{"data":{"id":17585,"title":"Star Citizen Monthly Report: April 2020","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/17585-Star-Citizen-Monthly-Report-April-2020","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/17585","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/17585","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly 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was all hands on deck in April as Alpha 3.9 launched into the Persistent Universe. Naturally, teams contributed to the release in a variety of ways, so the hard work they put in is prevalent throughout this month\u2019s report. Progress was also made on several upcoming features for future patches and releases, so read on to find out more!\nAI\nAlongside final optimizations for Alpha 3.9, the Social AI Team improved the performance of the Usable Cache Manager. They added the ability to time-slice the main update to make it easier to control the update usage of different jobs, and began using queued physical ray-casting to validate which usable enter\/exit locations are available and not blocked by other objects.\nWork started on compound usables, which can inherit functionalities from other usables and override data based on specific setups. For example, maintenance or inspection operations on a Gladius might use generic animations in most locations, but a more complex section of the ship may require specific Mannequin tags.\nFunctionality and visual quality were further developed for vendors such as the Bartender. Work went into potentially allowing designers to set up proc clips that stow\/unstow objects from a specific inventory pocket. The team also extended the Communication system to allow designers to tag different options relating to the same contextual voice line. This will allow a generic behavior to automatically select the right option for a specific context. For example, a shop patron can use a generic \u2018order\u2019 communication line to pass the tag of the object they want to order, which will allow the selection of a relevant voice and animation. If one isn\u2019t present, a generic option might be selected. This, combined with a pass on wildlines and secondary sub-activities for the vendor behavior, allowed the team to significantly improve the visual fidelity of the behaviors.\nAI are currently integrating more functionalities into consumable objects to create an additional layer of customization to the flow, such as enabling AI to differentiate between open and closed bottles and act accordingly.\nFocus was also given to improving several aspects of the patrol path tech. This involved moving some of the parallel functionalities trigger-logic to the movement system, which is a big change for several reasons: The team can now send simple requests related to a path to the movement system, making the subsumption task much simpler; they can using the same approach used for complex usables, such as closed doors, elevators, and the transit system; and the movement planner is now responsible for analyzing the data and creating a plan that can be as complex as needed.\nAnimation\nLast month, Animation supported Social AI with ship hangar work, general inspection places, bar patron idles and actions, bridge control seats, and lockers. They also worked on reloading and malfunction animations for all weapon classes. Development of stumbles, knockdowns, body dragging, and what happens when a player is injured or incapacitated continued.\nThe Mo-Cap Team improved the motion builder skeleton, which will help the wider team create assets faster, and the \u2018take selection\u2019 tool, which will improve post-shoot turnaround. Tools were also created to enable quick data renaming and video conversion. Several team members are temporarily supporting other related areas of development due to the suspension of all mo-cap shoots.\nArt (Environment)\nLast month, the Environment Art Team progressed with Pyro I and II, which will make full use of Planet Tech v4. They\u2019re currently creating new geology and vegetation packs and putting them together on the new planets. Look out for an unstable star, hostile landscapes, and dangerous plant life when it launches.\n\u201cAfter the frozen dangers of microTech and its moons, Pyro will definitely put the players in new and exciting surroundings filled with new challenges.\u201d \u2013 Environment Art Team\n\n\nArt (Ships)\nIn the UK, progress on the Crusader Hercules continued; the bulk of the exterior is now greybox-complete, while the thrusters and turrets are currently being worked on. Inside, the bridge is greybox-complete and the rest of the upper deck, including the hab area, is making great progress. The interior doors are complete and the large hold is starting to take shape. Work on an unannounced ship continued too.\nIn the US, the team kicked off the Crusader Mercury Star Runner, working through the cockpit greybox and cargo holds. Progress was made on the wings and turret exteriors too. The ongoing improvements to the Origin M50 entered the polish phase and the Cutlass Blue\u2019s prisoner pods were tweaked after feedback.\nArt (Weapons)\nIn preparation for the feature work next quarter, the Weapons Team iterated on the Behring GP-33 grenade launcher to fix a few issues and bring it up to current standards. The Lighting Bolt Co. Atzkav sniper rifle and Yubarev pistol received final art and LOD passes and were handed over to the downstream teams. The Gemini C54 SMG was reviewed by Design, which led to its dimensions being significantly trimmed down to make it feel more like an SMG and less like an assault rifle.\nBackend Services\nApril saw the team deal with a variety of bugs, including memory leaks that were discovered on some of the backend services. Work bagen on the new dynamic mission service and support was provided to Theaters of War. Entitlement processing, iCache Advanced Query, iCache\/Login Flow, and GIM services development was also undertaken.\nCharacters\nThe Character Team fixed a handful of bugs, cleaned up documentation, and handled small material fixes. Characters were placed in landing zones and work went into the Hi-Tech hangars, cargo, and tweaks were made to the existing loadouts for prisons and New Babbage. The tech artists finished their Zone Cut tool, which allows the Art Team to cull hidden geometry under clothing. Art is currently being created for various carnivorous species and the Orison Tourist character.\nCommunity\nThe Community Team kicked off the month with Planet Tech V5: The Flattening, which marks a significant step forward for both \u201ctechnical innovation\u201d and \u201cscientific accuracy\u201d.\n\nBack in reality, another Spectrum AMA answered the community\u2019s most burning questions about the Quantum system first introduced at CitizenCon 2019. When complete, it\u2019ll give the devs complete control and visibility over Star Citizen\u2019s system-spanning economy.\nAlpha 3.9\u2019s Pillar Talk was released too. Chris Roberts was joined by Sean Tracy, Paul Reindell, and Eric Kieron Davis for a discussion on the unified friends list, persistence, quality of life improvements, the player interaction system, New Babbage, prison mechanics, and more.\nLastly, the Community Team would like to draw your attention to an important update on CitizenCon 2950.\nEngineering\nEngineering\u2019s April involved working on AFT, adding rotation resistance to the driven articulated entity tracking joint (exposing tuning parameters), making body-dragging-driven ragdoll behavior less framerate dependent, and adding rotation damping for the dragging character (with exposed linear and angular damping factors). They also fixed animation pops, added force reactions, and made the head and neck joints of a drag-driven ragdolls ignore actor entity collisions.\nPhysics-wise, they made improvements to the load and spawn time for entities, reworked the processing of dead-marked entities, and optimized the CheckAreas function (which is now three-to-five times faster in new grid-OC-split regions). Basic ricochet behavior was added and made deterministic. They also looked into character physicalization issues for the Cinematics Team and integrated physics into the main development stream.\nEngineering wrapped up the mesh refactor for the Gen12 renderer, moved shader item creation away from the render thread, relocated shader objects to resource containers (to improve material-streaming during OCS), and made headway into permanently enabling certain G12 effects. They added asynchronous shader compilation support to the Gen12 code and refactored the buffer management for the render mesh. This means they can now create buffers on any thread instead of deferring it to RT, use a VB stream wrapper object to maintain ref counts for writes and reads on render mesh streams, and run numerous API cleanups. They further cleaned the loading and refreshing of the shader system, ported texture sampler state code, and started porting brush rendering to the new pipeline.