{"data":{"id":17759,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: August 2020","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/17759-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-August-2020","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/17759","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/17759","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly Reports","images":[{"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":42,"translations":{"en_EN":"This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We\u2019re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.\nAttention Recruits,\n\nWhat you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).\n\nAs a result of our latest intel reports, we\u2019ve learned about work towards creating the Xi\u2019an race, responsive music to dynamic situations, and further work on the Vanduul combat AI and animation.\nThe information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.\n\nUEE Naval High Command AI (Combat)\nThough a significant portion of the AI Team\u2019s work is relevant for both SQ42 and the PU, some ongoing tasks are exclusive to the single-player campaign. This includes continued iterations on Vanduul melee behavior, which now automatically evaluates the suitability of specific special actions (dodging, jump attacks, melee attacks, etc.).\n\nRegarding melee attacks, damage is now triggered by collision with the weapon\u2019s blade to enable timing and assets to be tweaked and adjusted. The Vanduul lance has several states that can be utilized by the behavior, including extending it when preparing for melee attacks or keeping it collapsed when firing or aiming. These weapon state modifications are triggered by the behavior based on general context. Vanduul health was also further developed to reflect the different skeleton and activate the correct damage when it receives hits to different areas.\n\n\n\nAI (Social)\nFor social AI, the recently devised bridge crew behavior now uses operator seat functionalities. The team are currently using this scenario to extend the seated actor state to support some usable functionalities. For example, they have extended the idle\/fidget system on top of operator seats to allow the animators more freedom to bring life to seated scenarios.\n\nSQ42-specific behaviors and functionalities were set up for vendor characters as well. Work also started on usables for the mess hall that will allow NPCs to collect and consume food systemically. When complete, NPCs will be able to collect cutlery and plates, serve themselves food, and then occupy seats to eat and drink.\n\n\n\nAnimation\nAnimation spent the month working on object and grenade throwing, knockdowns and knockbacks, and several new weapons. They further developed the weapons master, capital ship seat interaction, the bartender, and AI ship inspections. They also made great inroads into the NPC ammo retrieval mentioned last month, Vanduul combat, and female player faces and emotes. Interrupts were added to several chapters as part of ongoing scene work too.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe Character Team revisited a few key heads, cleaning up skin textures, refining hair, and are currently working with tech animation and cinematics to address facial animations. Some of these revisions may impact other departments, so all changes are modular and easy to roll back. This work will inform the process of reviewing other SQ42 characters and updates in the future.\n\nAliens-wise, the character artists finished modeling and texturing the Vanduul armor and passed it to the tech artists for rigging.\n\n\u201cSo far work on the Vanduul looks fantastic and we are very excited about it.\u201d -The Character Team\n\nThey also began coordinating with Tech Animation on the Xi\u2019an race, ironing out major anatomy and animation issues.\n\nArt (Weapons)\nWeapon Art\u2019s SQ42 focus throughout August was on the Vanduul lance, which consisted of looking at the weapon\u2019s materials. A new concept for a medical device used in some of the larger ships was completed too.\n\nAudio\nAugust saw a refactor to the footsteps system to improve the audio on different surfaces, making it more responsive to player movement. They\u2019re also improving the granularity and structure of the music system to improve transitions between music content based on what\u2019s happening in a gameplay context.\n\nTime was dedicated to the Lombard effect; a newly developed system detects louder volumes and large amounts of noise in-game and makes dialogue louder automatically so that players don\u2019t need to do it manually. Audio also supported the VFX Team on triggering sounds when particles are generated on the GPU. Currently, if a particle is generated on the GPU, audio cannot efficiently play or sync. This ongoing work will remedy that.\n\n\n\nCinematics\nAugust saw work continue on the character lighting rig used by scenes that don\u2019t require a full manual pass, with more rules defined and edge cases identified. They also began investigating how the automatic depth-of-field focus system chooses which character is of interest during conversations. For filmic scenes (where the cinematic designer directs the camera), focus is selected and controlled manually. However, conversational scenes (where the player can freely roam around) can move out of focus if the player looks past them. Careful consideration is taken to ensure this doesn\u2019t happen due to another character being classed as a \u2018higher priority.\u2019\n\nSeveral scenes moved past the \u2018implementation complete\u2019 phase and into production. Once production is complete, scenes are fully playable and deemed almost shippable, though a final pass is required to tweak and finalize lighting, VFX, UI, and animation.\n\nAttention was also given to sequences that play out if the player reaches a \u2018game over\u2019 condition due to behavior not befitting a UEE naval officer.