{"data":{"id":17829,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: September 2020","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/17829-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-September-2020","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/17829","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/17829","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\nThanks to the work of dedicated field agents and operatives, we\u2019ve uncovered information on Vanduul combat at varying distances, creating dynamic lighting to cinematic moments, and work continues on bringing the Xi\u2019an race to life.\n\nThe information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.\n\nUEE Naval High Command AI (Combat)\nCharacter Combat kick off the report with their ongoing work on Vanduul and human combat. Vanduul focus was on two of the alien race\u2019s main combat tactics: melee and ranged combat. Melee utilizes the \u2018special attack\u2019 functionality mentioned last month, which allows AI to cache and evaluate the environment to determine which (if any) unique attack is best. Dodging or performing a normal melee attack requires the AI to evaluate how much space is available and decide which animation is best suited. Currently, the team are evaluating which melee attacks to include, with some using body attacks like front kicks or the Vanduul spear. When implemented, the behavior will evaluate which combination of attacks is best for the given scenario. For example, if they want the AI to move back a specific distance from the player and then perform a lance attack, they could create space with a front kick. For ranged attacks, the team ensured the Vanduul can correctly shoot-to-target from any position. This involved setting up \u2018aim-poses\u2019 and fire modes for the Vanduul lance.\n\nRegarding realistic human combat, progress was made on accurate ammunition handling. As NPCs won\u2019t have infinite ammo, the behaviors need to account for resources and decide when to attempt to procure more. However, NPCs can deplete their stocks and, should they not have an appropriate melee weapon or the specific set of traits and skills to fight unarmed, may decide that surrender is the best option. The first pass was made, with the team preparing several animation options and embedding surrender in various behaviors. They also added better transitions when exiting and staying in cover under certain conditions.\n\nVisual perception parameters and debug draw were tweaked to allow the designers to better iterate on the values that the AI use to perceive and understand enemies from different distances (and whether the character is in the primary or secondary field-of-view).\n\n\n\nAI (General)\nLast month, the AI Team fixed more issues with characters standing on top of usables, a lot of which were related to the object container failing to restore characters to the right state. The long-term plan is to make extensive use of services to populate the environment and simulate areas when players are not around. This means a lot of these issues will become irrelevant due to the systems being used in a slightly different way.\n\n\n\nAI (Social)\nThe Social AI Team focused on several NPC activities and states, including engineer and off-duty. These will be shared between the PU and Squadron 42 and are being designed in a way that will work in any dynamic environment. They\u2019re currently creating the decision-making flow and identifying which usables should be created and how they should expose their functionalities. They will then iterate on the behavior implementation and usable data definition. For example, for the engineer, they are currently focusing on the repair, inspect, and maintenance behaviors. They also continued to work on the mess hall scenario detailed last month. The off-duty behavior currently encapsulates a set of activities that NPCs can do when nothing specific is assigned to them. These \u2018leisure\u2019 sub-activities include visiting their bunk, searching for arcade machines to play, taking a walk, and so on. The idea is to allow the state of an actor and their traits to drive what an NPC likes to do and dynamically use the environment to find what best fits its interests.\n\nSpecifically for SQ42, the team continued to work on vendor behaviors and functionalities. They extended some of the vendor functionalities to use \u2018scooching\u2019 animations to drive specific actor performances into the systemic vendor behavior. They also continued to develop the chow-line sequence mentioned last month that enable NPCs to collect cutlery, plates, and warm-up food.\n\n\n\nAnimation\nSeptember saw the Animation Team working on knockdowns and knockbacks, zero-G movement pre-vis, object push\/pull, grenade throwing, Vanduul combat melee and locomotion, AI reloading, the chowline, engineer wall panels, sinks, and armories. They also began looking into mounted guns, a new takedown, and a new Gemini sniper rifle. On the Facial side, work progressed with the female player character, which will be finished this month. A host of other character improvements were made too. They also continued to burndown the motion-capture backlog and supported the Gameplay Story Team.\n\n\n\nArt (Characters)\nCharacter Art\u2019s major focus last month was the continuing updates to major campaign characters. For example, Morrow went through major revisions that the team are excited about and Vallon\u2019s hair was further iterated on. During the process, they noted issues with old character shaders and are currently awaiting graphics support to resolve and upgrade them. Major progress was made on the alien characters too. The Xi\u2019an body is in the final stages and is almost ready for rigging. The team are currently in the process of rigging a highly complex Vanduul armor that will look incredible in motion. Concept revisions were also made to some naval uniforms and a trench coat was created that will need cloth simulation from the Physics Team to function as intended.\n\n\n\nArt (Weapons)\nWeapons Art moved the Vanduul lance through the final-art phase, meaning the weapon is nearing completion. A texture revamp is also under way.\n\nCinematics\nWork on the automatic lighting rig is nearing completion; it\u2019s now active in game builds and almost in a release-ready state. The automatic lighting rig is essentially three auto-generated lights around characters used when the player is close. The rig consists of a key, fill, and rim light and parses lights in the environment to figure out what color each should be. It also tries to find the best quadrant around a character to fade the lights in\/out and gently updates the rig when the player moves in\/out of range. The rig has several active rules to help it get the best results and is mainly used to help light characters in potentially dark corridors or when the player interacts with them in environments not ideally lit for character scenes. If they know the location of a scene, such as a briefing room or the captain\u2019s chair of the Idris, the team still manually place lighting rigs. However, they found the auto rig to be a useful boost in these situations as well. The team also had to make the rig work with sudden camera cuts and eliminate a one-frame lag due to calculations in TrackView. Cinematics spent part of the month preparing to shoot new motion-capture. They now have a working set of OptiTrack cameras in the Frankfurt studio that they use to shoot small scenes or pickups as needed. This will help with the occasional cinematic scene that requires minor adjustments to half-steps or turns, or minor additions such as a leaning pose against a wall. These tweaks are usually required due to an environmental change or because the state machine requires certain edits.