\nRegarding the shader system, they fixed an issue in cache generation that caused certain combinations of hull, domain, geometry, and compute to not pre-cache. For hair, they created a new slider for creating a \u2018salt and pepper\u2019 look and improved scattering for blonde and bright hair.\nEngineering bundled the processing of adaptive resolution samples so that lowering adaptive resolution will show GPU perf scaling as expected. They changed the way active sample indices are built to maintain the desired serialization order per sample block. Each sample block can now be processed as a bundle via the thread group to better utilize cache effects. They also looked into deep learning-based de-noising and up-sampling, and worked to implement a guided filter to de-noise and up-sample lower resolution raymarched inscatter and transmittance results. For the ongoing ocean work, the team upgraded buoyancy physics to make it functional with the new changes, fixed motion vectors on deferred oceans, and added sub-surface scattering to improve the appearance of crest waves.\nGeneral system worked involved enabling advanced CPU features for Linux DGS (in addition to already enabled Haswell-based code gen in Clang). Batch worker wakeup was improved and optimizations to the aggregate broad phase were made, such as replacing the sphere tree with an optimized radix tree and an optimized state update.\nFinally for Engineering, the entity component update scheduler was further developed. To this end, they added a new component update policy based on entity rendering bounds with an optional view ratio and added support for view ratio in component updates. They also fixed a crash in a video driver caused by an incorrect use of the texture upload path taken for UI\/Flash assets. Various frame times were added to important threads (MT, RT, network, physics), with one of the goals being to derive a VSync agnostic frame time. The exception handler and crash dump processing tools now support new cig-trace events and have unique folders to dump debug information into, which streamlines runtime error processing and analysis. The developers can now also mute FPEs until a given date.\nFeatures (Gameplay)\nAlongside polishing and bug-fixing for Alpha 3.9, the Gameplay Features Team worked to support initiatives for Arena Commander, Star Marine, Theaters of War, and Invictus Launch Week. They also began preliminary work on a new player trading app for mobiGlas. The first phase focuses on the ability to send currency between players, with later revisions extending to physical inventory items.\nFeatures (Vehicles)\nThe Vehicle Features Team continue to rebuild the HUD using the new Building Blocks technology. Last month, targeting and missile-lock UI were worked on heavily. They\u2019re currently improving how IFCS copes with an imbalance in ship thrusters. For example, when thrusters are damaged, the imbalance will cause undesirable power delivery and make controlling the ship more difficult. Progress on docking was also made, with the team figuring out how to connect ships while the physics engine reacts appropriately. They supported research and testing into improving ship combat too.\nGraphics\nThe Graphics Team continued their crucial work on the Gen12\/Vulkan renderer, with the focus on getting a preliminary pipeline up and running. This is the first of several major milestones in the development of the new renderer and will allow them to deprecate much of the old post effect code. The organic shader used for vegetation and rocks is currently receiving a long-planned upgrade that will integrate into Planet Tech v4 and add many new features, such as better integration of assets into planetary terrain.\nThe long-awaited real-time environment probe feature was completed. This allows bounced lighting and reflections to be re-computed dynamically to account for the ever-changing lighting on rotating planets, orbiting space stations, lights being turned on\/off, and destroyed interiors.\nThe final task of the month was the integration of the texture streaming system, which enables the team to intelligently manage when they update each probe and when to unload them to make way for other textures. This feature was included in various locations across Alpha 3.9, though the Art Team still need to ensure the assets in each location are optimized to keep the cost of the render pass to a minimum, so rollout will be a gradual process.\nLevel Design\nWith the majority of New Babbage complete, most of the Level Design Team moved to continue work on Orison. They\u2019re also making updates to Grim HEX, which involves finishing the internal racing kiosk, making structural changes to the asteroid, and finally adding hangars. They\u2019re also working with the feature teams to ensure the new restricted areas and ATCs are working as they should.\nLighting\nWith Alpha 3.9 work wrapped up, the Lighting Team looked at adding a day and night setup to Lorville, which will create different ambient moods depending on the time of day. They also replaced some cubemaps with the new runtime probes tech to help the lighting feel more grounded during the day and prevent areas from appearing too \u201cglowy\u201d or dark. Several team members looked into adding the same features to the exteriors of surface outposts and underground facility locations. Lastly, a new kiosk was added to the New Babbage spaceport and a number of minor legacy bugs in older locations were fixed.\n\n\n\n\nProps\nThe Props Team closed out the food and drink props last month, with minor bug fixes currently underway.\n\u201cThere are plenty of plans for where we want to go next and some new techniques we would like to test in the future\u201d \u2013 Props Team\nNew props were also created for the Mission Team to help them prototype future content and new tools were introduced to the animation workflow to speed up 3ds Max processes.\nQA\nLast month, QA were assigned a new test request (QATR) for the restricted areas rework, which the locations-side of the team focused on testing. The QATR related to Lorville and Area18, with the tests ensuring the updated restricted areas worked as before and didn\u2019t introduce any new issues. Engine-wise, they were involved in several instances of binary testing. Two sets were to fix various issues plaguing the Alpha 3.9 builds and help with performance and optimization. Others related to character textures and skinning.\nQA continued testing the current tools in use across the whole development team, including Graphics Viewer Tester, StarWords, and Dataforge with the inclusion of TrackView. They also joined the weekly playtests that have been set up for the whole company to join in. This allows the team to play areas they\u2019re not wholly familiar with and gives a fresh perspective on many of the features.\nSystem Design\nSystem Design started implementing the new Refining Station kiosk. This will be used by players to convert their raw materials into refined goods that can be sold for higher prices (and in the future used to craft items). When live, players will have to take their mixed materials to a station with refining capabilities and then start a refining job. Based on the type of refining process, the materials they want to refine or discard, and how busy the refinery is, the player will pay a price and the job will begin. Refining will then run, even if the player is not present in the station or logged on. Once finished, the player will receive a notification and will be able to return to the station to collect their goods. Work continues on resource management and item control, with the team undertaking initial prototyping to ensure everything planned works correctly and will scale properly with future content.\nTech Animation\nFollowing last month\u2019s report, Tech Animation continued to develop the internal toolsets in support of Tech Art and Animation. They worked with Social AI on new usables, including the bartender and a wide variety of new additions for hangar behavior. They also worked on a tool to allow animators to export their state machines straight from Visio to Mannequin, speeding up the implementation process. Work began on a proprietary tool that will eventually make the process even faster. Finally, they helped rig props for the animators to use in Maya to make interactions easier.