\n\nEngineering\nIn August, the Engineering Team added support for SDF-based local physics grids and SDF sets, interior grid markup for SDFs in the resource compiler, and g-force calculation for all actor entities. They also added a separate g-force collision calculation to the actor entity, new visualization modes to help development, and \u2018inspect\u2019 and \u2018modify\u2019 properties of static and rigid entities. The option to export bit-voxel geometry via the mesh setup and save it inside CGF was added too.\n\nOptimization-wise, they worked on multi-threaded RC bit-voxel baking, which saves a few hundred bytes on every CPhysicalEntity instance and improves cache locality by reordering members. They also saved four bytes per physical-placeholder instance, disabled debug validation in the final release, moved large geometry into a dedicated bucket during grid population, improved bit-voxel tree-box calculation by using blocks instead of individual voxels, and optimized tree traversals in grid checks\n\nThe Systems Team added an API to the crash handler that allows the dumping of cigprofile data. This will help them analyze what the system was doing shortly before running into a deadlock and watch dog time out and log memory usage at the time of the crash.\n\nDeep analysis was done to resolve the disparity between tracked and system-reported memory use. Several improvements were made on both Windows and Linux to correctly track data moving forward, including low level allocator reserved pages and third-party allocations. They continued looking into the SIMD and memory layout code for zone partitions, implemented faster execution for scoped FPE enable and disable by eliminating linear search through all registered threads, and fixed several issues with ISPC integration. They also reduced the memory use of P4K system and changed the MemoryAddressRange to use CIG API instead of native OS API for memory tracking.\n\nWork on the Gen12 renderer continued, with the team adding support for instancing and a \u2018keep alive\u2019 list so that GPUDevice objects are kept active until the end of a frame. Several refactors and optimizations were made too.\n\nCleanup in the shader system and renderer for thread safety continued, as did G12 brush rendering. They also started to look into DX11.1 API support (Windows 8.1 and up) for binding CBs using offsets for intermediate performance improvements until Vulkan ships. They also added support for custom texture views when using pass resources.\n\nVolumetric fog to PassResource was ported to prevent the shader parser from stripping global symbols. Some severe Alpha 3.10 GPU memory leaks were fixed too.\n\nFor planet atmosphere unified raymarching, the team established a general atmosphere context to avoid accessing resources globally. This make it easier and safer to reuse shared code. All related shader code was refactored too. For temporal reprojection, they implemented options for: neighborhood clipping, refining color bbox using neighborhood variance, compression (based on scene luminance), and color space conversion of color data for tighter bbox to reduce errors introduce by clipping and clamping. The depth dilation code was futher developed too.\n\nR&D into volumetric clouds continued and detailed plans for experiments and next steps were drafted. The initial set up for the volumetric cloud render environment was completed, code was restructured to allow it to be shared between planet atmosphere and volumetric cloud shaders, and the initial pass and injection of cloud raymarch results into the unified atmosphere raymarcher was implemented. The team made performance improvements to the terrain displacement mapping and optimized the shader parser to improve turnaround times when editing shader code.\n\nFinally, Engineering implemented fast bicubic b-spline and Catmull Rom spline interpolation variants for two-to-four channel texture data, further bi-cubic spline evaluation optimizations, made a planet terrain shadow pass, and fixed time precision issue in cloud animation.\n\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story continued to work thorough the key introduction of a ship early in the game, and two days of mo-cap was completed in the Derby studio.\n\n\u201cIt was a little more challenging to work in a COVID-safe environment, but it was great to get back into the studio after such a long hiatus.\u201d -The Gameplay Story Team\n\nThis has enabled the team to complete some long-standing tasks that could not be addressed through hand-keying alone.\n\nGraphics\nThe Graphics Team predominantly focused on the Gen12 renderer last month, with time dedicated spcifically to the conversion process so that the old renderer code can be deprecated as quickly as possible. Various systems are currently being converted, including gas cloud rendering, shadow masking, and run-time environment probes. Improvements were also made to the rendering API to allow simpler and more robust client code that\u2019s less prone to human error. Work on the Vulkan backend made good progress too. The shaders were cleaned up to remove all unnecessary reliance on CPU uploaded data; modern GPU performance means it\u2019s more important to save the CPU work in the renderer and driver than a few tiny instructions on the GPU.\n\nWork on the organic shader continued too, bringing tighter integration with the planets to enable the artists to use assets in a variety of biomes and have them automatically integrate into their surroundings.\n\n\n\nLevel Design\nThe Social Design Team continued to work on scenes, usables, and NPC behaviors. They moved ten scenes to the \u2018gold standard\u2019 level, where everything plays out as expected in the final game. These scenes vary in complexity to give the team an accurate representation of how long it will take to complete their tasks for the rest of the game.