{"data":{"id":18388,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: October 2021","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/18388-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-October-2021","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/18388","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/18388","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"Monthly Reports","images":[{"id":30963,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/vjhp2njbokvxb\/source.png","alt":"","size":4895804,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-05-02T18:53:45+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/30963","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/30963\/similar"},{"id":31194,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/dyu8i559admn1\/source.png","alt":"","size":3831731,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-06-06T16:13:24+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31194","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31194\/similar"},{"id":31403,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/p34sp3q2kl01b\/source.png","alt":"","size":3014864,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-07-04T13:35:01+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31403","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31403\/similar"},{"id":31536,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/6u5x9e23ftrw7\/source.png","alt":"","size":3531870,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-08-01T14:29:26+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31536","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31536\/similar"},{"id":31783,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/gaazjx0n1kop2\/source.png","alt":"","size":3223870,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-09-12T14:59:52+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31783","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/31783\/similar"},{"id":32961,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/8m2c1vusdb0hj\/source.png","alt":"","size":4757052,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2023-10-03T12:11:38+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32961","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32961\/similar"},{"id":32962,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/4x3lw5w4vk3o4\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":584749,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2023-10-31T19:13:02+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32962","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/32962\/similar"},{"id":38000,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/x5aus9nndxu4s\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":1186506,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2025-02-05T13:01:54+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38000","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38000\/similar"},{"id":38060,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/fe6j2ifv3ash4\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":1773870,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2025-03-04T15:04:48+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38060","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38060\/similar"},{"id":38084,"name":"source.jpg","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/pgmk7f9gt3j9y\/source.jpg","alt":"","size":2091105,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","last_modified":"2025-04-01T17:29:16+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38084","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/38084\/similar"},{"id":40391,"name":"source.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/media.robertsspaceindustries.com\/svep7j1purh1f\/source.png","alt":"","size":5543040,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2025-07-01T15:37:40+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/40391","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/40391\/similar"}],"images_count":42,"translations":{"en_EN":"This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We\u2019re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.\nTO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS\n\nSUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 11:03:2021\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO Squadron 42 recruits.\n\nWelcome to October\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you\u2019ll find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to vital backend services, AI behaviors, and cockpit communications.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS AI Content\nAlongside actor status work shared with the PU, the AI Content team progressed with specific Squadron 42 tasks, including the Cryopod and Simpod usables. The Simpod usable is a workstation where the player or NPCs can train. Once complete, it will available for NPC gunners to practice turret skills in a safe space.\n\nThe Cryopod usable is a cold-storage container for preserving humanoids, with vital signs displayed on external screens. The first iteration allows NPCs to check the occupant\u2019s health on the terminal and clear frost from the pod\u2019s window.\n\nThe animators also polished the motion-capture data collected earlier in the year. This is the last step in delivering the usable interactions initially request for the Aciedo level.\n\nAI Features\nThe AI Feature team\u2019s main focus throughout October was on Vanduul combat behavior, which is heavily focused on melee, allowing the team to progress with the previously detailed combo attack system. New additions include parameters to combo attacks to rapidly prototype faster melee animations by adjusting a scale factor. This allows them to quickly balance the speed of animations, so the pace of close-range combat can be altered to increase or decrease the challenge to the player.\n\nMotion-warp targeting now updates throughout melee attacks so that characters can re-adjust their positioning to correctly hit their targets. The team also improved the way staggers can be triggered. Now, larger characters can have staggers triggering after sustained bullet fire to interrupt their melee attacks.\n\nThe team also worked on pre-visualization for the Vanduul cinematic experience, animations for a specific navigation setup to allow NPCs to duck under obstacles, and surrendering and untrained cover usage.\n\nAnimation\nLast month, the Animation team worked on various AI behaviors, including purposeful and frantic interactions with consoles, navigation under broken doorways, the breaking of computer servers and vents, and searching over railings and around boxes and vents. They also spent time working on Vanduul combat alongside the AI Team, blocking out animations for Vanduul breaking through closed or partially closed doorways and breaking equipment. Improvements continued on zero-g gameplay and player ground-based animations.