\nTech (Art)\nIn April, Tech Art continued work on the RuntimeRig system, further enhancing it by adding functionality to allow the efficient sharing of RigComponents between several instances (typically characters). Certain RigComponent types (such as the BlendShapeComponents or the WrinkleMaskComponents) contain static data that never changes at runtime and is usually identical for all rigs of the same type and tier. In early versions, this data was duplicated for simplicity. However, this isn\u2019t ideal, both maintenance and memory-wise. In the old RigLogic system, it had been fully hard-coded via static arrays in shared C++ header files, which led to a more optimal memory footprint but completely removed flexibility on the tech-art side.\nThe latest iteration gives resource sharing wherever possible and the artists full technical freedom to edit the data and quickly iterate on the deformation and shading-related rig outputs. As with all core systems designed to replace legacy versions, rigorous testing, tech-hardening, and optimization are needed before it can be rolled out across the board. As a first step, they\u2019ll test it on the Maya-side only, using the new Vanduul face rigs. Eventually, it\u2019ll be applied to all 130+ human head rigs in the DCC and, later, the engine too.\nTech (Vehicles)\nApril saw the Vehicle Technical Team incorporate a new in-game system that will be revealed at an upcoming event. A new life-support item is in development that allows ships to re-pressurize after their internal atmospheres have been vented. It will also work in stations, outposts, and other room-based structures with airlocks. Finally, several Alpha 3.9 bugs were addressed, including debris-related issues that now make vehicle destruction much more visually satisfying. The mining feature was also expanded.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent supported the launch of the Esperia Tevarin Prowler and all the promotional pages for Alpha 3.9.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nThroughout the first quarter of 2020, the core UI Team progressed with adding 3D support to the Building Blocks UI tool. April\u2019s work will make it easier for designers to add 3D vehicle or character icons to a screen without relying on a programmer. They also finished the first iteration of a new UI kit that makes it easier to set up pages by using ready-made components, which can be easily restyled for different manufacturers.\nCurrently, many of the UI Team are working closely with other teams: alongside the Vehicle Team, they worked on improvements to the targeting, missile lock, and landing UI. For the Actor Team, UI supported the creation of the new inventory system. The UI artists also worked on screens and branding for some upcoming environments.\nVFX\nApril saw VFX\u2019s work on the Atzkav sniper rifle and Yubarev pistol begin. These electron weapons require new functionality not seen in Star Citizen before, so extra time went into identifying missing features and communicating it to the Weapons Team. Alongside this, pre-production started on the S12 torpedoes and a reworked mass driver weapon.\nThe ship and environmental fire propagation system was further developed. This will spread fire based on various material parameters, such as fuel, surface type, and oxygen level. They also plan to make the fire interactive with environments and player interaction, such as wind blowing it around or it reacting to a player\u2019s fire extinguisher. Fire hazards progressed well too, with a set of \u2018look-dev\u2019 videos being produced to help visualize goals and push conversations further.\nCode work was done for new particle-system features, such as alpha erosion, angular rotation, child-ribbons, and emission size scaling. VFX Tech Art spent the month finalizing the fragment tool that\u2019s used to save small sections of the Houdini network, which will be rolled out to the users shortly. This will be particularly useful for gas cloud authoring and procedural generation.\nWE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026","de_DE":"Im April waren alle Mann an Deck, als Alpha 3.9 in das Persistent Universe startete. Nat\u00fcrlich haben die Teams auf verschiedene Weise zur Freigabe beigetragen, so dass die harte Arbeit, die sie geleistet haben, sich durch den gesamten Bericht dieses Monats zieht. Es wurden auch Fortschritte bei verschiedenen bevorstehenden Funktionen f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Patches und Versionen gemacht, also lesen Sie weiter, um mehr dar\u00fcber zu erfahren!\nKI\nNeben den letzten Optimierungen f\u00fcr Alpha 3.9 verbesserte das Social AI Team die Leistung des Usable Cache Managers. Es f\u00fcgte die M\u00f6glichkeit hinzu, das Haupt-Update in Zeitabschnitte zu unterteilen, um die Update-Verwendung verschiedener Jobs leichter kontrollieren zu k\u00f6nnen, und begann mit physischem Ray-Casting in der Warteschlange, um zu \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen, welche benutzbaren Eingangs-\/Ausgangsorte verf\u00fcgbar und nicht durch andere Objekte blockiert sind.\nEs wurde mit der Arbeit an Compound Usables begonnen, die Funktionalit\u00e4ten von anderen Usables erben und Daten, die auf bestimmten Setups basieren, \u00fcberschreiben k\u00f6nnen. Beispielsweise k\u00f6nnen bei Wartungs- oder Inspektionsarbeiten an einer Gladius an den meisten Stellen generische Animationen verwendet werden, aber f\u00fcr einen komplexeren Abschnitt des Schiffes sind m\u00f6glicherweise spezielle Mannequin-Tags erforderlich.\nFunktionalit\u00e4t und visuelle Qualit\u00e4t wurden f\u00fcr Anbieter wie den Bartender weiter entwickelt. Es wurde daran gearbeitet, den Designern die M\u00f6glichkeit zu geben, Proc-Clips einzurichten, die Objekte aus einem bestimmten Inventarfach stauen\/entstauen. Das Team erweiterte auch das Kommunikationssystem, damit die Designer verschiedene Optionen in Bezug auf dieselbe kontextbezogene Sprechleitung kennzeichnen k\u00f6nnen. Dies erm\u00f6glicht es einem generischen Verhalten, automatisch die richtige Option f\u00fcr einen bestimmten Kontext auszuw\u00e4hlen. Beispielsweise kann ein Ladenbesucher eine generische \"Bestell\"-Kommunikationslinie verwenden, um das Tag des Objekts, das er bestellen m\u00f6chte, zu \u00fcbergeben, was die Auswahl einer relevanten Stimme und Animation erm\u00f6glicht. Wenn eine solche nicht vorhanden ist, kann eine generische Option gew\u00e4hlt werden. Dies, kombiniert mit einer Weitergabe von \"wildlines\" und sekund\u00e4ren Unteraktivit\u00e4ten f\u00fcr das Verk\u00e4uferverhalten, erm\u00f6glichte es dem Team, die visuelle Treue der Verhaltensweisen deutlich zu verbessern.\nDie KI ist derzeit dabei, mehr Funktionalit\u00e4ten in Verbrauchsobjekte zu integrieren, um eine zus\u00e4tzliche Ebene der Anpassung an den Fluss zu schaffen, wie z.B. die M\u00f6glichkeit, dass die KI zwischen offenen und geschlossenen Flaschen unterscheiden und entsprechend handeln kann.\nDer Schwerpunkt wurde auch auf die Verbesserung mehrerer Aspekte der Patrouillenpfadtechnik gelegt. Dazu geh\u00f6rte die Verlagerung einiger der parallelen Funktionalit\u00e4ten der Trigger-Logik in das Bewegungssystem, was aus mehreren Gr\u00fcnden eine gro\u00dfe Ver\u00e4nderung darstellt: Das Team kann jetzt einfache Anfragen in Bezug auf einen Pfad an das Bewegungssystem senden, was die Aufgabe der Subsumption viel einfacher macht; es kann denselben Ansatz verwenden, der f\u00fcr komplexe Gebrauchsgegenst\u00e4nde wie geschlossene T\u00fcren, Aufz\u00fcge und das Transitsystem verwendet wird; und der Bewegungsplaner ist jetzt f\u00fcr die Analyse der Daten und die Erstellung eines Plans verantwortlich, der so komplex wie n\u00f6tig sein kann.\nAnimation\nIm vergangenen Monat unterst\u00fctzte Animation Social AI mit Schiffshangar-Arbeiten, Generalinspektionsorten, Barpatron-Idle und Aktionen, Br\u00fcckenkontrollsitzen und Schlie\u00dff\u00e4chern. Sie arbeiteten auch an Nachlade- und Fehlfunktionsanimationen f\u00fcr alle Waffenklassen. Die Entwicklung von Stolpern, Knockdowns, Body Dragging und was passiert, wenn ein Spieler verletzt oder unf\u00e4hig ist, wurde fortgesetzt.\nDas Mo-Cap-Team verbesserte das Skelett des Motion-Builders, mit dessen Hilfe das breitere Team schneller Aktivposten erstellen kann, sowie das \"Take Selection\"-Tool, das den Turnaround nach dem Schuss verbessern wird. Au\u00dferdem wurden Tools geschaffen, die eine schnelle Datenumbenennung und Videokonvertierung erm\u00f6glichen. Mehrere Teammitglieder unterst\u00fctzen vor\u00fcbergehend andere verwandte Entwicklungsbereiche, da alle Mo-Cap-Shootings ausgesetzt wurden.\nKunst (Umwelt)\nLetzten Monat machte das Environment Art Team Fortschritte mit Pyro I und II, die Planet Tech v4 voll ausnutzen werden. Zurzeit erstellen sie neue Geologie- und Vegetationspakete und stellen sie auf den neuen Planeten zusammen. Achten Sie beim Start auf einen instabilen Stern, feindliche Landschaften und gef\u00e4hrliches Pflanzenleben.