{"data":{"id":18515,"title":"Star Citizen Monthly Report: November & December 2021","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/SCW\/18515-API","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/18515","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/18515","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"None","images":[{"id":26651,"name":"STARCITIZEN_WHITE.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/y1f0boj8fak5rr\/source\/STARCITIZEN_WHITE.png","alt":"","size":73278,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2021-02-03T06:54:29+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/26651","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/26651\/similar"}],"images_count":1,"translations":{"en_EN":"PU Monthly Reports\nNovember & December 2021\nWelcome to the first PU Monthly Report of 2022! We always start the year off looking back on the last couple of months of development, so the reports below highlight work undertaken throughout November and December, 2021. We\u2019ll also publish January\u2019s report at the usual time early next month, so keep an eye out soon for the next installment!\n\nAI CONTENT\nThe AI team as a whole closed out the year creating feature testmaps for AI behaviors and usables.\n\nFeature testmaps are new autonomous testing processes that run each day and print out reports, which are hugely beneficial to the team as they enable them to identify bugs significantly quicker than before.\n\n\u201cA significant challenge we always had on the team was understanding when an issue was specific to a certain feature or if an external change from another team caused the problem. Patterns identified by the feature tests will solve this problem.\" AI Team\n\nCurrently, the team are testing approximately 50 usables and 20 AI behaviors that can be interacted with by the player. Typically, a usable has between three and six directions characters can approach them from and the same number they exit from, each playing a different animation. With such a high number of permutations, automating the process was essential. The team will soon move to more advanced feature tests for the more complicated behaviors, such as the bartender, engineer, and security guard.\n\nAI Content continued to improve the bartenders and patrons for Alpha 3.16 and added more drink options, including Cuba Libres and Mai Tais. \u2018Busy work\u2019 animations were also devised to increase variety when the bartender isn\u2019t serving patrons. There are now 10 different animations, including stretching, glass cleaning, and shelf organizing. Idle facial expressions were also added to the patron and bartender.\n\nAI Content also began implementing animation assets for the vending and arcade machines, and started closing out the coffee shop usables.\n\nAI FEATURES\nAI Features worked on feature test levels, setting up tests to repeat with different starting conditions, such as equipping AI with different weapons. Alongside identifying and fixing bugs before they become an issue, the feature test levels are useful for showing other teams existing functionality and how to use it. As they become more familiar with the technology, they\u2019ll begin to cover existing functionality to maintain quality across the board.\n\nThe team also investigated and fixed issues with the bartender behavior, including \u2018popping\u2019 issues when moving between different areas of the bar.\n\nAI TECH\nAI finished their work on the initial version of planetary navigation, which contains all the base elements required for it to be used in-game. Once implemented, navigation mesh will be created on planetary surfaces around actors and NPCs, who are able to use it to find paths and move along them. Improvements were added for both generation processes and the pathfinder to work with this new tech too.\n\nThe team continued to refactor the AI weapon controller used by ship AI, this time focusing on improving missile turrets and accuracy. New collision avoidance tech (the AI navigation obstacle) was also added for use in narrow areas and spaces with complex concave objects. This involved adding simplified primitive shapes (like spheres and boxes) that can be used by the collision avoidance system.\n\nThe team also went back to the AI trolley push\/pull feature to help the designers begin using it, which involved adjusting the path follower and creating a feature test map.AI Tech continued to refine the path follower tech, specifically the social AI element, improving functionality by setting usables linked to a path. NPCs will be able to follow the path and stop to use the linked usables. Alongside this, they investigated and fixed several issues with NPC aiming, looking, and locomotion; most of which involved synchronization issues between the servers and clients.