\n\nThe animators also polished and pushed scenes through their respective passes, including a set in the brig and Bishop\u2019s war speech to the UEE Senate.\n\n\n\nEngineering\nLast month\u2019s physics optimizations included improving the intersection routines for SDF baking and adding further culling to AABB tree traversal. The team added g-force calculation to all rigid entities and the ability to add the mass of rigids inside the grid host mass. They gave initial support to adaptive signed-distance-fields (SDF), added exterior shadow geometry (which enables boundary entities within the hosted zone in interior OCs), and now properly support all primitive physics types for interior grids. They also added external impulses to \u2018pe_status_dynamics\u2019 and created a grid without explicit geometry. Support was provided for multiple external accelerations too. For the ongoing G12 renderer work, the team supported the optional execution of stages, added debug names to all constant buffers (and made it mandatory), and undertook custom material CB and layer-blend support. Legacy pipeline resets were removed from the begin\/end render pass to the locations of the legacy Gen12 switch, which currently saves up to 2000 API calls.\n\nEngineering merged the deferred and deferred-display-mapped pipelines, implemented the TSAA stage, and promoted the following stages to \u2018stable:\u2019 Tonemapping, DepthOfField, MotionBlur, Optics, Colorgrading, OpticsExposure. They removed save\/load resource-binding code on the begin\/end render pass, saving around 500 API calls per-frame. Parameterized common depth functions were also added so they don\u2019t access global constants, as was depth down-sampling.\n\nWork on the atmosphere, clouds, and unified raymarcher continued in earnest, which led to cloud data that now properly interacts with the atmosphere segment it injects into (via corrected luminance integration and transmittance evaluation). The team added support for the injection of (existing) spherical clouds into the unified atmospheric raymarcher, now using uniformly distributed sample locations when integrating over hemispheres. This significantly improves LUT integration results, removes several artifacts, and converges much quicker.\n\nA new atmospheric multi-scatter LUT was added that supports infinite scattering orders, while the current multi-scatter LUT was rebalanced due to excessive brightness. The team also refined soft-edge computation for spherical clouds to reduce aliasing and improved the visible sun-disc evaluation when computing sunlight. This evaluation is fully integrated into the wider atmospheric lighting system and impacts direct and indirect lighting. An imbalance of computed brightness between regular and injection passes was completed; now clouds appear with consistent brightness in both regular atmospheres and via unified raymarching. The team provided support for separate Rayleigh and Mie inscatter LUTs in the current atmospheric code path too, which fixes several false color artifacts. The new LUT parameterization better supports high atmospheres and, among other things, fixes the very prominent halo around the silhouette of a planet\u2019s dark side.\n\nThe team sped up and unified the optical depth pre-computations in the absorption layers of atmospheres. Among other things, this allows them to add an ozone layer to Earth-like planets, which will emphasize blue skies and enable correct shading during twilight. It also supports the physically plausible fine-tuning of atmospheres. They now use solar irradiance throughout the evaluation of atmospheric lighting to give a much-improved evaluation of sun radiance for points outside of planetary atmospheres. This enables twilight casting, atmospheric scattering, and allows the sun\u2019s angular radius to project objects onto a planet\u2019s penumbra region.\n\nGeneral system work involved several fixes to ISPC integration (a special compiler that generates highly optimized SSE code for heavy duty jobs running on CPUs). The team implemented support for static stationary zone groups and concave geometries as vis areas and fixed the method they find vis areas and portals by name.\n\n\n\nFeatures\nThe SQ42 Feature Team continued to support dynamic lighting, working with the Cinematics Team to refine rig creation and optimize the algorithm that determines the color and strength of the lights. For example, before creating a light, they perform a collision check to ensure it won\u2019t be placed behind geometry and shine through it. They also supported the designers with \u2018walk and talk.\u2019 This involved refining the player\/NPC speed-match feature and polishing the display screen functionality. Work also started on getting all levels working correctly with Object Container Streaming, which is required for seamless loading throughout the entire game.\n\nThe Actor Team started work on a new co-operative locomotion feature, which enables the player to grab another movable prop and move around with it; the example use-case is a wheeled trolley. The prop is moved by the character applying force, so it reacts in a highly realistic manner and responds to factors like mass and the terrain. They also continued to improve the throw mechanic, adding support for underhand throwing.\n\n\n\nGameplay Story\nSeptember was a productive month for the Gameplay Story Team who progressed with an important ship tour that is now scheduled for completion in October. They began working on another important \u2018walk and talk\u2019 from chapter 5 and continued to support Design with various minor updates to scenes across chapter 4. Progress was also made on several large-scale scenes from chapters 11 and 13, where the focus is on combat and traversal. Lastly for Gameplay Story, they began prototyping additional scenes and vignettes for chapter 1.\n\nGraphics\nThe Graphics Team split their time last month between work on the new Gen12 renderer, general features, and bug fixing. Gen12 tasks included converting the game\u2019s post-effects manager, which handles all \u2018miscellaneous\u2019 effects such as blurred vision and blackouts. The Gen12 core infrastructure was further developed to be compatible with the configurable graphics pipelines and the constant shader buffers were further polished. The remainder of the Graphics Team\u2019s time was spent on the render-to-texture system, with the hookup to the texture-streaming system now complete. This means they can now run-time-generate as many textures as they like and automatically load-balance the memory with the rest of the textures in-game. The organic shader work was also completed.