\n\nOn the facial side, the team continued their improvement pass on the next set of characters. The development of in-game scenes continued to give narrative life to the environment, including motion-capture pickup as needed.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe Character Art and Tech team spent the month polishing the navy faction of SQ42, reworking many old outfits to match the current quality standards. This included the bridge officer jackets, battle dress uniform sweaters, and navy medical staff outfits. They also polished the heads and hair of important characters like Bishop and Trejo.\n\nArt (Environment)\nThe Environment Art team supported the project milestone, helping bring a visual quality to the work being shown off by other teams. Elsewhere, the team continued work across numerous chapters, including chapters 5, 12, and 13, and pushed vertical slices to a high visual standard on chapters 7 and 19. Further progress was made on creating stellar-looking spacescapes to bring more vibrancy and wow-factor to cinematic space scenes.\n\nAudio\nAudio continued to investigate SQ42\u2019s systems and planned their future support for the campaign.\n\nCinematics\nThe Cinematics team worked heavily on the opening chapter of the game, which received a much-deserved planet tech and vista overhaul. New spacescaping meant the team needed to assess whether certain shots were still valid or required additional camera scouting to make the most of the new giant storm wall nebula. The cinematic designers always anticipate future elements and frame their cameras with them in mind, but seeing the actual vistas in-camera can occasionally require framing to be reconsidered. The sun changed position by a couple of degrees due to art build-up too. Variants of existing ships like the Bengal were concepted, built, and delivered, while new ships were created for the Vanduul fleet. All bridge scenes featuring Admiral Bishop and his Vanduul counterpart progressed too.\n\nMost scenes received their \u2018prop and finger contact pass\u2019. Now, all officers are properly located in their seats, with their hands touching reactive controls and moving as required. For example, fingers grabbing a swivel display properly.\n\nTime also went into creating reusable stunt sequences of ships battling or getting destroyed that might be viewed by the player from a corridor window or on a ship\u2019s bridge during battle.\n\nA key turret sequence was fleshed out, with cutaways created to distinguish waves and different challenges. This led to a lot of navsplines being drawn up and improved on.\n\nFinally for Cinematics, the recent spacescaping, fleet additions, mo-cap polish, and tweaked sun made it possible to rethink the opening shot of the game, making it better and more dynamic.\n\nEngine\nLast month, the Physics team spent time on various optimizations. The process of voxelizing triangular meshes was sped up by utilizing a scanline-based acceleration structure instead of a voxel-based one when flood-filling cells. The team also helped AI Code to optimize their update routine for the audio map by batching the stimuli processing. Furthermore, the sorting of collision events was optimized, and default brush physics are now created lazily. A debug visualization for collision history was implemented too. Lastly for Physics, a tree-based quantum grid was implemented that will be used during quantum-travel boosting and regular quantum travel to detect collisions and obstacles along the path. For the renderer, significant effort was spent on improving the results of the pipeline profiler for Gen12 and legacy render paths. This was done to gain an accurate assessment of how long render and compute passes take to process on CPUs and GPUs without impacting actual frame rate too much (real-time profiling).\n\nSignificant progress was also made on the Gen12 transition: Pipeline state objects are now compiled on demand to improve loading times, massive instancing is now supported, and instance buffer management was optimized. The Scaleform render stage used for menu and in-game-world UI was optimized to reduce the average stage count from 2000 states to a maximum of 60, with the pipeline state also being created on demand. Additionally, refactoring was done to the particle code, light atlas stage, and shader parser. Content integrity was tightened by adding data asserts for invalid shaders being used in materials. Support for material texture updates (texture animation) was added too.\n\nImprovements continued to be made to cloud and atmosphere indirect lighting based on the presence of clouds in the atmosphere. The initial part of this work was completed (LUT generation), with work picking up again once planned performance optimizations are in place. To get the latter in place, work on the reprojection and filter chain commenced to allow for temporal and spatial reuse of raymarch results. Specifically for this purpose, R&D work started on performing reprojection without motion vectors (as these can\u2019t represent participating media properly).\n\nThe Core Engine team also worked on entity streaming code, which now supports the sphere-based culling needed for SQ42. A large refactor was submitted to the entity component update scheduler. This includes a new API that uses update IDs instead of passes to allow multiple updates per pass. The engine\u2019s frame profiler was updated to include various statistics from heartbeat events as well as a summary of CPU time and memory usage by the dev teams, build info, and a screenshot into the capture. The memory manager was extended to support separate allocation arenas and thread caches per dev team. In cases of invalid memory access, the exception handler can now indicate which arena an inaccessible memory address maps to. This in turn allows debugging memory crashes with more fine-grained memory check enabled, which typically means the build runs much faster and uses less memory as it otherwise would do with memory debugging enabled globally. Additionally, work continued on improving vis area (frustum) culling and functionality to capture and pass around C++ lambdas without heap allocations was added.\n\nFeatures (Gameplay)\nGameplay Features completed smaller support tasks alongside progressing on several highly complicated cinematic sequences. Much of this involved technical issues with how the engine has had to change to support object container streaming. As some legacy systems aren\u2019t streaming aware, the team had to find ways to fix references to vehicles that aren\u2019t loaded by default but spawned later on in a mission. With the base character customizer working in-game, the team continued to liaise with related teams to prototype the user experience. Several changes were made to remove some hard-coded limits, such as the number of areas on the face players can amend or the number of heads they can blend between. The team notes that it can be challenging to create an intuitive user interface without hampering the power and freedom of the system.