\n\"Nach den eingefrorenen Gefahren von MicroTech und seinen Monden wird Pyro die Spieler definitiv in eine neue und aufregende Umgebung voller neuer Herausforderungen versetzen. - Umwelt-Kunst-Team\n\n\nKunst (Schiffe)\nIm Vereinigten K\u00f6nigreich wurden die Fortschritte beim Kreuzritter Herkules fortgesetzt; der Gro\u00dfteil des \u00c4u\u00dferen ist nun fertig gestellt, w\u00e4hrend an den Triebwerken und T\u00fcrmen derzeit gearbeitet wird. Im Inneren ist die Br\u00fccke fertig gestellt und der Rest des Oberdecks, einschlie\u00dflich des Hab-Bereichs, macht gro\u00dfe Fortschritte. Die Innent\u00fcren sind fertiggestellt, und der gro\u00dfe Laderaum nimmt allm\u00e4hlich Gestalt an. Die Arbeiten an einem unangek\u00fcndigten Schiff wurden ebenfalls fortgesetzt.\nIn den USA startete das Team die \"Crusader Mercury Star Runner\" und arbeitete sich durch die Greybox im Cockpit und den Frachtraum. Auch bei den Tragfl\u00e4chen und der Turmau\u00dfenseite wurden Fortschritte erzielt. Die laufenden Verbesserungen an der Origin M50 gingen in die Polierphase, und die Gefangenenkapseln der Cutlass Blue wurden nach R\u00fcckmeldungen optimiert.\nKunst (Waffen)\nIn Vorbereitung auf die Arbeiten im n\u00e4chsten Quartal wiederholte das Waffenteam die Arbeiten am Granatwerfer Behring GP-33, um einige Probleme zu beheben und den Granatwerfer auf den aktuellen Stand zu bringen. Die Lighting Bolt Co. Atzkav-Scharfsch\u00fctzengewehr und die Yubarev-Pistole erhielten die letzten Kunst- und LOD-P\u00e4sse und wurden an die nachgelagerten Teams \u00fcbergeben. Das Gemini C54 SMG wurde von Design \u00fcberpr\u00fcft, was dazu f\u00fchrte, dass seine Abmessungen deutlich reduziert wurden, damit es sich mehr wie ein SMG und weniger wie ein Sturmgewehr anf\u00fchlt.\nBackend-Dienste\nIm April befasste sich das Team mit einer Vielzahl von Fehlern, darunter auch mit Speicherlecks, die bei einigen der Backend-Dienste entdeckt wurden. Den Kriegsschaupl\u00e4tzen wurden Arbeitsgruppen f\u00fcr den neuen dynamischen Missionsdienst und Unterst\u00fctzung zur Verf\u00fcgung gestellt. Au\u00dferdem wurden Berechtigungsverarbeitung, iCache Advanced Query, iCache\/Login Flow und die Entwicklung von GIM-Diensten in Angriff genommen.\nZeichen\nDas Charakter-Team hat eine Handvoll Fehler behoben, die Dokumentation bereinigt und kleine Materialkorrekturen vorgenommen. Die Charaktere wurden in Landezonen platziert, und die Arbeit ging in die Hi-Tech-Hangars, die Fracht und die vorhandenen Ladevorrichtungen f\u00fcr Gef\u00e4ngnisse und New Babbage wurden optimiert. Die Tech-K\u00fcnstler stellten ihr \"Zone Cut\"-Werkzeug fertig, mit dem das Kunst-Team verborgene Geometrien unter der Kleidung ausmerzen kann. Gegenw\u00e4rtig wird Kunst f\u00fcr verschiedene fleischfressende Arten und den Orison-Touristencharakter geschaffen.\nGemeinschaft\nDas Community Team startete den Monat mit Planet Tech V5: The Flattening, das sowohl f\u00fcr die \"technische Innovation\" als auch f\u00fcr die \"wissenschaftliche Genauigkeit\" einen bedeutenden Schritt nach vorn darstellt.\n\nZur\u00fcck in der Realit\u00e4t beantwortete ein weiterer Spectrum AMA die brennendsten Fragen der Gemeinschaft zu dem auf der CitizenCon 2019 erstmals vorgestellten Quantum-System. Nach seiner Fertigstellung wird es den Entwicklern vollst\u00e4ndige Kontrolle und Transparenz \u00fcber die system\u00fcbergreifende Wirtschaft von Star Citizen geben.\nAuch der Pillar Talk von Alpha 3.9 wurde ver\u00f6ffentlicht. Neben Chris Roberts diskutierten Sean Tracy, Paul Reindell und Eric Kieron Davis \u00fcber die Liste der vereinten Freunde, Persistenz, Verbesserungen der Lebensqualit\u00e4t, das Spieler-Interaktionssystem, New Babbage, Gef\u00e4ngnismechanik und mehr.\nAbschlie\u00dfend m\u00f6chte das Community Team Ihre Aufmerksamkeit auf ein wichtiges Update zur CitizenCon 2950 lenken.\nTechnik\nIm April arbeiteten die Ingenieure an der AFT, indem sie den Rotationswiderstand f\u00fcr das angetriebene, gelenkig gelenkig gelagerte Tracking-Gelenk hinzuf\u00fcgten (und dabei die Tuning-Parameter aufdeckten), das durch Body-Dragging angetriebene Ragdoll-Verhalten weniger framerate-abh\u00e4ngig machten und eine Rotationsd\u00e4mpfung f\u00fcr den ziehenden Charakter hinzuf\u00fcgten (mit aufgedeckten linearen und winkligen D\u00e4mpfungsfaktoren). Au\u00dferdem wurden Animations-Pops fixiert, Kraftreaktionen hinzugef\u00fcgt und die Kopf- und Halsgelenke einer schleppenden Ragdoll dazu gebracht, Zusammenst\u00f6\u00dfe zwischen den Akteurseinheiten zu ignorieren.\nPhysikalisch gesehen verbesserten sie die Lade- und Laichzeit f\u00fcr Entit\u00e4ten, \u00fcberarbeiteten die Verarbeitung von totmarkierten Entit\u00e4ten und optimierten die CheckAreas-Funktion (die jetzt in neuen Gitter-OC-Split-Regionen drei- bis f\u00fcnfmal schneller ist). Ein grundlegendes Querschl\u00e4gerverhalten wurde hinzugef\u00fcgt und deterministisch gemacht. Sie untersuchten auch Fragen der Charakterphysikalisierung f\u00fcr das Cinematics-Team und integrierten die Physik in den Hauptentwicklungsstrom.\nDie Ingenieure beendeten den Mesh-Refactor f\u00fcr den Gen12-Renderer, verlagerten die Erstellung von Shader-Objekten vom Render-Thread weg, verlagerten Shader-Objekte in Ressourcen-Container (zur Verbesserung des Materialflusses w\u00e4hrend der OCS) und machten Fortschritte bei der dauerhaften Aktivierung bestimmter G12-Effekte. Sie f\u00fcgten dem Gen12-Code Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die asynchrone Shader-Kompilierung hinzu und refaktorisierten die Pufferverwaltung f\u00fcr das Render-Mesh. Das bedeutet, dass sie jetzt Puffer f\u00fcr jeden Thread erstellen k\u00f6nnen, anstatt ihn auf RT zu verschieben, ein VB-Stream-Wrapper-Objekt verwenden k\u00f6nnen, um die Ref-Counts f\u00fcr Schreib- und Lesevorg\u00e4nge auf Render-Mesh-Streams beizubehalten, und zahlreiche API-Bereinigungen durchf\u00fchren k\u00f6nnen. Sie haben das Laden und Aktualisieren des Shader-Systems weiter bereinigt, den Textur-Sampler-Zustandscode portiert und mit der Portierung des Pinsel-Renderings auf die neue Pipeline begonnen.\nIn Bezug auf das Shader-System wurde ein Problem bei der Cache-Generierung behoben, das dazu f\u00fchrte, dass bestimmte Kombinationen von H\u00fclle, Dom\u00e4ne, Geometrie und Berechnung nicht im Voraus zwischengespeichert wurden. F\u00fcr Haare wurde ein neuer Schieberegler zur Erzeugung eines \"Salz- und Pfeffer-Looks\" erstellt und die Streuung f\u00fcr blondes und helles Haar verbessert.\nDie Technik b\u00fcndelte die Verarbeitung von Proben mit adaptiver Aufl\u00f6sung, so dass eine Verringerung der adaptiven Aufl\u00f6sung die GPU-Leistungsskalierung wie erwartet zeigt. Sie \u00e4nderten die Art und Weise, wie aktive Probenindizes aufgebaut werden, um die gew\u00fcnschte Serialisierungsreihenfolge pro Probenblock beizubehalten. Jeder Abtastblock kann jetzt als B\u00fcndel \u00fcber die Thread-Gruppe verarbeitet werden, um Cache-Effekte besser auszunutzen. Sie befassten sich auch mit tiefem, lernbasiertem Entrauschen und Up-Sampling und arbeiteten an der Implementierung eines gef\u00fchrten Filters zum Entrauschen und Up-Sampling von raymarched Instreuungs- und Transmissionsergebnissen mit niedrigerer Aufl\u00f6sung. F\u00fcr die laufenden Arbeiten auf den Ozeanen verbesserte das Team die Auftriebsphysik, um sie mit den neuen \u00c4nderungen, festen Bewegungsvektoren auf verschobenen Ozeanen funktionsf\u00e4hig zu machen, und f\u00fcgte Untergrundstreuung hinzu, um das Erscheinungsbild von Wellenbergen zu verbessern.\nBei der Arbeit am allgemeinen System ging es darum, erweiterte CPU-Funktionen f\u00fcr Linux DGS zu erm\u00f6glichen (zus\u00e4tzlich zu dem bereits aktivierten Haswell-basierten Code gen in Clang). Das Aufwachen des Batch Workers wurde verbessert, und es wurden Optimierungen an der Aggregatbreitphase vorgenommen, wie z.B. das Ersetzen des Kugelbaums durch einen optimierten Radix-Baum und eine optimierte Zustandsaktualisierung.\nSchlie\u00dflich wurde f\u00fcr das Engineering der Entit\u00e4tskomponenten-Aktualisierungsplaner weiterentwickelt. Zu diesem Zweck wurde eine neue Komponentenaktualisierungsrichtlinie hinzugef\u00fcgt, die auf Entit\u00e4ts-Rendering-Grenzen mit einem optionalen Ansichtsverh\u00e4ltnis basiert, und es wurde Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr das Ansichtsverh\u00e4ltnis in Komponentenaktualisierungen hinzugef\u00fcgt. Au\u00dferdem wurde ein Absturz in einem Videotreiber behoben, der durch eine falsche Verwendung des Textur-Upload-Pfads f\u00fcr UI\/Flash-Assets verursacht wurde. Zu wichtigen Threads (MT, RT, Netzwerk, Physik) wurden verschiedene Frame-Zeiten hinzugef\u00fcgt, wobei eines der Ziele darin bestand, eine agnostische VSync-Frame-Zeit abzuleiten. Die Exception-Handler- und Crash-Dump-Verarbeitungstools unterst\u00fctzen jetzt neue cig-trace-Ereignisse und verf\u00fcgen \u00fcber eindeutige Ordner, in die Debug-Informationen gedumpt werden k\u00f6nnen, wodurch die Verarbeitung und Analyse von Laufzeitfehlern rationalisiert wird. Die Entwickler k\u00f6nnen jetzt auch FPEs bis zu einem bestimmten Datum stumm schalten.