\n\nThe Level Design Team continued to polish the ground-based levels while maintaining a strong focus on AI behaviors and multiple traversal routes.\n\nThe development of important dogfight locations continued. This involved working closely with the Flight AI and Art teams for support on use cases and space-scaping respectively.\n\nNarrative\nThroughout August, the Narrative Team continued with the review sessions detailed last month. As more locations progress in development, the team generated additional environmental storytelling documents to give intrepid players more insight into the story, history, and character of the environments.\n\nAs part of these playthroughs, they started to call out potential moments that could benefit from additional content, such as filling in potential lulls or calling out gameplay mechanics. After scripting, the hope is to record placeholder versions of the audio to block into the game and see how it plays. This approach will allow them to field-test new lines in situ and iterate on them long before official capture. They also worked alongside the Audio Team to develop the Vanduul language, which involved a deeper dive into the alien race\u2019s culture.\n\n\n\nQA\nQA continued to support Cinematics with recordings of each level to ensure scenes are working as intended and are of the intended quality. They also created test levels for different effects to enable them to be tested more quickly and efficiently.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nMost visual teams have embedded UI artists, all of who have been working on a variety of upcoming features. For the Actor Feature Team, the artists polished the Personal Inner Though system and external inventory, both of which will be used in the PU and SQ42. They also began looking at the various fonts used throughout the game with the goal of unifying and updating them.\n\nThe UI Tech Team worked on \u2018canvas-slicing\u2019 tech, which will give other teams more freedom to add 2D UI to 3D spaces (via Building Blocks). They also began looking into refactoring the color system. The aim is to aid developers by making it easier to adjust colors across various UIs using a stylesheet rather than adjusting RGB values in each element. It will also allow vector gradients to be used in UI.\n\nVFX\nWorking closely with the Design and Art teams, VFX Tech Art continued to support gas clouds, which is predominately now in the bug-fixing phase. They also continued to improve the texture sequence creation process, creating a faster, more streamlined workflow than the current one (which involves several different software packages). This is important to allow the artists to be more incremental with fluid sims (and exporting them as baked texture sequences), which will ultimately lead to higher-quality explosions, smokes, and fire effects. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026","de_DE":"Dies ist ein Cross-Post des Berichts, der k\u00fcrzlich \u00fcber den monatlichen Squadron 42 Newsletter verschickt wurde. Wir ver\u00f6ffentlichen ihn ein zweites Mal als Comm-Link, um es f\u00fcr die Community einfacher zu machen, darauf zur\u00fcckzugreifen.\nAchtung Rekruten,\n\nWas ihr gleich lesen werdet, sind die neuesten Informationen \u00fcber die Weiterentwicklung von Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).\n\nAls Ergebnis unserer letzten Geheimdienstberichte haben wir von der Arbeit an der Erschaffung der Xi'an-Rasse erfahren, von der Musik, die auf dynamische Situationen reagiert, und von der weiteren Arbeit an der Vanduul-Kampf-KI und der Animation.\nDie in dieser Mitteilung enthaltenen Informationen sind \u00e4u\u00dferst sensibel und es ist von gr\u00f6\u00dfter Wichtigkeit, dass sie nicht in die falschen H\u00e4nde geraten. S\u00e4ubere alle Aufzeichnungen nach dem Lesen.\n\nUEE Marine-Oberkommando\n\nKI (Kampf)\nObwohl ein bedeutender Teil der Arbeit des KI-Teams sowohl f\u00fcr SQ42 als auch f\u00fcr die PU relevant ist, sind einige laufende Aufgaben ausschlie\u00dflich der Einzelspielerkampagne vorbehalten. Dazu geh\u00f6ren fortgesetzte Iterationen zum Vanduul-Nahkampfverhalten, das nun automatisch die Eignung bestimmter Spezialaktionen (Ausweichen, Sprungangangriffe, Nahkampfangriffe, etc.) bewertet.\nBei Nahkampfangriffen wird der Schaden nun durch den Zusammenprall mit der Klinge der Waffe ausgel\u00f6st, um das Timing und die Aktiva zu optimieren und anzupassen. Die Vanduul-Lanze hat mehrere Zust\u00e4nde, die durch das Verhalten ausgenutzt werden k\u00f6nnen, wie z.B. das Ausfahren der Lanze, wenn man sich auf Nahkampfangriffe vorbereitet, oder das Zusammenklappen der Lanze, wenn man schie\u00dft oder zielt. Diese Waffenzustandsmodifikationen werden durch das Verhalten ausgel\u00f6st, das auf dem allgemeinen Kontext basiert. Der Vanduul-Gesundheitszustand wurde ebenfalls weiterentwickelt, um das unterschiedliche Skelett widerzuspiegeln und den richtigen Schaden zu aktivieren, wenn er Treffer in verschiedenen Bereichen erh\u00e4lt.\n\n\nKI (sozial)\nF\u00fcr die soziale KI nutzt das k\u00fcrzlich entwickelte Verhalten der Br\u00fcckenbesatzung nun die Funktionalit\u00e4ten des Operator-Sitzes. Das Team verwendet dieses Szenario derzeit, um den Zustand des sitzenden Schauspielers zu erweitern, um einige nutzbare Funktionalit\u00e4ten zu unterst\u00fctzen. Zum Beispiel haben sie das Idle\/Fidget-System auf den Operator-Sitzen erweitert, um den Animatoren mehr Freiheit zu geben, um sitzende Szenarien mit Leben zu erf\u00fcllen.\nSQ42-spezifische Verhaltensweisen und Funktionalit\u00e4ten wurden auch f\u00fcr Verk\u00e4ufercharaktere eingerichtet. Es wurde auch mit der Arbeit an Benutzbarkeiten f\u00fcr den Speisesaal begonnen, die es den NSCs erlauben, Nahrung systemisch zu sammeln und zu konsumieren. Wenn die Arbeiten abgeschlossen sind, werden die NSCs in der Lage sein, Besteck und Teller einzusammeln, sich selbst Essen zu servieren und dann Pl\u00e4tze zum Essen und Trinken zu besetzen.