\n\nGameplay Story\nThroughout October, Gameplay Story worked on a wide variety of scenes and chapters. Polish work was done across chapter 1, with several scenes updated with new audio, while the Graves walk-and-talk in chapter 5 progressed well. A briefing scene in chapter 8 received new mo-cap, while a complicated scene from chapter 12 was completely overhauled.\n\nTactile interaction progressed too which, though difficult to implement, makes the characters feel more alive and present in the world.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nThe Graphics team\u2019s improvements to water volumes continued, this time focusing on how to correctly simulate volumetric lighting under the surface. Two approaches were taken: The first makes use of the general voxel fog system, though this has several limitations that make it not applicable to very large or very small water volumes. The second approach is to re-use the particle lighting model, which is less accurate but can work at more extreme scales. Work also started on changes to the material system to allow shaders to become more modular. This is a stepping stone towards building a new suite of shaders that provide more power and flexibility for the artists without always needing complex re-engineering by the graphics programmers.\n\nGen12 work continued, with more systems being converted. The team are also looking to complete a large refactor of the texture samplers to make them compatible with Gen12\/Vulkan.\n\nOther completed tasks include new light animation features, technical design work for using damage maps for salvage, gamma correction fixes, and general support for the fire feature.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Space\/Dogfight team continued their work on the expanded patrol spaces. Last month they incorporated more optional points of interest in the early parts of the game, with some of the player\u2019s actions in these areas potentially having ramifications on future chapters. They also worked closely with the Ship AI team to create more realistic and challenging AI behaviors to allow for better close-quarters dogfighting combat.\n\nHaving gone through the entire ground-based areas of the game down to opening-door level, the FPS team began fleshing out the spaces with AI and new mechanics.\n\nThe Social Design team continued the significant job of implementing all in-game scenes for the various chapters for review and sign-off, which will be the case for many months to come.\n\nNarrative\nLast month saw the Narrative team putting the improvements to the placeholder dialogue pipeline outlined in September\u2019s report into action alongside the Dialogue and Design teams. This revised process allows the team to quickly place newly written dialogue into the game for playtesting. As the game is being refined, it\u2019s often a single line of dialogue that needs to be adjusted rather than a whole scene. So, revised tracking documentation was worked on to better help the team monitor the status of additional dialogue requests as they come in.\n\nThe team also improved a few tutorial scenes to better instruct the player on key gameplay elements. Scenes that are tied closely to gameplay are often continuously improved as development progresses.\n\nQA\nCinematics continued to rely on QA for regular chapter testing. Also, last month was geared towards cinematic tool testing and ironing out many of the tools\u2019 defects when rendering scenes. They also continued to support the AI team\u2019s behavior implementations, last month focusing on Vanduul AI improvements and upgrading existing AI functions.\n\nTech Animation\nOctober saw Tech Animation complete their long-running task of upgrading the head-creation and animation pipeline. \u201cWe have rewritten major parts of the DNA system used to create our in-game actors. Coupled with this, we have added support for creating and editing these head assets in Maya through a plugin that shares the same codebase and a huge amount of tooling to use it efficiently. This has allowed us to move beyond our current gene-pool limits and set our eyes on the future.\u201d- Tech Animation\n\nNow, all types of face rigs are viable (including animals and aliens) along with the prospect of upgrading or customizing the facial animation rigs for whatever is required in the future. This technology is also being prospectively recruited with more complex forms of deformation.\n\nTech Animation are nearly ready to present the head-authoring pipeline they created in tandem with the DNA system. This will give them the opportunity to create new face rigs for the DNA gene pools and tightly control the quality of assets.\n\nAdditional tooling was created throughout the quarter to include alembic cache export in the animation pipeline. It was always supported but including it this way has opened up new opportunities for the Animation and Tech teams to directly include it in their animation pipelines as an export preference. The team are planning to leverage this technology for some impressive showpieces during Squadron 42.\n\nAnimation also continued the development of the tools pipeline and refined some older code and tools to keep them working as intended.\n\nUI\nThe UI team created decals for a specific level and new Building Blocks styles for use on interactive screens in some of the key environments throughout the game.\n\nVFX\nVFX continued the work detailed last month, with the \u2018strike team\u2019 working closely with Cinematics in particular, helping them populate an epic battle scene with visual effects.\n\nWE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026","de_DE":"Dies ist ein Querverweis auf den Bericht, der k\u00fcrzlich \u00fcber den monatlichen Newsletter von Squadron 42 verschickt wurde. Wir ver\u00f6ffentlichen ihn ein zweites Mal als Comm-Link, damit die Community leichter darauf zur\u00fcckgreifen kann.\nTO: REKRUTEN DES GESCHWADERS 42\n\nSUBJ: ENTWICKLUNG UPDATE 11:03:2021\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO-Geschwader 42 rekrutiert.\n\nWillkommen zum Entwicklungsbericht f\u00fcr Squadron 42 im Oktober. Anbei findest du Details zu den neuesten Fortschritten in der Kampagne, einschlie\u00dflich Updates f\u00fcr wichtige Backend-Dienste, KI-Verhalten und Cockpit-Kommunikation.\n\nVielen Dank f\u00fcr eure anhaltende Unterst\u00fctzung von Squadron 42.\n\nMit freundlichen Gr\u00fc\u00dfen,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI Inhalt\n\nNeben der Arbeit am Status der Schauspieler, die mit der PU geteilt wurde, arbeitete das Team f\u00fcr KI-Inhalte an speziellen Aufgaben f\u00fcr Squadron 42, darunter die Cryopod- und Simpod-Usables. Der Simpod ist eine Arbeitsstation, an der der Spieler oder NSCs trainieren k\u00f6nnen. Sobald er fertiggestellt ist, k\u00f6nnen NSC-Sch\u00fctzen dort in einem sicheren Raum ihre Gesch\u00fctzf\u00e4higkeiten \u00fcben.