\nFunktionen (Gameplay)\nNeben dem Polieren und der Fehlerbehebung f\u00fcr Alpha 3.9 arbeitete das Gameplay-Features-Team daran, Initiativen f\u00fcr Arena Commander, Star Marine, Theaters of War und Invictus Launch Week zu unterst\u00fctzen. Au\u00dferdem begannen sie mit den Vorarbeiten f\u00fcr eine neue Spielerhandelsapplikation f\u00fcr mobiGlas. Die erste Phase konzentriert sich auf die M\u00f6glichkeit, W\u00e4hrungen zwischen den Spielern zu versenden, wobei sp\u00e4tere \u00dcberarbeitungen auf Gegenst\u00e4nde des physischen Inventars ausgeweitet wurden.\nFunktionen (Fahrzeuge)\nDas Vehicle Features Team setzt den Umbau des HUD unter Verwendung der neuen Building Blocks-Technologie fort. Im vergangenen Monat wurde intensiv an der Ziel- und Raketenschloss-UI gearbeitet. Gegenw\u00e4rtig verbessern sie die Art und Weise, wie das IFCS mit einem Ungleichgewicht bei den Schiffsantrieben umgeht. Wenn zum Beispiel die Triebwerke besch\u00e4digt sind, f\u00fchrt das Ungleichgewicht zu einer unerw\u00fcnschten Energiezufuhr und erschwert die Steuerung des Schiffes. Fortschritte wurden auch beim Andocken erzielt, wobei das Team herausgefunden hat, wie man Schiffe miteinander verbindet, w\u00e4hrend die Physikmaschine angemessen reagiert. Sie unterst\u00fctzten auch Forschung und Tests zur Verbesserung des Schiffskampfes.\nGrafiken\nDas Grafikteam setzte seine entscheidende Arbeit am Gen12\/Vulkan-Renderer fort, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf der Einrichtung einer vorl\u00e4ufigen Pipeline lag. Dies ist der erste von mehreren wichtigen Meilensteinen in der Entwicklung des neuen Renderers und wird es ihnen erm\u00f6glichen, einen Gro\u00dfteil des alten Post-Effekt-Codes zu verwerfen. Der organische Shader, der f\u00fcr Vegetation und Felsen verwendet wird, erh\u00e4lt derzeit ein seit langem geplantes Upgrade, das sich in Planet Tech v4 integrieren und viele neue Funktionen hinzuf\u00fcgen wird, wie z.B. eine bessere Integration von Assets in planetarisches Terrain.\nDie lang erwartete Echtzeit-Umweltsondenfunktion wurde fertiggestellt. Damit k\u00f6nnen Lichtreflexionen und Reflexionen dynamisch neu berechnet werden, um den sich st\u00e4ndig \u00e4ndernden Lichtverh\u00e4ltnissen auf rotierenden Planeten, umkreisenden Raumstationen, an- und ausgeschalteten Lampen und zerst\u00f6rten Innenr\u00e4umen Rechnung zu tragen.\nDie letzte Aufgabe des Monats war die Integration des Textur-Streaming-Systems, das es dem Team erm\u00f6glicht, auf intelligente Weise zu verwalten, wann es jede Sonde aktualisiert und wann es sie entl\u00e4dt, um Platz f\u00fcr andere Texturen zu schaffen. Dieses Feature wurde an verschiedenen Orten in Alpha 3.9 integriert, obwohl das Kunst-Team immer noch sicherstellen muss, dass die Assets an jedem Standort optimiert werden, um die Kosten f\u00fcr den Render-Pass auf ein Minimum zu beschr\u00e4nken, so dass die Einf\u00fchrung ein schrittweiser Prozess sein wird.\nLevel-Entwurf\nNachdem der Gro\u00dfteil von New Babbage fertiggestellt war, zog der gr\u00f6\u00dfte Teil des Leveldesign-Teams um, um die Arbeit an Orison fortzusetzen. Sie nehmen auch Aktualisierungen an Grim HEX vor, was die Fertigstellung des internen Renn-Kiosks, strukturelle \u00c4nderungen am Asteroiden und schlie\u00dflich das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von Hangars beinhaltet. Sie arbeiten auch mit den Feature-Teams zusammen, um sicherzustellen, dass die neuen Sperrbereiche und ATCs so funktionieren, wie sie sollten.\nBeleuchtung\nNachdem die Arbeiten an Alpha 3.9 abgeschlossen waren, \u00fcberlegte das Beleuchtungsteam, Lorville mit einem Tag- und Nachtaufbau auszustatten, der je nach Tageszeit unterschiedliche Stimmungen erzeugen wird. Sie ersetzten auch einige Cubemaps durch die neue Runtime-Probes-Technik, damit sich die Beleuchtung tags\u00fcber geerdeter anf\u00fchlt und die Bereiche nicht zu \"gl\u00fchend\" oder zu dunkel erscheinen. Mehrere Teammitglieder untersuchten, ob die Au\u00dfenfl\u00e4chen von Au\u00dfenposten an der Oberfl\u00e4che und unterirdischen Einrichtungen mit den gleichen Merkmalen ausgestattet werden k\u00f6nnten. Schlie\u00dflich wurde dem New Babbage Spaceport ein neuer Kiosk hinzugef\u00fcgt und eine Reihe kleinerer Altlasten an \u00e4lteren Standorten behoben.\n\n\n\n\nRequisiten\nDas Requisitenteam schloss die Essens- und Getr\u00e4nkerequisiten letzten Monat ab, kleinere Fehlerbehebungen sind derzeit im Gange.\n\"Es gibt viele Pl\u00e4ne, wohin wir als n\u00e4chstes gehen wollen, und einige neue Techniken, die wir in Zukunft testen m\u00f6chten\" - Requisiten-Team\nAu\u00dferdem wurden neue Requisiten f\u00fcr das Missionsteam erstellt, um ihnen bei der Erstellung von Prototypen zuk\u00fcnftiger Inhalte zu helfen, und es wurden neue Tools f\u00fcr den Animationsablauf eingef\u00fchrt, um die 3ds Max-Prozesse zu beschleunigen.\nQUALIT\u00c4TSSICHERUNG\nIm vergangenen Monat wurde der QA eine neue Testanforderung (QATR) f\u00fcr die \u00dcberarbeitung der Sperrbereiche zugewiesen, auf deren Pr\u00fcfung sich die Standortseite des Teams konzentrierte. Der QATR bezog sich auf Lorville und das Gebiet18, wobei die Tests sicherstellten, dass die aktualisierten Sperrbereiche wie zuvor funktionierten und keine neuen Probleme auftraten. Was die Maschine betrifft, so waren sie an mehreren F\u00e4llen von bin\u00e4ren Tests beteiligt. Zwei S\u00e4tze sollten verschiedene Probleme beheben, die die Alpha 3.9-Builds plagten, und bei der Leistung und Optimierung helfen. Andere bezogen sich auf Zeichentexturen und Skinning.\nDie Qualit\u00e4tssicherung testete weiterhin die aktuellen Tools, die vom gesamten Entwicklungsteam verwendet werden, einschlie\u00dflich Graphics Viewer Tester, StarWords und Dataforge unter Einbeziehung von TrackView. Sie schlossen sich auch den w\u00f6chentlichen Spieltests an, die f\u00fcr das gesamte Unternehmen eingerichtet wurden, um mitzumachen. Dies erm\u00f6glicht es dem Team, Bereiche zu spielen, mit denen sie nicht ganz vertraut sind, und gibt ihnen eine neue Perspektive auf viele der Funktionen.\nSystem-Entwurf\nSystem Design begann mit der Implementierung des neuen Kiosks der Raffinerie-Station. Dieser wird von den Spielern genutzt werden, um ihre Rohstoffe in raffinierte Waren umzuwandeln, die zu h\u00f6heren Preisen verkauft werden k\u00f6nnen (und in Zukunft zum Herstellen von Gegenst\u00e4nden verwendet werden k\u00f6nnen). Wenn sie in Betrieb sind, m\u00fcssen die Spieler ihre gemischten Materialien zu einer Station mit Veredelungsm\u00f6glichkeiten bringen und dann einen Veredelungsauftrag starten. Je nach Art des Veredelungsprozesses, den Materialien, die sie veredeln oder ausrangieren wollen, und wie ausgelastet die Raffinerie ist, zahlt der Spieler einen Preis und die Arbeit beginnt. Die Raffination l\u00e4uft dann, auch wenn der Spieler nicht in der Station anwesend oder eingeloggt ist. Sobald die Raffination beendet ist, erh\u00e4lt der Spieler eine Benachrichtigung und kann zur Station zur\u00fcckkehren, um seine Waren abzuholen. Die Arbeit an der Ressourcenverwaltung und der Gegenstandskontrolle wird fortgesetzt, wobei das Team einen ersten Prototyp erstellt, um sicherzustellen, dass alles, was geplant ist, korrekt funktioniert und mit zuk\u00fcnftigen Inhalten richtig skaliert werden kann.\nTechnische Animation\nIm Anschluss an den Bericht vom letzten Monat setzte Tech Animation die Entwicklung der internen Toolsets zur Unterst\u00fctzung von Tech Art und Animation fort. Sie arbeiteten mit der sozialen KI an neuen Nutzungsm\u00f6glichkeiten, einschlie\u00dflich des Barkeepers und einer Vielzahl neuer Erg\u00e4nzungen f\u00fcr das Verhalten im Hangar. Sie arbeiteten auch an einem Werkzeug, das es den Animatoren erm\u00f6glicht, ihre Zustandsautomaten direkt von Visio nach Mannequin zu exportieren, wodurch der Implementierungsprozess beschleunigt wird. Es wurde mit der Arbeit an einem firmeneigenen Tool begonnen, das den Prozess schlie\u00dflich noch schneller machen wird. Schlie\u00dflich halfen sie den Animatoren, Requisiten f\u00fcr Maya zu konstruieren, um die Interaktionen zu erleichtern.