\n\nProgress was made on the Subsumption editor tool. The team now have all the base elements in place so the designers and programmers can start using it to create missions and NPC behaviors.\n\nANIMATION\nThroughout November and December, Animation worked on the Kahix missile launcher and weapon select\/deselect, improved the player crouch motion, idle animations, and drunk locomotion, and further developed mining gadgets.\n\nFor AI, the team worked on the cowering, surrender, mess hall, and patron animation sets. Tasks were completed for vendors and bartenders, the multi-tool work zone set, security blocking and directing players, vent searching, vandalizing objects, and medical behavior. They also blocked out NPCs reacting to dead bodies.\n\nOn the facial-animation side, they progressed with general security lines, animations for idles and workers, vendors, and medical behaviors. The Motion Capture team continued to solve data for transversals and ill or injured AI, and worked with Marketing on various videos and promotions.\n\nART (CHARACTERS)\nThe Character Art team wrapped up a visual update to the DNA head archetypes, which should see improvements to heads and eyes in Alpha 3.17.\n\nSome of the team focused on the frontier-style outfits for Pyro, while others worked on a series of generic Stanton outfits from the backlog that will begin to appear in-game shortly.\n\nThe Tech team worked with Graphics on the second version of the \u2018layerblend\u2019 shader to improve wear and dirt tech.\n\nART (SHIPS)\nIn the UK, the Ship Team progressed well with the MISC Hull A, bringing most of the interior to the final art stage. The landing gear and extending cargo mechanism (along with LODs) were completed and are now ready to hand over to Tech Art.\n\nThe Hull C moved through the pipeline too and is currently approaching its greybox review. Work throughout December included converting materials to hard-surface shaders, adding control panels throughout the ship, and refining the pilot seat for optimal visibility.\n\nThroughout November, the RSI Scorpius moved through the whitebox phase before greybox work commenced in December. Most of the exterior was completed by the end of the year, including the wings, thrusters, landing gear, and canopy.\n\nAn all-new vehicle progressed through whitebox, while the Banu Merchantman progressed towards greybox.\n\nTints and holo-viewers were worked on too, along with polish and bug fixing for the Alpha 3.16 release.\n\nIn the US, the Drake Vulture\u2019s interior reached final art, with just a lighting pass remaining. The exterior colors and wear were worked on, as were LODs for the landing gear, while the internal damage pass began.\n\nThe Drake Corsair moved into greybox, and art was finalized for the cockpit and mess hall.\n\nAUDIO\nAudio's main focus was on IAE, with early November seeing them wrap up sound effects for various vehicles and weapons. Specifically, the Crusader Ares, Aegis Redeemer, and Argo Raft each received ambiances, animation, and thruster SFX passes.\n\nAfter the event, Area18\u2019s hospital was given a sound pass and a PA system to enhance the medical feel of the environment. Effects were added to the Drake Cutlass Steel and the final VO was added to character breathing.\n\nThe Audio Code team continued to work towards the first release of Claudius.\n\nCOMMUNITY\nThe Community team kicked off November supporting the Alpha 3.15 release with a comm-link detailing the new hospitals, medical gameplay, and updated healing system. They also hosted a Server Meshing & Persistent Streaming Q&A as a follow-up to the CitizenCon 2951 panel, with a lot of additional information and answers to the community's most up-voted questions.\n\nTo celebrate the launch of IAE 2951, the team published the Free Fly schedule, FAQ, and infographic to help players get to and enjoy the event. During IAE, they compiled several Q&As for ship reveals, including the Anvil Spartan, Argo RAFT, and MISC Odyssey. The IAE's Best in Show days also saw the finalists of the 2951 Ship Showdown take home their exclusive liveries and leather jackets.\n\nIn December, Community supported the launch of Alpha 3.16 and kicked off the Luminalia celebration. Outside the \u2018verse, they provided daily gifts via the Luminalia Calendar and hosted two Luminalia themed contests.