{"data":{"id":17887,"title":"Alpha 3.11 Postmortem","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/17887-Alpha-311-Postmortem","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/17887","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/17887","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"None","images":[{"id":22574,"name":"Misc.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/vfkyf0zbkq2sur\/source\/Misc.png","alt":"","size":3788,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2016-12-14T20:45:47+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/22574","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/22574\/similar"},{"id":24818,"name":"1.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/xi7moj7o9v3jtr\/source\/1.jpg","alt":"","size":813156,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-11-20T01:29:49+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24818","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24818\/similar"},{"id":24821,"name":"95.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/915tw70q47xoor\/source\/95.jpg","alt":"","size":894991,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-11-20T01:30:14+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24821","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24821\/similar"},{"id":24822,"name":"Yela_02.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/lec7x2zb98j6br\/source\/Yela_02.jpg","alt":"","size":2900169,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-11-20T02:19:48+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24822","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24822\/similar"},{"id":24824,"name":"9.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/vm0tvau59hdimr\/source\/9.jpg","alt":"","size":728262,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-11-20T01:30:26+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24824","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24824\/similar"},{"id":24825,"name":"91.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/09h3j0aj609rsr\/source\/91.jpg","alt":"","size":526792,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-11-20T01:30:08+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24825","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24825\/similar"},{"id":24826,"name":"92.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/knq1y2fk0ci20r\/source\/92.jpg","alt":"","size":533523,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-11-20T01:30:11+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24826","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24826\/similar"},{"id":24829,"name":"Cellin_01-Min.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/0hh305qiyrmxrr\/source\/Cellin_01-Min.jpg","alt":"","size":1544468,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2020-11-20T02:15:29+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24829","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/24829\/similar"}],"images_count":15,"translations":{"en_EN":"Alpha 3.11 Postmortem\nOn October 8, 2020, we launched Alpha 3.11 High Impact, which introduced a number of new features and changes, including cargo decks, force reactions, and the first stage of the wider Armistice Zone removal. The following is a postmortem from the senior developers themselves, detailing what was delivered and their thoughts on how it went. Vehicle Team\nThe Vehicle Pillar had a much lighter quarter with Alpha 3.11 compared to the bumper delivery in Alpha 3.10, but what we delivered hopefully had a big impact on the gameplay experience.\nOrigin 100 Series\nThe Vehicle Content Team delivered the Origin 100 Series in Alpha 3.11, comprising of the 100i, 125a, and 135c. The 100 Series adds an alternative starter ship to the game as well as a light fighter and light cargo hauler. These are fantastic little ships for new players to start their Star Citizen journey with and provide the ability to tackle a wide range of missions and explore the far reaches of the \u2018verse. Missiles & Countermeasures\nThe missile and countermeasure gameplay had been in various states over the years and was never truly enjoyable from the aggressor or defender side. We\u2019re aiming to ultimately fix that with Missile Operator Mode, but until that is delivered, we decided to spend the time implementing fixes and iterations to the gameplay to provide a taste of what that feature will deliver. The main issues with the missiles prior to Alpha 3.11 were as follows: Countermeasures would act only on IR missiles (flares) and EM missiles (chaff)\n\nOnly flares worked (sometimes and highly server-dependant)\n\nThere were no countermeasures available to spoof CS missiles\n\nFiring missiles was extremely easy, defending against missiles was extremely hard\n\nFirst, we investigated why only flares would work and chaff wouldn\u2019t. The issue was a combination of incorrect setup data in some ships, incorrect data in some countermeasures and missiles, and a now-redundant workaround originally created for a specific SQ42 level that had knock-ons game-wide.\nOnce we fixed those issues, we recognized that the signature system has two distinct ways of modifying signals \u2013 either creating a strong signal or dampening all signals around. We decided to embrace that difference instead of requiring pilots to play \u201cwhack-a-mole\u201d by choosing the \u201cright\u201d countermeasure for the \u201cright\u201d missile type whilst under the stress of having a few seconds to decide before impact. With that in mind, we did some playtests with the following changes: Flares would act on all missile types\n\nChaff would be turned into a noise field, dampening all signatures around the field\n\n\nRight away, the first gameplay tests proved that this was a much more engaging way to defend against missiles. We then went ahead and updated the HUD elements of the missile warning system, re-added a countermeasure widget, and updated the keybinds to allow direct launching for each countermeasure type. The UI and VFX teams then jumped in and beautified everything, replacing the effects and also fixing a couple of VFX related bugs (like countermeasures being invisible in the PU).\nOne future addition that we couldn\u2019t do in time for Alpha 3.11 was to change the names of \u201cflares\u201d and \u201cchaff\u201d. Both names are very common for flight sim communities, but we still want to rename them to make it clear that Star Citizen uses different concepts for defending against missiles. This will require us to record new VO lines to update ship computer voices. Each vehicle is only allowed four locks at a time\n\nOnly one missile can launch per rack at a time\n\nOnly one missile type (IR\/EM\/CS) can launch at a time\n\nMissiles lose lock outside of their locking angle\n\n\nOnce we had these measures in, the missile experience notably improved in early testing. The spamming of missiles was significantly reduced, and the meta shifted towards ships getting very close to each other and firing missiles at distances where the defender would not even get a missile warning before impact. As a result of this undesirable change, we introduced minimum and maximum lock ranges. This notably stretched the missile gameplay out of gun range, allowing missile-focussed ships to loiter at the edge of combat as designed while dedicated gunfighters would get in closer. This also allowed us to increase the locking angle of smaller missiles so that ships like the Constellation (that do not fire missiles forward but slightly off-angle) were viable to use missiles again.\nA lot of these changes (especially to the missiles) are temporary to give a better experience until Missile Operator Mode is ready, which will change the behaviour again and\/or remove certain aspects when it is implemented. Final Thoughts\nThe overall goal we want to achieve in the missile gameplay loop is to make both employing missiles and defending against missiles deeper and more rewarding, with its own \u201cslot\u201d in the combat environment. Missiles are not supposed to be an alternative to guns but tactical weapons, and the use of them should be a conscious decision with consequences. We also want to give special missile boats, like the Talon Shrike or Freelancer MIS, an edge when it comes to employing ordnance for the same reason. Those ships will excel in offensive missile gameplay though have obvious drawbacks in other categories. So, there will be more iterations on countermeasures and missile gameplay in the next couple of releases. For the time being though, we\u2019re quite happy the missile experience stepped away from the frustrations of previous releases.\nJohn Crewe\nVehicle Director\n\nTechnology\nCanvas Decal System\nFor Alpha 3.11, the Graphics Team delivered underlying rendering tech to help power the \u2018canvas decal\u2019 system, which leverages the Building Blocks system to create decal textures at runtime. These decals can be used for signposting, on clothing, or even the signage on vehicles. The advantage of the decals being created at runtime is that we can use game data such as the player\u2019s name or even have the content translated to the language the game is being played in.\nTo make this feature scalable for wider use in the PU, the system is tightly coupled with the texture streaming system, such that the dynamic textures are \u2018streamed in\u2019 using the same logic as standard textures, which ensures we always maintain a fixed memory budget. This streaming logic ensures we can automatically run the same feature set on low-spec machines by carefully load-balancing texture resolutions on the fly, but also allows us to push the texture resolution as high as possible on more powerful machines. Integrating the canvas decals into texture streaming resulted in several crashes in the PTU that were very difficult to track down and took a lot of time to resolve. As a result, we wrote some documentation to help future programmers understand the complexities of the texture streaming system, which will be especially important as we plan to generalize the code and use it for mesh streaming too. Planet Tech\nOn the planet-tech side, we added several features, including improvements to planet tools. This includes new painting brushes, revamped UI, and merged ground layer and object presets to make it even faster to paint planets. Utilising the new planetary painting tools, the Environment Art Team went through all planets and moons in the Stanton System and repainted the ground surfaces and object presets. This also futureproofs us and allows us to take advantage of new tech in existing locations. On a per-object basis, we are now able to support HW tessellation displacement on geology distributed across terrain to give it a more detailed and organic appearance. There were also several ocean and water related improvements, including ground cover buoyancy, which we will continue to expand upon in the future, as there wasn\u2019t enough time during this release cycle to introduce larger floating objects.\nA lot of time in the past few months was dedicated towards continued research and development of the atmosphere and cloud renderer, including the planet atmosphere unified raymarcher. We will go into more detail once the system becomes available. For now, let\u2019s just say we worked on various algorithms to allow raymarching at lower-than-screen resolution and denoise and upsample the results to full resolution to improve the performance of costly raymarching operations. These are combined with reprojection techniques and the bundling of raymarch requests for pixels to be updated each frame to further improve performance. Additionally, our existing multiscatter solution now supports a significantly higher number of scattering orders, which will be important for very dense atmospheres. BTW, we\u2019re now in the very early days of volumetric cloud rendering R&D\u2026\nAlmost a byproduct of this work, we made various improvements to the existing atmosphere rendering technology. First and foremost several long-standing artifacts, such as false color rendering in twilight near the atmosphere top along with very prominent halos around the silhouette of a planet\u2019s dark side, have been addressed. The generation of lookup tables now uses a better-suited method to generate sample locations for numerical integration over (hemi)spheres. That and other numerical precision improvements led to more accurate results in those tables at reduced computational overhead. We didn\u2019t stop there, however, and implemented additional visual improvements for you to hopefully enjoy soon. One of them includes evaluating how much of the sun\u2019s disc is visible when computing how much sunlight reaches point x in-atmosphere. This evaluation is fully integrated into the entire atmosphere lighting system and impacts direct and indirect lighting. Moreover, we added support for an absorption layer. Among other things, this allows us to add an ozone layer to Earth-like planets that emphasizes the blueness of the sky and enables better shading in twilight (removing yellow tint). We now also incorporate IRL extraterrestrial sun radiometry data when running the light simulation instead of assuming a \u201cpure white\u201d light source as well as an approximate conversion from spectral radiance (the result of the atmosphere lighting simulation) to luminance (used to light the scene in a traditional sense). Lastly, we improved the evaluation of sun radiance received by points outside the planet\u2019s atmosphere. It now casts twilight due to atmospheric scattering and the impact of the sun\u2019s angular radius onto objects in a planet\u2019s penumbra region. This should add a nice touch to capital ships or moons orbiting planets. Engine\nOn the engine side, several improvements were made. We updated our compiler toolchain to VS 2019, which will allow for faster compile and link times. Moreover, we\u2019ve added support for Intel SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC). This will allow us to write target-agnostic SSE optimized code (think HLSL) for heavy duty CPU compute jobs and will fully utilize CPU capabilities on each individual machine that the code runs on. Several code paths in physics, the 3D engine, and the zone system are in the process of being ported. And, we have another compiler optimization in store for you. AVX code generation support for clients was previously enabled and should hit the public servers in the coming Alpha 3.12 release.