\nTechnik (Kunst)\nIm April setzte Tech Art die Arbeit am RuntimeRig-System fort und verbesserte es weiter, indem es Funktionen hinzuf\u00fcgte, die die effiziente gemeinsame Nutzung von RigComponents zwischen mehreren Instanzen (typischerweise Zeichen) erm\u00f6glichen. Bestimmte RigComponent-Typen (wie z.B. die BlendShapeComponents oder die WrinkleMaskComponents) enthalten statische Daten, die sich zur Laufzeit nie \u00e4ndern und normalerweise f\u00fcr alle Rigs desselben Typs und derselben Ebene identisch sind. In fr\u00fchen Versionen wurden diese Daten der Einfachheit halber dupliziert. Dies ist jedoch nicht ideal, sowohl wartungs- als auch speicherm\u00e4\u00dfig. Im alten RigLogic-System waren sie \u00fcber statische Arrays in gemeinsam genutzten C++-Header-Dateien vollst\u00e4ndig fest codiert, was zu einem optimaleren Speicherbedarf f\u00fchrte, aber die Flexibilit\u00e4t auf der Tech-Art-Seite vollst\u00e4ndig entfernte.\nDie neueste Iteration erm\u00f6glicht die gemeinsame Nutzung von Ressourcen, wo immer dies m\u00f6glich ist, und den K\u00fcnstlern volle technische Freiheit bei der Bearbeitung der Daten und der schnellen Iteration der Deformations- und Shading-bezogenen Rig-Ausgaben. Wie bei allen Kernsystemen, die \u00e4ltere Versionen ersetzen sollen, sind strenge Tests, technische H\u00e4rtung und Optimierung erforderlich, bevor das System fl\u00e4chendeckend eingef\u00fchrt werden kann. In einem ersten Schritt wird es nur auf der Maya-Seite getestet, und zwar mit den neuen Vanduul-Frontpr\u00fcfst\u00e4nden. Schlie\u00dflich wird es auf alle mehr als 130 Pr\u00fcfst\u00e4nde mit menschlichem Kopf im DCC und sp\u00e4ter auch auf den Motor angewandt werden.\nTechnik (Fahrzeuge)\nIm April hat das Vehicle Technical Team ein neues In-Game-System eingebaut, das bei einer bevorstehenden Veranstaltung vorgestellt werden soll. Ein neuer lebenserhaltender Gegenstand befindet sich in der Entwicklung, der es den Schiffen erm\u00f6glicht, den Druck wieder zu erh\u00f6hen, nachdem ihre Innenatmosph\u00e4re entl\u00fcftet wurde. Es wird auch in Stationen, Au\u00dfenposten und anderen raumgest\u00fctzten Strukturen mit Luftschleusen funktionieren. Schlie\u00dflich wurden mehrere Fehler in Alpha 3.9 behoben, darunter auch Probleme im Zusammenhang mit Tr\u00fcmmern, die die Zerst\u00f6rung von Fahrzeugen jetzt optisch viel befriedigender machen. Auch die Bergbau-Funktion wurde erweitert.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent unterst\u00fctzte den Start der Esperia Tevarin Prowler und alle Werbeseiten f\u00fcr Alpha 3.9.\n\nBenutzerschnittstelle (UI)\nIm Laufe des ersten Quartals 2020 machte das Kern-UI-Team Fortschritte bei der 3D-Unterst\u00fctzung des Building Blocks UI-Tools. Aprils Arbeit wird es den Designern erleichtern, 3D-Fahrzeug- oder Charaktersymbole zu einem Bildschirm hinzuzuf\u00fcgen, ohne sich auf einen Programmierer verlassen zu m\u00fcssen. Sie haben auch die erste Iteration eines neuen UI-Kits abgeschlossen, das das Einrichten von Seiten durch die Verwendung vorgefertigter Komponenten erleichtert, die f\u00fcr verschiedene Hersteller leicht umgestaltet werden k\u00f6nnen.\nGegenw\u00e4rtig arbeiten viele Mitglieder des UI-Teams eng mit anderen Teams zusammen: Neben dem Fahrzeugteam arbeiteten sie an Verbesserungen der Ziel-, Raketenarretierungs- und Lande-UI. F\u00fcr das Schauspieler-Team unterst\u00fctzte UI die Schaffung des neuen Inventarsystems. Die UI-K\u00fcnstler arbeiteten auch an Bildschirmen und dem Branding f\u00fcr einige kommende Umgebungen.\nVFX\nIm April begannen die Arbeiten der VFX an dem Atzkav-Scharfsch\u00fctzengewehr und der Yubarev-Pistole. Diese Elektronenwaffen erfordern neue Funktionen, die es bisher im Star Citizen noch nicht gab. Daher wurde zus\u00e4tzliche Zeit investiert, um fehlende Funktionen zu identifizieren und dem Waffenteam mitzuteilen. Parallel dazu begann die Vorproduktion der S12-Torpedos und einer \u00fcberarbeiteten Massentreiberwaffe.\nDas Schiffs- und Umgebungsfeuerausbreitungssystem wurde weiter entwickelt. Dieses wird das Feuer auf der Grundlage verschiedener Materialparameter, wie Treibstoff, Oberfl\u00e4chenart und Sauerstoffgehalt, ausbreiten. Geplant ist auch, das Feuer interaktiv mit den Umgebungen und der Interaktion der Spieler zu machen, z.B. durch den Wind, der es umherweht, oder durch die Reaktion auf den Feuerl\u00f6scher eines Spielers. Auch die Brandgefahren machten gute Fortschritte, wobei eine Reihe von \"Look-Dev\"-Videos produziert wurden, die helfen sollen, Tore zu visualisieren und die Gespr\u00e4che voranzutreiben.\nEs wurde Codearbeit f\u00fcr neue Partikelsystemfunktionen geleistet, wie Alpha-Erosion, Winkelrotation, Kinderb\u00e4nder und Skalierung der Emissionsgr\u00f6\u00dfe. VFX Tech Art verbrachte den Monat mit der Fertigstellung des Fragment-Tools, mit dem kleine Teile des Houdini-Netzwerks gespeichert werden und das in K\u00fcrze den Benutzern zur Verf\u00fcgung gestellt werden soll. Dies wird vor allem f\u00fcr die Erstellung von Gaswolken und die Erzeugung von Prozeduren n\u00fctzlich sein.\nWIR SEHEN SIE N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT...","zh_CN":"It was all hands on deck in April as Alpha 3.9 launched into the Persistent Universe. Naturally, teams contributed to the release in a variety of ways, so the hard work they put in is prevalent throughout this month\u2019s report. Progress was also made on several upcoming features for future patches and releases, so read on to find out more!\nAI\nAlongside final optimizations for Alpha 3.9, the Social AI Team improved the performance of the Usable Cache Manager. They added the ability to time-slice the main update to make it easier to control the update usage of different jobs, and began using queued physical ray-casting to validate which usable enter\/exit locations are available and not blocked by other objects.\nWork started on compound usables, which can inherit functionalities from other usables and override data based on specific setups. For example, maintenance or inspection operations on a Gladius might use generic animations in most locations, but a more complex section of the ship may require specific Mannequin tags.\nFunctionality and visual quality were further developed for vendors such as the Bartender. Work went into potentially allowing designers to set up proc clips that stow\/unstow objects from a specific inventory pocket. The team also extended the Communication system to allow designers to tag different options relating to the same contextual voice line. This will allow a generic behavior to automatically select the right option for a specific context. For example, a shop patron can use a generic \u2018order\u2019 communication line to pass the tag of the object they want to order, which will allow the selection of a relevant voice and animation. If one isn\u2019t present, a generic option might be selected. This, combined with a pass on wildlines and secondary sub-activities for the vendor behavior, allowed the team to significantly improve the visual fidelity of the behaviors.\nAI are currently integrating more functionalities into consumable objects to create an additional layer of customization to the flow, such as enabling AI to differentiate between open and closed bottles and act accordingly.\nFocus was also given to improving several aspects of the patrol path tech. This involved moving some of the parallel functionalities trigger-logic to the movement system, which is a big change for several reasons: The team can now send simple requests related to a path to the movement system, making the subsumption task much simpler; they can using the same approach used for complex usables, such as closed doors, elevators, and the transit system; and the movement planner is now responsible for analyzing the data and creating a plan that can be as complex as needed.\nAnimation\nLast month, Animation supported Social AI with ship hangar work, general inspection places, bar patron idles and actions, bridge control seats, and lockers. They also worked on reloading and malfunction animations for all weapon classes. Development of stumbles, knockdowns, body dragging, and what happens when a player is injured or incapacitated continued.\nThe Mo-Cap Team improved the motion builder skeleton, which will help the wider team create assets faster, and the \u2018take selection\u2019 tool, which will improve post-shoot turnaround. Tools were also created to enable quick data renaming and video conversion. Several team members are temporarily supporting other related areas of development due to the suspension of all mo-cap shoots.\nArt (Environment)\nLast month, the Environment Art Team progressed with Pyro I and II, which will make full use of Planet Tech v4. They\u2019re currently creating new geology and vegetation packs and putting them together on the new planets. Look out for an unstable star, hostile landscapes, and dangerous plant life when it launches.