\n\nThey also published a Patch Watch spotlighting some of Alpha 3.16\u2019s new features that don't appear on the Public Roadmap.\n\nENGINE\nDuring the last two months of 2021, the Physics team worked on a variety of topics. Quantum grids were changed to use one per solar system. They also received support for box queries. Grid overlap checks were unified for planets and other entities, and grid transitions were improved to allow a natural transition into grids that aren\u2019t a direct parent\/child of the current grid to transition from. Moreover, physics constraints received support for limiting the gravity tilt angle and work began to support structural joints on CGAs. Also, a quantum step function for spaceships was implemented and entities tied to a rope are no longer unnecessarily woken up when the rope becomes slack.\n\nFor optimizations, physics post-step notifications and networked rigids are now processed in parallel. Similarly, vehicle hit processing was moved to allow parallelization. Cross-grid collision detection was optimized to avoid expensive geometry checks as much as possible, and asteroid fields now use the faster hash function and cache physics proxies of their occupants to prevent redundant component lookups. Lastly, physics events are now more efficiently deleted after being processed.\n\nOn the renderer, further work was done on the transition to Gen12. Progress included improvements to instance buffers (indirections on GPU removed, support for offset-based buffer binding, support for different buffer layouts) after they had previously been optimized in October. Furthermore, shadow support for lightweight render nodes was added. Lightweight render node decals were also ported to Gen12 and projected decals were fixed. A G buffer copy pass was implemented, unnecessary GPU updates were fixed, and shader stage visibility was improved to compile and bind fewer stages. Render passes are now always submitted via render graph and support a fallback pass in case any required PSO isn't compiled. Fog volumes and skybox rendering were ported, clip volume rendering migrated, render proxy shadow enabled, and color grading refactored for Gen12. Lastly, the sorting of PSOs was tweaked, resulting in significantly fewer API calls during rendering.\n\nRegarding atmosphere and cloud rendering, R&D on the reprojection of frame data without the need for motion vectors was completed but didn't yield satisfactory results. Therefore, the implementation will stick with the current reprojection scheme for the time being. To improve image quality nonetheless, research started on noise reduction of the original raymarch results that are fed into the filter chain to produce final full-resolution images. Results look promising and will hopefully be shared in a coming PU release. Additionally, irradiance computation for atmospheric lighting was improved; it now better integrates ground albedo and reflected sunlight. Lodding and fade out of ground albedo was also improved, which is important for large objects in high orbit. In general, code was unified in various areas and prepared for integration upstream into the main development branch as preparation for the coming transition of all atmosphere and cloud render code to Gen12.\n\nOn the core engine side, the team submitted the first draft of entity-centric component update scheduling, which is already showing promising performance results. The scheduler now also catches and reports invalid dependencies and provides options for various update processing scenarios (client\/server only, etc). The commonly used performance stats (r_displayinfo) are being reworked. PageHeap (our heap to track memory corruptions) now supports dev team filters so issues can be more easily assigned to the owners of related code. Vis area culling received additional improvements and now better handles invalid shapes. Additionally, care was taken to ensure the engine's exception is correctly invoked in case of stack corruptions reported by specially prepared game binaries (typically for debugging certain issues during PTU). The localization manager's loading code was optimized, and the engine now collects GPU timings as part of its profiler telemetry data that can be consumed for analysis by the external profiling tool. Lastly, investigations regarding EASTL integration continued.