\n\n\n\nLevel Design\nThe Level Design Team kicked off the month bringing four new team members up to speed with the tools and pipelines. They\u2019re currently forging ahead on various FPS spaces, with a focus on locking down some of the sub-routes so they can be passed over for final art. The Space\/Dogfight Team continued with space-scaping and creating general points of interest. They also supported co-operative AI and NPC behaviors around the new additions.\n\nTasks were completed on various NPC scenes, usables, and behaviors, with Social Design working closely with AI and Animation to ensure everything is as seamless as possible.\n\n\n\nNarrative\nLast month, the Vanduul and their culture became one of the main focuses for the Narrative Team. This included ongoing work with the Audio Team to brainstorm the unique sounds of the alien race, consulting on how to make their combat behaviors tie in further with their lore and unique physiology, and diving deeper into the backstories of some of the specific Vanduul that players may encounter. In addition, Narrative continued their work on polishing the narrative flow of the game as Design continues to finalize traversal routes. This includes highlighting possible narrative dressing to reward players who take the time to explore levels thoroughly along with scripting potential lines that might need to be recorded in the future.\n\nProps\nThe Props Team supported SQ42 with dressing assets for Aciedo. A pass on medical props requested by the Gameplay Story Team was completed and support was given to Social AI on the chowline and master-at-arms character.\n\nQA\nCinematics continued to rely on QA for recordings of each of SQ42\u2019s levels to help them ensure scenes are working and are of the expected quality. They also continued to reproduce issues found in tools used by the Cinematics Team, such as TrackView and the batch renderer.\n\nTech Animation\nAlongside training new additions to the team, Tech Animation worked to complete the in-house facial rig and tool suite to enable the continued creation of new heads. This precedes the wider push to overhaul the entire head creation pipeline, with the view to future-proofing it for the next few years. The ongoing initiative to create new tools to help implement animations with a graphical user interface continued.\n\n\u201cThe UI is looking great and we\u2019re currently writing the technical implementation that will drive the link into our current animation toolset.\u201d Tech Animation Team\n\nThey were also heavily involved in the creation of Vanduul animation assets and supported the Art Team in developing the Xi\u2019an.\n\nVFX\nSeptember saw VFX Tech Art complete their texture-sequence creation process, including running a workshop for the wider VFX Team. They also resumed their investigations into the destruction pipeline, mostly in preparation for October\u2019s work, which features a couple of key destruction sequences. The VFX and SQ42 artists worked closely on ways to \u201cmake empty space interesting.\u201d Together, they achieved great results using meshes with a transparent VFX shader spawned via the particle system. While they need to keep a close eye on performance (overdraw in particular), this is a promising setup that adds interesting layers of parallax while the player traverses space.\n\nWE\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\nDank der Arbeit von engagierten Feldagenten und Agenten haben wir Informationen \u00fcber Vanduul-K\u00e4mpfe in verschiedenen Entfernungen aufgedeckt und dynamische Beleuchtung f\u00fcr filmische Momente geschaffen, und die Arbeit geht weiter, um die Rasse der Xi'an zum Leben zu erwecken.\n\nDie in dieser Mitteilung enthaltenen Informationen sind \u00e4u\u00dferst sensibel und es ist von gr\u00f6\u00dfter Wichtigkeit, dass sie nicht in die falschen H\u00e4nde geraten. S\u00e4ubere alle Aufzeichnungen nach dem Lesen.\n\nUEE Marine-Oberkommando\n\nKI (Kampf)\n\nCharacter Combat geben den Startschuss f\u00fcr den Bericht mit ihrer laufenden Arbeit \u00fcber Vanduul und den Kampf der Menschen. Der Schwerpunkt von Vanduul lag auf zwei der wichtigsten Kampftaktiken der au\u00dferirdischen Rasse: Nahkampf und Fernkampf. Nahkampf nutzt die im letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnte 'Spezialangriff'-Funktionalit\u00e4t, die es der KI erm\u00f6glicht, die Umgebung zwischenzuspeichern und auszuwerten, um zu bestimmen, welcher (wenn \u00fcberhaupt) einzigartige Angriff am besten ist. Um auszuweichen oder einen normalen Nahkampfangriff durchzuf\u00fchren, muss die KI absch\u00e4tzen, wie viel Platz zur Verf\u00fcgung steht und entscheiden, welche Animation am besten geeignet ist. Zurzeit evaluiert das Team, welche Nahkampfangriffe enthalten sein sollten, wobei einige K\u00f6rperangriffe wie Frontkicks oder der Vanduul-Speer verwendet werden. Wenn das Verhalten implementiert ist, wird bewertet, welche Kombination von Angriffen f\u00fcr das gegebene Szenario am besten geeignet ist. Wenn sie zum Beispiel wollen, dass sich die KI eine bestimmte Distanz vom Spieler zur\u00fcckzieht und dann einen Lanzenangriff ausf\u00fchrt, k\u00f6nnten sie mit einem Frontalstoss Raum schaffen. Bei Distanzangriffen stellte das Team sicher, dass der Vanduul aus jeder Position korrekt auf das Ziel schie\u00dfen kann. Dies beinhaltete das Einrichten von 'Ziel-Posen' und Feuer-Modi f\u00fcr die Vanduul-Lanze.\n\nWas den realistischen Kampf der Menschen betrifft, wurden Fortschritte bei der pr\u00e4zisen Handhabung der Munition gemacht. Da die NSCs nicht unendlich viel Munition haben werden, m\u00fcssen die Verhaltensweisen die Ressourcen ber\u00fccksichtigen und entscheiden, wann sie versuchen, mehr zu beschaffen. NSCs k\u00f6nnen jedoch ihre Vorr\u00e4te aufbrauchen und, sollten sie keine geeignete Nahkampfwaffe oder die spezifischen Eigenschaften und Fertigkeiten f\u00fcr den unbewaffneten Kampf besitzen, entscheiden, dass die Kapitulation die beste Option ist. Der erste Durchgang wurde gemacht, wobei das Team mehrere Animationsoptionen vorbereitet und die Kapitulation in verschiedene Verhaltensweisen eingebettet hat. Au\u00dferdem wurden bessere \u00dcberg\u00e4nge beim Verlassen und beim Verbleiben in Deckung unter bestimmten Bedingungen hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nDie visuellen Wahrnehmungsparameter und das Debug-Draw wurden optimiert, damit die Designer die Werte, die die KI verwendet, um Feinde aus verschiedenen Entfernungen wahrzunehmen und zu verstehen (und ob sich der Charakter im prim\u00e4ren oder sekund\u00e4ren Sichtfeld befindet), besser nachvollziehen k\u00f6nnen.\n\n\nKI (Allgemein)\nLetzten Monat hat das KI-Team weitere Probleme mit Charakteren behoben, die auf benutzbaren Objekten standen, wobei viele davon damit zusammenhingen, dass der Objektcontainer die Charaktere nicht wieder in den richtigen Zustand versetzen konnte. Der langfristige Plan ist es, die Dienste ausgiebig zu nutzen, um die Umgebung zu bev\u00f6lkern und Gebiete zu simulieren, wenn Spieler nicht in der N\u00e4he sind. Das bedeutet, dass viele dieser Probleme irrelevant werden, da die Systeme auf eine etwas andere Art und Weise genutzt werden.