\n\n\nAnimation\nDie Animation hat den Monat damit verbracht, an Objekt- und Granatewerfen, Niederschl\u00e4gen und R\u00fcckschl\u00e4gen und einigen neuen Waffen zu arbeiten. Sie entwickelten den Waffenmeister, die Interaktion mit dem Kapit\u00e4nssitz, den Barkeeper und die KI-Schiffsinspektionen weiter. Au\u00dferdem haben sie gro\u00dfe Fortschritte bei der im letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnten NSC-Munitionsbeschaffung, dem Vanduul-Kampf und den Gesichtern und Emotes der Spielerinnen gemacht. Als Teil der laufenden Szenenarbeit wurden auch Unterbrechungen in mehreren Kapiteln hinzugef\u00fcgt.\nKunst (Charaktere)\nDas Charakter-Team hat ein paar Schl\u00fcsselk\u00f6pfe \u00fcberarbeitet, Hauttexturen bereinigt, Haare verfeinert und arbeitet derzeit mit Tech-Animation und Cinematics, um Gesichtsanimationen zu behandeln. Einige dieser \u00dcberarbeitungen k\u00f6nnen sich auf andere Abteilungen auswirken, daher sind alle \u00c4nderungen modular und leicht r\u00fcckg\u00e4ngig zu machen. Diese Arbeit wird in Zukunft in den Prozess der \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung anderer SQ42-Charaktere und Updates einflie\u00dfen.\nWas die Aliens betrifft, so haben die Character Artists die Modellierung und Texturierung der Vanduul-R\u00fcstung abgeschlossen und sie an die Tech Artists zum Rigging weitergegeben.\n\"Bis jetzt sieht die Arbeit am Vanduul fantastisch aus und wir sind sehr aufgeregt dar\u00fcber\". -Das Charakter-Team\nSie fingen auch an, sich mit der Tech-Animation der Xi'an-Rasse zu koordinieren, um wichtige Anatomie- und Animationsprobleme auszub\u00fcgeln.\nKunst (Waffen)\nDer Schwerpunkt von Weapon Art's SQ42 lag den ganzen August \u00fcber auf der Vanduul Lanze, die darin bestand, sich die Materialien der Waffe anzusehen. Ein neues Konzept f\u00fcr ein medizinisches Ger\u00e4t, das in einigen der gr\u00f6\u00dferen Schiffe verwendet wird, wurde ebenfalls fertiggestellt.\nAudio\nIm August wurde das Fu\u00dfspursystem \u00fcberarbeitet, um den Ton auf verschiedenen Oberfl\u00e4chen zu verbessern, damit es besser auf Spielerbewegungen reagiert. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Granularit\u00e4t und Struktur des Musiksystems verbessert, um die \u00dcberg\u00e4nge zwischen den Musikinhalten basierend auf den Geschehnissen im Spielkontext zu verbessern.\nZeit wurde dem Lombardeffekt gewidmet; ein neu entwickeltes System erkennt lautere Lautst\u00e4rken und gro\u00dfe Mengen an Ger\u00e4uschen im Spiel und macht Dialoge automatisch lauter, so dass die Spieler dies nicht mehr manuell tun m\u00fcssen. Audio unterst\u00fctzte das VFX-Team auch beim Ausl\u00f6sen von Sounds, wenn Partikel auf der GPU generiert werden. Derzeit kann Audio nicht effizient abgespielt oder synchronisiert werden, wenn ein Partikel auf der GPU erzeugt wird. Diese laufende Arbeit wird das beheben.\n\n\nCinematics\nIm August wurde die Arbeit an der Charakterbeleuchtungsanlage fortgesetzt, die f\u00fcr Szenen verwendet wird, die keinen vollst\u00e4ndigen manuellen Durchgang erfordern, wobei weitere Regeln definiert und Randf\u00e4lle identifiziert wurden. Au\u00dferdem begannen sie damit, zu untersuchen, wie das automatische Tiefensch\u00e4rfe-Fokussiersystem ausw\u00e4hlt, welcher Charakter w\u00e4hrend der Gespr\u00e4che von Interesse ist. Bei Filmszenen (bei denen der Filmdesigner die Kamera f\u00fchrt) wird der Fokus manuell ausgew\u00e4hlt und gesteuert. Konversationsszenen (in denen sich der Spieler frei bewegen kann) k\u00f6nnen jedoch aus dem Fokus geraten, wenn der Spieler an ihnen vorbei schaut. Es wird sorgf\u00e4ltig darauf geachtet, dass dies nicht dadurch geschieht, dass ein anderer Charakter als 'h\u00f6here Priorit\u00e4t' eingestuft wird.\nEinige Szenen sind nach der Phase 'Implementierung abgeschlossen' in die Produktion \u00fcbergegangen. Sobald die Produktion abgeschlossen ist, sind die Szenen vollst\u00e4ndig spielbar und k\u00f6nnen fast versendet werden. Allerdings ist ein letzter Durchgang erforderlich, um die Beleuchtung, VFX, UI und Animation zu optimieren und abzuschlie\u00dfen.\nEs wurde auch auf Sequenzen geachtet, die abgespielt werden, wenn der Spieler aufgrund eines Verhaltens, das nicht zu einem UEE-Marine-Offizier passt, einen 'Game over'-Zustand erreicht.\nTechnik\nIm August f\u00fcgte das Ingenieurteam Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr SDF-basierte lokale Physik-Grids und SDF-Sets, innere Gitterauszeichnung f\u00fcr SDFs im Ressourcen-Compiler und g-force-Berechnung f\u00fcr alle Akteur-Entit\u00e4ten hinzu. Sie f\u00fcgten auch eine separate G-Kraft-Kollisionsberechnung f\u00fcr die actor Entity hinzu, neue Visualisierungsmodi, um die Entwicklung zu unterst\u00fctzen, und 'inspizieren' und 'modifizieren' Eigenschaften von statischen und starren Entities. Die Option, Bit-Voxel-Geometrie \u00fcber das Mesh-Setup zu exportieren und im CGF zu speichern, wurde ebenfalls hinzugef\u00fcgt.\nOptimierungstechnisch arbeiteten sie am Multi-Threaded-RC-Bit-Voxel-Backing, das ein paar hundert Bytes auf jeder CPhysicalEntity-Instanz spart und die Cache-Lokalit\u00e4t durch die Neuordnung der Mitglieder verbessert. Au\u00dferdem haben sie vier Bytes pro physischer Platzhalter-Instanz eingespart, die Debug-Validierung in der finalen Version deaktiviert, gro\u00dfe Geometrien w\u00e4hrend der Grid-Population in einen dedizierten Eimer verschoben, die Bit-Voxel-Baum-Box-Berechnung durch die Verwendung von Bl\u00f6cken statt einzelner Voxel verbessert und die Baumdurchquerung bei Grid-Checks optimiert.\nDas Systems Team hat dem Crashhandler eine API hinzugef\u00fcgt, die das Dumpen von Zigprofildaten erlaubt. Dies wird ihnen helfen, zu analysieren, was das System kurz vor einem Deadlock gemacht hat, und das Timeout des Hundes zu beobachten und den Speicherverbrauch zum Zeitpunkt des Absturzes zu protokollieren.