\nRegarding server and client memory usage, we spent a good deal of time further refining our tracking tools to ensure we have good visibility on where we spend memory. We\u2019re now also able to properly track memory usage in third-party libraries that either don\u2019t allow us to reroute memory allocation through our system or haven\u2019t been updated yet to do so. We still plan to get a bit more visibility on client-side video memory allocations on the driver level (below the level we can currently track as an application using the GPU). As a result of these improvements, ongoing investigations, and tracking, a few critical memory leaks were fixed for release.\nThroughout Alpha 3.11 production, the Core Engine Team was mostly focused on features for later releases, like the Gen12 Renderer. However, a very large bug was fixed, which caused all our objects on clients to unload way earlier than we intended. Objects on clients should now stay streamed for noticeably larger distances. Audio\nFor audio tech, we updated the Wwise version to 2019.2.4, which fixed several issues. As part of this endeavour we reworked memory management within the audio system, going from a group of memory pools to a single pool. This allows us to deal more easily with the many different situations that Star Citizen presents by allocating memory where it is needed, when it is needed. We spent a lot of time revisiting our voice budgets to improve the overall experience and to allow players to hear more of what\u2019s going on in the game. Weapon fire support, particularly at long distance, was improved and several issues with audio fire rates and weapon volumes were fixed. Canvas Slicing\nThis quarter the UI-Tech team has been working on a system called the Canvas Slicer. This is a sub-system of Building Blocks which will allow the UI designers to place slices of 2D UI in 3D space. Normally, when we draw 2D UI, it gets rendered to a texture and then that texture is applied to geometry such as a monitor panel or data-pad. With the Canvas Slicer, we create the geometry at any position in 3D-space at runtime and draw the 2D UI directly onto it. This means we will be able to produce interesting layered UI, such as holographic ship HUDs and helmet displays. Tooltips\nWe have also started designing our tooltips system for Building Blocks. On the surface, this looked like a simple system to implement but the requirements to ensure it is super flexible have meant we\u2019ve got quite a lot to think about before we start implementation.\nMarco Corbetta\nVP of Technology\n\nCore Gameplay\nExternal Inventory\nExternal Inventory is the first iteration of our grid-based inventory interface that allows players to manage their FPS commodities between their backpack, chest, and leg pockets. As it says in the name, the External Inventory also allows players to directly interact with other storage containers in the world and drag and drop items between them. In Alpha 3.11, this is only enabled for the Greycat ROC storage compartment so players can manage their FPS mineables. But, in the future and once we realise true item storage (underpinned by iCache), this will allow players to store items in compartments, crates, and other such external inventories.\nWhile on the face of it, a new inventory UI and being able to drag and drop items between storage containers may sound simple, we had to overcome several creative and technical challenges. The main creative challenges revolved around having an interface that felt tactile and accessible to use without just feeling like a standard 2D interface that you see in most RPGs. This wasn\u2019t because those inventories are bad, more that we didn\u2019t want players performing inventory Tetris to manage their items; we wanted players to freely move items between storage containers without having to worry about where they dropped the item or if another item was in the way. We were able to achieve the first iteration of this using our Building Blocks technology, which stores the items as a list rather than a 2D grid. This means items fluidly move around your cursor as you drag objects between containers. We still want to further improve on the overall feel, but the team is happy with the initial outing.\nWhile Building Blocks allowed us to deliver on the creative aspects of the design, it also provided the main technical challenge. As the technology is still being developed, it means it doesn\u2019t always support things that you need to deliver a feature. In the case of External Inventory, we wanted the UI to feel diegetic and 3D even though it is not. This meant we wanted all the icons to be holographic, like they were being displayed in AR directly in front of your eyes. Unfortunately, our 3D icons could only support a limited shader which meant we lost a lot of material detail from the items being displayed. At this point we could have delayed the feature, but the team and I felt it was important for us to go live and get as much feedback as we could between now and a true physical inventory. We will definitely be upgrading that shader in an upcoming patch. Force Reactions\nAt its core, Force Reactions is a system developed to simulate what a character would do when impacted by a force, whether that is a strong gust of wind or a bullet penetrating their shoulder. It can be split into three levels of impacts: Low impact: twitches, flinches, and leans\n\nMedium impact: staggers\n\nHigh impact: knockdowns\n\nIn Alpha 3.10, we delivered the first iteration of low-impact reactions with the procedural twitches in FPS combat and leaning during sustained winds. In Alpha 3.11, we added more \u2018feels\u2019 to the twitches with additional camera and weapon reactions and our first iteration of knockdowns, with the intention for staggers to come later.\nThe biggest challenge for this system was that it needed to be truly systemic as forces can come from a lot of different places, not just bullets. For this, we broke down the forces into three main categories: Direct forces: anything that physically impacts the character, like a box or bullet\n\nIndirect forces: the force you receive when your ship gets rammed or from a gust of wind\n\nSustained forces: where a force is constantly applied, such a g-force or wind\n\n\nThis meant we could compartmentalise different forces with different scales and allow the designers to balance the character\u2019s reaction accordingly, as the forces of being hit by a box compared to the acceleration of a ship in space to 1000m\/s are vastly different. While low-impact reactions do not take away any player control, we were very cognizant of the fact that knockdowns would. We spent a lot of time making sure the knockdown animations were very reactive to player control as soon as their character hit the ground. We also implemented a skill-based system that meant if you tried to ADS before touching the floor you would trigger a faster recovery animation, meaning you could get back into the action quicker.\nForce Reactions in Alpha 3.11 was our second delivery and will be by no means our last. We are actively working on medium-impact reactions and will be constantly reviewing and tweaking the balance going forward, especially in FPS combat.\nThrowing T1\nThrowing grenades or other objects has always been a bit inconsistent and is even more disappointing when you think you have that perfect multi-kill opportunity for the grenade to just whimper a few feet from you. So, the first thing we wanted to achieve with T1 was to make throwing much more reliable, so that the object you throw (whether a grenade or other object) goes where you expect it to go. The second biggest objective, which is a critical pre-requisite for the physical inventory, was for the throw system to be able to interact and co-exist with the carriable system.\nIn Alpha 3.10, if you picked up a grenade from the floor and then tried to throw it, there was no way for you to pull the pin. Also, if you pressed the \u2018Throw Grenade\u2019 hotkey, you would drop the grenade in your hand and pull a new one from your suit. Obviously, this is not the intended behaviour and was a major reason why we changed throwing to come from an equipped state (i.e. holding the grenade in your hand) rather than directly from your suit. This system will also allow us to deliver gadgets and deployables in the future.\nAs part of T1, we also added a UI \u2018throw arc\u2019 that allows you to see the trajectory of the grenade. While currently this is enabled for all helmets, it will only be accessible from combat helmets once we start to define different armor archetypes in the \u2018verse.\nBehring Grenade Launcher & Behring BR2 Shotgun\nEver since I have been directing weapons, we have been trying to make sure that every weapon we add to the game has a unique purpose or playstyle that it suits. Currently, we already have several live shotguns that are deadly when up-close-and-personal but ineffective beyond that. With Behring being a manufacturer that we have identified as being middle of the road when it comes to damage, fire rate, and accuracy, we felt the BR2 was our first opportunity to push the range out for a shotgun to provide a bit more oomph in mid-quarter combat without it dominating at close-quarters. While we were happy with the BR2, we are not necessarily happy with shotguns as an overall class as they are outgunned by SMGs and outranged by assault rifles. We will be doing an update to all the shotguns in an upcoming patch to give them greater identity.\nThe Behring grenade launcher on the other hand presented entirely different problems. A 40mm grenade in real life has a kill radius of about 5m with a casualty radius of about 15m. These are big numbers when you look at our interior spaces and, considering that you can fire several of these over a short space of time, you are left with a pretty powerful weapon. On the one hand we wanted to deliver a weapon that felt heavy and designed to rain down destruction, but on the other hand we didn\u2019t want to massively wreck the balance of FPS combat.\nWith that aim, we made sure the numbers were slightly less than that of a normal frag grenade for both kill and injury radius. But if I\u2019m being totally honest, I would say the grenade launcher is slightly too powerful in the current game. The main reason is that players have access to an infinite amount of ammo using the PMA, so we had to choose between releasing the weapon as intended or massively nerfing it until the physical inventory comes online. As a team we felt it was more representative of an experience to release the weapon as it\u2019s supposed to work and wait for the other systems, such as physical inventory and physical damage, to balance out its sheer power. Then, players will have to consider how much space they allocate to ammunition and physical damage will cause weapons and armor to lose integrity when they are hit. This means if someone gets blown up by an explosion, a lot of their equipment will be damaged, which lowers the overall value. I have also seen the feedback regarding arming distance and it\u2019s something that we will be working on.\nFinal Thoughts\nIf I look back across all the features that the Core Gameplay Pillar delivered for Alpha 3.11, I am happy with the results. However, this doesn\u2019t mean everything went well or if I had that time again, I would do everything the same.\nThe main thing I think I would change would be how we implemented Force Reactions in the ships. Rather than treat it the same as all the other forces in the game (wind, bullets, etc) \u2013 which on the face of it makes sense \u2013 I would have designed it specifically around the gravity generator inside the ships. Currently we take the force that is applied to the ship and then directly apply it to the actor through filters depending on the force so that they react accordingly. Instead, I would have rather had the gravity itself react to the force, which would then cause the actor to react. While there would be no difference to the player, I think it would have been a cleaner implementation and be easier to extend the system in the future. For example, when we add gravity generator items, etc.\nIn the last two quarters we have also delivered two features (Body Dragging and Knockdowns) that would have really benefited from driven ragdoll. Unfortunately, that feature is not being delivered by someone on my teams, so I wouldn\u2019t have necessarily been able to change anything. But looking back, I would have raised more visibility on the benefits of trying to push that feature forward. That is obviously a challenge with working on a 600-person team that is spread across multiple continents and has different priorities across multiple projects. Everyone is trying to deliver the best features\/content\/tech that they can to the highest possible quality and sometimes the stars don\u2019t align when it comes to priorities. In this case, it is purely on my shoulders due to a lack of communication. As developers, we don\u2019t always get it right when we\u2019re in the thick of things, but hopefully this gives some insight into our processes and how we are always giving it 100% to try and create the best experiences for you to enjoy.