\n\n\nKI (sozial)\nDas soziale KI-Team konzentrierte sich auf verschiedene NPC-Aktivit\u00e4ten und Zust\u00e4nde, einschlie\u00dflich Ingenieur und au\u00dferdienstlich. Diese werden zwischen der PU und Squadron 42 geteilt und werden so gestaltet, dass sie in jeder dynamischen Umgebung funktionieren. Sie sind gerade dabei, den Entscheidungsfluss zu erstellen und zu identifizieren, welche Nutzbarkeiten erstellt werden sollen und wie sie ihre Funktionalit\u00e4ten offenlegen sollen. Dann werden sie sich \u00fcber die Verhaltensimplementierung und die Definition der benutzbaren Daten Gedanken machen. Zum Beispiel konzentrieren sie sich derzeit f\u00fcr den Ingenieur auf das Verhalten bei Reparaturen, Inspektionen und Wartungsarbeiten. Au\u00dferdem arbeiten sie weiter an dem Messehallen-Szenario, das sie letzten Monat detailliert ausgearbeitet haben. Das dienstfreie Verhalten umfasst derzeit eine Reihe von Aktivit\u00e4ten, die NSCs ausf\u00fchren k\u00f6nnen, wenn ihnen nichts Spezielles zugewiesen ist. Zu diesen 'Freizeit'-Unteraktivit\u00e4ten geh\u00f6ren der Besuch ihrer Koje, die Suche nach Spielautomaten zum Spielen, Spazierg\u00e4nge und so weiter. Die Idee ist es, dem Zustand eines Akteurs und seinen Eigenschaften zu erlauben, das zu steuern, was ein NSC gerne tut und die Umgebung dynamisch zu nutzen, um das zu finden, was am besten zu seinen Interessen passt.\n\nSpeziell f\u00fcr SQ42 hat das Team weiter an den Verhaltensweisen und Funktionalit\u00e4ten der Anbieter gearbeitet. Sie erweiterten einige der Anbieterfunktionalit\u00e4ten, um 'Scooching'-Animationen zu verwenden, um spezifische Schauspielerleistungen in das systemische Anbieterverhalten zu bringen. Au\u00dferdem haben sie die im letzten Monat erw\u00e4hnte Chow-Line-Sequenz weiterentwickelt, die es den NSCs erm\u00f6glicht, Besteck und Teller einzusammeln und Essen aufzuw\u00e4rmen.\n\n\nAnimation\nIm September arbeitete das Animationsteam an Knockdowns und R\u00fcckschl\u00e4gen, Zero-G-Bewegung vor dem Spiel, Objekt Push\/Pull, Granatenwerfen, Vanduul-Kampfnahkampf und Fortbewegung, KI-Wiederaufladung, der Chowline, Ingenieur-Wandtafeln, Sp\u00fclbecken und R\u00fcstungen. Sie begannen sich auch mit berittenen Waffen, einem neuen Takedown und einem neuen Gemini-Scharfsch\u00fctzengewehr zu besch\u00e4ftigen. Auf der Gesichtsseite ging die Arbeit an der weiblichen Spielerfigur voran, die diesen Monat abgeschlossen sein wird. Eine Menge anderer Charakterverbesserungen wurden auch gemacht. Au\u00dferdem wurde der R\u00fcckstand bei den Motion-Captures weiter abgebrannt und das Gameplay-Story-Team unterst\u00fctzt.\n\n\nKunst (Charaktere)\nDas Hauptaugenmerk von Character Art lag letzten Monat auf den fortlaufenden Updates der wichtigsten Kampagnencharaktere. Zum Beispiel hat Morrow gro\u00dfe \u00dcberarbeitungen durchgemacht, von denen das Team begeistert ist und Vallons Haare wurden weiter iteriert. W\u00e4hrend des Prozesses stellten sie Probleme mit alten Charaktershadern fest und warten derzeit auf Grafikunterst\u00fctzung, um diese zu beheben und zu aktualisieren. Auch bei den au\u00dferirdischen Charakteren wurden gro\u00dfe Fortschritte gemacht. Der Xi'an-K\u00f6rper befindet sich in der Endphase und ist fast bereit f\u00fcr das Rigging. Das Team ist gerade dabei, eine hochkomplexe Vanduul-R\u00fcstung zu bauen, die in Bewegung unglaublich aussehen wird. Auch einige Marineuniformen wurden konzeptionell \u00fcberarbeitet und ein Trenchcoat wurde erstellt, der eine Stoffsimulation des Physik-Teams ben\u00f6tigt, um wie vorgesehen zu funktionieren.\n\n\nKunst (Waffen)\nWeapons Art hat die Vanduul-Lanze durch die finale Kunstphase gebracht, was bedeutet, dass die Waffe kurz vor der Fertigstellung steht. Eine \u00dcberarbeitung der Textur ist ebenfalls im Gange.\nFilmkunst\nDie Arbeiten an der automatischen Beleuchtungsanlage stehen kurz vor dem Abschluss; sie ist jetzt in den Spiel-Builds aktiv und fast in einem ver\u00f6ffentlichungsreifen Zustand. Die automatische Beleuchtungsanlage besteht im Wesentlichen aus drei automatisch generierten Lichtern um die Charaktere herum, die verwendet werden, wenn der Spieler in der N\u00e4he ist. Das Rig besteht aus einem Schl\u00fcssel-, F\u00fcll- und Randlicht und analysiert die Lichter in der Umgebung, um herauszufinden, welche Farbe jedes einzelne haben sollte. Es versucht auch, den besten Quadranten um einen Charakter zu finden, um die Lichter ein- und auszublenden, und aktualisiert das Rig, wenn der Spieler sich in\/aus der Reichweite bewegt. Das Rig hat mehrere aktive Regeln, die ihm dabei helfen, die besten Ergebnisse zu erzielen, und wird haupts\u00e4chlich verwendet, um Charaktere in potenziell dunklen Korridoren aufzuhellen oder wenn der Spieler mit ihnen in Umgebungen interagiert, die f\u00fcr Charakterszenen nicht ideal beleuchtet sind. Wenn sie den Ort einer Szene kennen, wie z.B. einen Besprechungsraum oder den Kapit\u00e4nsstuhl des Idris, platziert das Team die Beleuchtungsriggs immer noch manuell. Sie fanden jedoch, dass das automatische Rigg auch in diesen Situationen ein n\u00fctzliches Hilfsmittel ist. Das Team musste das Rigg auch mit pl\u00f6tzlichen Kameraeinschnitten zum Laufen bringen und eine Verz\u00f6gerung von einem Bild aufgrund von Berechnungen in TrackView eliminieren. Cinematics verbrachte einen Teil des Monats mit den Vorbereitungen f\u00fcr neue Motion-Capture-Aufnahmen. Jetzt haben sie ein funktionierendes Set von OptiTrack-Kameras im Frankfurter Studio, mit denen sie je nach Bedarf kleine Szenen oder Pickups drehen k\u00f6nnen. Dies wird bei gelegentlichen Filmszenen helfen, bei denen kleinere Anpassungen an Halbtonschritten oder Drehungen oder kleinere Erg\u00e4nzungen wie eine an die Wand gelehnte Pose erforderlich sind. Diese Anpassungen sind in der Regel erforderlich, weil sich die Umgebung ge\u00e4ndert hat oder weil der Zustandsautomat bestimmte Bearbeitungen erfordert.\n\nDie Animatoren polierten und schoben auch Szenen durch ihre jeweiligen P\u00e4sse, darunter ein Set in der Brigg und die Kriegsrede des Bischofs vor dem Senat der UEE.\n\n\nTechnik\nDie Physik-Optimierungen des letzten Monats beinhalteten die Verbesserung der Schnittpunkt-Routinen f\u00fcr das SDF-Backen und das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von weiterem Culling zur AABB-Baumdurchquerung. Das Team f\u00fcgte eine G-Kraft-Berechnung f\u00fcr alle starren Entit\u00e4ten hinzu und die M\u00f6glichkeit, die Masse der Rigids innerhalb der Grid-Host-Masse hinzuzuf\u00fcgen. Sie gaben anf\u00e4nglich Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr adaptive signed-distance-fields (SDF), f\u00fcgten \u00e4u\u00dfere Schattengeometrie hinzu (was Boundary Entities innerhalb der gehosteten Zone in inneren OCs erm\u00f6glicht), und unterst\u00fctzen nun alle primitiven Physiktypen f\u00fcr innere Grids korrekt. Sie haben auch externe Impulse zu 'pe_status_dynamics' hinzugef\u00fcgt und ein Grid ohne explizite Geometrie erstellt. Es wurde auch Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr mehrere externe Beschleunigungen bereitgestellt. F\u00fcr die laufende Arbeit am G12-Renderer unterst\u00fctzte das Team die optionale Ausf\u00fchrung von Stages, f\u00fcgte Debug-Namen zu allen konstanten Puffern hinzu (und machte es zur Pflicht), und \u00fcbernahm die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr benutzerdefiniertes Material CB und Layer-Blend. Legacy-Pipeline-Resets wurden aus dem Begin\/End-Renderer-Pass an die Stellen des Legacy-Gen12-Switch entfernt, der derzeit bis zu 2000 API-Aufrufe speichert.