\n\nThe teams also looked into compile-time optimizations. Some of the changes consist of the removal of unnecessary headers included in common header files used throughout the project, a cleanup of platform headers, removal of various boost cruft and removal\/replacement of expensive unnecessary macros, reimplementation of a recursive helper template by an equivalent constexpr, and the externalization of huge if-else chains. Moreover, compile times were re-analyzed via clang and code file was redistributed to uber files accordingly.\n\nFEATURES (CHARACTERS & WEAPONS)\nThroughout November and December, the Feature team focused on the final patch release of the year, with a lot of work going into fixing bugs frequently raised in player feedback reports. The team also added some of the player inventory and actor status features that didn't make the first release. For the inventory, this included features to make interactions with the client more robust, with better failure handling and improved feedback. For actor status, an important addition was the \u2018corpse marker,\u2019 which helps players locate and recover their equipment. The team also worked on the injury system to make medical gameplay more impactful.\n\nIn late November, the team moved on to salvaging. The initial focus was on the technical aspect of visually removing material from an object and ensuring its state can be reliably stored and recreated, both across the network and when the object streams back in again. This is currently being prototyped using the damage map system.\n\nThroughout the year, work on the hacking minigame continued. It has gone through multiple iterations, with each prototype being playtested internally using a simplified 2D in-game representation. It has since evolved to be more competitive, tying into some of the in-world gameplay mechanics like scanning. As the core layout of the minigame has remained fairly stable throughout the multiple prototypes, work began on bringing the visuals online. The concepts for this saw multiple iterations, with it currently looking like the player is executing scripts to programmatically attack the target system. The interface, as it currently stands, will offer the user different options to input the various commands.\n\nFEATURES (GAMEPLAY)\nGameplay Feature\u2019s work for November and December focused heavily on tasks for releases in 2022. Significant progress was made in enabling item selling, with the kiosk UI approaching completion and backend code trending towards completion in Q1.\n\nThe cargo rework is ongoing but intermittent as supporting work from other teams comes online. The team are using the time between these jumps to work on small quality-of-life fixes where possible. The team also worked on (and released) Jumptown 2.0.\n\nFEATURES (VEHICLES)\nTowards the end of 2022, Vehicle Features focused on the grav-lev rework. In November, they wrapped up the base implementation and tuned the available bikes for improved stability and handling. In December, players got a hold of the feature and flagged bugs, issues, and instabilities for fixing. This led to massive improvements throughout the Evocati and PTU patches.\n\n\u201cWe're incredibly pleased with how the community helped us hone in the feature for release. There are still some issues we need to fix up in 2022, but we're generally quite happy with how the rework turned out.\u201d Vehicle Features\n\nTowards the end of the year, some team members looked to the future with technical reworks being planned and started for the transit networks and restricted areas. While these won't result in significant changes to the player experience (particularly in the case of transit), they will result in far fewer bugs and much better general stability. These sorts of reworks are necessary because, longer-term, they free the team up to focus on either new features or improve other aspects of the game.\n\nThe last major focus was on jump points, which are progressing well. The team are currently working on 'abnormal exits,' which are situations where the player might exit a jump point prematurely or not in a usual, safe way. For example, a player falling out the back of their ship, the powering down of the jump point, or a jump drive failing.\n\n\u201cDealing with all the possible cases in a sensible and consistent way is a tricky problem, but the result is a feature that has a genuine sense of risk and danger to its use, so it's important we get it right.