\nRichard Tyrer\nCore Gameplay Director\n\nEnvironments\nCargo Decks\nFor this release we were able to introduce the next step in adding complexity to our space stations. The idea for the major stations located around planets is that they would be more than just rest stops; they would have their own facilities dedicated to other services, like cargo.\nFor the exterior, we introduced new addon components that describe the infrastructure and large racks of containers implying the capacity of the location (which right now is purely visual, in the future we would like to include more interactive elements).\nInside, we wanted to expand the traversal routes. For this, we introduced the idea of a station having a main transit network that connects the various elements of the station together \u2013 commercial decks, cargo decks, etc.\nFor the interior of the cargo deck, there were a few elements we wanted to include. Firstly, for the hub area we wanted to describe a themed logistical experience for the player. This includes a section of a shipping warehouse that, in the future, will be a sandbox for mission content. For the main shopping space, we wanted to incorporate a few elements into one larger shop. Now we can see the cargo drop-off and pickup counter located within a mini logistic sorting office, the ship rental space is located off to the side, and the guild and supplies area is in the corner. Overall, this gives a more diverse experience for the player rather than separating all these elements into separate stores..\nPlanet Content\nFor this quarter we were able to keep momentum in updating the planets and moons in the Stanton System with the latest tools and tech we\u2019re using to build out the Pyro System. The start of this was doing a global repainting pass to all planets and moons. Fundamentally, this painting process drives a lot of the latest features in how we\u2019re unifying objects, so to get this into the game we needed to bite the bullet and do the first pass over everything. In the last patch, we introduced the new heightmaps, and now the new painting pass will take advantage of all this new data.\nThe second element we were able to introduce was a global improvement to all our geology packs. We now have the ability to specify terrain colour pickup for assets which will enable them to procedurally match the colour of the terrain or bedrock. Also, we were able to add asset tessellation and displacement on a per-object basis, which means we can assign heightmaps to assets that drive the displacement parameters. In a nutshell, this means when the player gets close to an asset it should be considerably higher in geometry resolution, giving a complex silhouette read.\nLastly, we replaced all of our terrain shaders with scanned data. This is something we\u2019ve been looking into for some time as the quality of the results was extremely high, but with some of the latest tech, we were able to implement it into our pipeline. We recreated over 70 base shaders by combining and mixing the scanned data together to get the results we wanted. In the future, we have ambitions to set up dedicated scanning equipment to process our own data, which we\u2019ll gather from field trips. We want to ensure we can create a diverse and wonderful palette for future Star Citizen locations.\nFinal Thoughts\nWe were able to introduce a lot of new tech in this release, as well as start to show the second round of polish updates on the planet surfaces. Also, with the introduction of scanned data for our surfaces, we saw a substantial jump in quality. However, some of the global painting passes were not as detailed and involved as we would have liked. This is mainly due to time restraints in the quarter. Some of the geology surfacing with the new libraries could be more appropriate to the biome\/region also.\nFor cargo decks, we should have foreseen the disconnect between the interior and exterior when separating out the commercial decks. To improve the experience and help give context to the player we would like this transit network to be physicalized in the future. This will provide visibility out from the transit cab to the exterior of the station as it moves towards its destination.\nIan Leyland\nStar Citizen Art Director\n\nDesign\nArmistice Zones\nThe Armistice Zone relaxations are the first step in removing all arbitrary restrictions from the game, as and when we have the capability to properly defend and police the various areas of the game. This was possible at the rest stops because as well as reusing the existing size-4 turrets and size-6 sentries, we created an all-new size-10 turret. Together, these are capable of dealing with any ship planned to be in the game. And rather than impose yet another arbitrary restriction, we made the defenses fully destructible, though their respawn time is very swift at 5 minutes. This respawn system will be developed further in the future to likely rely on repair.\nIn concert with the defenses, we added the first iteration of a security response system which, while still quite simplistic, adds up the CrimeStats of all players in the area (known internally as \u201cheat\u201d) and spawns security ships of increasing numbers and strength in response. The system responds quickly to increases in an area\u2019s heat by spawning in new ships and despawning out weaker ships they replace. The system responds slower to the killing of its members (should the heat not be raised by this) and slower still to decreases in heat. We will develop this system further in the future to also take into account the ships that players are using and the aggression shown.\nWe will roll this out across other locations like outposts, though Grim HEX will need a more complex solution as the defenses there should only respond to crimes committed in its jurisdiction and not in others. Olisar will remain an aberration as it is a legacy location that cannot support an Armistice Zone of the radius required.\nThe Live Team had to be extremely vigilant and quick to react to issues given the short time that Alpha 3.11 was running in the PTU. One example of an issue we noticed was players stealing the sentries by swallowing them in the cargo bay of their 890 Jumps and flying off with them. We rectified this by self-destructing sentries taken away from the area and respawning them. Another example is that while the security response was capable of quickly spawning ships on local severs, on a live server it was not. To try and improve this we reduced the thresholds that the system responded to in order to reduce the number of spawns requested.\nWe have seen videos of many players teaming up to overrun a rest stop and hold it for a long time despite the defenses and security response. Because of this, the moment the Idris became available, we added it to the top level of the response system, so we\u2019re hopeful that those players would struggle to replicate this in the not too distant future.\nFinal Thoughts\nMoving forward, we also plan to relax the arbitrary limitations found in interiors, again starting at the rest stops. We are already well underway with a spawn closet system that will allow us to spawn the guards necessary to police the area. As well as this, we are working on a security network that will know whether players have the right to be in certain areas and enable cameras, turrets, and guards to respond to trespassers, those with CrimeStats, or those in the process of committing crimes.\nLuke Pressley\nLead Designer\n\n\nSee you in the \u2018Verse!\nWe believe that giving this level of insight into our development process is highly valuable, especially when you can read the thought processes, reflections, and learnings direct from our senior developers. As mentioned last time, we\u2019re committed to transparent development and will continue to provide quarterly patch postmortems going forward.","de_DE":"Alpha 3.11 Obduktion\nAm 8. Oktober 2020 starteten wir Alpha 3.11 High Impact, das eine Reihe von neuen Features und \u00c4nderungen einf\u00fchrte, darunter Frachtdecks, Kraftreaktionen und die erste Stufe der umfassenderen Entfernung der Waffenstillstandszone. Im Folgenden findet ihr eine Obduktion der Senior-Entwickler selbst, die detailliert beschreibt, was geliefert wurde und was sie dar\u00fcber dachten, wie es gelaufen ist.\n\n\nFahrzeug-Team\nDie Fahrzeugs\u00e4ule hatte mit Alpha 3.11 ein viel leichteres Viertel im Vergleich zur Sto\u00dfstangenlieferung in Alpha 3.10, aber was wir geliefert haben, hatte hoffentlich einen gro\u00dfen Einfluss auf das Spielerlebnis.\nHerkunft 100er Serie\nDas Team f\u00fcr Fahrzeuginhalte lieferte die Origin 100 Serie in Alpha 3.11, bestehend aus 100i, 125a und 135c. Die 100er Serie f\u00fcgt dem Spiel ein alternatives Startschiff sowie einen leichten J\u00e4ger und leichten Frachtschlepper hinzu. Dies sind fantastische kleine Schiffe f\u00fcr neue Spieler, mit denen sie ihre Reise als Sternenb\u00fcrger beginnen k\u00f6nnen. Sie bieten die M\u00f6glichkeit, eine Vielzahl von Missionen zu bew\u00e4ltigen und die Weiten des 'Verses' zu erforschen. Raketen & Gegenma\u00dfnahmen\nDas Raketen- und Gegenma\u00dfnahmen-Gameplay war im Laufe der Jahre in verschiedenen Zust\u00e4nden gewesen und war weder auf der Seite des Angreifers noch auf der Seite des Verteidigers wirklich unterhaltsam. Unser Ziel ist es, dies mit dem Raketenoperator-Modus endg\u00fcltig zu beheben, aber bis es soweit ist, haben wir beschlossen, die Zeit damit zu verbringen, Korrekturen und Iterationen im Gameplay zu implementieren, um einen Vorgeschmack darauf zu geben, was dieses Feature liefern wird. Die Hauptprobleme mit den Raketen vor Alpha 3.11 waren die folgenden:\nGegenma\u00dfnahmen w\u00fcrden nur auf IR-Raketen (Flares) und EM-Raketen (Chaff) wirken Nur Flares funktionierten (manchmal und stark Server-abh\u00e4ngig) Es gab keine Gegenma\u00dfnahmen f\u00fcr Spoof-CS-Raketen Es war extrem einfach, Raketen abzufeuern, und die Verteidigung gegen Raketen war extrem schwierig\nZuerst untersuchten wir, warum nur Fackeln funktionieren w\u00fcrden und Spreu nicht. Das Problem war eine Kombination aus falschen Setup-Daten bei einigen Schiffen, falschen Daten bei einigen Gegenma\u00dfnahmen und Raketen und einem jetzt redundanten Workaround, der urspr\u00fcnglich f\u00fcr einen bestimmten SQ42-Level erstellt wurde und das ganze Spiel \u00fcber angeklopft hat.\nNachdem wir diese Probleme behoben hatten, erkannten wir, dass das Signatursystem zwei verschiedene M\u00f6glichkeiten hat, Signale zu modifizieren - entweder ein starkes Signal zu erzeugen oder alle Signale in der Umgebung zu d\u00e4mpfen. Wir entschieden uns, diesen Unterschied zu nutzen, anstatt von den Piloten zu verlangen, \"Maulwurfwaffen\" zu spielen, indem wir die \"richtige\" Gegenma\u00dfnahme f\u00fcr den \"richtigen\" Raketentyp w\u00e4hlten, w\u00e4hrend wir unter dem Stress standen, einige Sekunden vor dem Einschlag entscheiden zu m\u00fcssen. Mit diesem Gedanken im Hinterkopf haben wir einige Spieltests mit den folgenden \u00c4nderungen durchgef\u00fchrt: Fackeln w\u00fcrden auf alle Raketentypen wirken Chaff w\u00fcrde in ein L\u00e4rmfeld verwandelt werden, das alle Signaturen um das Feld herum d\u00e4mpft\nSofort bewiesen die ersten Gameplay-Tests, dass dies eine viel ansprechendere Art der Raketenabwehr ist. Wir haben dann die HUD-Elemente des Raketenwarnsystems aktualisiert, ein Widget f\u00fcr Gegenma\u00dfnahmen hinzugef\u00fcgt und die Keybinds aktualisiert, um einen direkten Start f\u00fcr jede Art von Gegenma\u00dfnahme zu erm\u00f6glichen. Die UI- und VFX-Teams sind dann eingesprungen und haben alles versch\u00f6nert, die Effekte ersetzt und auch ein paar Fehler im Zusammenhang mit VFX behoben (z.B. dass Gegenma\u00dfnahmen im PU unsichtbar sind).\nEin zuk\u00fcnftiger Zusatz, den wir nicht rechtzeitig f\u00fcr Alpha 3.11 machen konnten, war die \u00c4nderung der Namen von \"Flares\" und \"Spreu\". Beide Namen sind f\u00fcr Flugsimulationsgemeinschaften sehr gebr\u00e4uchlich, aber wir wollen sie trotzdem umbenennen, um deutlich zu machen, dass Star Citizen unterschiedliche Konzepte zur Verteidigung gegen Raketen verwendet. Dies wird uns dazu zwingen, neue VO-Zeilen aufzunehmen, um die Schiffscomputerstimmen zu aktualisieren. Jedes Fahrzeug darf nur vier Schl\u00f6sser gleichzeitig haben Nur eine Rakete kann pro Gestell gleichzeitig starten Nur ein Raketentyp (IR\/EM\/CS) kann gleichzeitig starten Raketen verlieren au\u00dferhalb ihres Verriegelungswinkels\nNachdem wir diese Ma\u00dfnahmen eingef\u00fchrt hatten, verbesserte sich das Raketenerlebnis in den ersten Tests deutlich. Das Spamming der Raketen wurde deutlich reduziert und die Meta verlagerte sich in Richtung Schiffe, die sehr nahe aneinander herankommen und Raketen auf Entfernungen abfeuern, bei denen der Verteidiger nicht einmal eine Raketenwarnung vor dem Einschlag erhalten w\u00fcrde. Als Ergebnis dieser unerw\u00fcnschten \u00c4nderung f\u00fchrten wir minimale und maximale Zielreichweiten ein. Dadurch wurde das Raketen-Gameplay deutlich \u00fcber die Reichweite der Gesch\u00fctze hinaus ausgedehnt, so dass raketenfokussierte Schiffe wie geplant am Rand des Kampfes herumlungern konnten, w\u00e4hrend engagierte K\u00e4mpfer n\u00e4her an sie herankamen. Dies erm\u00f6glichte es uns auch, den Verriegelungswinkel kleinerer Raketen zu erh\u00f6hen, so dass Schiffe wie die Constellation (die Raketen nicht nach vorne, sondern leicht aus dem Winkel feuern) wieder Raketen einsetzen konnten.