\n\nDie Ingenieure haben die verz\u00f6gerten und verz\u00f6gerten Displaymap-Pipelines zusammengef\u00fchrt, die TSAA-Stufe implementiert und die folgenden Stufen zu 'stabil' gemacht: Tonemapping, DepthOfField, MotionBlur, Optics, Colorgrading, OpticsExposure. Sie entfernten den ressourcenbindenden Code zum Speichern\/Laden beim Rendern am Anfang\/Ende, wodurch etwa 500 API-Aufrufe pro Frame eingespart wurden. Au\u00dferdem wurden parametrisierte allgemeine Tiefenfunktionen hinzugef\u00fcgt, so dass sie nicht auf globale Konstanten zugreifen, ebenso wie Tiefen-Down-Sampling.\n\nDie Arbeit an der Atmosph\u00e4re, den Wolken und dem vereinigten Raymarcher wurde ernsthaft fortgesetzt, was zu Wolkendaten f\u00fchrte, die nun korrekt mit dem Atmosph\u00e4rensegment interagieren, in das sie injiziert werden (durch korrigierte Luminanzintegration und Transmissionsauswertung). Das Team f\u00fcgte Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die Injektion von (existierenden) kugelf\u00f6rmigen Wolken in den vereinheitlichten atmosph\u00e4rischen Raymarcher hinzu, die nun gleichm\u00e4\u00dfig verteilte Probenorte bei der Integration \u00fcber Hemisph\u00e4ren verwenden. Dies verbessert die Ergebnisse der LUT-Integration erheblich, entfernt mehrere Artefakte und konvergiert viel schneller.\n\nEine neue atmosph\u00e4rische Multi-Scatter-LUT wurde hinzugef\u00fcgt, die unendliche Streuordnungen unterst\u00fctzt, w\u00e4hrend die aktuelle Multi-Scatter-LUT aufgrund zu hoher Helligkeit neu ausbalanciert wurde. Das Team verfeinerte auch die Soft-Edge-Berechnung f\u00fcr sph\u00e4rische Wolken, um Aliasing zu reduzieren und verbesserte die Auswertung der sichtbaren Sonnenscheibe bei der Berechnung des Sonnenlichts. Diese Auswertung ist vollst\u00e4ndig in das breitere atmosph\u00e4rische Beleuchtungssystem integriert und beeinflusst die direkte und indirekte Beleuchtung. Ein Ungleichgewicht der berechneten Helligkeit zwischen regul\u00e4ren und Injektionsdurchg\u00e4ngen wurde vervollst\u00e4ndigt; jetzt erscheinen die Wolken mit konstanter Helligkeit sowohl in regul\u00e4ren Atmosph\u00e4ren als auch durch vereinheitlichtes Raymarching. Das Team hat auch Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr separate Rayleigh- und Mie-Inscatter-LUTs im aktuellen atmosph\u00e4rischen Codepfad bereitgestellt, was mehrere Falschfarben-Artefakte behebt. Die neue LUT-Parametrisierung unterst\u00fctzt hohe Atmosph\u00e4ren besser und behebt unter anderem den sehr markanten Halo um die Silhouette der dunklen Seite eines Planeten.\n\nDas Team beschleunigte und vereinheitlichte die Vorberechnungen der optischen Tiefe in den Absorptionsschichten der Atmosph\u00e4ren. Dies erlaubt ihnen unter anderem, den erd\u00e4hnlichen Planeten eine Ozonschicht hinzuzuf\u00fcgen, die den blauen Himmel hervorhebt und eine korrekte Schattierung w\u00e4hrend der D\u00e4mmerung erm\u00f6glicht. Es unterst\u00fctzt auch die physikalisch plausible Feinabstimmung der Atmosph\u00e4ren. Sie benutzen jetzt die Sonneneinstrahlung w\u00e4hrend der gesamten Bewertung der atmosph\u00e4rischen Beleuchtung, um eine viel bessere Bewertung der Sonnenstrahlung f\u00fcr Punkte au\u00dferhalb der planetarischen Atmosph\u00e4ren zu erhalten. Dies erm\u00f6glicht den D\u00e4mmerungswurf, die atmosph\u00e4rische Streuung und erlaubt es dem Winkelradius der Sonne, Objekte auf die Halbschattenregion eines Planeten zu projizieren.\n\nAllgemeine Systemarbeit beinhaltete mehrere Korrekturen an der ISPC-Integration (ein spezieller Compiler, der hochoptimierten SSE-Code f\u00fcr hochbelastete Jobs auf CPUs generiert). Das Team implementierte die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr statische station\u00e4re Zonengruppen und konkave Geometrien als Vis-Bereiche und korrigierte die Methode, mit der sie Vis-Bereiche und Portale anhand des Namens finden.\n\n\nEigenschaften\nDas SQ42 Feature Team unterst\u00fctzte weiterhin die dynamische Beleuchtung und arbeitete mit dem Cinematics Team zusammen, um die Rig-Erstellung zu verfeinern und den Algorithmus, der die Farbe und St\u00e4rke der Lichter bestimmt, zu optimieren. Zum Beispiel f\u00fchren sie, bevor sie ein Licht erstellen, eine Kollisionspr\u00fcfung durch, um sicherzustellen, dass es nicht hinter der Geometrie platziert wird und durch sie hindurchscheint. Au\u00dferdem unterst\u00fctzten sie die Designer mit 'walk and talk'. Dies beinhaltete die Verfeinerung der Spieler\/NPC-Speedmatch-Funktion und das Polieren der Bildschirmfunktionalit\u00e4t. Au\u00dferdem wurde damit begonnen, alle Levels mit dem Objekt-Container-Streaming korrekt funktionieren zu lassen, was f\u00fcr ein nahtloses Laden w\u00e4hrend des gesamten Spiels erforderlich ist.\n\nDas Schauspieler-Team hat mit der Arbeit an einem neuen kooperativen Fortbewegungs-Feature begonnen, das es dem Spieler erm\u00f6glicht, sich eine andere bewegliche Requisite zu schnappen und sich mit ihr fortzubewegen; der Beispielnutzungskasten ist ein Rollwagen. Die Requisite wird durch die Kraftaus\u00fcbung des Charakters bewegt, so dass sie sehr realistisch reagiert und auf Faktoren wie Masse und das Gel\u00e4nde reagiert. Au\u00dferdem haben sie die Wurfmechanik weiter verbessert und Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr das Unterhandwerfen hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\n\nGameplay-Geschichte\nDer September war ein produktiver Monat f\u00fcr das Gameplay-Story-Team, das mit einer wichtigen Schiffstour vorankam, die nun im Oktober abgeschlossen werden soll. Sie begannen mit der Arbeit an einem weiteren wichtigen 'Walk and Talk' aus Kapitel 5 und unterst\u00fctzten das Design weiterhin mit verschiedenen kleineren Updates der Szenen aus Kapitel 4. Fortschritte wurden auch bei mehreren gro\u00df angelegten Szenen aus den Kapiteln 11 und 13 gemacht, in denen der Schwerpunkt auf Kampf und Durchquerung liegt. Zuletzt f\u00fcr Gameplay Story begannen sie damit, zus\u00e4tzliche Szenen und Vignetten f\u00fcr Kapitel 1 zu entwerfen.\nGrafiken\nDas Grafikteam hat letzten Monat seine Zeit zwischen der Arbeit am neuen Gen12-Renderer, allgemeinen Features und Fehlerbehebung aufgeteilt. Zu den Gen12-Aufgaben geh\u00f6rte die Konvertierung des Post-Effekt-Managers des Spiels, der alle 'Verschiedenen' Effekte wie verschwommene Sicht und Blackouts handhabt. Die Gen12-Kerninfrastruktur wurde weiterentwickelt, um mit den konfigurierbaren Grafik-Pipelines kompatibel zu sein, und die konstanten Shader-Puffer wurden weiter aufpoliert. Die restliche Zeit des Grafikteams wurde mit dem Render-to-Texture-System verbracht, wobei die Verbindung zum Textur-Streaming-System nun abgeschlossen ist. Das bedeutet, dass sie nun zur Laufzeit so viele Texturen generieren k\u00f6nnen, wie sie wollen, und den Speicher automatisch mit dem Rest der Texturen im Spiel ausbalancieren k\u00f6nnen. Die Arbeit an den organischen Shadern wurde ebenfalls abgeschlossen.\n\n\nLevel-Design\nDas Leveldesign-Team startete den Monat und brachte vier neue Teammitglieder mit den Werkzeugen und Pipelines auf den neuesten Stand. Zurzeit arbeiten sie an verschiedenen FPS-R\u00e4umen, wobei der Schwerpunkt darauf liegt, einige der Unterrouten zu sperren, damit sie f\u00fcr die finale Kunst \u00fcbergangen werden k\u00f6nnen. Das Space\/Dogfight-Team hat mit der Gestaltung des Weltraums und der Schaffung allgemeiner Sehensw\u00fcrdigkeiten weitergemacht. Au\u00dferdem unterst\u00fctzten sie kooperatives KI- und NSC-Verhalten im Zusammenhang mit den neuen Erweiterungen.