\u201d\n\nGRAPHICS & VFX PROGRAMMING\nThe Graphics team completed a significant amount of work on shaders and materials towards the end of last year, with one of the main focuses being updating volumetric water lighting so it works in a similar way to the volumetric fog model. There were also several bug fixes for water volumes in general. The hair shader also received attention due to updates to the hair clip volume interaction and efforts to prevent artists from having to rework assets through emulating the old visuals with the latest shading model. They completed the shader conversion from the old DX9 style and kicked off work on the opaque ice\/crystal shader to solve quality and rendering issues with previous attempts using GlassPBR. As it\u2019s opaque, the shader will be cheap to use extensively. For example, in scattered planetary rocks and the Banu Merchantman\u2019s floors and walls.\n\nFor Gen12, the team implemented a fallback rendering system called 'pass group fallbacks' for use when the shaders are compiling. For Vulkan, they continued with the GPU marker refactor, adding API versioning and fixing issues with arrays of resources on Vulkan. They also spent time investigating issues with the Overwolf implicit layer (DLL injection) that were impacting players in Alpha 3.15.1.\n\nDevelopment of the fire hazard feature continued, with the VFX Programming team moving heat and temperature to the physics proxy, working on IR emission, and fixing various bugs with the temperature component and look-at debug camera.\n\nSalvage-wise, an investigation was made into the networking of damage-map data as well as implementing placeholder interfaces to unblock the game coders. The main damage-map features are being worked on in Q1.\n\nNumerous updates were made to particles, including new controls for the mesh particle offset position and min\/max pixels, a new option to pick 'attached zones' of particle entities, particle texture aspect-ratio support. There were also bug fixes for flashing\/black particles, emitter bounds calculations, entity placement on planet OCs, and shock diamonds.\n\nFinally, a number of performance improvements and optimizations were made to emitter memory consumption, material glow lock contention from entity effects, and gas cloud zone contention on destruction and impact MFX.\n\nLIGHTING\nNovember and December saw the Lighting team wrap up support for IAE, which involved a fresh and interesting new lighting style for the existing convention halls.\n\n\u201cAt this stage, it's all about ensuring each ship has a light rig on it that shows it off as best as possible while maintaining render budgets to keep the experience smooth.\u201d Lighting Team\n\nWith that done, the team moved on to providing support to the Ship team, which involved looking at various older ships and optimizing their lighting setups alongside another layer of polish. This task was mostly successful, though existing tech issues and bugs with some ships need to be ironed out before further progress can be made.\n\nTo wrap up the year, the team moved back to working on Pyro\u2019s space stations, this time exploring more look-development and visual benchmarks, and supported the Jumptown 2.0 locations with updated visuals.\n\nNARRATIVE\nBefore the release of Alpha 3.16, Narrative worked closely with Design to write and capture the voice content for Ruto and the other security reps in preparation for Jumptown 2.0 (which was teased earlier in an installment of Data Cache).\n\nNarrative met with Mission Features to start work on additional mission content, determining what kind of lines would be needed, and discussed content for future Dynamic Events. They worked alongside Character Art on the upcoming frontier-style clothing, which will be most common on the fringes of society, such as less-hospitable planets or areas without much commerce. It was decided that while it will be influenced by Earth and Terra fashion, it will have its own unique overall aesthetic.\n\nThe team provided names and descriptions for various items and components, and completed documentation on fictional elements of the overall universe.\n\nAs usual, there were several Spectrum dispatches too: The team answered some of the biggest questions from the Ask a Dev forum in Loremaker\u2019s Community Questions, the Galactapedia received another update, and the latest installment of Something Every Tuesday delved into the annual tradition of Traveler\u2019s Day.\n\nPROPS\nThe Props team continued to work on Pyro station. This included refining the new trash assets, creating a modular set for the improvised marketplace counters, heating and lighting props, and other dressing\/flavor elements such as generators and fuseboxes.\n\nThey also closed out support on additional underground facility mission props for the Mission Feature team and polished several hospital props alongside the team in Montreal.