\nViele dieser \u00c4nderungen (besonders an den Raketen) sind vor\u00fcbergehend, um ein besseres Erlebnis zu bieten, bis der Raketenoperator-Modus bereit ist, der das Verhalten wieder \u00e4ndert und\/oder bestimmte Aspekte entfernt, wenn er implementiert wird. Abschlie\u00dfende Gedanken\nDas \u00fcbergeordnete Ziel, das wir im Raketenspiel erreichen wollen, ist es, sowohl den Einsatz von Raketen als auch die Verteidigung gegen Raketen tiefer und lohnender zu machen, mit einem eigenen \"Slot\" in der Kampfumgebung. Raketen sollen keine Alternative zu Gewehren sein, sondern taktische Waffen, und der Einsatz von Raketen soll eine bewusste Entscheidung mit Konsequenzen sein. Aus dem gleichen Grund wollen wir auch speziellen Raketenbooten, wie der Talonw\u00fcrger oder dem Freelancer MIS, einen Vorteil verschaffen, wenn es darum geht, Munition einzusetzen. Diese Schiffe werden sich im offensiven Raketen-Gameplay auszeichnen, haben aber in anderen Kategorien offensichtliche Nachteile. Daher wird es in den n\u00e4chsten paar Versionen mehr Iterationen zu Gegenma\u00dfnahmen und Raketenspiel geben. Im Moment sind wir jedoch sehr froh, dass die Raketenerfahrung die Frustrationen der vorherigen Versionen hinter sich gelassen hat.\nJohn Crewe\nFahrzeug-Direktor\n\nTechnik\nLeinwand-Aufkleber-System\nF\u00fcr Alpha 3.11 lieferte das Grafikteam die zugrundeliegende Rendering-Technologie, um das 'Canvas Decal'-System zu unterst\u00fctzen, das das Building Blocks-System nutzt, um Decal-Texturen zur Laufzeit zu erstellen. Diese Abziehbilder k\u00f6nnen f\u00fcr die Beschilderung, auf der Kleidung oder sogar f\u00fcr die Beschilderung von Fahrzeugen verwendet werden. Der Vorteil der Abziehbilder, die zur Laufzeit erstellt werden, ist, dass wir Spieldaten wie den Namen des Spielers verwenden oder sogar den Inhalt in die Sprache \u00fcbersetzen lassen k\u00f6nnen, in der das Spiel gespielt wird.\nUm dieses Feature f\u00fcr eine breitere Verwendung in der PU skalierbar zu machen, ist das System eng mit dem Textur-Streaming-System gekoppelt, so dass die dynamischen Texturen mit der gleichen Logik wie Standardtexturen 'hereingestreamt' werden, was sicherstellt, dass wir immer ein festes Speicherbudget haben. Diese Streaminglogik stellt sicher, dass wir die gleichen Funktionen automatisch auch auf Maschinen mit niedriger Spezifikation ausf\u00fchren k\u00f6nnen, indem die Texturaufl\u00f6sungen w\u00e4hrend des Streamens sorgf\u00e4ltig ausbalanciert werden, erlaubt es uns aber auch, die Texturaufl\u00f6sung auf leistungsst\u00e4rkeren Maschinen so hoch wie m\u00f6glich zu pushen. Die Integration der Canvas-Aufkleber in das Textur-Streaming f\u00fchrte zu mehreren Abst\u00fcrzen in der PTU, die sehr schwer aufzusp\u00fcren waren und viel Zeit ben\u00f6tigten, um sie zu l\u00f6sen. Infolgedessen haben wir einige Dokumentationen geschrieben, um zuk\u00fcnftigen Programmierern zu helfen, die Komplexit\u00e4t des Textur-Streaming-Systems zu verstehen, was besonders wichtig sein wird, da wir planen, den Code zu verallgemeinern und ihn auch f\u00fcr das Mesh-Streaming zu verwenden. Planeten-Technologie\nAuf der Seite der Planetentechnologie haben wir einige Features hinzugef\u00fcgt, einschlie\u00dflich Verbesserungen an den Planetenwerkzeugen. Dazu geh\u00f6ren neue Malpinsel, eine \u00fcberarbeitete Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che und kombinierte Bodenebenen- und Objektvoreinstellungen, um das Malen von Planeten noch schneller zu machen. Mit den neuen Malwerkzeugen f\u00fcr Planeten ging das Umweltkunst-Team durch alle Planeten und Monde im Stanton-System und malte die Bodenfl\u00e4chen und Objektvoreinstellungen neu. Dies macht uns auch zukunftssicher und erlaubt uns, die Vorteile der neuen Technologie an bestehenden Orten zu nutzen. Auf einer Pro-Objekt-Basis sind wir nun in der Lage, die Verschiebung der HW-Tessellation auf der \u00fcber das Gel\u00e4nde verteilten Geologie zu unterst\u00fctzen, um ihr ein detaillierteres und organischeres Aussehen zu geben. Es gab auch einige Verbesserungen im Zusammenhang mit Ozeanen und Wasser, einschlie\u00dflich des Auftriebs der Bodendecke, die wir in Zukunft weiter ausbauen werden, da w\u00e4hrend dieses Release-Zyklus nicht genug Zeit war, um gr\u00f6\u00dfere schwimmende Objekte einzuf\u00fchren.\nIn den letzten Monaten wurde viel Zeit f\u00fcr die weitere Erforschung und Entwicklung der Atmosph\u00e4re und des Wolkenrenderers, einschlie\u00dflich des vereinheitlichten Raymarchers f\u00fcr die Planetenatmosph\u00e4re, aufgewendet. Wir werden mehr ins Detail gehen, sobald das System verf\u00fcgbar ist. F\u00fcr den Moment sagen wir einfach, dass wir an verschiedenen Algorithmen gearbeitet haben, um das Raymarchen bei einer Aufl\u00f6sung unter dem Bildschirm zu erm\u00f6glichen und das Rauschen und Upsampling der Ergebnisse auf die volle Aufl\u00f6sung zu reduzieren, um die Leistung der kostspieligen Raymarching-Vorg\u00e4nge zu verbessern. Diese werden mit Reprojektionstechniken und der B\u00fcndelung von Raymarching-Anfragen f\u00fcr Pixel, die bei jedem Frame aktualisiert werden sollen, kombiniert, um die Leistung weiter zu verbessern. Zus\u00e4tzlich unterst\u00fctzt unsere bestehende Multiscatter-L\u00f6sung nun eine deutlich h\u00f6here Anzahl an Streuauftr\u00e4gen, was f\u00fcr sehr dichte Atmosph\u00e4ren wichtig sein wird. \u00dcbrigens befinden wir uns jetzt in den allerersten Tagen der volumetrischen Wolken-Rendering-Forschung...\nFast als Nebenprodukt dieser Arbeit haben wir verschiedene Verbesserungen an der bestehenden Atmosph\u00e4ren-Rendering-Technologie vorgenommen. Zuallererst wurden einige seit langem bestehende Artefakte, wie z.B. die Falschfarbenwiedergabe in der D\u00e4mmerung in der N\u00e4he der Atmosph\u00e4renoberseite zusammen mit sehr markanten Halos um die Silhouette der dunklen Seite eines Planeten, angesprochen. Die Generierung von Nachschlagetabellen verwendet nun eine besser geeignete Methode, um Beispielstandorte f\u00fcr die numerische Integration \u00fcber (Hemi-)Sph\u00e4ren zu generieren. Dies und andere Verbesserungen der numerischen Pr\u00e4zision f\u00fchrten zu genaueren Ergebnissen in diesen Tabellen bei reduziertem Rechenaufwand. Doch damit nicht genug, wir haben noch weitere visuelle Verbesserungen implementiert, die ihr hoffentlich bald genie\u00dfen werdet. Eine davon ist die Auswertung, wie viel von der Sonnenscheibe sichtbar ist, wenn man berechnet, wie viel Sonnenlicht den Punkt x in der Atmosph\u00e4re erreicht. Diese Auswertung ist vollst\u00e4ndig in das gesamte Beleuchtungssystem der Atmosph\u00e4re integriert und wirkt sich auf die direkte und indirekte Beleuchtung aus. Au\u00dferdem haben wir Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr eine Absorptionsschicht hinzugef\u00fcgt. Dies erlaubt uns unter anderem, den erd\u00e4hnlichen Planeten eine Ozonschicht hinzuzuf\u00fcgen, die die Bl\u00e4ue des Himmels betont und eine bessere Schattierung in der D\u00e4mmerung erm\u00f6glicht (Entfernung der gelben T\u00f6nung). Wir beziehen nun auch IRL-Radiometriedaten der extraterrestrischen Sonne mit ein, wenn wir die Lichtsimulation durchf\u00fchren, anstatt von einer \"rein wei\u00dfen\" Lichtquelle auszugehen, sowie eine ungef\u00e4hre Umrechnung von spektraler Strahldichte (das Ergebnis der Atmosph\u00e4renbeleuchtungssimulation) in Leuchtdichte (die im traditionellen Sinne zur Beleuchtung der Szene verwendet wird). Schlie\u00dflich haben wir die Auswertung der Sonnenstrahlung verbessert, die von Punkten au\u00dferhalb der Atmosph\u00e4re des Planeten empfangen wird. Sie wirft nun D\u00e4mmerungslicht aufgrund der atmosph\u00e4rischen Streuung und dem Aufprall des Winkelradius der Sonne auf Objekte in der Halbschattenregion eines Planeten. Dies sollte einen netten Touch f\u00fcr Gro\u00dfkampfschiffe oder Monde, die Planeten umkreisen, hinzuf\u00fcgen. Triebwerk\nAuf der Motorseite wurden einige Verbesserungen vorgenommen. Wir haben unsere Compiler-Toolchain auf VS 2019 aktualisiert, was schnellere Kompilier- und Linkzeiten erm\u00f6glichen wird. Au\u00dferdem haben wir Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr den Intel SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) hinzugef\u00fcgt. Dies wird es uns erm\u00f6glichen, zielgerichteten, SSE-optimierten Code (man denke an HLSL) f\u00fcr Hochleistungs-CPU-Compute-Jobs zu schreiben und die CPU-F\u00e4higkeiten auf jeder einzelnen Maschine, auf der der Code l\u00e4uft, voll auszunutzen. Mehrere Codepfade in der Physik, der 3D-Engine und dem Zonensystem sind dabei, portiert zu werden. Und, wir haben noch eine weitere Compiler-Optimierung f\u00fcr euch auf Lager. Die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die AVX-Codegenerierung f\u00fcr Clients wurde bereits aktiviert und sollte in der kommenden Alpha 3.12-Version auf die \u00f6ffentlichen Server kommen.\nWas die Speicherauslastung der Server und Clients betrifft, haben wir viel Zeit damit verbracht, unsere Tracking-Tools weiter zu verfeinern, um sicherzustellen, dass wir eine gute \u00dcbersicht dar\u00fcber haben, wo wir Speicher verbrauchen. Wir sind jetzt auch in der Lage, die Speichernutzung in Bibliotheken von Drittanbietern korrekt zu verfolgen, die es uns entweder nicht erlauben, die Speicherzuweisung durch unser System umzuleiten, oder die noch nicht aktualisiert wurden, um dies zu tun. Wir planen immer noch, etwas mehr Sichtbarkeit bei der clientseitigen Video-Speicherzuweisung auf der Treiberebene zu erhalten (unterhalb der Ebene, die wir derzeit als Anwendung mit der GPU verfolgen k\u00f6nnen). Als Ergebnis dieser Verbesserungen, der laufenden Untersuchungen und des Trackings wurden einige kritische Speicherlecks zur Ver\u00f6ffentlichung behoben.\nW\u00e4hrend der gesamten Alpha 3.11 Produktion konzentrierte sich das Core Engine Team haupts\u00e4chlich auf Features f\u00fcr sp\u00e4tere Versionen, wie den Gen12 Renderer. Allerdings wurde ein sehr gro\u00dfer Fehler behoben, der dazu f\u00fchrte, dass alle unsere Objekte auf den Clients viel fr\u00fcher als geplant entladen wurden. Objekte auf den Clients sollten nun f\u00fcr deutlich gr\u00f6\u00dfere Entfernungen gestreamt bleiben. Audio\nF\u00fcr die Audiotechnik haben wir die Wise-Version auf 2019.2.4 aktualisiert, wodurch mehrere Probleme behoben wurden. Als Teil dieses Unterfangens haben wir die Speicherverwaltung innerhalb des Audiosystems \u00fcberarbeitet, indem wir von einer Gruppe von Speicherpools zu einem einzigen Pool \u00fcbergegangen sind. Dadurch k\u00f6nnen wir mit den vielen verschiedenen Situationen, die der Sternenb\u00fcrger pr\u00e4sentiert, leichter umgehen, indem wir Speicher dort zuweisen, wo er gebraucht wird, wenn er gebraucht wird. Wir haben viel Zeit damit verbracht, unsere Voice-Budgets zu \u00fcberdenken, um das Gesamterlebnis zu verbessern und den Spielern zu erm\u00f6glichen, mehr von dem zu h\u00f6ren, was im Spiel vor sich geht. Die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Waffenfeuer, insbesondere auf gro\u00dfe Entfernungen, wurde verbessert und mehrere Probleme mit der Audio-Feuerrate und der Waffenlautst\u00e4rke wurden behoben. Leinwand-Slicing\nDieses Quartal hat das UI-Tech Team an einem System gearbeitet, das Canvas Slicer genannt wird. Dabei handelt es sich um ein Untersystem von Building Blocks, das es den UI-Designern erm\u00f6glichen wird, Scheiben von 2D-UI in 3D-Raum zu platzieren. Normalerweise, wenn wir ein 2D UI zeichnen, wird es zu einer Textur gerendert und dann wird diese Textur auf eine Geometrie, wie z.B. ein Monitor Panel oder ein Data-Pad, angewendet. Mit dem Canvas Slicer erstellen wir die Geometrie an einer beliebigen Position im 3D-Raum zur Laufzeit und zeichnen die 2D-UI direkt darauf. Das bedeutet, dass wir in der Lage sein werden, interessante UI-Layer zu erzeugen, wie z.B. holografische Schiffs HUDs und Helmdisplays. Tooltipps\nWir haben auch begonnen, unser Tooltips-System f\u00fcr Building Blocks zu entwerfen. Oberfl\u00e4chlich gesehen sah es nach einem einfach zu implementierenden System aus, aber die Anforderungen, um sicherzustellen, dass es superflexibel ist, haben dazu gef\u00fchrt, dass wir \u00fcber eine ganze Menge nachdenken m\u00fcssen, bevor wir mit der Implementierung beginnen.\nMarco Corbetta\nVP der Technologie\n\nKern-Gameplay\nExternes Inventar\nExternes Inventar ist die erste Iteration unseres gitterbasierten Inventarinterfaces, mit dem Spieler ihre FPS-Waren zwischen Rucksack-, Brust- und Beintaschen verwalten k\u00f6nnen. Wie der Name schon sagt, k\u00f6nnen Spieler mit dem Externen Inventar auch direkt mit anderen Lagerbeh\u00e4ltern in der Welt interagieren und Gegenst\u00e4nde zwischen ihnen hin- und herziehen. In Alpha 3.11 ist dies nur f\u00fcr das Greycat ROC-Lagerfach aktiviert, damit Spieler ihre FPS-Mineng\u00fcter verwalten k\u00f6nnen. Aber in der Zukunft und sobald wir eine echte Item-Lagerung (unterst\u00fctzt durch iCache) realisieren, wird dies Spielern erlauben, Gegenst\u00e4nde in F\u00e4chern, Kisten und anderen solchen externen Inventaren zu lagern.