\nEine tiefgehende Analyse wurde durchgef\u00fchrt, um die Diskrepanz zwischen dem verfolgten und dem vom System gemeldeten Speicherverbrauch aufzul\u00f6sen. Sowohl unter Windows als auch unter Linux wurden mehrere Verbesserungen vorgenommen, um die Daten korrekt zu verfolgen, einschlie\u00dflich der von Low-Level-Allokatoren reservierten Seiten und der Zuweisung von Drittanbietern. Sie setzten die Untersuchung des SIMD- und Speicher-Layout-Codes f\u00fcr Zonenpartitionen fort, implementierten eine schnellere Ausf\u00fchrung f\u00fcr scoped FPE aktivieren und deaktivieren, indem die lineare Suche durch alle registrierten Threads eliminiert wurde, und beendeten mehrere Probleme mit der ISPC-Integration. Sie reduzierten auch den Speicherverbrauch des P4K-Systems und \u00e4nderten den MemoryAddressRange, um die CIG-API anstelle der nativen OS-API f\u00fcr die Speicherverfolgung zu verwenden.\nDie Arbeit am Gen12-Renderer wurde fortgesetzt, wobei das Team Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Instancing und eine 'keep alive'-Liste hinzuf\u00fcgte, so dass GPUDevice-Objekte bis zum Ende eines Frames aktiv bleiben. Verschiedene Refactors und Optimierungen wurden ebenfalls vorgenommen.\nAufr\u00e4umarbeiten im Shader-System und Renderer f\u00fcr die Threadsicherheit wurden fortgesetzt, ebenso das G12-Pinsel-Rendering. Sie begannen auch, sich mit der DX11.1-API-Unterst\u00fctzung (Windows 8.1 und h\u00f6her) f\u00fcr das Binden von CBs unter Verwendung von Offsets f\u00fcr zwischenzeitliche Leistungsverbesserungen zu besch\u00e4ftigen, bis Vulkan ausl\u00e4uft. Sie f\u00fcgten auch Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr benutzerdefinierte Texturansichten bei der Verwendung von Pass-Ressourcen hinzu.\nVolumetrischer Nebel wurde auf PassResource portiert, um den Shader-Parser daran zu hindern, globale Symbole zu entfernen. Einige schwere Alpha 3.10 GPU-Speicherlecks wurden ebenfalls behoben.\nF\u00fcr das vereinheitlichte Raymarching der Planetenatmosph\u00e4re hat das Team einen allgemeinen Atmosph\u00e4renkontext erstellt, um den globalen Zugriff auf Ressourcen zu vermeiden. Dies macht es einfacher und sicherer, geteilten Code wiederzuverwenden. Der gesamte zugeh\u00f6rige Shader-Code wurde ebenfalls \u00fcberarbeitet. F\u00fcr die zeitliche Reprojektion implementierten sie Optionen f\u00fcr: Nachbarschaftsclipping, Verfeinerung der bbox-Farbdaten durch Nachbarschaftsvarianz, Kompression (basierend auf der Szenenluminanz) und Farbraumkonvertierung der Farbdaten f\u00fcr eine engere bbox, um Fehler zu reduzieren, die durch Clipping und Clamping entstehen. Der Code zur Tiefenausdehnung wurde ebenfalls weiterentwickelt.\nDie Forschung und Entwicklung im Bereich der volumetrischen Wolken wurde fortgesetzt und detaillierte Pl\u00e4ne f\u00fcr Experimente und n\u00e4chste Schritte wurden entworfen. Die anf\u00e4ngliche Einrichtung der volumetrischen Wolken-Rendering-Umgebung wurde abgeschlossen, der Code wurde umstrukturiert, damit er zwischen der Planetenatmosph\u00e4re und den volumetrischen Wolken-Shadern geteilt werden kann, und der anf\u00e4ngliche Durchlauf und die Injektion der Ergebnisse des Wolken-Raymarch in den einheitlichen Atmosph\u00e4ren-Raymarch wurde implementiert. Das Team nahm Leistungsverbesserungen an der Gel\u00e4ndeverschiebungskartierung vor und optimierte den Shader-Parser, um die Umlaufzeiten beim Editieren des Shader-Codes zu verbessern.\nSchlie\u00dflich implementierte die Technik schnelle bikubische B-Spline- und Catmull-Rom-Spline-Interpolationsvarianten f\u00fcr Zwei-zu-Vier-Kanal-Texturdaten, weitere Optimierungen der bikubischen Spline-Bewertung, machte einen Planeten-Terrain-Schattenpass und behebt ein Zeitgenauigkeitsproblem in der Wolkenanimation.\nGameplay-Geschichte\nGameplay Story arbeitete weiterhin gr\u00fcndlich an der wichtigen Einf\u00fchrung eines Schiffes zu Beginn des Spiels, und zwei Tage mo-cap wurden im Derby-Studio fertiggestellt.\n\"Es war etwas schwieriger, in einer COVID-sicheren Umgebung zu arbeiten, aber es war toll, nach einer so langen Pause wieder ins Studio zu kommen. -Das Gameplay-Story-Team\nDies hat es dem Team erm\u00f6glicht, einige langj\u00e4hrige Aufgaben zu erledigen, die nicht allein durch Handtasten gel\u00f6st werden konnten.\nGrafiken\nDas Grafikteam konzentrierte sich letzten Monat haupts\u00e4chlich auf den Gen12-Renderer, wobei die Zeit speziell dem Konvertierungsprozess gewidmet wurde, damit der alte Renderer-Code so schnell wie m\u00f6glich veraltet ist. Zurzeit werden verschiedene Systeme konvertiert, darunter Gaswolken-Rendering, Schattenmaskierung und Runtime Environment Probes. Verbesserungen wurden auch an der Rendering-API vorgenommen, um einfacheren und robusteren Clientcode zu erm\u00f6glichen, der weniger anf\u00e4llig f\u00fcr menschliche Fehler ist. Die Arbeit am Vulkan-Backend machte ebenfalls gute Fortschritte. Die Shader wurden ges\u00e4ubert, um alle unn\u00f6tige Abh\u00e4ngigkeit von der CPU hochgeladenen Daten zu entfernen; moderne GPU-Leistung bedeutet, dass es wichtiger ist, die CPU-Arbeit im Renderer und Treiber zu sparen, als ein paar winzige Anweisungen auf der GPU.\nDie Arbeit an den organischen Shadern wurde ebenfalls fortgesetzt, um eine engere Integration mit den Planeten zu erreichen, damit die K\u00fcnstler in der Lage sind, Assets in einer Vielzahl von Biomen zu nutzen und sie automatisch in ihre Umgebung zu integrieren.\n\n\nLevel-Design\nDas Social Design Team arbeitete weiter an Szenen, Benutzbarkeit und NPC-Verhalten. Sie haben zehn Szenen auf das 'Goldstandard'-Niveau gebracht, wo alles wie erwartet im finalen Spiel abl\u00e4uft. Diese Szenen variieren in ihrer Komplexit\u00e4t, um dem Team eine genaue Vorstellung davon zu geben, wie lange es dauern wird, ihre Aufgaben f\u00fcr den Rest des Spiels zu erledigen.\nDas Leveldesign-Team fuhr damit fort, die bodengest\u00fctzten Levels aufzupolieren, wobei der Schwerpunkt weiterhin auf dem KI-Verhalten und den verschiedenen \u00dcberquerungsrouten lag.