\n\nDer Cryopod ist ein K\u00e4ltespeicher f\u00fcr die Konservierung von Humanoiden, dessen Lebenszeichen auf externen Bildschirmen angezeigt werden. In der ersten Version k\u00f6nnen NSCs den Gesundheitszustand des Insassen am Terminal \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen und das Fenster des Cryopods vom Frost befreien.\n\nDie Animatoren haben auch die Motion-Capture-Daten, die Anfang des Jahres gesammelt wurden, aufpoliert. Dies ist der letzte Schritt, um die urspr\u00fcnglich f\u00fcr den Aciedo-Level geforderten Interaktionen zu verwirklichen.\n\n\n\n\nKI-Funktionen\n\nDas KI-Feature-Team hat sich im Oktober vor allem auf das Kampfverhalten der Vanduul konzentriert, das sich stark auf den Nahkampf konzentriert und es dem Team erm\u00f6glicht, mit dem zuvor detaillierten Kombo-Angriffssystem voranzukommen. Neu hinzugekommen sind Parameter f\u00fcr Kombo-Angriffe, um schnell schnellere Nahkampf-Animationen zu prototypisieren, indem ein Skalierungsfaktor angepasst wird. So kann die Geschwindigkeit der Animationen schnell ausbalanciert werden, so dass das Tempo des Nahkampfes ver\u00e4ndert werden kann, um die Herausforderung f\u00fcr den Spieler zu erh\u00f6hen oder zu verringern.\n\nDas Motion-Warp-Zielsystem wird jetzt w\u00e4hrend der Nahkampfangriffe aktualisiert, damit die Charaktere ihre Positionierung anpassen k\u00f6nnen, um ihre Ziele korrekt zu treffen. Das Team hat auch die Art und Weise verbessert, wie Taumeln ausgel\u00f6st werden kann. Jetzt k\u00f6nnen gr\u00f6\u00dfere Charaktere nach anhaltendem Kugelfeuer Stagger ausl\u00f6sen, um ihre Nahkampfangriffe zu unterbrechen.\n\nDas Team arbeitete auch an der Pre-Visualisierung f\u00fcr das Vanduul-Kinoerlebnis, an Animationen f\u00fcr ein bestimmtes Navigations-Setup, das es NSCs erm\u00f6glicht, sich unter Hindernissen zu ducken, und an der Verwendung von Kapitulation und untrainierter Deckung.\n\n\n\n\nAnimation\n\nIm letzten Monat hat das Animationsteam an verschiedenen KI-Verhaltensweisen gearbeitet, darunter zielgerichtete und hektische Interaktionen mit Konsolen, das Navigieren unter zerbrochenen T\u00fcr\u00f6ffnungen, das Zerbrechen von Computerservern und L\u00fcftungssch\u00e4chten sowie das Suchen \u00fcber Gel\u00e4nder und um Kisten und L\u00fcftungssch\u00e4chte herum. Au\u00dferdem arbeiteten sie zusammen mit dem KI-Team an der Bek\u00e4mpfung der Vanduul, indem sie Animationen f\u00fcr das Durchbrechen geschlossener oder teilweise geschlossener T\u00fcren und das Zerbrechen von Ausr\u00fcstungsgegenst\u00e4nden durch die Vanduul einstellten. Das Zero-G-Gameplay und die Animationen der Spieler am Boden wurden weiter verbessert.\n\nAuf der Gesichtsseite setzte das Team seine Verbesserungsarbeiten an der n\u00e4chsten Gruppe von Charakteren fort. Die Entwicklung von Spielszenen wurde fortgesetzt, um der Umgebung erz\u00e4hlerisches Leben einzuhauchen, einschlie\u00dflich Motion-Capture-Aufnahmen bei Bedarf.\n\n\n\n\nKunst (Charaktere)\nDas Character Art- und Tech-Team hat den Monat damit verbracht, die Marinefraktion von SQ42 aufzupolieren und viele alte Outfits zu \u00fcberarbeiten, damit sie den aktuellen Qualit\u00e4tsstandards entsprechen. Dazu geh\u00f6rten die Jacken der Br\u00fcckenoffiziere, die Pullover der Kampfanz\u00fcge und die Outfits des medizinischen Personals der Marine. Au\u00dferdem haben sie die K\u00f6pfe und Haare von wichtigen Charakteren wie Bishop und Trejo aufpoliert.\n\nKunst (Umgebung)\n\nDas Environment Art Team unterst\u00fctzte den Projektmeilenstein und trug dazu bei, dass die Arbeit der anderen Teams eine visuelle Qualit\u00e4t erhielt. Andernorts setzte das Team die Arbeit an zahlreichen Kapiteln fort, darunter Kapitel 5, 12 und 13, und brachte die vertikalen Slices in Kapitel 7 und 19 auf einen hohen visuellen Standard. Weitere Fortschritte wurden bei der Erstellung von fantastisch aussehenden Weltraumlandschaften gemacht, um den Weltraumszenen im Kino mehr Lebendigkeit und einen Wow-Faktor zu verleihen.\n\n\n\n\nAudio\nAudio untersuchte weiterhin die Systeme von SQ42 und plante ihre zuk\u00fcnftige Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die Kampagne.\n\nCinematics\n\nDas Cinematics-Team arbeitete intensiv am Er\u00f6ffnungskapitel des Spiels, das eine wohlverdiente \u00dcberarbeitung der Planetentechnologie und des Ausblicks erhielt. Die neue Raumgestaltung bedeutete, dass das Team pr\u00fcfen musste, ob bestimmte Aufnahmen noch g\u00fcltig waren oder ob zus\u00e4tzliche Kamerafahrten n\u00f6tig waren, um den neuen riesigen Sturmnebel optimal zu nutzen. Die Filmdesignerinnen und -designer nehmen zuk\u00fcnftige Elemente immer vorweg und richten ihre Kameras darauf aus, aber wenn sie die tats\u00e4chlichen Aussichten in der Kamera sehen, kann es vorkommen, dass das Framing neu \u00fcberdacht werden muss. Auch die Sonne \u00e4nderte ihre Position um ein paar Grad, weil sie von den K\u00fcnstlern aufgebaut wurde. Varianten von bestehenden Schiffen wie der Bengal wurden entworfen, gebaut und ausgeliefert, w\u00e4hrend neue Schiffe f\u00fcr die Vanduul-Flotte entworfen wurden. Alle Br\u00fcckenszenen mit Admiral Bishop und seinem vanduulischen Gegenst\u00fcck wurden ebenfalls weiterentwickelt.\n\nDie meisten Szenen erhielten ihren \"St\u00fctzen- und Fingerkontaktpass\". Jetzt sitzen alle Offiziere richtig auf ihren Sitzen, ihre H\u00e4nde ber\u00fchren die reaktiven Bedienelemente und bewegen sich nach Bedarf. Zum Beispiel greifen die Finger richtig nach einem schwenkbaren Display.\n\nEs wurde auch viel Zeit darauf verwendet, wiederverwendbare Stunt-Sequenzen von Schiffen zu erstellen, die k\u00e4mpfen oder zerst\u00f6rt werden und die der Spieler aus einem Korridorfenster oder auf der Br\u00fccke eines Schiffes w\u00e4hrend der Schlacht sehen kann.\n\nEine wichtige Gesch\u00fctzturmsequenz wurde mit Schnitten versehen, um Wellen und verschiedene Herausforderungen zu unterscheiden. Dies f\u00fchrte dazu, dass eine Menge Navsplines erstellt und verbessert wurden.\n\nBei den Cinematics schlie\u00dflich haben das neue Spacecaping, die Flottenerweiterungen, der Feinschliff am Mo-Cap und die optimierte Sonne es erm\u00f6glicht, den Er\u00f6ffnungsschuss des Spiels zu \u00fcberdenken und ihn besser und dynamischer zu gestalten.\n\n\n\n\nEngine\n\nIm letzten Monat hat das Physik-Team an verschiedenen Optimierungen gearbeitet. Der Prozess der Voxelisierung dreieckiger Maschen wurde beschleunigt, indem beim Flood-Filling von Zellen eine Scanline-basierte Beschleunigungsstruktur anstelle einer Voxel-basierten verwendet wurde. Das Team half AI Code auch dabei, die Aktualisierungsroutine f\u00fcr die Audiokarte zu optimieren, indem die Verarbeitung der Stimuli gestapelt wurde. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Sortierung von Kollisionsereignissen optimiert, und die Standard-Pinselphysik wird jetzt \"lazily\" erstellt. Eine Debug-Visualisierung f\u00fcr den Kollisionsverlauf wurde ebenfalls implementiert. Schlie\u00dflich wurde f\u00fcr die Physik ein baumbasiertes Quantengitter implementiert, das beim Quantenreise-Boosting und bei der regul\u00e4ren Quantenreise verwendet wird, um Kollisionen und Hindernisse auf dem Weg zu erkennen. F\u00fcr den Renderer wurden erhebliche Anstrengungen unternommen, um die Ergebnisse des Pipeline-Profilers f\u00fcr Gen12- und Legacy-Renderpfade zu verbessern. Dies geschah, um eine genaue Einsch\u00e4tzung dar\u00fcber zu erhalten, wie lange Render- und Rechenvorg\u00e4nge auf CPUs und GPUs dauern, ohne die tats\u00e4chliche Bildrate zu sehr zu beeintr\u00e4chtigen (Echtzeit-Profiling).\n\nAuch bei der Umstellung auf Gen12 wurden erhebliche Fortschritte erzielt: Pipeline-Zustandsobjekte werden jetzt bei Bedarf kompiliert, um die Ladezeiten zu verbessern, massive Instanzierung wird jetzt unterst\u00fctzt und die Verwaltung der Instanzpuffer wurde optimiert. Die Scaleform-Rendering-Stage, die f\u00fcr das Men\u00fc und die Spielwelt-UI verwendet wird, wurde optimiert, um die durchschnittliche Anzahl der Stages von 2000 auf maximal 60 zu reduzieren, wobei der Pipeline-State ebenfalls bei Bedarf erstellt wird. Au\u00dferdem wurden der Partikelcode, die Lichtatlas-Stufe und der Shader-Parser \u00fcberarbeitet. Die Integrit\u00e4t der Inhalte wurde durch das Hinzuf\u00fcgen von Data Asserts f\u00fcr ung\u00fcltige Shader in Materialien verbessert. Au\u00dferdem wurde Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Materialtextur-Updates (Texturanimation) hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nDie indirekte Beleuchtung der Wolken und der Atmosph\u00e4re wurde weiter verbessert, die auf dem Vorhandensein von Wolken in der Atmosph\u00e4re basiert. Der erste Teil dieser Arbeit wurde abgeschlossen (LUT-Generierung). Die Arbeit wird wieder aufgenommen, sobald die geplanten Leistungsoptimierungen umgesetzt sind. Um Letzteres zu erreichen, wurde mit der Arbeit an der Reprojektion und der Filterkette begonnen, um die zeitliche und r\u00e4umliche Wiederverwendung von Raymarch-Ergebnissen zu erm\u00f6glichen. Zu diesem Zweck wurde damit begonnen, die Reprojektion ohne Bewegungsvektoren durchzuf\u00fchren (da diese die teilnehmenden Medien nicht richtig darstellen k\u00f6nnen).\n\nDas Core-Engine-Team hat auch am Code f\u00fcr das Streaming von Entit\u00e4ten gearbeitet, der jetzt das f\u00fcr SQ42 ben\u00f6tigte sph\u00e4renbasierte Culling unterst\u00fctzt. Der Update-Scheduler f\u00fcr die Entity-Komponenten wurde einer umfassenden \u00dcberarbeitung unterzogen. Dazu geh\u00f6rt eine neue API, die Aktualisierungs-IDs anstelle von Durchg\u00e4ngen verwendet, um mehrere Aktualisierungen pro Durchgang zu erm\u00f6glichen. Der Frame-Profiler der Engine wurde aktualisiert, um verschiedene Statistiken von Heartbeat-Ereignissen sowie eine Zusammenfassung der CPU-Zeit und der Speichernutzung durch die Entwicklerteams, Build-Informationen und einen Screenshot in das Capture aufzunehmen. Der Speichermanager wurde erweitert, um separate Zuweisungsbereiche und Thread-Caches pro Entwicklerteam zu unterst\u00fctzen. Bei ung\u00fcltigen Speicherzugriffen kann der Exception-Handler jetzt angeben, auf welche Arena eine unzug\u00e4ngliche Speicheradresse verweist. Das wiederum erm\u00f6glicht das Debuggen von Speicherabst\u00fcrzen mit einer feink\u00f6rnigeren Speicherpr\u00fcfung, was in der Regel bedeutet, dass der Build viel schneller l\u00e4uft und weniger Speicher verbraucht, als es bei global aktiviertem Speicher-Debugging der Fall w\u00e4re. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Arbeit an der Verbesserung des Vis Area (Frustum) Culling fortgesetzt und eine Funktion zum Erfassen und Weiterleiten von C++-Lambdas ohne Heap-Allokationen hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\n\n\n\nFunktionen (Gameplay)\n\nIm Bereich Gameplay-Features wurden kleinere Support-Aufgaben erledigt und gleichzeitig mehrere sehr komplizierte Filmsequenzen weiterentwickelt. Dabei ging es vor allem um technische Probleme, da die Engine ge\u00e4ndert werden musste, um Objekt-Container-Streaming zu unterst\u00fctzen. Da einige Altsysteme nicht streamingf\u00e4hig sind, musste das Team Wege finden, um Verweise auf Fahrzeuge zu korrigieren, die nicht standardm\u00e4\u00dfig geladen werden, sondern erst sp\u00e4ter in einer Mission spawnen. Nachdem der Basis-Charakteranpassungsmodus im Spiel funktioniert hatte, arbeitete das Team weiter mit verwandten Teams zusammen, um das Benutzererlebnis zu prototypisieren. Es wurden mehrere \u00c4nderungen vorgenommen, um einige fest kodierte Grenzen zu beseitigen, wie z. B. die Anzahl der Bereiche im Gesicht, die Spieler\/innen \u00e4ndern k\u00f6nnen, oder die Anzahl der K\u00f6pfe, zwischen denen sie sich mischen k\u00f6nnen. Das Team stellt fest, dass es eine Herausforderung sein kann, eine intuitive Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che zu schaffen, ohne die Leistungsf\u00e4higkeit und Freiheit des Systems zu beeintr\u00e4chtigen.\n\n\n\n\nGameplay Story\n\nDen ganzen Oktober \u00fcber wurde an einer Vielzahl von Szenen und Kapiteln gearbeitet. In Kapitel 1 wurden mehrere Szenen mit neuem Ton \u00fcberarbeitet, w\u00e4hrend das Gespr\u00e4ch mit Graves in Kapitel 5 gut vorankam. Eine Briefing-Szene in Kapitel 8 erhielt ein neues Mo-Cap, w\u00e4hrend eine komplizierte Szene aus Kapitel 12 komplett \u00fcberarbeitet wurde.\n\nAuch die taktile Interaktion wurde weiterentwickelt, was zwar schwierig umzusetzen ist, aber die Charaktere lebendiger und pr\u00e4senter in der Welt erscheinen l\u00e4sst.\n\n\n\n\nGrafik & VFX-Programmierung\n\nDie Verbesserungen des Grafikteams an den Wasservolumina wurden fortgesetzt. Diesmal ging es darum, wie die volumetrische Beleuchtung unter der Oberfl\u00e4che korrekt simuliert werden kann. Es wurden zwei Ans\u00e4tze verfolgt: Der erste nutzt das allgemeine Voxel-Nebel-System, das jedoch einige Einschr\u00e4nkungen aufweist, die es f\u00fcr sehr gro\u00dfe oder sehr kleine Wasservolumina unbrauchbar machen. Der zweite Ansatz ist die Wiederverwendung des Partikel-Beleuchtungsmodells, das zwar weniger genau ist, aber bei extremeren Ma\u00dfst\u00e4ben funktionieren kann. Au\u00dferdem wurde damit begonnen, das Materialsystem zu \u00e4ndern, um die Shader modularer zu gestalten. Dies ist ein Schritt auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Reihe von Shadern, die den K\u00fcnstlern mehr Leistung und Flexibilit\u00e4t bieten, ohne dass sie von den Grafikprogrammierern immer wieder aufw\u00e4ndig \u00fcberarbeitet werden m\u00fcssen.\n\nDie Arbeit an Gen12 wurde fortgesetzt, und weitere Systeme wurden umgestellt. Das Team arbeitet au\u00dferdem an einer umfassenden \u00dcberarbeitung der Textur-Sampler, um sie mit Gen12\/Vulkan kompatibel zu machen.