\nAuch wenn eine neue Inventar-UI und die M\u00f6glichkeit, Gegenst\u00e4nde per Drag & Drop zwischen den Lagercontainern hin- und herzuziehen, auf den ersten Blick einfach klingen mag, mussten wir einige kreative und technische Herausforderungen meistern. Die wichtigsten kreativen Herausforderungen drehten sich darum, ein Interface zu haben, das sich taktil und zug\u00e4nglich anf\u00fchlt, ohne sich einfach nur wie ein Standard 2D Interface anzuf\u00fchlen, das man in den meisten RPGs sieht. Das lag nicht daran, dass diese Inventare schlecht sind, vielmehr wollten wir nicht, dass Spieler, die Inventar-Tetris durchf\u00fchren, ihre Gegenst\u00e4nde verwalten; wir wollten, dass die Spieler Gegenst\u00e4nde frei zwischen den Lagercontainern bewegen k\u00f6nnen, ohne sich Gedanken dar\u00fcber machen zu m\u00fcssen, wo sie den Gegenstand fallen lassen oder ob ein anderer Gegenstand im Weg ist. Die erste Iteration davon konnten wir mit unserer Building Blocks-Technologie erreichen, die die Gegenst\u00e4nde als Liste und nicht als 2D-Raster speichert. Das bedeutet, dass sich die Gegenst\u00e4nde flie\u00dfend um deinen Cursor bewegen, wenn du Objekte zwischen den Containern hin- und herziehst. Wir wollen das Gesamtgef\u00fchl noch weiter verbessern, aber das Team ist mit der ersten Iteration zufrieden.\nMit Building Blocks konnten wir zwar die kreativen Aspekte des Designs umsetzen, aber es stellte auch die gr\u00f6\u00dfte technische Herausforderung dar. Da sich die Technologie noch in der Entwicklung befindet, bedeutet das, dass sie nicht immer die Dinge unterst\u00fctzt, die man braucht, um ein Feature zu liefern. Im Fall von External Inventory wollten wir, dass sich die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che diegetisch und 3D anf\u00fchlt, auch wenn sie es nicht ist. Das bedeutete, dass wir wollten, dass alle Icons holografisch sind, so wie sie in AR direkt vor deinen Augen angezeigt werden. Leider konnten unsere 3D-Symbole nur einen begrenzten Shader unterst\u00fctzen, was bedeutete, dass wir viele materielle Details der angezeigten Gegenst\u00e4nde verloren haben. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt h\u00e4tten wir das Feature verz\u00f6gern k\u00f6nnen, aber das Team und ich hielten es f\u00fcr wichtig, dass wir live gehen und so viel Feedback wie m\u00f6glich erhalten, bis wir ein echtes Inventar haben. Wir werden diesen Shader in einem kommenden Patch definitiv aufr\u00fcsten. Reaktionen erzwingen\nIm Kern ist Force Reactions ein System, das entwickelt wurde, um zu simulieren, was ein Charakter tun w\u00fcrde, wenn er von einer Kraft getroffen wird, sei es ein starker Windsto\u00df oder eine Kugel, die in seine Schulter eindringt. Es kann in drei Stufen von Aufprallen unterteilt werden:\nGeringer Aufprall: zuckt, zuckt zusammen und neigt sich, mittlerer Aufprall: taumelt, hoher Aufprall: niederschl\u00e4gt.\nIn Alpha 3.10 lieferten wir die erste Iteration von Low-Impact-Reaktionen mit den prozeduralen Zuckungen im FPS-Kampf und Schr\u00e4glage bei anhaltendem Wind. In Alpha 3.11 f\u00fcgten wir den Zuckungen mehr \"Gef\u00fchl\" hinzu, mit zus\u00e4tzlichen Kamera- und Waffenreaktionen und unserer ersten Iteration von Knockdowns, mit der Absicht, dass die Torkel sp\u00e4ter kommen.\nDie gr\u00f6\u00dfte Herausforderung f\u00fcr dieses System war, dass es wirklich systemisch sein musste, da Kr\u00e4fte von vielen verschiedenen Orten kommen k\u00f6nnen, nicht nur von Kugeln. Daf\u00fcr haben wir die Kr\u00e4fte in drei Hauptkategorien eingeteilt: Direkte Kr\u00e4fte: alles, was physisch auf den Charakter einwirkt, wie eine Schachtel oder eine Kugel Indirekte Kr\u00e4fte: die Kraft, die du erh\u00e4ltst, wenn dein Schiff gerammt wird oder von einer Windb\u00f6e Nachhaltige Kr\u00e4fte: wo eine Kraft st\u00e4ndig angewendet wird, wie eine G-Kraft oder Wind\nDas bedeutete, dass wir verschiedene Kr\u00e4fte mit unterschiedlichen Ma\u00dfst\u00e4ben aufteilen konnten und es den Designern erlaubten, die Reaktion des Charakters entsprechend auszugleichen, da die Kr\u00e4fte, wenn man von einer Kiste getroffen wird, verglichen mit der Beschleunigung eines Schiffes im Weltraum auf 1000m\/s sehr unterschiedlich sind. Auch wenn die Reaktionen der Spieler bei geringerem Aufprall nicht die Kontrolle \u00fcber den Spieler verlieren, waren wir uns der Tatsache bewusst, dass ein Knockdown das tun w\u00fcrde. Wir haben viel Zeit damit verbracht, sicherzustellen, dass die Knockdown-Animationen sehr reaktiv auf die Spielersteuerung reagieren, sobald ihr Charakter auf dem Boden aufschl\u00e4gt. Wir implementierten auch ein f\u00e4higkeitsbasiertes System, das bedeutete, dass wenn man versuchte, ADS auszul\u00f6sen, bevor man den Boden ber\u00fchrte, eine schnellere Genesungsanimation ausl\u00f6ste, was bedeutete, dass man schneller wieder in die Action einsteigen konnte.\nForce Reactions in Alpha 3.11 war unsere zweite Lieferung und wird keineswegs unsere letzte sein. Wir arbeiten aktiv an Reaktionen mit mittlerer Wirkung und werden die Balance in Zukunft st\u00e4ndig \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen und optimieren, insbesondere im FPS-Kampf.\nWurf T1\nDas Werfen von Granaten oder anderen Gegenst\u00e4nden war schon immer ein wenig inkonsequent und ist umso entt\u00e4uschender, wenn man denkt, dass man die perfekte Multi-Kill-Gelegenheit hat, bei der die Granate nur ein paar Meter von einem entfernt wimmert. Also, das erste, was wir mit T1 erreichen wollten, war, das Werfen viel zuverl\u00e4ssiger zu machen, so dass das Objekt, das man wirft (egal ob Granate oder anderes Objekt) dorthin kommt, wo man es erwartet. Das zweitgr\u00f6\u00dfte Ziel, das eine entscheidende Voraussetzung f\u00fcr das physische Inventar ist, war, dass das Wurfsystem mit dem tragbaren System interagieren und koexistieren kann.\nWenn man in Alpha 3.10 eine Granate vom Boden aufhob und dann versuchte, sie zu werfen, gab es f\u00fcr dich keine M\u00f6glichkeit, den Stift zu ziehen. Au\u00dferdem, wenn du den Hotkey 'Granate werfen' gedr\u00fcckt hast, hast du die Granate in deine Hand fallen lassen und eine neue aus deinem Anzug gezogen. Offensichtlich ist dies nicht das beabsichtigte Verhalten und war einer der Hauptgr\u00fcnde, warum wir das Werfen ge\u00e4ndert haben, um aus einem ausger\u00fcsteten Zustand zu kommen (d.h. die Granate in der Hand zu halten) und nicht direkt aus deinem Anzug. Dieses System wird es uns auch erlauben, in Zukunft Gadgets und Deployables zu liefern.\nAls Teil von T1 haben wir auch einen UI-'Wurfbogen' hinzugef\u00fcgt, der es euch erlaubt, die Flugbahn der Granate zu sehen. Derzeit ist dies zwar f\u00fcr alle Helme aktiviert, wird aber erst von Kampfhelmen aus zug\u00e4nglich sein, wenn wir anfangen, verschiedene R\u00fcstungsarchetypen im 'Vers' zu definieren.\nBehring Granatwerfer & Behring BR2 Schrotflinte\nSeitdem ich Waffen dirigiere, versuchen wir sicherzustellen, dass jede Waffe, die wir dem Spiel hinzuf\u00fcgen, einen einzigartigen Zweck oder Spielstil hat, der zu ihr passt. Momentan haben wir bereits mehrere lebende Schrotflinten, die aus n\u00e4chster N\u00e4he t\u00f6dlich sind, aber dar\u00fcber hinaus ineffektiv. Da Behring ein Hersteller ist, den wir in Bezug auf Schaden, Feuerrate und Genauigkeit als Mitte der Stra\u00dfe identifiziert haben, war die BR2 unsere erste Gelegenheit, die Reichweite f\u00fcr eine Schrotflinte zu vergr\u00f6\u00dfern, um im Nahkampf etwas mehr Schwung zu geben, ohne dass sie im Nahkampf dominiert. W\u00e4hrend wir mit dem BR2 zufrieden waren, sind wir mit Schrotflinten als Gesamtklasse nicht unbedingt zufrieden, da sie von SMGs unterlegen sind und von Sturmgewehren \u00fcberrannt werden. Wir werden in einem kommenden Patch ein Update f\u00fcr alle Schrotflinten machen, um ihnen mehr Identit\u00e4t zu geben.\nDer Behring-Granatwerfer hingegen warf ganz andere Probleme auf. Eine 40mm-Granate im echten Leben hat einen T\u00f6tungsradius von etwa 5m mit einem Verletztenradius von etwa 15m. Das sind gro\u00dfe Zahlen, wenn man sich unsere Innenr\u00e4ume ansieht, und wenn man bedenkt, dass man mehrere davon in kurzer Zeit abfeuern kann, bleibt einem eine ziemlich m\u00e4chtige Waffe. Auf der einen Seite wollten wir eine Waffe liefern, die sich schwer anf\u00fchlt und daf\u00fcr ausgelegt ist, Zerst\u00f6rung herabregnen zu lassen, aber auf der anderen Seite wollten wir die Balance des FPS-Kampfes nicht massiv st\u00f6ren.\nMit diesem Ziel haben wir daf\u00fcr gesorgt, dass die Zahlen sowohl f\u00fcr den T\u00f6tungs- als auch f\u00fcr den Verletzungsradius etwas unter denen einer normalen Splittergranate liegen. Aber wenn ich ganz ehrlich bin, w\u00fcrde ich sagen, dass der Granatwerfer im aktuellen Spiel etwas zu m\u00e4chtig ist. Der Hauptgrund daf\u00fcr ist, dass die Spieler mit dem PMA Zugang zu einer unendlichen Menge an Munition haben, also mussten wir uns entscheiden, ob wir die Waffe wie beabsichtigt loslassen oder sie massiv nerfen, bis das physische Inventar online ist. Als Team waren wir der Meinung, dass es eher eine Erfahrung war, die Waffe freizugeben, da sie funktionieren sollte, und darauf zu warten, dass die anderen Systeme, wie das Inventar und der physische Schaden, ihre schiere Kraft ausgleichen. Dann m\u00fcssen sich die Spieler \u00fcberlegen, wie viel Platz sie f\u00fcr Munition und physischen Schaden einplanen, damit Waffen und R\u00fcstung ihre Integrit\u00e4t verlieren, wenn sie getroffen werden. Das hei\u00dft, wenn jemand durch eine Explosion in die Luft gejagt wird, wird ein Gro\u00dfteil seiner Ausr\u00fcstung besch\u00e4digt, was den Gesamtwert senkt. Ich habe auch die R\u00fcckmeldungen bez\u00fcglich der Bewaffnungsdistanz gesehen und daran werden wir arbeiten.\nAbschlie\u00dfende Gedanken\nWenn ich auf all die Features zur\u00fcckblicke, die die Core Gameplay Pillar f\u00fcr Alpha 3.11 geliefert hat, bin ich mit den Ergebnissen zufrieden. Das hei\u00dft aber nicht, dass alles gut gelaufen ist, oder wenn ich diese Zeit noch einmal h\u00e4tte, w\u00fcrde ich alles genauso machen.\nDas Wichtigste, was ich denke, dass ich \u00e4ndern w\u00fcrde, w\u00e4re, wie wir Force Reactions in den Schiffen implementiert haben. Anstatt sie gleich zu behandeln wie alle anderen Kr\u00e4fte im Spiel (Wind, Kugeln, etc.) - was auf den ersten Blick Sinn macht - h\u00e4tte ich sie speziell um den Gravitationsgenerator in den Schiffen herum entworfen. Momentan nehmen wir die Kraft, die auf das Schiff einwirkt und wenden sie dann \u00fcber Filter je nach Kraft direkt auf den Akteur an, damit dieser entsprechend reagiert. Stattdessen h\u00e4tte ich lieber die Gravitation selbst auf die Kraft reagieren lassen, die dann den Akteur zu einer Reaktion veranlassen w\u00fcrde. W\u00e4hrend es f\u00fcr den Spieler keinen Unterschied g\u00e4be, denke ich, dass es eine sauberere Implementierung gewesen w\u00e4re und das System in Zukunft einfacher zu erweitern w\u00e4re. Zum Beispiel, wenn wir Gegenst\u00e4nde des Gravitationsgenerators hinzuf\u00fcgen, etc.\nIn den letzten zwei Quartalen haben wir auch zwei Features (Body Dragging und Knockdowns) geliefert, die von einer getriebenen Ragdoll wirklich profitiert h\u00e4tten. Leider wird dieses Feature nicht von jemandem aus meinen Teams geliefert, also h\u00e4tte ich nicht unbedingt etwas daran \u00e4ndern k\u00f6nnen. Aber wenn ich zur\u00fcckblicke, h\u00e4tte ich mehr Aufmerksamkeit auf die Vorteile gelenkt, wenn ich versucht h\u00e4tte, dieses Feature voranzutreiben. Das ist nat\u00fcrlich eine Herausforderung, wenn man in einem 600-k\u00f6pfigen Team arbeitet, das \u00fcber mehrere Kontinente verteilt ist und in mehreren Projekten unterschiedliche Priorit\u00e4ten hat. Jeder versucht, die besten Features\/Inhalte\/Techniken in h\u00f6chstm\u00f6glicher Qualit\u00e4t zu liefern, und manchmal stimmen die Sterne nicht \u00fcberein, wenn es um die Priorit\u00e4ten geht. In diesem Fall liegt es aufgrund mangelnder Kommunikation rein auf meinen Schultern. Als Entwickler kriegen wir es nicht immer richtig hin, wenn wir mitten im Geschehen sind, aber hoffentlich gibt uns das einen Einblick in unsere Prozesse und wie wir immer 100%ig geben, um zu versuchen, die besten Erlebnisse zu schaffen, die du genie\u00dfen kannst.\nRichard Tyrer\nHaupt-Gameplay-Regisseur\n\nUmgebungen\nFrachtdecks\nF\u00fcr diese Ver\u00f6ffentlichung konnten wir den n\u00e4chsten Schritt einf\u00fchren, um die Komplexit\u00e4t unserer Raumstationen zu erh\u00f6hen. Die Idee f\u00fcr die gro\u00dfen Stationen, die sich um Planeten herum befinden, ist, dass sie mehr als nur Rastst\u00e4tten sein w\u00fcrden; sie w\u00fcrden ihre eigenen Einrichtungen haben, die anderen Diensten gewidmet sind, wie zum Beispiel der Fracht.\nF\u00fcr das \u00c4u\u00dfere haben wir neue Addon-Komponenten eingef\u00fchrt, die die Infrastruktur und die gro\u00dfen Containerregale beschreiben, die die Kapazit\u00e4t des Ortes implizieren (die im Moment noch rein visuell ist, in Zukunft w\u00fcrden wir gerne mehr interaktive Elemente einbauen).\nIm Inneren wollten wir die Traversalrouten erweitern. Dazu haben wir die Idee einer Station mit einem Haupttransitnetz eingef\u00fchrt, das die verschiedenen Elemente der Station miteinander verbindet - Handelsdecks, Frachtdecks, etc.\nF\u00fcr das Innere des Frachtdecks wollten wir ein paar Elemente einbauen. Erstens wollten wir f\u00fcr den Hub-Bereich eine thematische logistische Erfahrung f\u00fcr den Spieler beschreiben. Dazu geh\u00f6rt ein Bereich eines Versandlagers, der in Zukunft eine Sandkiste f\u00fcr Missionsinhalte sein wird. F\u00fcr den Haupteinkaufsbereich wollten wir ein paar Elemente in einen gr\u00f6\u00dferen Shop integrieren. Jetzt sehen wir den Ladungsabgabe- und Abholschalter, der sich in einem Mini-Logistiksortierraum befindet, den Schiffsverleihraum an der Seite und den Gilden- und Vorratsraum in der Ecke. Insgesamt bietet dies dem Spieler eine abwechslungsreichere Erfahrung, anstatt all diese Elemente in separate L\u00e4den zu trennen.