\n\nFinally, initial whitebox work was done for the upcoming lockable\/lootable crates and cargo for the ongoing cargo refactor.\n\nQA\nQA\u2019s primary publishing focus was getting Alpha 3.15.1 and 3.16 to the PTU and LIVE servers. However, Alpha 3.16 wasn\u2019t stable enough, so it was decided to use Alpha 3.15.x and piecemeal specific features in. This worked well, so the internal branch ID of 3.15.2 (externally called 3.16.0) was pushed to the PTU and LIVE with several 3.16 features in a much more stable build. Time was also spent hiring additional team members as the department expands.\n\nSYSTEMIC SERVICES & TOOLS\nIn November and December, Systemic Services & Tools wrapped up work on the Economy, Tools, and AI Simulation optimizations and tools polish. New functionality will be added to these tools in Q1, some of which will be detailed in January\u2019s report.\n\nWork began to wrap up implementation of the new selling gameplay system. This required an under-the-hood rework of the existing shop system, which will act as the foundation for the initial implementation that\u2019s planned for release shortly.\n\nThe whole team helped stabilize services and ensure one of the most stable patch releases yet, which was achieved by addressing various edge cases found with the new Super pCache and other backend services and systems.\n\nTECH ANIMATION\nTo close the year out, the Tech Animation team set a mandate to finish upgrading all head assets to the new pipeline in preparation for the full DNA system refactor. This is a long-standing initiative that will hopefully conclude in early 2022.\n\n\u201cTo get us there, we need to recreate every single head asset in the game and check it\u2019s still working as we intend. All hands are on deck for this one, with the whole team pushing to reach the finish line.\u201d Tech Animation\n\nAlongside this, the team began cleaning up the animation databases, which involved triaging several hundred old animation asset references from the databases. Tech Animation also continued to support the various feature teams with embedded staff.\n\nUI\nTowards the end of the year, the UI Feature and Tech teams supported the Alpha 3.15 and 3.16 releases by addressing bugs, crashes, and performance issues related to the ASOP terminals, rental kiosks, vehicle management app, and inventory system. They supported other teams with their UI-related issues too.\n\nThey continued to update features for persistent streaming and supported the visual implementation of the refueling HUD.\n\nProgress was made on the core tech and feature set of the new Starmap. For example, they added display controls to modify relative distance, orientation and scale, and the ability to frame selected objects appropriately.\n\nUI Tech continued work on the core technology for hacking, adding the ability to select and edit text in the UI.\n\nThe new Building Blocks editor entered pre-production towards the end of the year, which will make working on UIs more efficient and developer-friendly. Additionally, more Building Blocks features were added.\n\nOn the art side, the team created a variety of new concepts for the mobiGlas, AR markers, Starmap, Aegis HUD modes, and Origin HUD. Updated icons for the law system were concepted too.\n\nVFX\nTowards the end of the year, the VFX team worked on a full effects suite for the Aegis Redeemer, including its unique 'nutcracker' thrusters. They also created effects for a Size 3 bomb for a future release.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not quite as destructive as the Size 10, but it\u2019s powerful enough to cause a stir!\u201d VFX Team\n\nWork was also completed on Arena Commander's Dying Star map, including a spectacular new version of the star itself.\n\nElsewhere, further tweaks were made to the planetary storm effects to help them pick up the lighting more naturally. Finally, R&D for salvage commenced.","de_DE":"PU Monatliche Berichte\nNovember & Dezember 2021\nWillkommen zum ersten PU-Monatsbericht des Jahres 2022! Zu Beginn des Jahres blicken wir immer auf die letzten Monate zur\u00fcck. In den folgenden Berichten geht es um die Arbeit, die im November und Dezember 2021 geleistet wurde. Den Bericht f\u00fcr Januar werden wir wie gewohnt Anfang n\u00e4chsten Monats ver\u00f6ffentlichen, also halte bald Ausschau nach der n\u00e4chsten Ausgabe!\n\nKI INHALT\nDas gesamte KI-Team hat das Jahr mit der Erstellung von Feature-Testmaps f\u00fcr KI-Verhaltensweisen und Usables abgeschlossen.