\n\u201cAfter the frozen dangers of microTech and its moons, Pyro will definitely put the players in new and exciting surroundings filled with new challenges.\u201d \u2013 Environment Art Team\n\n\nArt (Ships)\nIn the UK, progress on the Crusader Hercules continued; the bulk of the exterior is now greybox-complete, while the thrusters and turrets are currently being worked on. Inside, the bridge is greybox-complete and the rest of the upper deck, including the hab area, is making great progress. The interior doors are complete and the large hold is starting to take shape. Work on an unannounced ship continued too.\nIn the US, the team kicked off the Crusader Mercury Star Runner, working through the cockpit greybox and cargo holds. Progress was made on the wings and turret exteriors too. The ongoing improvements to the Origin M50 entered the polish phase and the Cutlass Blue\u2019s prisoner pods were tweaked after feedback.\nArt (Weapons)\nIn preparation for the feature work next quarter, the Weapons Team iterated on the Behring GP-33 grenade launcher to fix a few issues and bring it up to current standards. The Lighting Bolt Co. Atzkav sniper rifle and Yubarev pistol received final art and LOD passes and were handed over to the downstream teams. The Gemini C54 SMG was reviewed by Design, which led to its dimensions being significantly trimmed down to make it feel more like an SMG and less like an assault rifle.\nBackend Services\nApril saw the team deal with a variety of bugs, including memory leaks that were discovered on some of the backend services. Work bagen on the new dynamic mission service and support was provided to Theaters of War. Entitlement processing, iCache Advanced Query, iCache\/Login Flow, and GIM services development was also undertaken.\nCharacters\nThe Character Team fixed a handful of bugs, cleaned up documentation, and handled small material fixes. Characters were placed in landing zones and work went into the Hi-Tech hangars, cargo, and tweaks were made to the existing loadouts for prisons and New Babbage. The tech artists finished their Zone Cut tool, which allows the Art Team to cull hidden geometry under clothing. Art is currently being created for various carnivorous species and the Orison Tourist character.\nCommunity\nThe Community Team kicked off the month with Planet Tech V5: The Flattening, which marks a significant step forward for both \u201ctechnical innovation\u201d and \u201cscientific accuracy\u201d.\n\nBack in reality, another Spectrum AMA answered the community\u2019s most burning questions about the Quantum system first introduced at CitizenCon 2019. When complete, it\u2019ll give the devs complete control and visibility over Star Citizen\u2019s system-spanning economy.\nAlpha 3.9\u2019s Pillar Talk was released too. Chris Roberts was joined by Sean Tracy, Paul Reindell, and Eric Kieron Davis for a discussion on the unified friends list, persistence, quality of life improvements, the player interaction system, New Babbage, prison mechanics, and more.\nLastly, the Community Team would like to draw your attention to an important update on CitizenCon 2950.\nEngineering\nEngineering\u2019s April involved working on AFT, adding rotation resistance to the driven articulated entity tracking joint (exposing tuning parameters), making body-dragging-driven ragdoll behavior less framerate dependent, and adding rotation damping for the dragging character (with exposed linear and angular damping factors). They also fixed animation pops, added force reactions, and made the head and neck joints of a drag-driven ragdolls ignore actor entity collisions.\nPhysics-wise, they made improvements to the load and spawn time for entities, reworked the processing of dead-marked entities, and optimized the CheckAreas function (which is now three-to-five times faster in new grid-OC-split regions). Basic ricochet behavior was added and made deterministic. They also looked into character physicalization issues for the Cinematics Team and integrated physics into the main development stream.\nEngineering wrapped up the mesh refactor for the Gen12 renderer, moved shader item creation away from the render thread, relocated shader objects to resource containers (to improve material-streaming during OCS), and made headway into permanently enabling certain G12 effects. They added asynchronous shader compilation support to the Gen12 code and refactored the buffer management for the render mesh. This means they can now create buffers on any thread instead of deferring it to RT, use a VB stream wrapper object to maintain ref counts for writes and reads on render mesh streams, and run numerous API cleanups. They further cleaned the loading and refreshing of the shader system, ported texture sampler state code, and started porting brush rendering to the new pipeline.\nRegarding the shader system, they fixed an issue in cache generation that caused certain combinations of hull, domain, geometry, and compute to not pre-cache. For hair, they created a new slider for creating a \u2018salt and pepper\u2019 look and improved scattering for blonde and bright hair.\nEngineering bundled the processing of adaptive resolution samples so that lowering adaptive resolution will show GPU perf scaling as expected. They changed the way active sample indices are built to maintain the desired serialization order per sample block. Each sample block can now be processed as a bundle via the thread group to better utilize cache effects. They also looked into deep learning-based de-noising and up-sampling, and worked to implement a guided filter to de-noise and up-sample lower resolution raymarched inscatter and transmittance results. For the ongoing ocean work, the team upgraded buoyancy physics to make it functional with the new changes, fixed motion vectors on deferred oceans, and added sub-surface scattering to improve the appearance of crest waves.\nGeneral system worked involved enabling advanced CPU features for Linux DGS (in addition to already enabled Haswell-based code gen in Clang). Batch worker wakeup was improved and optimizations to the aggregate broad phase were made, such as replacing the sphere tree with an optimized radix tree and an optimized state update.\nFinally for Engineering, the entity component update scheduler was further developed. To this end, they added a new component update policy based on entity rendering bounds with an optional view ratio and added support for view ratio in component updates. They also fixed a crash in a video driver caused by an incorrect use of the texture upload path taken for UI\/Flash assets. Various frame times were added to important threads (MT, RT, network, physics), with one of the goals being to derive a VSync agnostic frame time. The exception handler and crash dump processing tools now support new cig-trace events and have unique folders to dump debug information into, which streamlines runtime error processing and analysis. The developers can now also mute FPEs until a given date.\nFeatures (Gameplay)\nAlongside polishing and bug-fixing for Alpha 3.9, the Gameplay Features Team worked to support initiatives for Arena Commander, Star Marine, Theaters of War, and Invictus Launch Week. They also began preliminary work on a new player trading app for mobiGlas. The first phase focuses on the ability to send currency between players, with later revisions extending to physical inventory items.\nFeatures (Vehicles)\nThe Vehicle Features Team continue to rebuild the HUD using the new Building Blocks technology. Last month, targeting and missile-lock UI were worked on heavily. They\u2019re currently improving how IFCS copes with an imbalance in ship thrusters. For example, when thrusters are damaged, the imbalance will cause undesirable power delivery and make controlling the ship more difficult. Progress on docking was also made, with the team figuring out how to connect ships while the physics engine reacts appropriately. They supported research and testing into improving ship combat too.\nGraphics\nThe Graphics Team continued their crucial work on the Gen12\/Vulkan renderer, with the focus on getting a preliminary pipeline up and running. This is the first of several major milestones in the development of the new renderer and will allow them to deprecate much of the old post effect code. The organic shader used for vegetation and rocks is currently receiving a long-planned upgrade that will integrate into Planet Tech v4 and add many new features, such as better integration of assets into planetary terrain.\nThe long-awaited real-time environment probe feature was completed. This allows bounced lighting and reflections to be re-computed dynamically to account for the ever-changing lighting on rotating planets, orbiting space stations, lights being turned on\/off, and destroyed interiors.