\nInhalt des Planeten\nIn diesem Quartal konnten wir die Planeten und Monde im Stanton-System mit den neuesten Tools und Technologien, die wir f\u00fcr den Aufbau des Pyro-Systems verwenden, auf den neuesten Stand bringen. Der Anfang davon war die Durchf\u00fchrung eines globalen Neumalungspasses f\u00fcr alle Planeten und Monde. Im Grunde treibt dieser Malprozess eine Menge der neuesten Features an, wie wir Objekte vereinigen, also mussten wir, um das ins Spiel zu bekommen, in den sauren Apfel bei\u00dfen und den ersten Pass \u00fcber alles machen. Im letzten Patch haben wir die neuen H\u00f6henkarten eingef\u00fchrt, und jetzt wird der neue Maldurchgang all diese neuen Daten nutzen.\nDas zweite Element, das wir einf\u00fchren konnten, war eine globale Verbesserung all unserer Geologie-Packs. Wir haben jetzt die M\u00f6glichkeit, die Gel\u00e4ndefarbaufnahme f\u00fcr Assets zu spezifizieren, was es ihnen erm\u00f6glicht, die Farbe des Gel\u00e4ndes oder des Untergrunds prozedural anzupassen. Au\u00dferdem konnten wir die Mosaikierung und die Verschiebung von Objekten auf Objektbasis hinzuf\u00fcgen, was bedeutet, dass wir den Objekten, die die Verschiebungsparameter steuern, H\u00f6henkarten zuweisen k\u00f6nnen. Kurz gesagt bedeutet das, wenn der Spieler in die N\u00e4he eines Assets kommt, sollte die Aufl\u00f6sung der Geometrie wesentlich h\u00f6her sein, so dass eine komplexe Silhouette gelesen werden kann.\nZuletzt haben wir alle unsere Terrain-Shader durch gescannte Daten ersetzt. Das ist etwas, mit dem wir uns schon seit einiger Zeit besch\u00e4ftigt haben, da die Qualit\u00e4t der Ergebnisse extrem hoch war, aber mit der neuesten Technologie konnten wir es in unsere Pipeline implementieren. Wir haben \u00fcber 70 Basis-Shader neu erstellt, indem wir die gescannten Daten miteinander kombiniert und gemischt haben, um die Ergebnisse zu erhalten, die wir wollten. F\u00fcr die Zukunft haben wir Ambitionen, eine dedizierte Scan-Ausr\u00fcstung einzurichten, um unsere eigenen Daten zu verarbeiten, die wir bei unseren Exkursionen sammeln werden. Wir wollen sicherstellen, dass wir eine vielf\u00e4ltige und wunderbare Palette f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Star-Citizen-Standorte erstellen k\u00f6nnen.\nAbschlie\u00dfende Gedanken\nWir waren in der Lage, eine Menge neuer Tech in dieser Ver\u00f6ffentlichung einzuf\u00fchren, sowie die zweite Runde der polnischen Updates auf den Planetenoberfl\u00e4chen zu zeigen. Au\u00dferdem haben wir mit der Einf\u00fchrung der gescannten Daten f\u00fcr unsere Oberfl\u00e4chen einen erheblichen Qualit\u00e4tssprung gesehen. Allerdings waren einige der globalen Maldurchg\u00e4nge nicht so detailliert und aufw\u00e4ndig, wie wir es uns gew\u00fcnscht h\u00e4tten. Das liegt haupts\u00e4chlich an den Zeitbeschr\u00e4nkungen im Quartal. Ein Teil der Geologie, die mit den neuen Bibliotheken an die Oberfl\u00e4che kommt, k\u00f6nnte auch f\u00fcr die Biome\/Region besser geeignet sein.\nBei den Frachtdecks h\u00e4tten wir die Trennung zwischen Innen- und Au\u00dfenbereich bei der Trennung der kommerziellen Decks vorhersehen m\u00fcssen. Um die Erfahrung zu verbessern und dem Spieler einen Kontext zu geben, w\u00fcrden wir uns w\u00fcnschen, dass dieses Transitnetzwerk in Zukunft physisiert wird. Dadurch wird die Sicht aus der Transitkabine auf die Au\u00dfenseite der Station, w\u00e4hrend sie sich ihrem Ziel n\u00e4hert, gew\u00e4hrleistet.\nIan Leyland\nStar-B\u00fcrger Art Director\n\nGestaltung\nWaffenstillstands-Zonen\nDie Entspannungen der Waffenstillstandszone sind der erste Schritt, um alle willk\u00fcrlichen Beschr\u00e4nkungen aus dem Spiel zu entfernen, sobald wir in der Lage sind, die verschiedenen Bereiche des Spiels richtig zu verteidigen und zu \u00fcberwachen. Dies war an den Rastst\u00e4tten m\u00f6glich, weil wir nicht nur die bestehenden T\u00fcrme der Gr\u00f6\u00dfe 4 und Wachposten der Gr\u00f6\u00dfe 6 wiederverwenden, sondern auch einen v\u00f6llig neuen Turm der Gr\u00f6\u00dfe 10 geschaffen haben. Zusammen sind diese in der Lage, mit jedem Schiff fertig zu werden, das im Spiel geplant ist. Und anstatt noch eine weitere willk\u00fcrliche Beschr\u00e4nkung aufzuerlegen, haben wir die Verteidigungsanlagen vollst\u00e4ndig zerst\u00f6rbar gemacht, obwohl ihre Respawn-Zeit mit 5 Minuten sehr schnell ist. Dieses Respawn-System wird in Zukunft weiter entwickelt werden, um wahrscheinlich auf Reparaturen angewiesen zu sein.\nZusammen mit der Verteidigung haben wir die erste Iteration eines Sicherheitsreaktionssystems hinzugef\u00fcgt, das, obwohl es noch recht simpel ist, die CrimeStats aller Spieler in der Gegend addiert (intern als \"Heat\" bekannt) und als Reaktion darauf Sicherheitsschiffe von steigender Anzahl und St\u00e4rke hervorbringt. Das System reagiert schnell auf den Anstieg der Hitze in einem Gebiet, indem es neue Schiffe laicht und schw\u00e4chere Schiffe, die sie ersetzen, despawnen l\u00e4sst. Das System reagiert langsamer auf die T\u00f6tung seiner Mitglieder (sollte die Hitze dadurch nicht erh\u00f6ht werden) und noch langsamer auf eine Abnahme es in der Hitze. Wir werden dieses System in Zukunft weiterentwickeln, um auch die Schiffe, die die Spieler benutzen, und die gezeigte Aggression zu ber\u00fccksichtigen.\nWir werden es auch auf andere Orte wie Au\u00dfenposten ausrollen, obwohl Grim HEX eine komplexere L\u00f6sung ben\u00f6tigt, da die dortigen Verteidigungsanlagen nur auf Verbrechen reagieren sollen, die in ihrem Zust\u00e4ndigkeitsbereich begangen wurden und nicht in anderen. Olisar wird eine Anomalie bleiben, da es ein veralteter Standort ist, der keine Waffenstillstandszone mit dem erforderlichen Radius unterst\u00fctzen kann.\nDas Live-Team musste extrem wachsam sein und schnell auf Probleme reagieren, angesichts der kurzen Zeit, die Alpha 3.11 in der PTU lief. Ein Beispiel f\u00fcr ein Problem, das uns auffiel, waren Spieler, die die Wachen stahlen, indem sie sie in der Ladebucht ihrer 890 Spr\u00fcnge verschluckten und mit ihnen davonflogen. Wir berichtigten dies, indem wir selbstzerst\u00f6rende Wachen aus dem Gebiet weggebracht und sie wiederbelebt haben. Ein anderes Beispiel ist, dass die Sicherheitsreaktion zwar in der Lage war, schnell Schiffe auf lokalen Severn zu respawnen, auf einem Live-Server jedoch nicht. Um dies zu verbessern, haben wir die Schwellenwerte, auf die das System reagierte, reduziert, um die Anzahl der angeforderten Spawns zu reduzieren.\nWir haben Videos von vielen Spielern gesehen, die sich zusammentun, um einen Rastplatz zu \u00fcberrennen und ihn trotz der Abwehr- und Sicherheitsma\u00dfnahmen lange Zeit zu halten. Aus diesem Grund haben wir den Idris in dem Moment, als er verf\u00fcgbar wurde, der obersten Ebene des Antwortsystems hinzugef\u00fcgt, so dass wir hoffen, dass diese Spieler in nicht allzu ferner Zukunft Schwierigkeiten haben werden, ihn zu replizieren.\nAbschlie\u00dfende Gedanken\nIn Zukunft planen wir auch, die willk\u00fcrlichen Begrenzungen in den Innenr\u00e4umen zu lockern, wieder beginnend an den Rastst\u00e4tten. Wir sind bereits auf dem besten Wege, ein Spawn-Schranksystem zu entwickeln, das es uns erlaubt, die Wachen zu spawnen, die notwendig sind, um das Gebiet zu \u00fcberwachen. Au\u00dferdem arbeiten wir an einem Sicherheitsnetzwerk, das wissen wird, ob Spieler das Recht haben, sich in bestimmten Bereichen aufzuhalten, und das es den Spielern erm\u00f6glicht, Kameras, T\u00fcrmchen und Wachen zu aktivieren, um auf Eindringlinge, die mit CrimeStats ausgestattet sind oder die gerade dabei sind, Verbrechen zu begehen, zu reagieren.\nLukas Pressley\nChefdesigner\n\n\nWir sehen uns im 'Vers'!\nWir glauben, dass es sehr wertvoll ist, auf dieser Ebene Einblick in unseren Entwicklungsprozess zu geben, besonders wenn man die Gedankeng\u00e4nge, Reflexionen und Lektionen direkt von unseren Senior-Entwicklern lesen kann. Wie bereits beim letzten Mal erw\u00e4hnt, haben wir uns zu einer transparenten Entwicklung verpflichtet und werden auch in Zukunft viertelj\u00e4hrliche Patch-Postmortems zur Verf\u00fcgung stellen.","zh_CN":"Alpha 3.11 Postmortem\nOn October 8, 2020, we launched Alpha 3.11 High Impact, which introduced a number of new features and changes, including cargo decks, force reactions, and the first stage of the wider Armistice Zone removal. The following is a postmortem from the senior developers themselves, detailing what was delivered and their thoughts on how it went. Vehicle Team\nThe Vehicle Pillar had a much lighter quarter with Alpha 3.11 compared to the bumper delivery in Alpha 3.10, but what we delivered hopefully had a big impact on the gameplay experience.\nOrigin 100 Series\nThe Vehicle Content Team delivered the Origin 100 Series in Alpha 3.11, comprising of the 100i, 125a, and 135c. The 100 Series adds an alternative starter ship to the game as well as a light fighter and light cargo hauler. These are fantastic little ships for new players to start their Star Citizen journey with and provide the ability to tackle a wide range of missions and explore the far reaches of the \u2018verse. Missiles & Countermeasures\nThe missile and countermeasure gameplay had been in various states over the years and was never truly enjoyable from the aggressor or defender side. We\u2019re aiming to ultimately fix that with Missile Operator Mode, but until that is delivered, we decided to spend the time implementing fixes and iterations to the gameplay to provide a taste of what that feature will deliver. The main issues with the missiles prior to Alpha 3.11 were as follows: Countermeasures would act only on IR missiles (flares) and EM missiles (chaff)\n\nOnly flares worked (sometimes and highly server-dependant)\n\nThere were no countermeasures available to spoof CS missiles\n\nFiring missiles was extremely easy, defending against missiles was extremely hard\n\nFirst, we investigated why only flares would work and chaff wouldn\u2019t. The issue was a combination of incorrect setup data in some ships, incorrect data in some countermeasures and missiles, and a now-redundant workaround originally created for a specific SQ42 level that had knock-ons game-wide.\nOnce we fixed those issues, we recognized that the signature system has two distinct ways of modifying signals \u2013 either creating a strong signal or dampening all signals around. We decided to embrace that difference instead of requiring pilots to play \u201cwhack-a-mole\u201d by choosing the \u201cright\u201d countermeasure for the \u201cright\u201d missile type whilst under the stress of having a few seconds to decide before impact. With that in mind, we did some playtests with the following changes: Flares would act on all missile types\n\nChaff would be turned into a noise field, dampening all signatures around the field\n\n\nRight away, the first gameplay tests proved that this was a much more engaging way to defend against missiles. We then went ahead and updated the HUD elements of the missile warning system, re-added a countermeasure widget, and updated the keybinds to allow direct launching for each countermeasure type. The UI and VFX teams then jumped in and beautified everything, replacing the effects and also fixing a couple of VFX related bugs (like countermeasures being invisible in the PU).\nOne future addition that we couldn\u2019t do in time for Alpha 3.11 was to change the names of \u201cflares\u201d and \u201cchaff\u201d. Both names are very common for flight sim communities, but we still want to rename them to make it clear that Star Citizen uses different concepts for defending against missiles. This will require us to record new VO lines to update ship computer voices. Each vehicle is only allowed four locks at a time\n\nOnly one missile can launch per rack at a time\n\nOnly one missile type (IR\/EM\/CS) can launch at a time\n\nMissiles lose lock outside of their locking angle\n\n\nOnce we had these measures in, the missile experience notably improved in early testing. The spamming of missiles was significantly reduced, and the meta shifted towards ships getting very close to each other and firing missiles at distances where the defender would not even get a missile warning before impact. As a result of this undesirable change, we introduced minimum and maximum lock ranges. This notably stretched the missile gameplay out of gun range, allowing missile-focussed ships to loiter at the edge of combat as designed while dedicated gunfighters would get in closer. This also allowed us to increase the locking angle of smaller missiles so that ships like the Constellation (that do not fire missiles forward but slightly off-angle) were viable to use missiles again.\nA lot of these changes (especially to the missiles) are temporary to give a better experience until Missile Operator Mode is ready, which will change the behaviour again and\/or remove certain aspects when it is implemented. Final Thoughts\nThe overall goal we want to achieve in the missile gameplay loop is to make both employing missiles and defending against missiles deeper and more rewarding, with its own \u201cslot\u201d in the combat environment. Missiles are not supposed to be an alternative to guns but tactical weapons, and the use of them should be a conscious decision with consequences. We also want to give special missile boats, like the Talon Shrike or Freelancer MIS, an edge when it comes to employing ordnance for the same reason. Those ships will excel in offensive missile gameplay though have obvious drawbacks in other categories. So, there will be more iterations on countermeasures and missile gameplay in the next couple of releases. For the time being though, we\u2019re quite happy the missile experience stepped away from the frustrations of previous releases.