\n\nFeature-Testmaps sind neue autonome Testprozesse, die jeden Tag ablaufen und Berichte ausdrucken. Sie sind f\u00fcr das Team von gro\u00dfem Nutzen, da sie es ihm erm\u00f6glichen, Fehler deutlich schneller als bisher zu identifizieren.\n\n\"Eine gro\u00dfe Herausforderung f\u00fcr unser Team war es, herauszufinden, ob ein Problem spezifisch f\u00fcr ein bestimmtes Feature war oder ob eine externe \u00c4nderung eines anderen Teams das Problem verursachte. Die Muster, die durch die Feature-Tests identifiziert werden, l\u00f6sen dieses Problem.\" KI-Team\n\nDerzeit testet das Team etwa 50 nutzbare Funktionen und 20 KI-Verhaltensweisen, mit denen der Spieler interagieren kann. Normalerweise gibt es zwischen drei und sechs Richtungen, aus denen sich die Charaktere n\u00e4hern k\u00f6nnen, und ebenso viele, aus denen sie wieder herauskommen. Bei einer so gro\u00dfen Anzahl von Permutationen war es wichtig, den Prozess zu automatisieren. Das Team wird bald zu fortgeschritteneren Funktionstests f\u00fcr die komplizierteren Verhaltensweisen \u00fcbergehen, z. B. f\u00fcr den Barkeeper, den Ingenieur und den Wachmann.\n\nAI Content hat die Barkeeper und G\u00e4ste f\u00fcr Alpha 3.16 weiter verbessert und weitere Getr\u00e4nkeoptionen hinzugef\u00fcgt, darunter Cuba Libres und Mai Tais. Au\u00dferdem wurden Animationen f\u00fcr \"Besch\u00e4ftigte\" entwickelt, um f\u00fcr mehr Abwechslung zu sorgen, wenn der Barkeeper gerade keine G\u00e4ste bedient. Es gibt jetzt 10 verschiedene Animationen, z. B. zum Strecken, Reinigen von Gl\u00e4sern und Ordnen von Regalen. Au\u00dferdem wurden dem Gast und dem Barkeeper Gesichtsausdr\u00fccke f\u00fcr den Leerlauf hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nAI Content hat au\u00dferdem damit begonnen, Animationen f\u00fcr die Automaten und Spielhallen zu erstellen und die Nutzbarkeit des Caf\u00e9s abzuschlie\u00dfen.\n\nAI FEATURES\nAI Features arbeitete an den Testleveln f\u00fcr die Features und richtete Tests ein, die mit verschiedenen Startbedingungen wiederholt wurden, z. B. indem die KI mit verschiedenen Waffen ausgestattet wurde. Neben der Identifizierung und Behebung von Fehlern, bevor sie zu einem Problem werden, sind die Feature-Test-Levels n\u00fctzlich, um anderen Teams zu zeigen, welche Funktionen bereits vorhanden sind und wie man sie nutzt. Je vertrauter sie mit der Technologie werden, desto mehr werden sie die bestehenden Funktionen abdecken, um die Qualit\u00e4t auf breiter Front zu sichern.\n\nDas Team hat auch Probleme mit dem Verhalten des Barkeepers untersucht und behoben, z. B. \"Popping\"-Probleme beim Wechsel zwischen verschiedenen Bereichen der Bar.\n\nAI TECH\nDas KI-Team hat die Arbeit an der ersten Version der Planetennavigation abgeschlossen, die alle Basiselemente enth\u00e4lt, die f\u00fcr die Verwendung im Spiel erforderlich sind. Sobald sie implementiert ist, wird das Navigationsnetz auf den Planetenoberfl\u00e4chen um die Akteure und NSCs herum erstellt, die es nutzen k\u00f6nnen, um Wege zu finden und sich auf ihnen zu bewegen. Sowohl die Generierungsprozesse als auch der Pfadfinder wurden verbessert, damit sie mit dieser neuen Technologie funktionieren.\n\nDas Team setzte die \u00dcberarbeitung der KI-Waffensteuerung fort, die von der SchiffskI verwendet wird, und konzentrierte sich dieses Mal auf die Verbesserung der Raketent\u00fcrme und der Genauigkeit. Au\u00dferdem wurde eine neue Technologie zur Kollisionsvermeidung (das KI-Navigationshindernis) hinzugef\u00fcgt, die in engen Bereichen und R\u00e4umen mit komplexen konkaven Objekten eingesetzt werden kann. Dazu wurden vereinfachte primitive Formen (wie Kugeln und Kisten) hinzugef\u00fcgt, die vom Kollisionsvermeidungssystem verwendet werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDas Team hat auch die KI-Funktion zum Schieben und Ziehen von Trolleys weiterentwickelt, um den Designern zu helfen, sie zu nutzen, indem es den Path Follower angepasst und eine Testkarte f\u00fcr die Funktion erstellt hat. NSCs k\u00f6nnen dem Pfad folgen und anhalten, um die verkn\u00fcpften Nutzgegenst\u00e4nde zu nutzen. Au\u00dferdem wurden mehrere Probleme beim Zielen, Suchen und der Fortbewegung von NSCs untersucht und behoben, die meisten davon betrafen Synchronisationsprobleme zwischen Servern und Clients.\n\nBeim Subsumption-Editor wurden Fortschritte erzielt. Das Team verf\u00fcgt nun \u00fcber alle Basiselemente, sodass die Designer und Programmierer damit beginnen k\u00f6nnen, Missionen und NSC-Verhalten zu erstellen.