\n\nEs wurden Aufgaben zu verschiedenen NPC-Szenen, Nutzungsm\u00f6glichkeiten und Verhaltensweisen erledigt, wobei das Social Design eng mit KI und Animation zusammenarbeitete, um sicherzustellen, dass alles so nahtlos wie m\u00f6glich abl\u00e4uft.\n\n\nErz\u00e4hlung\nLetzten Monat wurden die Vanduul und ihre Kultur zu einem der Schwerpunkte des Narrative Teams. Dies beinhaltete die fortlaufende Arbeit mit dem Audio-Team, um ein Brainstorming der einzigartigen Kl\u00e4nge der au\u00dferirdischen Rasse durchzuf\u00fchren, Beratung dar\u00fcber, wie man ihr Kampfverhalten weiter mit ihrer \u00dcberlieferung und ihrer einzigartigen Physiologie in Einklang bringen kann, und ein tieferes Eintauchen in die Hintergrundgeschichten einiger der spezifischen Vanduul, denen Spieler begegnen k\u00f6nnen. Dar\u00fcber hinaus setzte Narrative ihre Arbeit an der Verfeinerung des Erz\u00e4hlflusses des Spiels fort, w\u00e4hrend das Design weiter an der Fertigstellung der \u00dcberquerungsrouten arbeitet. Dazu geh\u00f6rt auch die Hervorhebung m\u00f6glicher narrativer Aufmachungen, um Spieler zu belohnen, die sich die Zeit nehmen, die Level gr\u00fcndlich zu erkunden, sowie die Erstellung von Skripten, die m\u00f6glicherweise in Zukunft aufgezeichnet werden m\u00fcssen.\nRequisiten\nDas Requisiten-Team unterst\u00fctzte SQ42 mit Kleidungsst\u00fccken f\u00fcr Aciedo. Ein vom Gameplay Story Team angeforderter Pass f\u00fcr medizinische Requisiten wurde fertiggestellt und Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Social AI f\u00fcr den Chowline- und Master-at-arms-Charakter geleistet.\nQA\nCinematics verlie\u00df sich bei den Aufnahmen der einzelnen SQ42-Level weiterhin auf QA, um sicherzustellen, dass die Szenen funktionieren und die erwartete Qualit\u00e4t haben. Sie fuhren auch damit fort, Probleme zu reproduzieren, die in den vom Cinematics-Team verwendeten Tools wie TrackView und dem Batch-Renderer auftraten.\nTechnische Animation\nNeben der Ausbildung neuer Teammitglieder arbeitete Tech Animation an der Vervollst\u00e4ndigung der hauseigenen Gesichtsausr\u00fcstung und der Werkzeugsuite, um die kontinuierliche Kreation neuer K\u00f6pfe zu erm\u00f6glichen. Dies geht dem umfassenderen Vorsto\u00df voraus, die gesamte Pipeline zur Kreation von K\u00f6pfen zu \u00fcberholen, um sie f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chsten Jahre zukunftssicher zu machen. Die laufende Initiative, neue Werkzeuge zu schaffen, um Animationen mit einer grafischen Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che zu implementieren, wurde fortgesetzt.\n\n\"Das UI sieht gro\u00dfartig aus und wir schreiben gerade an der technischen Umsetzung, die den Link in unser aktuelles Animations-Toolset bringen wird. Technisches Animationsteam\n\nSie waren auch stark an der Erstellung von Vanduul-Animationen beteiligt und unterst\u00fctzten das Art Team bei der Entwicklung des Xi'an.\n\n\n\nVFX\nIm September haben VFX Tech Art ihren Textursequenz-Erstellungsprozess abgeschlossen, einschlie\u00dflich eines Workshops f\u00fcr das gesamte VFX-Team. Au\u00dferdem haben sie ihre Untersuchungen \u00fcber die Zerst\u00f6rungs-Pipeline wieder aufgenommen, haupts\u00e4chlich in Vorbereitung auf die Arbeit im Oktober, die einige wichtige Zerst\u00f6rungssequenzen enth\u00e4lt. Die VFX- und SQ42-K\u00fcnstler arbeiteten eng an M\u00f6glichkeiten, \"leeren Raum interessant zu machen\". Gemeinsam erzielten sie gro\u00dfartige Ergebnisse durch die Verwendung von Meshes mit einem transparenten VFX-Shader, der \u00fcber das Partikelsystem gespawned wurde. Auch wenn sie die Leistung genau im Auge behalten m\u00fcssen (insbesondere den Overdraw), ist dies ein vielversprechendes Setup, das interessante Parallaxenschichten hinzuf\u00fcgt, w\u00e4hrend der Spieler den Raum durchquert.\n\nWIR 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\nThanks to the work of dedicated field agents and operatives, we\u2019ve uncovered information on Vanduul combat at varying distances, creating dynamic lighting to cinematic moments, and work continues on bringing the Xi\u2019an race to life.\n\nThe information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.\n\nUEE Naval High Command AI (Combat)\nCharacter Combat kick off the report with their ongoing work on Vanduul and human combat. Vanduul focus was on two of the alien race\u2019s main combat tactics: melee and ranged combat. Melee utilizes the \u2018special attack\u2019 functionality mentioned last month, which allows AI to cache and evaluate the environment to determine which (if any) unique attack is best. Dodging or performing a normal melee attack requires the AI to evaluate how much space is available and decide which animation is best suited. Currently, the team are evaluating which melee attacks to include, with some using body attacks like front kicks or the Vanduul spear. When implemented, the behavior will evaluate which combination of attacks is best for the given scenario. For example, if they want the AI to move back a specific distance from the player and then perform a lance attack, they could create space with a front kick. For ranged attacks, the team ensured the Vanduul can correctly shoot-to-target from any position. This involved setting up \u2018aim-poses\u2019 and fire modes for the Vanduul lance.\n\nRegarding realistic human combat, progress was made on accurate ammunition handling. As NPCs won\u2019t have infinite ammo, the behaviors need to account for resources and decide when to attempt to procure more. However, NPCs can deplete their stocks and, should they not have an appropriate melee weapon or the specific set of traits and skills to fight unarmed, may decide that surrender is the best option. The first pass was made, with the team preparing several animation options and embedding surrender in various behaviors. They also added better transitions when exiting and staying in cover under certain conditions.\n\nVisual perception parameters and debug draw were tweaked to allow the designers to better iterate on the values that the AI use to perceive and understand enemies from different distances (and whether the character is in the primary or secondary field-of-view).\n\n\n\nAI (General)\nLast month, the AI Team fixed more issues with characters standing on top of usables, a lot of which were related to the object container failing to restore characters to the right state. The long-term plan is to make extensive use of services to populate the environment and simulate areas when players are not around. This means a lot of these issues will become irrelevant due to the systems being used in a slightly different way.