\nJohn Crewe\nVehicle Director\n\nTechnology\nCanvas Decal System\nFor Alpha 3.11, the Graphics Team delivered underlying rendering tech to help power the \u2018canvas decal\u2019 system, which leverages the Building Blocks system to create decal textures at runtime. These decals can be used for signposting, on clothing, or even the signage on vehicles. The advantage of the decals being created at runtime is that we can use game data such as the player\u2019s name or even have the content translated to the language the game is being played in.\nTo make this feature scalable for wider use in the PU, the system is tightly coupled with the texture streaming system, such that the dynamic textures are \u2018streamed in\u2019 using the same logic as standard textures, which ensures we always maintain a fixed memory budget. This streaming logic ensures we can automatically run the same feature set on low-spec machines by carefully load-balancing texture resolutions on the fly, but also allows us to push the texture resolution as high as possible on more powerful machines. Integrating the canvas decals into texture streaming resulted in several crashes in the PTU that were very difficult to track down and took a lot of time to resolve. As a result, we wrote some documentation to help future programmers understand the complexities of the texture streaming system, which will be especially important as we plan to generalize the code and use it for mesh streaming too. Planet Tech\nOn the planet-tech side, we added several features, including improvements to planet tools. This includes new painting brushes, revamped UI, and merged ground layer and object presets to make it even faster to paint planets. Utilising the new planetary painting tools, the Environment Art Team went through all planets and moons in the Stanton System and repainted the ground surfaces and object presets. This also futureproofs us and allows us to take advantage of new tech in existing locations. On a per-object basis, we are now able to support HW tessellation displacement on geology distributed across terrain to give it a more detailed and organic appearance. There were also several ocean and water related improvements, including ground cover buoyancy, which we will continue to expand upon in the future, as there wasn\u2019t enough time during this release cycle to introduce larger floating objects.\nA lot of time in the past few months was dedicated towards continued research and development of the atmosphere and cloud renderer, including the planet atmosphere unified raymarcher. We will go into more detail once the system becomes available. For now, let\u2019s just say we worked on various algorithms to allow raymarching at lower-than-screen resolution and denoise and upsample the results to full resolution to improve the performance of costly raymarching operations. These are combined with reprojection techniques and the bundling of raymarch requests for pixels to be updated each frame to further improve performance. Additionally, our existing multiscatter solution now supports a significantly higher number of scattering orders, which will be important for very dense atmospheres. BTW, we\u2019re now in the very early days of volumetric cloud rendering R&D\u2026\nAlmost a byproduct of this work, we made various improvements to the existing atmosphere rendering technology. First and foremost several long-standing artifacts, such as false color rendering in twilight near the atmosphere top along with very prominent halos around the silhouette of a planet\u2019s dark side, have been addressed. The generation of lookup tables now uses a better-suited method to generate sample locations for numerical integration over (hemi)spheres. That and other numerical precision improvements led to more accurate results in those tables at reduced computational overhead. We didn\u2019t stop there, however, and implemented additional visual improvements for you to hopefully enjoy soon. One of them includes evaluating how much of the sun\u2019s disc is visible when computing how much sunlight reaches point x in-atmosphere. This evaluation is fully integrated into the entire atmosphere lighting system and impacts direct and indirect lighting. Moreover, we added support for an absorption layer. Among other things, this allows us to add an ozone layer to Earth-like planets that emphasizes the blueness of the sky and enables better shading in twilight (removing yellow tint). We now also incorporate IRL extraterrestrial sun radiometry data when running the light simulation instead of assuming a \u201cpure white\u201d light source as well as an approximate conversion from spectral radiance (the result of the atmosphere lighting simulation) to luminance (used to light the scene in a traditional sense). Lastly, we improved the evaluation of sun radiance received by points outside the planet\u2019s atmosphere. It now casts twilight due to atmospheric scattering and the impact of the sun\u2019s angular radius onto objects in a planet\u2019s penumbra region. This should add a nice touch to capital ships or moons orbiting planets. Engine\nOn the engine side, several improvements were made. We updated our compiler toolchain to VS 2019, which will allow for faster compile and link times. Moreover, we\u2019ve added support for Intel SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC). This will allow us to write target-agnostic SSE optimized code (think HLSL) for heavy duty CPU compute jobs and will fully utilize CPU capabilities on each individual machine that the code runs on. Several code paths in physics, the 3D engine, and the zone system are in the process of being ported. And, we have another compiler optimization in store for you. AVX code generation support for clients was previously enabled and should hit the public servers in the coming Alpha 3.12 release.\nRegarding server and client memory usage, we spent a good deal of time further refining our tracking tools to ensure we have good visibility on where we spend memory. We\u2019re now also able to properly track memory usage in third-party libraries that either don\u2019t allow us to reroute memory allocation through our system or haven\u2019t been updated yet to do so. We still plan to get a bit more visibility on client-side video memory allocations on the driver level (below the level we can currently track as an application using the GPU). As a result of these improvements, ongoing investigations, and tracking, a few critical memory leaks were fixed for release.\nThroughout Alpha 3.11 production, the Core Engine Team was mostly focused on features for later releases, like the Gen12 Renderer. However, a very large bug was fixed, which caused all our objects on clients to unload way earlier than we intended. Objects on clients should now stay streamed for noticeably larger distances. Audio\nFor audio tech, we updated the Wwise version to 2019.2.4, which fixed several issues. As part of this endeavour we reworked memory management within the audio system, going from a group of memory pools to a single pool. This allows us to deal more easily with the many different situations that Star Citizen presents by allocating memory where it is needed, when it is needed. We spent a lot of time revisiting our voice budgets to improve the overall experience and to allow players to hear more of what\u2019s going on in the game. Weapon fire support, particularly at long distance, was improved and several issues with audio fire rates and weapon volumes were fixed. Canvas Slicing\nThis quarter the UI-Tech team has been working on a system called the Canvas Slicer. This is a sub-system of Building Blocks which will allow the UI designers to place slices of 2D UI in 3D space. Normally, when we draw 2D UI, it gets rendered to a texture and then that texture is applied to geometry such as a monitor panel or data-pad. With the Canvas Slicer, we create the geometry at any position in 3D-space at runtime and draw the 2D UI directly onto it. This means we will be able to produce interesting layered UI, such as holographic ship HUDs and helmet displays. Tooltips\nWe have also started designing our tooltips system for Building Blocks. On the surface, this looked like a simple system to implement but the requirements to ensure it is super flexible have meant we\u2019ve got quite a lot to think about before we start implementation.\nMarco Corbetta\nVP of Technology\n\nCore Gameplay\nExternal Inventory\nExternal Inventory is the first iteration of our grid-based inventory interface that allows players to manage their FPS commodities between their backpack, chest, and leg pockets. As it says in the name, the External Inventory also allows players to directly interact with other storage containers in the world and drag and drop items between them. In Alpha 3.11, this is only enabled for the Greycat ROC storage compartment so players can manage their FPS mineables. But, in the future and once we realise true item storage (underpinned by iCache), this will allow players to store items in compartments, crates, and other such external inventories.\nWhile on the face of it, a new inventory UI and being able to drag and drop items between storage containers may sound simple, we had to overcome several creative and technical challenges. The main creative challenges revolved around having an interface that felt tactile and accessible to use without just feeling like a standard 2D interface that you see in most RPGs. This wasn\u2019t because those inventories are bad, more that we didn\u2019t want players performing inventory Tetris to manage their items; we wanted players to freely move items between storage containers without having to worry about where they dropped the item or if another item was in the way. We were able to achieve the first iteration of this using our Building Blocks technology, which stores the items as a list rather than a 2D grid. This means items fluidly move around your cursor as you drag objects between containers. We still want to further improve on the overall feel, but the team is happy with the initial outing.\nWhile Building Blocks allowed us to deliver on the creative aspects of the design, it also provided the main technical challenge. As the technology is still being developed, it means it doesn\u2019t always support things that you need to deliver a feature. In the case of External Inventory, we wanted the UI to feel diegetic and 3D even though it is not. This meant we wanted all the icons to be holographic, like they were being displayed in AR directly in front of your eyes. Unfortunately, our 3D icons could only support a limited shader which meant we lost a lot of material detail from the items being displayed. At this point we could have delayed the feature, but the team and I felt it was important for us to go live and get as much feedback as we could between now and a true physical inventory. We will definitely be upgrading that shader in an upcoming patch. Force Reactions\nAt its core, Force Reactions is a system developed to simulate what a character would do when impacted by a force, whether that is a strong gust of wind or a bullet penetrating their shoulder. It can be split into three levels of impacts: Low impact: twitches, flinches, and leans\n\nMedium impact: staggers\n\nHigh impact: knockdowns\n\nIn Alpha 3.10, we delivered the first iteration of low-impact reactions with the procedural twitches in FPS combat and leaning during sustained winds. In Alpha 3.11, we added more \u2018feels\u2019 to the twitches with additional camera and weapon reactions and our first iteration of knockdowns, with the intention for staggers to come later.\nThe biggest challenge for this system was that it needed to be truly systemic as forces can come from a lot of different places, not just bullets. For this, we broke down the forces into three main categories: Direct forces: anything that physically impacts the character, like a box or bullet\n\nIndirect forces: the force you receive when your ship gets rammed or from a gust of wind\n\nSustained forces: where a force is constantly applied, such a g-force or wind\n\n\nThis meant we could compartmentalise different forces with different scales and allow the designers to balance the character\u2019s reaction accordingly, as the forces of being hit by a box compared to the acceleration of a ship in space to 1000m\/s are vastly different. While low-impact reactions do not take away any player control, we were very cognizant of the fact that knockdowns would. We spent a lot of time making sure the knockdown animations were very reactive to player control as soon as their character hit the ground. We also implemented a skill-based system that meant if you tried to ADS before touching the floor you would trigger a faster recovery animation, meaning you could get back into the action quicker.\nForce Reactions in Alpha 3.11 was our second delivery and will be by no means our last. We are actively working on medium-impact reactions and will be constantly reviewing and tweaking the balance going forward, especially in FPS combat.\nThrowing T1\nThrowing grenades or other objects has always been a bit inconsistent and is even more disappointing when you think you have that perfect multi-kill opportunity for the grenade to just whimper a few feet from you. So, the first thing we wanted to achieve with T1 was to make throwing much more reliable, so that the object you throw (whether a grenade or other object) goes where you expect it to go. The second biggest objective, which is a critical pre-requisite for the physical inventory, was for the throw system to be able to interact and co-exist with the carriable system.