\nDie Entwicklung von wichtigen Dogfight-Orten wurde fortgesetzt. Dies beinhaltete eine enge Zusammenarbeit mit dem Flug-KI- und dem Kunst-Team f\u00fcr die Unterst\u00fctzung bei Use Cases bzw. Space-Scaping.\nErz\u00e4hlung\nDen ganzen August \u00fcber setzte das Erz\u00e4hlteam die R\u00fcckblicke des letzten Monats fort. Da immer mehr Schaupl\u00e4tze in der Entwicklung voranschreiten, erstellte das Team zus\u00e4tzliche Dokumente zum Geschichtenerz\u00e4hlen der Umgebung, um unerschrockenen Spielern mehr Einblick in die Geschichte, die Geschichte und den Charakter der Umgebungen zu geben.\nAls Teil dieser Durchspielungen begannen sie damit, potenzielle Momente auszurufen, die von zus\u00e4tzlichen Inhalten profitieren k\u00f6nnten, wie z.B. das Ausf\u00fcllen potenzieller Flauten oder das Herausrufen von Spielmechaniken. Nach der Erstellung des Skripts besteht die Hoffnung, Platzhalterversionen des Audios aufzuzeichnen, um sie in das Spiel einzubauen und zu sehen, wie es l\u00e4uft. Diese Vorgehensweise wird es ihnen erm\u00f6glichen, neue Zeilen vor Ort zu testen und sie lange vor der offiziellen Aufnahme zu wiederholen. Sie arbeiteten auch mit dem Audio-Team zusammen, um die Vanduul-Sprache zu entwickeln, was ein tieferes Eintauchen in die Kultur der au\u00dferirdischen Rasse mit sich brachte.\n\n\nQA\nQA unterst\u00fctzte Cinematics weiterhin mit Aufnahmen jedes Levels, um sicherzustellen, dass die Szenen wie beabsichtigt funktionieren und die beabsichtigte Qualit\u00e4t haben. Sie haben auch Testlevel f\u00fcr verschiedene Effekte erstellt, damit diese schneller und effizienter getestet werden k\u00f6nnen.\nBenutzeroberfl\u00e4che (UI)\nDie meisten visuellen Teams haben eingebettete UI-K\u00fcnstler, die alle an einer Vielzahl von kommenden Features gearbeitet haben. F\u00fcr das Actor Feature Team haben die K\u00fcnstler das Personal Inner Though System und das externe Inventar aufpoliert, die beide im PU und SQ42 verwendet werden. Sie begannen auch damit, sich die verschiedenen Schriftarten anzusehen, die im Spiel verwendet werden, mit dem Ziel, sie zu vereinheitlichen und zu aktualisieren.\nDas UI Tech Team arbeitete an der 'Canvas-Slicing'-Technologie, die anderen Teams mehr Freiheit geben wird, 2D-UI zu 3D-R\u00e4umen hinzuzuf\u00fcgen (\u00fcber Building Blocks). Sie begannen auch, sich mit dem Refactoring des Farbsystems zu besch\u00e4ftigen. Das Ziel ist es, den Entwicklern zu helfen, indem man es einfacher macht, die Farben \u00fcber verschiedene UIs mit Hilfe eines Stylesheets anzupassen, anstatt die RGB-Werte in jedem Element anzupassen. Es wird auch erlauben, Vektorgradienten in der UI zu verwenden.\nVFX\nIn enger Zusammenarbeit mit den Design- und Art-Teams unterst\u00fctzte VFX Tech Art weiterhin Gaswolken, was sich jetzt haupts\u00e4chlich in der Bugfixing-Phase befindet. Au\u00dferdem haben sie den Prozess zur Erstellung von Textursequenzen weiter verbessert und einen schnelleren und strafferen Arbeitsablauf als den jetzigen (der mehrere verschiedene Softwarepakete beinhaltet) geschaffen. Dies ist wichtig, um den K\u00fcnstlern die M\u00f6glichkeit zu geben, mit fl\u00fcssigen Sims inkrementeller zu arbeiten (und sie als gebackene Textursequenzen zu exportieren), was letztendlich zu qualitativ hochwertigeren Explosionen, Rauch und Feuereffekten f\u00fchren wird. WIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT...","zh_CN":"This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We\u2019re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.\nAttention Recruits,\n\nWhat you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).\n\nAs a result of our latest intel reports, we\u2019ve learned about work towards creating the Xi\u2019an race, responsive music to dynamic situations, and further work on the Vanduul combat AI and animation.\nThe information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.\n\nUEE Naval High Command AI (Combat)\nThough a significant portion of the AI Team\u2019s work is relevant for both SQ42 and the PU, some ongoing tasks are exclusive to the single-player campaign. This includes continued iterations on Vanduul melee behavior, which now automatically evaluates the suitability of specific special actions (dodging, jump attacks, melee attacks, etc.).\n\nRegarding melee attacks, damage is now triggered by collision with the weapon\u2019s blade to enable timing and assets to be tweaked and adjusted. The Vanduul lance has several states that can be utilized by the behavior, including extending it when preparing for melee attacks or keeping it collapsed when firing or aiming. These weapon state modifications are triggered by the behavior based on general context. Vanduul health was also further developed to reflect the different skeleton and activate the correct damage when it receives hits to different areas.\n\n\n\nAI (Social)\nFor social AI, the recently devised bridge crew behavior now uses operator seat functionalities. The team are currently using this scenario to extend the seated actor state to support some usable functionalities. For example, they have extended the idle\/fidget system on top of operator seats to allow the animators more freedom to bring life to seated scenarios.\n\nSQ42-specific behaviors and functionalities were set up for vendor characters as well. Work also started on usables for the mess hall that will allow NPCs to collect and consume food systemically. When complete, NPCs will be able to collect cutlery and plates, serve themselves food, and then occupy seats to eat and drink.\n\n\n\nAnimation\nAnimation spent the month working on object and grenade throwing, knockdowns and knockbacks, and several new weapons. They further developed the weapons master, capital ship seat interaction, the bartender, and AI ship inspections. They also made great inroads into the NPC ammo retrieval mentioned last month, Vanduul combat, and female player faces and emotes. Interrupts were added to several chapters as part of ongoing scene work too.