\n\nZu den weiteren abgeschlossenen Aufgaben geh\u00f6ren neue Lichtanimationsfunktionen, technische Designarbeit f\u00fcr die Verwendung von Schadenskarten f\u00fcr die Bergung, Korrekturen der Gammakorrektur und allgemeine Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die Feuerfunktion.\n\n\n\n\nLevel Design\n\nDas Space\/Dogfight-Team hat seine Arbeit an den erweiterten Patrouillenr\u00e4umen fortgesetzt. Im letzten Monat haben sie mehr optionale Punkte von Interesse in den fr\u00fchen Teilen des Spiels eingebaut, wobei einige der Aktionen des Spielers in diesen Gebieten Auswirkungen auf zuk\u00fcnftige Kapitel haben k\u00f6nnen. Au\u00dferdem arbeiteten sie eng mit dem SchiffskI-Team zusammen, um realistischere und anspruchsvollere KI-Verhaltensweisen zu entwickeln, die bessere Nahk\u00e4mpfe erm\u00f6glichen.\n\nNachdem das FPS-Team die gesamten bodenbasierten Bereiche des Spiels bis auf die Ebene der offenen T\u00fcr durchgespielt hatte, begann es, die R\u00e4ume mit KI und neuen Mechaniken auszustatten.\n\nDas Social Design Team setzte die wichtige Arbeit fort, alle Spielszenen f\u00fcr die verschiedenen Kapitel zur \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung und Freigabe zu implementieren, was noch viele Monate lang der Fall sein wird.\n\n\n\n\nNarrative\n\nIm letzten Monat hat das Narrative-Team zusammen mit dem Dialog- und dem Design-Team die im September-Bericht beschriebenen Verbesserungen an der Platzhalter-Dialog-Pipeline in die Tat umgesetzt. Dieser \u00fcberarbeitete Prozess erm\u00f6glicht es dem Team, neu geschriebene Dialoge schnell zum Testen ins Spiel zu bringen. Bei der Verfeinerung des Spiels muss oft nur eine einzelne Dialogzeile angepasst werden und nicht eine ganze Szene. Deshalb wurde die Dokumentation zur Nachverfolgung \u00fcberarbeitet, damit das Team den Status zus\u00e4tzlicher Dialoganfragen besser \u00fcberwachen kann, sobald sie eingehen.\n\nDas Team hat auch einige Tutorialszenen verbessert, um den Spieler\/innen die wichtigsten Gameplay-Elemente besser zu vermitteln. Szenen, die eng mit dem Spielgeschehen verkn\u00fcpft sind, werden im Laufe der Entwicklung oft kontinuierlich verbessert.\n\n\n\n\nQA\n\nDie Cinematics haben sich weiterhin auf die QA verlassen, um regelm\u00e4\u00dfig Kapitel zu testen. Der letzte Monat war au\u00dferdem dem Testen der Cinematic-Tools gewidmet, um viele Fehler beim Rendern von Szenen zu beheben. Au\u00dferdem unterst\u00fctzten sie weiterhin die Verhaltensimplementierungen des KI-Teams und konzentrierten sich im letzten Monat auf die Verbesserungen der Vanduul-KI und die Aufwertung bestehender KI-Funktionen.\n\n\n\n\nTechnische Animation\n\nIm Oktober schloss Tech Animation die langwierige Aufgabe ab, die Pipeline f\u00fcr die Erstellung von K\u00f6pfen und Animationen zu verbessern. \"Wir haben gro\u00dfe Teile des DNA-Systems umgeschrieben, mit dem wir unsere Schauspieler im Spiel erstellen. Gleichzeitig haben wir ein Plugin f\u00fcr die Erstellung und Bearbeitung dieser K\u00f6pfe in Maya entwickelt, das dieselbe Codebasis und eine Vielzahl von Werkzeugen zur effizienten Nutzung nutzt. Dadurch konnten wir die Grenzen unseres aktuellen Genpools \u00fcberwinden und unsere Augen auf die Zukunft richten.\"- Tech Animation\n\nJetzt sind alle Arten von Gesichtsanimationen m\u00f6glich (auch Tiere und Au\u00dferirdische), und es besteht die Aussicht, die Gesichtsanimationen f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Anforderungen zu erweitern oder anzupassen. Diese Technologie wird in Zukunft auch f\u00fcr komplexere Formen der Verformung eingesetzt werden.\n\nTech Animation steht kurz davor, die Kopf-Authoring-Pipeline zu pr\u00e4sentieren, die sie in Verbindung mit dem DNA-System entwickelt haben. Das gibt ihnen die M\u00f6glichkeit, neue Gesichts-Rigs f\u00fcr die DNA-Genpools zu erstellen und die Qualit\u00e4t der Assets genau zu kontrollieren.\n\nIm Laufe des Quartals wurden zus\u00e4tzliche Tools entwickelt, um den Cache-Export von Alembic in die Animationspipeline zu integrieren. Er wurde zwar schon immer unterst\u00fctzt, aber die Aufnahme in diese Form er\u00f6ffnete den Animations- und Technikteams neue M\u00f6glichkeiten, ihn als Exportpr\u00e4ferenz direkt in ihre Animationspipelines zu integrieren. Das Team plant, diese Technologie f\u00fcr einige beeindruckende Vorzeigeprojekte in Squadron 42 zu nutzen.\n\nDas Animationsteam hat auch die Entwicklung der Tool-Pipeline fortgesetzt und einige \u00e4ltere Codes und Tools \u00fcberarbeitet, damit sie weiterhin wie vorgesehen funktionieren.\n\n\n\n\nUI\nDas UI-Team hat Aufkleber f\u00fcr ein bestimmtes Level und neue Bausteine f\u00fcr die interaktiven Bildschirme in einigen der wichtigsten Umgebungen im Spiel erstellt.\n\nVFX\nDas VFX-Team hat die Arbeit des letzten Monats fortgesetzt und eng mit dem Cinematics-Team zusammengearbeitet, um eine epische Kampfszene mit visuellen Effekten auszustatten.\n\nWIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT WIEDER...","zh_CN":"This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We\u2019re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.\nTO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS\n\nSUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 11:03:2021\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO Squadron 42 recruits.\n\nWelcome to October\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you\u2019ll find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to vital backend services, AI behaviors, and cockpit communications.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS AI Content\nAlongside actor status work shared with the PU, the AI Content team progressed with specific Squadron 42 tasks, including the Cryopod and Simpod usables. The Simpod usable is a workstation where the player or NPCs can train. Once complete, it will available for NPC gunners to practice turret skills in a safe space.\n\nThe Cryopod usable is a cold-storage container for preserving humanoids, with vital signs displayed on external screens. The first iteration allows NPCs to check the occupant\u2019s health on the terminal and clear frost from the pod\u2019s window.\n\nThe animators also polished the motion-capture data collected earlier in the year. This is the last step in delivering the usable interactions initially request for the Aciedo level.\n\nAI Features\nThe AI Feature team\u2019s main focus throughout October was on Vanduul combat behavior, which is heavily focused on melee, allowing the team to progress with the previously detailed combo attack system. New additions include parameters to combo attacks to rapidly prototype faster melee animations by adjusting a scale factor. This allows them to quickly balance the speed of animations, so the pace of close-range combat can be altered to increase or decrease the challenge to the player.\n\nMotion-warp targeting now updates throughout melee attacks so that characters can re-adjust their positioning to correctly hit their targets. The team also improved the way staggers can be triggered. Now, larger characters can have staggers triggering after sustained bullet fire to interrupt their melee attacks.