced new sky irradiance LUT for a better approximation of light scattering events within atmosphere, and added support for an alternative jitter method that works alongside TSAA.\nRegarding ground fog, they implemented a strictly compute-based method to build the ground height map. This means they\u2019ll be able to ditch fog volume proxy mesh generations which, after a lot of improvements, were still subject to artifacts. This move will save on memory resources as well. They also removed the peel buffer (in preparation to drop the proxy mesh) and fog bounds are now evaluated analytically.\nFeatures (Gameplay)\nWith the quarterly plans locked, the team provided engineering support for the upcoming prison mission feature. They also spent time addressing a few critical crash bugs for Alpha 3.8.1. They\u2019re currently adding functionality for multiple cargo manifests per ship that will allow for more variety when collecting cargo from NPCs. Finally, they started converting the existing shop UI system to the new building blocks tech, which will be a multi-quarter initiative throughout 2020.\nFeatures (Vehicles)\nThe US-based Feature Team began improving radar and ping detection, including simplifying entity detection, reworking the A\/R marker display, and allowing low-signature entities. They also implemented vehicle-to-vehicle loadout spawning, which will enable players to store and spawn vehicles within the cargo bays of other vehicles. They worked on sub-targeting improvements to allow players to specifically target weapons and turrets after fully scanning vehicles. Ongoing work to the SDF shields will improve hit detection and effects, including extending shield gameplay to non-vehicle entities.\nGraphics\nWith the bulk of Planet Tech v4 complete, the Graphics Team began looking into improvements to the organic shader to enable it to take advantage of physical-based shading. This will allow the much wider reuse of assets as they will automatically adapt to the local biome (rock color, surface textures, snow\/sand build-up, etc.). The final paint and tint system changes are complete, with the system currently in use by the Environment Team. It\u2019ll be handed over to other teams shortly for them to decide how and when to incorporate it. Work also went into the Gen12\/Vulkan renderer, specifically the conversion of post effects to the new system.\nLevel Design\nLevel Design\u2019s January started with location planning, identifying dependencies, and organizing schedules. Most of that work is handled by the leads and production, so the rest of the team can focus on building content. As such, New Babbage is almost complete, with only a few additions and final polish to come. The team continued to work on the modular space stations. The stations currently in-game are known as Tier 0 \u2013 a concept to prove the feasibility of the design, approach, and procedural generation. Next, more structured and easily navigable layouts will be created along with procedural signage and future additions.\nLighting\nLast month, the Lighting Team tackled several bugs and polish tasks that had been put on the backburner while release work was prioritized. This involved updating Lorville\u2019s lighting with a city-wide glow previously used on ArcCorp to help give the feeling of light pollution scattering into the atmosphere. This is a subtle effect, but it helps connect the city to the wider atmosphere. The team also updated Levski\u2019s exterior to remove some legacy rot and make better use of prefab objects, which allows for much quicker iteration and large-scale changes. They also took the opportunity to improve the overall quality of the location\u2019s lighting by slightly simplifying the color scheme to make it less visually chaotic.\nThe team is currently focusing on New Babbage.\n\u201cThere are lots of visually interesting and distinct areas in the landing zone where we can take advantage of all our latest lighting features and optimizations for the best quality and most dynamic lighting in a landing zone to date.\u201d \u2013 The Lighting Team\nWork has already been completed on improving the overall city lighting experience, especially during nighttime and when player are in transit.\n\n\n\n\n\nPlayer Relations\nIn addition to supporting various promotions and events, Player Relations worked to stabilize the incremental Alpha 3.8 patches, with focus currently on Alpha 3.8.2.\nProps\nThe Props Team started the year off cleaning up bugs and taking stock of materials and textures in the ongoing process of improving asset quality. Work continued on the prison props, with the oxygen and ore machinery finalized. A boxing ring was also completed that will allow for some much-needed entertainment while the inmates serve their time. Small stashes were also hidden in the prison locations, so incarcerated players should keep an eye out for extra supplies. Some of the team continued work on the hi-tech dressings for New Babbage, this time focusing on the bar and furniture sets and dressing for the many food outlets. Finally, they started on new food assets required for the actor status feature.