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe Character Team revisited a few key heads, cleaning up skin textures, refining hair, and are currently working with tech animation and cinematics to address facial animations. Some of these revisions may impact other departments, so all changes are modular and easy to roll back. This work will inform the process of reviewing other SQ42 characters and updates in the future.\n\nAliens-wise, the character artists finished modeling and texturing the Vanduul armor and passed it to the tech artists for rigging.\n\n\u201cSo far work on the Vanduul looks fantastic and we are very excited about it.\u201d -The Character Team\n\nThey also began coordinating with Tech Animation on the Xi\u2019an race, ironing out major anatomy and animation issues.\n\nArt (Weapons)\nWeapon Art\u2019s SQ42 focus throughout August was on the Vanduul lance, which consisted of looking at the weapon\u2019s materials. A new concept for a medical device used in some of the larger ships was completed too.\n\nAudio\nAugust saw a refactor to the footsteps system to improve the audio on different surfaces, making it more responsive to player movement. They\u2019re also improving the granularity and structure of the music system to improve transitions between music content based on what\u2019s happening in a gameplay context.\n\nTime was dedicated to the Lombard effect; a newly developed system detects louder volumes and large amounts of noise in-game and makes dialogue louder automatically so that players don\u2019t need to do it manually. Audio also supported the VFX Team on triggering sounds when particles are generated on the GPU. Currently, if a particle is generated on the GPU, audio cannot efficiently play or sync. This ongoing work will remedy that.\n\n\n\nCinematics\nAugust saw work continue on the character lighting rig used by scenes that don\u2019t require a full manual pass, with more rules defined and edge cases identified. They also began investigating how the automatic depth-of-field focus system chooses which character is of interest during conversations. For filmic scenes (where the cinematic designer directs the camera), focus is selected and controlled manually. However, conversational scenes (where the player can freely roam around) can move out of focus if the player looks past them. Careful consideration is taken to ensure this doesn\u2019t happen due to another character being classed as a \u2018higher priority.\u2019\n\nSeveral scenes moved past the \u2018implementation complete\u2019 phase and into production. Once production is complete, scenes are fully playable and deemed almost shippable, though a final pass is required to tweak and finalize lighting, VFX, UI, and animation.\n\nAttention was also given to sequences that play out if the player reaches a \u2018game over\u2019 condition due to behavior not befitting a UEE naval officer.\n\nEngineering\nIn August, the Engineering Team added support for SDF-based local physics grids and SDF sets, interior grid markup for SDFs in the resource compiler, and g-force calculation for all actor entities. They also added a separate g-force collision calculation to the actor entity, new visualization modes to help development, and \u2018inspect\u2019 and \u2018modify\u2019 properties of static and rigid entities. The option to export bit-voxel geometry via the mesh setup and save it inside CGF was added too.\n\nOptimization-wise, they worked on multi-threaded RC bit-voxel baking, which saves a few hundred bytes on every CPhysicalEntity instance and improves cache locality by reordering members. They also saved four bytes per physical-placeholder instance, disabled debug validation in the final release, moved large geometry into a dedicated bucket during grid population, improved bit-voxel tree-box calculation by using blocks instead of individual voxels, and optimized tree traversals in grid checks\n\nThe Systems Team added an API to the crash handler that allows the dumping of cigprofile data. This will help them analyze what the system was doing shortly before running into a deadlock and watch dog time out and log memory usage at the time of the crash.\n\nDeep analysis was done to resolve the disparity between tracked and system-reported memory use. Several improvements were made on both Windows and Linux to correctly track data moving forward, including low level allocator reserved pages and third-party allocations. They continued looking into the SIMD and memory layout code for zone partitions, implemented faster execution for scoped FPE enable and disable by eliminating linear search through all registered threads, and fixed several issues with ISPC integration. They also reduced the memory use of P4K system and changed the MemoryAddressRange to use CIG API instead of native OS API for memory tracking.\n\nWork on the Gen12 renderer continued, with the team adding support for instancing and a \u2018keep alive\u2019 list so that GPUDevice objects are kept active until the end of a frame. Several refactors and optimizations were made too.\n\nCleanup in the shader system and renderer for thread safety continued, as did G12 brush rendering. They also started to look into DX11.1 API support (Windows 8.1 and up) for binding CBs using offsets for intermediate performance improvements until Vulkan ships. They also added support for custom texture views when using pass resources.\n\nVolumetric fog to PassResource was ported to prevent the shader parser from stripping global symbols. Some severe Alpha 3.10 GPU memory leaks were fixed too.\n\nFor planet atmosphere unified raymarching, the team established a general atmosphere context to avoid accessing resources globally. This make it easier and safer to reuse shared code. All related shader code was refactored too. For temporal reprojection, they implemented options for: neighborhood clipping, refining color bbox using neighborhood variance, compression (based on scene luminance), and color space conversion of color data for tighter bbox to reduce errors introduce by clipping and clamping. The depth dilation code was futher developed too.