\n\nThe team also worked on pre-visualization for the Vanduul cinematic experience, animations for a specific navigation setup to allow NPCs to duck under obstacles, and surrendering and untrained cover usage.\n\nAnimation\nLast month, the Animation team worked on various AI behaviors, including purposeful and frantic interactions with consoles, navigation under broken doorways, the breaking of computer servers and vents, and searching over railings and around boxes and vents. They also spent time working on Vanduul combat alongside the AI Team, blocking out animations for Vanduul breaking through closed or partially closed doorways and breaking equipment. Improvements continued on zero-g gameplay and player ground-based animations.\n\nOn the facial side, the team continued their improvement pass on the next set of characters. The development of in-game scenes continued to give narrative life to the environment, including motion-capture pickup as needed.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe Character Art and Tech team spent the month polishing the navy faction of SQ42, reworking many old outfits to match the current quality standards. This included the bridge officer jackets, battle dress uniform sweaters, and navy medical staff outfits. They also polished the heads and hair of important characters like Bishop and Trejo.\n\nArt (Environment)\nThe Environment Art team supported the project milestone, helping bring a visual quality to the work being shown off by other teams. Elsewhere, the team continued work across numerous chapters, including chapters 5, 12, and 13, and pushed vertical slices to a high visual standard on chapters 7 and 19. Further progress was made on creating stellar-looking spacescapes to bring more vibrancy and wow-factor to cinematic space scenes.\n\nAudio\nAudio continued to investigate SQ42\u2019s systems and planned their future support for the campaign.\n\nCinematics\nThe Cinematics team worked heavily on the opening chapter of the game, which received a much-deserved planet tech and vista overhaul. New spacescaping meant the team needed to assess whether certain shots were still valid or required additional camera scouting to make the most of the new giant storm wall nebula. The cinematic designers always anticipate future elements and frame their cameras with them in mind, but seeing the actual vistas in-camera can occasionally require framing to be reconsidered. The sun changed position by a couple of degrees due to art build-up too. Variants of existing ships like the Bengal were concepted, built, and delivered, while new ships were created for the Vanduul fleet. All bridge scenes featuring Admiral Bishop and his Vanduul counterpart progressed too.\n\nMost scenes received their \u2018prop and finger contact pass\u2019. Now, all officers are properly located in their seats, with their hands touching reactive controls and moving as required. For example, fingers grabbing a swivel display properly.\n\nTime also went into creating reusable stunt sequences of ships battling or getting destroyed that might be viewed by the player from a corridor window or on a ship\u2019s bridge during battle.\n\nA key turret sequence was fleshed out, with cutaways created to distinguish waves and different challenges. This led to a lot of navsplines being drawn up and improved on.\n\nFinally for Cinematics, the recent spacescaping, fleet additions, mo-cap polish, and tweaked sun made it possible to rethink the opening shot of the game, making it better and more dynamic.\n\nEngine\nLast month, the Physics team spent time on various optimizations. The process of voxelizing triangular meshes was sped up by utilizing a scanline-based acceleration structure instead of a voxel-based one when flood-filling cells. The team also helped AI Code to optimize their update routine for the audio map by batching the stimuli processing. Furthermore, the sorting of collision events was optimized, and default brush physics are now created lazily. A debug visualization for collision history was implemented too. Lastly for Physics, a tree-based quantum grid was implemented that will be used during quantum-travel boosting and regular quantum travel to detect collisions and obstacles along the path. For the renderer, significant effort was spent on improving the results of the pipeline profiler for Gen12 and legacy render paths. This was done to gain an accurate assessment of how long render and compute passes take to process on CPUs and GPUs without impacting actual frame rate too much (real-time profiling).\n\nSignificant progress was also made on the Gen12 transition: Pipeline state objects are now compiled on demand to improve loading times, massive instancing is now supported, and instance buffer management was optimized. The Scaleform render stage used for menu and in-game-world UI was optimized to reduce the average stage count from 2000 states to a maximum of 60, with the pipeline state also being created on demand. Additionally, refactoring was done to the particle code, light atlas stage, and shader parser. Content integrity was tightened by adding data asserts for invalid shaders being used in materials. Support for material texture updates (texture animation) was added too.\n\nImprovements continued to be made to cloud and atmosphere indirect lighting based on the presence of clouds in the atmosphere. The initial part of this work was completed (LUT generation), with work picking up again once planned performance optimizations are in place. To get the latter in place, work on the reprojection and filter chain commenced to allow for temporal and spatial reuse of raymarch results. Specifically for this purpose, R&D work started on performing reprojection without motion vectors (as these can\u2019t represent participating media properly).\n\nThe Core Engine team also worked on entity streaming code, which now supports the sphere-based culling needed for SQ42. A large refactor was submitted to the entity component update scheduler. This includes a new API that uses update IDs instead of passes to allow multiple updates per pass. The engine\u2019s frame profiler was updated to include various statistics from heartbeat events as well as a summary of CPU time and memory usage by the dev teams, build info, and a screenshot into the capture. The memory manager was extended to support separate allocation arenas and thread caches per dev team. In cases of invalid memory access, the exception handler can now indicate which arena an inaccessible memory address maps to. This in turn allows debugging memory crashes with more fine-grained memory check enabled, which typically means the build runs much faster and uses less memory as it otherwise would do with memory debugging enabled globally. Additionally, work continued on improving vis area (frustum) culling and functionality to capture and pass around C++ lambdas without heap allocations was added.