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nQA\nDevelopment-wise, QA tested the key elements of the incremental Alpha 3.8 patches, including the Drake Cutlass Red and Anvil Carrack. Some of the team moved back to game dev to test upcoming features, while planning began for the upcoming testing and current best-practice review.\nSystem Design\nSystem Design spent time in January finishing mining consumables. Once live, players will be able to activate a consumable to make mining jobs easier or correct mistakes made in the process. Work on volatile cargo progressed too; when extracted, it will need to be taken to a refining kiosk quickly and carefully to prevent it from detonating inside the ship.\nResource distribution is another significant feature currently under development. This will create a unified way to handle resources (power, heat, shields, CPU, etc.) inside a ship, station, or planetary settlement. The ultimate aim is to make the engineer role critical to large ships and to allow attackers to take out (or even sabotage) components.\nTech Animation\nTech Animation fixed several small bugs in the animation pipeline and reworked the PlayBlast animation tool in Maya to improve efficiency. They also supported Social AI with Mannequin tasks, implementing animations for the bartender, railings, and bar patron.\nTech Art\nTech Art continued to flesh out the runtime Rig Logic tools for Maya. The previously monolithic code and related data structures were broken down into generic building blocks known as rig components. These components can be chained together almost arbitrarily to provide the functionality required by specific rigs, such as a human body or space whale. BlendShape, linear joint offset, PSD, wrinkle map, and more are currently viable. In the future, support will be extended to RBF, look IK, and other more complex variants. This will allow the team to better develop new runtime rigs, which they\u2019ll need when they start creating the complex rigs for alien races and fauna.\nAnother important goal is to transition human body rigs from a fully-baked form (where the movement of joints and bones is exported into the game engine from Maya) to a workflow that only bakes and exports the primary joints. This will use a custom body runtime rig logic to determine the translation and rotation of all deformation helper joints. These joints ensure that, regardless of what clothing a character wears or what pose they\u2019re in, attachments always deform correctly without artifacts. By driving them via a runtime rig logic, the memory footprint of the thousands of body animation clips will become much smaller. Also, procedural animation of the primary joints via physicalized ragdolls, runtime IK, and others will not break deformation as the rig logic will adjust the deformation joints according to the final pose.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent supported the release of the Cutlass Red, working with in-house teams to build the web page and manage the backend. They also supported the Lunar New Year promotion, which gave backers the final chance to pick up (amongst other things) an Anvil Carrack before it becomes flyable.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nMuch of the UI Art Team\u2019s January focus was on hi-tech environmental screens for New Babbage and developing the visual style of the prison UI screens, which have a more retro-inspired functional look. Final polish was also given to the Actor Status display. The visuals for the personal inner thought made progress too. This popup radial menu lets players perform quick actions (such as turning on a torch) without having to remember keyboard shortcuts.\nThe UI Tech Team started work on 3D building blocks, which will support multi-layered screens and make it easier to add 3D icons. They also expanded reusability and restyling, which will help implement the new vehicle UI.\nVFX\nThe VFX Team further improved Planet Tech v4, specifically wind strength values across each location. This includes a new option to clamp a maximum wind strength for each planet, which allows the team to use fewer wind textures rather than a bespoke asset per location. They\u2019re currently adding effects to several new locations in the Stanton system. Work also continued on effects for New Babbage, mining attachments, the Cutlass Red, and the Carrack. They began looking into atmospheric entry improvements using the anticipated vehicle-specific SDF too. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026"},"links_count":3,"comment_count":54,"created_at":"2020-02-06T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"6 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 21:32:42","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":17444,"next_id":17446}}