\nThe final task of the month was the integration of the texture streaming system, which enables the team to intelligently manage when they update each probe and when to unload them to make way for other textures. This feature was included in various locations across Alpha 3.9, though the Art Team still need to ensure the assets in each location are optimized to keep the cost of the render pass to a minimum, so rollout will be a gradual process.\nLevel Design\nWith the majority of New Babbage complete, most of the Level Design Team moved to continue work on Orison. They\u2019re also making updates to Grim HEX, which involves finishing the internal racing kiosk, making structural changes to the asteroid, and finally adding hangars. They\u2019re also working with the feature teams to ensure the new restricted areas and ATCs are working as they should.\nLighting\nWith Alpha 3.9 work wrapped up, the Lighting Team looked at adding a day and night setup to Lorville, which will create different ambient moods depending on the time of day. They also replaced some cubemaps with the new runtime probes tech to help the lighting feel more grounded during the day and prevent areas from appearing too \u201cglowy\u201d or dark. Several team members looked into adding the same features to the exteriors of surface outposts and underground facility locations. Lastly, a new kiosk was added to the New Babbage spaceport and a number of minor legacy bugs in older locations were fixed.\n\n\n\n\nProps\nThe Props Team closed out the food and drink props last month, with minor bug fixes currently underway.\n\u201cThere are plenty of plans for where we want to go next and some new techniques we would like to test in the future\u201d \u2013 Props Team\nNew props were also created for the Mission Team to help them prototype future content and new tools were introduced to the animation workflow to speed up 3ds Max processes.\nQA\nLast month, QA were assigned a new test request (QATR) for the restricted areas rework, which the locations-side of the team focused on testing. The QATR related to Lorville and Area18, with the tests ensuring the updated restricted areas worked as before and didn\u2019t introduce any new issues. Engine-wise, they were involved in several instances of binary testing. Two sets were to fix various issues plaguing the Alpha 3.9 builds and help with performance and optimization. Others related to character textures and skinning.\nQA continued testing the current tools in use across the whole development team, including Graphics Viewer Tester, StarWords, and Dataforge with the inclusion of TrackView. They also joined the weekly playtests that have been set up for the whole company to join in. This allows the team to play areas they\u2019re not wholly familiar with and gives a fresh perspective on many of the features.\nSystem Design\nSystem Design started implementing the new Refining Station kiosk. This will be used by players to convert their raw materials into refined goods that can be sold for higher prices (and in the future used to craft items). When live, players will have to take their mixed materials to a station with refining capabilities and then start a refining job. Based on the type of refining process, the materials they want to refine or discard, and how busy the refinery is, the player will pay a price and the job will begin. Refining will then run, even if the player is not present in the station or logged on. Once finished, the player will receive a notification and will be able to return to the station to collect their goods. Work continues on resource management and item control, with the team undertaking initial prototyping to ensure everything planned works correctly and will scale properly with future content.\nTech Animation\nFollowing last month\u2019s report, Tech Animation continued to develop the internal toolsets in support of Tech Art and Animation. They worked with Social AI on new usables, including the bartender and a wide variety of new additions for hangar behavior. They also worked on a tool to allow animators to export their state machines straight from Visio to Mannequin, speeding up the implementation process. Work began on a proprietary tool that will eventually make the process even faster. Finally, they helped rig props for the animators to use in Maya to make interactions easier.\nTech (Art)\nIn April, Tech Art continued work on the RuntimeRig system, further enhancing it by adding functionality to allow the efficient sharing of RigComponents between several instances (typically characters). Certain RigComponent types (such as the BlendShapeComponents or the WrinkleMaskComponents) contain static data that never changes at runtime and is usually identical for all rigs of the same type and tier. In early versions, this data was duplicated for simplicity. However, this isn\u2019t ideal, both maintenance and memory-wise. In the old RigLogic system, it had been fully hard-coded via static arrays in shared C++ header files, which led to a more optimal memory footprint but completely removed flexibility on the tech-art side.\nThe latest iteration gives resource sharing wherever possible and the artists full technical freedom to edit the data and quickly iterate on the deformation and shading-related rig outputs. As with all core systems designed to replace legacy versions, rigorous testing, tech-hardening, and optimization are needed before it can be rolled out across the board. As a first step, they\u2019ll test it on the Maya-side only, using the new Vanduul face rigs. Eventually, it\u2019ll be applied to all 130+ human head rigs in the DCC and, later, the engine too.\nTech (Vehicles)\nApril saw the Vehicle Technical Team incorporate a new in-game system that will be revealed at an upcoming event. A new life-support item is in development that allows ships to re-pressurize after their internal atmospheres have been vented. It will also work in stations, outposts, and other room-based structures with airlocks. Finally, several Alpha 3.9 bugs were addressed, including debris-related issues that now make vehicle destruction much more visually satisfying. The mining feature was also expanded.\nTurbulent\nTurbulent supported the launch of the Esperia Tevarin Prowler and all the promotional pages for Alpha 3.9.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nThroughout the first quarter of 2020, the core UI Team progressed with adding 3D support to the Building Blocks UI tool. April\u2019s work will make it easier for designers to add 3D vehicle or character icons to a screen without relying on a programmer. They also finished the first iteration of a new UI kit that makes it easier to set up pages by using ready-made components, which can be easily restyled for different manufacturers.\nCurrently, many of the UI Team are working closely with other teams: alongside the Vehicle Team, they worked on improvements to the targeting, missile lock, and landing UI. For the Actor Team, UI supported the creation of the new inventory system. The UI artists also worked on screens and branding for some upcoming environments.\nVFX\nApril saw VFX\u2019s work on the Atzkav sniper rifle and Yubarev pistol begin. These electron weapons require new functionality not seen in Star Citizen before, so extra time went into identifying missing features and communicating it to the Weapons Team. Alongside this, pre-production started on the S12 torpedoes and a reworked mass driver weapon.\nThe ship and environmental fire propagation system was further developed. This will spread fire based on various material parameters, such as fuel, surface type, and oxygen level. They also plan to make the fire interactive with environments and player interaction, such as wind blowing it around or it reacting to a player\u2019s fire extinguisher. Fire hazards progressed well too, with a set of \u2018look-dev\u2019 videos being produced to help visualize goals and push conversations further.\nCode work was done for new particle-system features, such as alpha erosion, angular rotation, child-ribbons, and emission size scaling. VFX Tech Art spent the month finalizing the fragment tool that\u2019s used to save small sections of the Houdini network, which will be rolled out to the users shortly. This will be particularly useful for gas cloud authoring and procedural generation.\nWE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026"},"links_count":5,"comment_count":56,"created_at":"2020-05-06T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"6 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 21:12:33","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":17584,"next_id":17586}}