\n\nR&D into volumetric clouds continued and detailed plans for experiments and next steps were drafted. The initial set up for the volumetric cloud render environment was completed, code was restructured to allow it to be shared between planet atmosphere and volumetric cloud shaders, and the initial pass and injection of cloud raymarch results into the unified atmosphere raymarcher was implemented. The team made performance improvements to the terrain displacement mapping and optimized the shader parser to improve turnaround times when editing shader code.\n\nFinally, Engineering implemented fast bicubic b-spline and Catmull Rom spline interpolation variants for two-to-four channel texture data, further bi-cubic spline evaluation optimizations, made a planet terrain shadow pass, and fixed time precision issue in cloud animation.\n\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story continued to work thorough the key introduction of a ship early in the game, and two days of mo-cap was completed in the Derby studio.\n\n\u201cIt was a little more challenging to work in a COVID-safe environment, but it was great to get back into the studio after such a long hiatus.\u201d -The Gameplay Story Team\n\nThis has enabled the team to complete some long-standing tasks that could not be addressed through hand-keying alone.\n\nGraphics\nThe Graphics Team predominantly focused on the Gen12 renderer last month, with time dedicated spcifically to the conversion process so that the old renderer code can be deprecated as quickly as possible. Various systems are currently being converted, including gas cloud rendering, shadow masking, and run-time environment probes. Improvements were also made to the rendering API to allow simpler and more robust client code that\u2019s less prone to human error. Work on the Vulkan backend made good progress too. The shaders were cleaned up to remove all unnecessary reliance on CPU uploaded data; modern GPU performance means it\u2019s more important to save the CPU work in the renderer and driver than a few tiny instructions on the GPU.\n\nWork on the organic shader continued too, bringing tighter integration with the planets to enable the artists to use assets in a variety of biomes and have them automatically integrate into their surroundings.\n\n\n\nLevel Design\nThe Social Design Team continued to work on scenes, usables, and NPC behaviors. They moved ten scenes to the \u2018gold standard\u2019 level, where everything plays out as expected in the final game. These scenes vary in complexity to give the team an accurate representation of how long it will take to complete their tasks for the rest of the game.\n\nThe Level Design Team continued to polish the ground-based levels while maintaining a strong focus on AI behaviors and multiple traversal routes.\n\nThe development of important dogfight locations continued. This involved working closely with the Flight AI and Art teams for support on use cases and space-scaping respectively.\n\nNarrative\nThroughout August, the Narrative Team continued with the review sessions detailed last month. As more locations progress in development, the team generated additional environmental storytelling documents to give intrepid players more insight into the story, history, and character of the environments.\n\nAs part of these playthroughs, they started to call out potential moments that could benefit from additional content, such as filling in potential lulls or calling out gameplay mechanics. After scripting, the hope is to record placeholder versions of the audio to block into the game and see how it plays. This approach will allow them to field-test new lines in situ and iterate on them long before official capture. They also worked alongside the Audio Team to develop the Vanduul language, which involved a deeper dive into the alien race\u2019s culture.\n\n\n\nQA\nQA continued to support Cinematics with recordings of each level to ensure scenes are working as intended and are of the intended quality. They also created test levels for different effects to enable them to be tested more quickly and efficiently.\n\nUser Interface (UI)\nMost visual teams have embedded UI artists, all of who have been working on a variety of upcoming features. For the Actor Feature Team, the artists polished the Personal Inner Though system and external inventory, both of which will be used in the PU and SQ42. They also began looking at the various fonts used throughout the game with the goal of unifying and updating them.\n\nThe UI Tech Team worked on \u2018canvas-slicing\u2019 tech, which will give other teams more freedom to add 2D UI to 3D spaces (via Building Blocks). They also began looking into refactoring the color system. The aim is to aid developers by making it easier to adjust colors across various UIs using a stylesheet rather than adjusting RGB values in each element. It will also allow vector gradients to be used in UI.\n\nVFX\nWorking closely with the Design and Art teams, VFX Tech Art continued to support gas clouds, which is predominately now in the bug-fixing phase. They also continued to improve the texture sequence creation process, creating a faster, more streamlined workflow than the current one (which involves several different software packages). This is important to allow the artists to be more incremental with fluid sims (and exporting them as baked texture sequences), which will ultimately lead to higher-quality explosions, smokes, and fire effects. WE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":12,"created_at":"2020-09-09T00:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"5 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 20:52:44","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":17758,"next_id":17760}}