\n\n\n\nAI (Social)\nThe Social AI Team focused on several NPC activities and states, including engineer and off-duty. These will be shared between the PU and Squadron 42 and are being designed in a way that will work in any dynamic environment. They\u2019re currently creating the decision-making flow and identifying which usables should be created and how they should expose their functionalities. They will then iterate on the behavior implementation and usable data definition. For example, for the engineer, they are currently focusing on the repair, inspect, and maintenance behaviors. They also continued to work on the mess hall scenario detailed last month. The off-duty behavior currently encapsulates a set of activities that NPCs can do when nothing specific is assigned to them. These \u2018leisure\u2019 sub-activities include visiting their bunk, searching for arcade machines to play, taking a walk, and so on. The idea is to allow the state of an actor and their traits to drive what an NPC likes to do and dynamically use the environment to find what best fits its interests.\n\nSpecifically for SQ42, the team continued to work on vendor behaviors and functionalities. They extended some of the vendor functionalities to use \u2018scooching\u2019 animations to drive specific actor performances into the systemic vendor behavior. They also continued to develop the chow-line sequence mentioned last month that enable NPCs to collect cutlery, plates, and warm-up food.\n\n\n\nAnimation\nSeptember saw the Animation Team working on knockdowns and knockbacks, zero-G movement pre-vis, object push\/pull, grenade throwing, Vanduul combat melee and locomotion, AI reloading, the chowline, engineer wall panels, sinks, and armories. They also began looking into mounted guns, a new takedown, and a new Gemini sniper rifle. On the Facial side, work progressed with the female player character, which will be finished this month. A host of other character improvements were made too. They also continued to burndown the motion-capture backlog and supported the Gameplay Story Team.\n\n\n\nArt (Characters)\nCharacter Art\u2019s major focus last month was the continuing updates to major campaign characters. For example, Morrow went through major revisions that the team are excited about and Vallon\u2019s hair was further iterated on. During the process, they noted issues with old character shaders and are currently awaiting graphics support to resolve and upgrade them. Major progress was made on the alien characters too. The Xi\u2019an body is in the final stages and is almost ready for rigging. The team are currently in the process of rigging a highly complex Vanduul armor that will look incredible in motion. Concept revisions were also made to some naval uniforms and a trench coat was created that will need cloth simulation from the Physics Team to function as intended.\n\n\n\nArt (Weapons)\nWeapons Art moved the Vanduul lance through the final-art phase, meaning the weapon is nearing completion. A texture revamp is also under way.\n\nCinematics\nWork on the automatic lighting rig is nearing completion; it\u2019s now active in game builds and almost in a release-ready state. The automatic lighting rig is essentially three auto-generated lights around characters used when the player is close. The rig consists of a key, fill, and rim light and parses lights in the environment to figure out what color each should be. It also tries to find the best quadrant around a character to fade the lights in\/out and gently updates the rig when the player moves in\/out of range. The rig has several active rules to help it get the best results and is mainly used to help light characters in potentially dark corridors or when the player interacts with them in environments not ideally lit for character scenes. If they know the location of a scene, such as a briefing room or the captain\u2019s chair of the Idris, the team still manually place lighting rigs. However, they found the auto rig to be a useful boost in these situations as well. The team also had to make the rig work with sudden camera cuts and eliminate a one-frame lag due to calculations in TrackView. Cinematics spent part of the month preparing to shoot new motion-capture. They now have a working set of OptiTrack cameras in the Frankfurt studio that they use to shoot small scenes or pickups as needed. This will help with the occasional cinematic scene that requires minor adjustments to half-steps or turns, or minor additions such as a leaning pose against a wall. These tweaks are usually required due to an environmental change or because the state machine requires certain edits.\n\nThe animators also polished and pushed scenes through their respective passes, including a set in the brig and Bishop\u2019s war speech to the UEE Senate.\n\n\n\nEngineering\nLast month\u2019s physics optimizations included improving the intersection routines for SDF baking and adding further culling to AABB tree traversal. The team added g-force calculation to all rigid entities and the ability to add the mass of rigids inside the grid host mass. They gave initial support to adaptive signed-distance-fields (SDF), added exterior shadow geometry (which enables boundary entities within the hosted zone in interior OCs), and now properly support all primitive physics types for interior grids. They also added external impulses to \u2018pe_status_dynamics\u2019 and created a grid without explicit geometry. Support was provided for multiple external accelerations too. For the ongoing G12 renderer work, the team supported the optional execution of stages, added debug names to all constant buffers (and made it mandatory), and undertook custom material CB and layer-blend support. Legacy pipeline resets were removed from the begin\/end render pass to the locations of the legacy Gen12 switch, which currently saves up to 2000 API calls.\n\nEngineering merged the deferred and deferred-display-mapped pipelines, implemented the TSAA stage, and promoted the following stages to \u2018stable:\u2019 Tonemapping, DepthOfField, MotionBlur, Optics, Colorgrading, OpticsExposure. They removed save\/load resource-binding code on the begin\/end render pass, saving around 500 API calls per-frame. Parameterized common depth functions were also added so they don\u2019t access global constants, as was depth down-sampling.\n\nWork on the atmosphere, clouds, and unified raymarcher continued in earnest, which led to cloud data that now properly interacts with the atmosphere segment it injects into (via corrected luminance integration and transmittance evaluation). The team added support for the injection of (existing) spherical clouds into the unified atmospheric raymarcher, now using uniformly distributed sample locations when integrating over hemispheres. This significantly improves LUT integration results, removes several artifacts, and converges much quicker.\n\nA new atmospheric multi-scatter LUT was added that supports infinite scattering orders, while the current multi-scatter LUT was rebalanced due to excessive brightness. The team also refined soft-edge computation for spherical clouds to reduce aliasing and improved the visible sun-disc evaluation when computing sunlight. This evaluation is fully integrated into the wider atmospheric lighting system and impacts direct and indirect lighting. An imbalance of computed brightness between regular and injection passes was completed; now clouds appear with consistent brightness in both regular atmospheres and via unified raymarching. The team provided support for separate Rayleigh and Mie inscatter LUTs in the current atmospheric code path too, which fixes several false color artifacts. The new LUT parameterization better supports high atmospheres and, among other things, fixes the very prominent halo around the silhouette of a planet\u2019s dark side.