\nIn Alpha 3.10, if you picked up a grenade from the floor and then tried to throw it, there was no way for you to pull the pin. Also, if you pressed the \u2018Throw Grenade\u2019 hotkey, you would drop the grenade in your hand and pull a new one from your suit. Obviously, this is not the intended behaviour and was a major reason why we changed throwing to come from an equipped state (i.e. holding the grenade in your hand) rather than directly from your suit. This system will also allow us to deliver gadgets and deployables in the future.\nAs part of T1, we also added a UI \u2018throw arc\u2019 that allows you to see the trajectory of the grenade. While currently this is enabled for all helmets, it will only be accessible from combat helmets once we start to define different armor archetypes in the \u2018verse.\nBehring Grenade Launcher & Behring BR2 Shotgun\nEver since I have been directing weapons, we have been trying to make sure that every weapon we add to the game has a unique purpose or playstyle that it suits. Currently, we already have several live shotguns that are deadly when up-close-and-personal but ineffective beyond that. With Behring being a manufacturer that we have identified as being middle of the road when it comes to damage, fire rate, and accuracy, we felt the BR2 was our first opportunity to push the range out for a shotgun to provide a bit more oomph in mid-quarter combat without it dominating at close-quarters. While we were happy with the BR2, we are not necessarily happy with shotguns as an overall class as they are outgunned by SMGs and outranged by assault rifles. We will be doing an update to all the shotguns in an upcoming patch to give them greater identity.\nThe Behring grenade launcher on the other hand presented entirely different problems. A 40mm grenade in real life has a kill radius of about 5m with a casualty radius of about 15m. These are big numbers when you look at our interior spaces and, considering that you can fire several of these over a short space of time, you are left with a pretty powerful weapon. On the one hand we wanted to deliver a weapon that felt heavy and designed to rain down destruction, but on the other hand we didn\u2019t want to massively wreck the balance of FPS combat.\nWith that aim, we made sure the numbers were slightly less than that of a normal frag grenade for both kill and injury radius. But if I\u2019m being totally honest, I would say the grenade launcher is slightly too powerful in the current game. The main reason is that players have access to an infinite amount of ammo using the PMA, so we had to choose between releasing the weapon as intended or massively nerfing it until the physical inventory comes online. As a team we felt it was more representative of an experience to release the weapon as it\u2019s supposed to work and wait for the other systems, such as physical inventory and physical damage, to balance out its sheer power. Then, players will have to consider how much space they allocate to ammunition and physical damage will cause weapons and armor to lose integrity when they are hit. This means if someone gets blown up by an explosion, a lot of their equipment will be damaged, which lowers the overall value. I have also seen the feedback regarding arming distance and it\u2019s something that we will be working on.\nFinal Thoughts\nIf I look back across all the features that the Core Gameplay Pillar delivered for Alpha 3.11, I am happy with the results. However, this doesn\u2019t mean everything went well or if I had that time again, I would do everything the same.\nThe main thing I think I would change would be how we implemented Force Reactions in the ships. Rather than treat it the same as all the other forces in the game (wind, bullets, etc) \u2013 which on the face of it makes sense \u2013 I would have designed it specifically around the gravity generator inside the ships. Currently we take the force that is applied to the ship and then directly apply it to the actor through filters depending on the force so that they react accordingly. Instead, I would have rather had the gravity itself react to the force, which would then cause the actor to react. While there would be no difference to the player, I think it would have been a cleaner implementation and be easier to extend the system in the future. For example, when we add gravity generator items, etc.\nIn the last two quarters we have also delivered two features (Body Dragging and Knockdowns) that would have really benefited from driven ragdoll. Unfortunately, that feature is not being delivered by someone on my teams, so I wouldn\u2019t have necessarily been able to change anything. But looking back, I would have raised more visibility on the benefits of trying to push that feature forward. That is obviously a challenge with working on a 600-person team that is spread across multiple continents and has different priorities across multiple projects. Everyone is trying to deliver the best features\/content\/tech that they can to the highest possible quality and sometimes the stars don\u2019t align when it comes to priorities. In this case, it is purely on my shoulders due to a lack of communication. As developers, we don\u2019t always get it right when we\u2019re in the thick of things, but hopefully this gives some insight into our processes and how we are always giving it 100% to try and create the best experiences for you to enjoy.\nRichard Tyrer\nCore Gameplay Director\n\nEnvironments\nCargo Decks\nFor this release we were able to introduce the next step in adding complexity to our space stations. The idea for the major stations located around planets is that they would be more than just rest stops; they would have their own facilities dedicated to other services, like cargo.\nFor the exterior, we introduced new addon components that describe the infrastructure and large racks of containers implying the capacity of the location (which right now is purely visual, in the future we would like to include more interactive elements).\nInside, we wanted to expand the traversal routes. For this, we introduced the idea of a station having a main transit network that connects the various elements of the station together \u2013 commercial decks, cargo decks, etc.\nFor the interior of the cargo deck, there were a few elements we wanted to include. Firstly, for the hub area we wanted to describe a themed logistical experience for the player. This includes a section of a shipping warehouse that, in the future, will be a sandbox for mission content. For the main shopping space, we wanted to incorporate a few elements into one larger shop. Now we can see the cargo drop-off and pickup counter located within a mini logistic sorting office, the ship rental space is located off to the side, and the guild and supplies area is in the corner. Overall, this gives a more diverse experience for the player rather than separating all these elements into separate stores..\nPlanet Content\nFor this quarter we were able to keep momentum in updating the planets and moons in the Stanton System with the latest tools and tech we\u2019re using to build out the Pyro System. The start of this was doing a global repainting pass to all planets and moons. Fundamentally, this painting process drives a lot of the latest features in how we\u2019re unifying objects, so to get this into the game we needed to bite the bullet and do the first pass over everything. In the last patch, we introduced the new heightmaps, and now the new painting pass will take advantage of all this new data.\nThe second element we were able to introduce was a global improvement to all our geology packs. We now have the ability to specify terrain colour pickup for assets which will enable them to procedurally match the colour of the terrain or bedrock. Also, we were able to add asset tessellation and displacement on a per-object basis, which means we can assign heightmaps to assets that drive the displacement parameters. In a nutshell, this means when the player gets close to an asset it should be considerably higher in geometry resolution, giving a complex silhouette read.\nLastly, we replaced all of our terrain shaders with scanned data. This is something we\u2019ve been looking into for some time as the quality of the results was extremely high, but with some of the latest tech, we were able to implement it into our pipeline. We recreated over 70 base shaders by combining and mixing the scanned data together to get the results we wanted. In the future, we have ambitions to set up dedicated scanning equipment to process our own data, which we\u2019ll gather from field trips. We want to ensure we can create a diverse and wonderful palette for future Star Citizen locations.\nFinal Thoughts\nWe were able to introduce a lot of new tech in this release, as well as start to show the second round of polish updates on the planet surfaces. Also, with the introduction of scanned data for our surfaces, we saw a substantial jump in quality. However, some of the global painting passes were not as detailed and involved as we would have liked. This is mainly due to time restraints in the quarter. Some of the geology surfacing with the new libraries could be more appropriate to the biome\/region also.\nFor cargo decks, we should have foreseen the disconnect between the interior and exterior when separating out the commercial decks. To improve the experience and help give context to the player we would like this transit network to be physicalized in the future. This will provide visibility out from the transit cab to the exterior of the station as it moves towards its destination.\nIan Leyland\nStar Citizen Art Director\n\nDesign\nArmistice Zones\nThe Armistice Zone relaxations are the first step in removing all arbitrary restrictions from the game, as and when we have the capability to properly defend and police the various areas of the game. This was possible at the rest stops because as well as reusing the existing size-4 turrets and size-6 sentries, we created an all-new size-10 turret. Together, these are capable of dealing with any ship planned to be in the game. And rather than impose yet another arbitrary restriction, we made the defenses fully destructible, though their respawn time is very swift at 5 minutes. This respawn system will be developed further in the future to likely rely on repair.\nIn concert with the defenses, we added the first iteration of a security response system which, while still quite simplistic, adds up the CrimeStats of all players in the area (known internally as \u201cheat\u201d) and spawns security ships of increasing numbers and strength in response. The system responds quickly to increases in an area\u2019s heat by spawning in new ships and despawning out weaker ships they replace. The system responds slower to the killing of its members (should the heat not be raised by this) and slower still to decreases in heat. We will develop this system further in the future to also take into account the ships that players are using and the aggression shown.\nWe will roll this out across other locations like outposts, though Grim HEX will need a more complex solution as the defenses there should only respond to crimes committed in its jurisdiction and not in others. Olisar will remain an aberration as it is a legacy location that cannot support an Armistice Zone of the radius required.\nThe Live Team had to be extremely vigilant and quick to react to issues given the short time that Alpha 3.11 was running in the PTU. One example of an issue we noticed was players stealing the sentries by swallowing them in the cargo bay of their 890 Jumps and flying off with them. We rectified this by self-destructing sentries taken away from the area and respawning them. Another example is that while the security response was capable of quickly spawning ships on local severs, on a live server it was not. To try and improve this we reduced the thresholds that the system responded to in order to reduce the number of spawns requested.\nWe have seen videos of many players teaming up to overrun a rest stop and hold it for a long time despite the defenses and security response. Because of this, the moment the Idris became available, we added it to the top level of the response system, so we\u2019re hopeful that those players would struggle to replicate this in the not too distant future.\nFinal Thoughts\nMoving forward, we also plan to relax the arbitrary limitations found in interiors, again starting at the rest stops. We are already well underway with a spawn closet system that will allow us to spawn the guards necessary to police the area. As well as this, we are working on a security network that will know whether players have the right to be in certain areas and enable cameras, turrets, and guards to respond to trespassers, those with CrimeStats, or those in the process of committing crimes.\nLuke Pressley\nLead Designer\n\n\nSee you in the \u2018Verse!\nWe believe that giving this level of insight into our development process is highly valuable, especially when you can read the thought processes, reflections, and learnings direct from our senior developers. As mentioned last time, we\u2019re committed to transparent development and will continue to provide quarterly patch postmortems going forward."},"links_count":0,"comment_count":63,"created_at":"2020-11-20T04:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"5 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-04-29 05:49:11","valid_relations":["images","links","translations"],"prev_id":17886,"next_id":17889}}