\n\nFeatures (Gameplay)\nGameplay Features completed smaller support tasks alongside progressing on several highly complicated cinematic sequences. Much of this involved technical issues with how the engine has had to change to support object container streaming. As some legacy systems aren\u2019t streaming aware, the team had to find ways to fix references to vehicles that aren\u2019t loaded by default but spawned later on in a mission. With the base character customizer working in-game, the team continued to liaise with related teams to prototype the user experience. Several changes were made to remove some hard-coded limits, such as the number of areas on the face players can amend or the number of heads they can blend between. The team notes that it can be challenging to create an intuitive user interface without hampering the power and freedom of the system.\n\nGameplay Story\nThroughout October, Gameplay Story worked on a wide variety of scenes and chapters. Polish work was done across chapter 1, with several scenes updated with new audio, while the Graves walk-and-talk in chapter 5 progressed well. A briefing scene in chapter 8 received new mo-cap, while a complicated scene from chapter 12 was completely overhauled.\n\nTactile interaction progressed too which, though difficult to implement, makes the characters feel more alive and present in the world.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nThe Graphics team\u2019s improvements to water volumes continued, this time focusing on how to correctly simulate volumetric lighting under the surface. Two approaches were taken: The first makes use of the general voxel fog system, though this has several limitations that make it not applicable to very large or very small water volumes. The second approach is to re-use the particle lighting model, which is less accurate but can work at more extreme scales. Work also started on changes to the material system to allow shaders to become more modular. This is a stepping stone towards building a new suite of shaders that provide more power and flexibility for the artists without always needing complex re-engineering by the graphics programmers.\n\nGen12 work continued, with more systems being converted. The team are also looking to complete a large refactor of the texture samplers to make them compatible with Gen12\/Vulkan.\n\nOther completed tasks include new light animation features, technical design work for using damage maps for salvage, gamma correction fixes, and general support for the fire feature.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Space\/Dogfight team continued their work on the expanded patrol spaces. Last month they incorporated more optional points of interest in the early parts of the game, with some of the player\u2019s actions in these areas potentially having ramifications on future chapters. They also worked closely with the Ship AI team to create more realistic and challenging AI behaviors to allow for better close-quarters dogfighting combat.\n\nHaving gone through the entire ground-based areas of the game down to opening-door level, the FPS team began fleshing out the spaces with AI and new mechanics.\n\nThe Social Design team continued the significant job of implementing all in-game scenes for the various chapters for review and sign-off, which will be the case for many months to come.\n\nNarrative\nLast month saw the Narrative team putting the improvements to the placeholder dialogue pipeline outlined in September\u2019s report into action alongside the Dialogue and Design teams. This revised process allows the team to quickly place newly written dialogue into the game for playtesting. As the game is being refined, it\u2019s often a single line of dialogue that needs to be adjusted rather than a whole scene. So, revised tracking documentation was worked on to better help the team monitor the status of additional dialogue requests as they come in.\n\nThe team also improved a few tutorial scenes to better instruct the player on key gameplay elements. Scenes that are tied closely to gameplay are often continuously improved as development progresses.\n\nQA\nCinematics continued to rely on QA for regular chapter testing. Also, last month was geared towards cinematic tool testing and ironing out many of the tools\u2019 defects when rendering scenes. They also continued to support the AI team\u2019s behavior implementations, last month focusing on Vanduul AI improvements and upgrading existing AI functions.\n\nTech Animation\nOctober saw Tech Animation complete their long-running task of upgrading the head-creation and animation pipeline. \u201cWe have rewritten major parts of the DNA system used to create our in-game actors. Coupled with this, we have added support for creating and editing these head assets in Maya through a plugin that shares the same codebase and a huge amount of tooling to use it efficiently. This has allowed us to move beyond our current gene-pool limits and set our eyes on the future.\u201d- Tech Animation\n\nNow, all types of face rigs are viable (including animals and aliens) along with the prospect of upgrading or customizing the facial animation rigs for whatever is required in the future. This technology is also being prospectively recruited with more complex forms of deformation.\n\nTech Animation are nearly ready to present the head-authoring pipeline they created in tandem with the DNA system. This will give them the opportunity to create new face rigs for the DNA gene pools and tightly control the quality of assets.\n\nAdditional tooling was created throughout the quarter to include alembic cache export in the animation pipeline. It was always supported but including it this way has opened up new opportunities for the Animation and Tech teams to directly include it in their animation pipelines as an export preference. The team are planning to leverage this technology for some impressive showpieces during Squadron 42.\n\nAnimation also continued the development of the tools pipeline and refined some older code and tools to keep them working as intended.\n\nUI\nThe UI team created decals for a specific level and new Building Blocks styles for use on interactive screens in some of the key environments throughout the game.\n\nVFX\nVFX continued the work detailed last month, with the \u2018strike team\u2019 working closely with Cinematics in particular, helping them populate an epic battle scene with visual effects.\n\nWE\u2019LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH\u2026"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":5,"created_at":"2021-11-10T19:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"4 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 19:39:52","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":18387,"next_id":18389}}