\n\nThe team sped up and unified the optical depth pre-computations in the absorption layers of atmospheres. Among other things, this allows them to add an ozone layer to Earth-like planets, which will emphasize blue skies and enable correct shading during twilight. It also supports the physically plausible fine-tuning of atmospheres. They now use solar irradiance throughout the evaluation of atmospheric lighting to give a much-improved evaluation of sun radiance for points outside of planetary atmospheres. This enables twilight casting, atmospheric scattering, and allows the sun\u2019s angular radius to project objects onto a planet\u2019s penumbra region.\n\nGeneral system work involved several fixes to ISPC integration (a special compiler that generates highly optimized SSE code for heavy duty jobs running on CPUs). The team implemented support for static stationary zone groups and concave geometries as vis areas and fixed the method they find vis areas and portals by name.\n\n\n\nFeatures\nThe SQ42 Feature Team continued to support dynamic lighting, working with the Cinematics Team to refine rig creation and optimize the algorithm that determines the color and strength of the lights. For example, before creating a light, they perform a collision check to ensure it won\u2019t be placed behind geometry and shine through it. They also supported the designers with \u2018walk and talk.\u2019 This involved refining the player\/NPC speed-match feature and polishing the display screen functionality. Work also started on getting all levels working correctly with Object Container Streaming, which is required for seamless loading throughout the entire game.\n\nThe Actor Team started work on a new co-operative locomotion feature, which enables the player to grab another movable prop and move around with it; the example use-case is a wheeled trolley. The prop is moved by the character applying force, so it reacts in a highly realistic manner and responds to factors like mass and the terrain. They also continued to improve the throw mechanic, adding support for underhand throwing.\n\n\n\nGameplay Story\nSeptember was a productive month for the Gameplay Story Team who progressed with an important ship tour that is now scheduled for completion in October. They began working on another important \u2018walk and talk\u2019 from chapter 5 and continued to support Design with various minor updates to scenes across chapter 4. Progress was also made on several large-scale scenes from chapters 11 and 13, where the focus is on combat and traversal. Lastly for Gameplay Story, they began prototyping additional scenes and vignettes for chapter 1.\n\nGraphics\nThe Graphics Team split their time last month between work on the new Gen12 renderer, general features, and bug fixing. Gen12 tasks included converting the game\u2019s post-effects manager, which handles all \u2018miscellaneous\u2019 effects such as blurred vision and blackouts. The Gen12 core infrastructure was further developed to be compatible with the configurable graphics pipelines and the constant shader buffers were further polished. The remainder of the Graphics Team\u2019s time was spent on the render-to-texture system, with the hookup to the texture-streaming system now complete. This means they can now run-time-generate as many textures as they like and automatically load-balance the memory with the rest of the textures in-game. The organic shader work was also completed.\n\n\n\nLevel Design\nThe Level Design Team kicked off the month bringing four new team members up to speed with the tools and pipelines. They\u2019re currently forging ahead on various FPS spaces, with a focus on locking down some of the sub-routes so they can be passed over for final art. The Space\/Dogfight Team continued with space-scaping and creating general points of interest. They also supported co-operative AI and NPC behaviors around the new additions.\n\nTasks were completed on various NPC scenes, usables, and behaviors, with Social Design working closely with AI and Animation to ensure everything is as seamless as possible.\n\n\n\nNarrative\nLast month, the Vanduul and their culture became one of the main focuses for the Narrative Team. This included ongoing work with the Audio Team to brainstorm the unique sounds of the alien race, consulting on how to make their combat behaviors tie in further with their lore and unique physiology, and diving deeper into the backstories of some of the specific Vanduul that players may encounter. In addition, Narrative continued their work on polishing the narrative flow of the game as Design continues to finalize traversal routes. This includes highlighting possible narrative dressing to reward players who take the time to explore levels thoroughly along with scripting potential lines that might need to be recorded in the future.\n\nProps\nThe Props Team supported SQ42 with dressing assets for Aciedo. A pass on medical props requested by the Gameplay Story Team was completed and support was given to Social AI on the chowline and master-at-arms character.\n\nQA\nCinematics continued to rely on QA for recordings of each of SQ42\u2019s levels to help them ensure scenes are working and are of the expected quality. They also continued to reproduce issues found in tools used by the Cinematics Team, such as TrackView and the batch renderer.\n\nTech Animation\nAlongside training new additions to the team, Tech Animation worked to complete the in-house facial rig and tool suite to enable the continued creation of new heads. This precedes the wider push to overhaul the entire head creation pipeline, with the view to future-proofing it for the next few years. The ongoing initiative to create new tools to help implement animations with a graphical user interface continued.\n\n\u201cThe UI is looking great and we\u2019re currently writing the technical implementation that will drive the link into our current animation toolset.\u201d Tech Animation Team\n\nThey were also heavily involved in the creation of Vanduul animation assets and supported the Art Team in developing the Xi\u2019an.\n\nVFX\nSeptember saw VFX Tech Art complete their texture-sequence creation process, including running a workshop for the wider VFX Team. They also resumed their investigations into the destruction pipeline, mostly in preparation for October\u2019s work, which features a couple of key destruction sequences. The VFX and SQ42 artists worked closely on ways to \u201cmake empty space interesting.\u201d Together, they achieved great results using meshes with a transparent VFX shader spawned via the particle system. While they need to keep a close eye on performance (overdraw in particular), this is a promising setup that adds interesting layers of parallax while the player traverses space.\n\nWE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":17,"created_at":"2020-10-14T21:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"5 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-14 22:14:17","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":17828,"next_id":17830}}