\n\nANIMATION\nIm November und Dezember arbeitete das Animationsteam am Kahix-Raketenwerfer und an der Waffenauswahl, verbesserte die Hockbewegung des Spielers, die Leerlaufanimationen und die Fortbewegung der Betrunkenen und entwickelte die Bergbau-Gadgets weiter.\n\nF\u00fcr die KI arbeitete das Team an den Animationen f\u00fcr das Kauern, die Kapitulation, die Kantine und die G\u00f6nner. Es wurden Aufgaben f\u00fcr Verk\u00e4ufer und Barkeeper, das Multi-Tool-Arbeitsbereichsset, Sicherheitssperren und -anweisungen f\u00fcr Spieler, die Suche nach L\u00fcftungssch\u00e4chten, das Vandalisieren von Objekten und das medizinische Verhalten erledigt. Au\u00dferdem haben sie NSCs, die auf Leichen reagieren, ausgeblendet.\n\nIm Bereich der Gesichtsanimation wurden allgemeine Sicherheitslinien, Animationen f\u00fcr Leerlauf und Arbeiter, Verk\u00e4ufer und medizinisches Verhalten entwickelt. Das Motion Capture Team arbeitete weiter an der L\u00f6sung von Daten f\u00fcr Transversale und kranke oder verletzte KI und arbeitete mit dem Marketing an verschiedenen Videos und Werbeaktionen.\n\nKUNST (CHARAKTERE)\nDas Character Art Team hat ein visuelles Update der DNA-Kopf-Archetypen abgeschlossen, das in Alpha 3.17 Verbesserungen an K\u00f6pfen und Augen bringen wird.\n\nEin Teil des Teams konzentrierte sich auf die Outfits im Frontier-Stil f\u00fcr Pyro, w\u00e4hrend andere an einer Reihe von generischen Stanton-Outfits aus dem Backlog arbeiteten, die in K\u00fcrze im Spiel erscheinen werden.\n\nDas Tech-Team arbeitete zusammen mit dem Grafikteam an der zweiten Version des \"Layerblend\"-Shaders, um die Abnutzungs- und Schmutztechnologie zu verbessern.\n\nKUNST (SCHIFFE)\nIn Gro\u00dfbritannien kam das Schiffsteam mit dem MISC Rumpf A gut voran und brachte den gr\u00f6\u00dften Teil des Innenraums in die endg\u00fcltige Entwurfsphase. Das Fahrwerk und der Mechanismus zum Ausfahren der Ladung (zusammen mit den LODs) wurden fertiggestellt und k\u00f6nnen nun an Tech Art \u00fcbergeben werden.\n\nDer Rumpf C wurde ebenfalls fertiggestellt und steht kurz vor dem Greybox-Review. Im Dezember wurden unter anderem Materialien in Hard-Surface-Shader umgewandelt, Bedienfelder im ganzen Schiff hinzugef\u00fcgt und der Pilotensitz f\u00fcr eine optimale Sicht verfeinert.\n\nIm November durchlief die RSI Scorpius die Whitebox-Phase, bevor im Dezember die Greybox-Arbeiten begannen. Ende des Jahres war der gr\u00f6\u00dfte Teil des \u00c4u\u00dferen fertiggestellt, darunter die Fl\u00fcgel, die Triebwerke, das Fahrwerk und die Kabinenhaube.\n\nEin ganz neues Fahrzeug durchlief die Whitebox-Phase, w\u00e4hrend der Banu Merchantman die Greybox-Phase durchlief.\n\nAuch an den T\u00f6nungen und Holo-Viewern wurde gearbeitet, ebenso wie an der Politur und der Fehlerbehebung f\u00fcr die Alpha 3.16.\n\nIn den USA wurde das Innere des Drake Vulture fertiggestellt, es fehlt nur noch ein Beleuchtungspass. An den Au\u00dfenfarben und der Abnutzung wurde ebenso gearbeitet wie an den LODs f\u00fcr das Fahrwerk, w\u00e4hrend der interne Schadenspass begann.\n\nDie Drake Corsair wurde in die Greybox verlegt und die Gestaltung des Cockpits und der Kantine wurde abgeschlossen.\n\nAUDIO\nDas Hauptaugenmerk im Bereich Audio lag auf IAE. Anfang November wurden die Soundeffekte f\u00fcr verschiedene Fahrzeuge und Waffen fertiggestellt. Insbesondere der Crusader Ares, der Aegis Redeemer und das Argo Raft erhielten jeweils Ambient-, Animations- und Thruster-SFX-P\u00e4sse.\n\nNach dem Event erhielt das Krankenhaus von Area18 einen Soundpass und ein PA-System, um die medizinische Atmosph\u00e4re der Umgebung zu verbessern. Der Drake Cutlass Steel wurde mit Effekten versehen und die Atmung der Charaktere erhielt die letzte Stimme.\n\nDas Audio Code Team arbeitete weiter an der ersten Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Claudius.\n\nGEMEINSCHAFT\nDas Community-Team begann den November mit der Unterst\u00fctzung der Alpha 3.15 mit einem Comm-Link, der die neuen Krankenh\u00e4user, das medizinische Gameplay und das aktualisierte Heilungssystem vorstellte. Au\u00dferdem veranstaltete das Team im Anschluss an das Panel auf der CitizenCon 2951 ein Server Meshing & Persistent Streaming Q&A mit vielen zus\u00e4tzlichen Informationen und Antworten auf die am h\u00e4ufigsten gestellten Fragen der Community.\n\nUm den Start der IAE 2951 zu feiern, hat das Team den Free Fly-Zeitplan, die FAQ und eine Infografik ver\u00f6ffentlicht, um den Spielern die Anreise zum Event zu erleichtern. W\u00e4hrend der IAE wurden mehrere Fragen und Antworten zu Schiffsenth\u00fcllungen zusammengestellt, darunter die Anvil Spartan, die Argo RAFT und die MISC Odyssey. An den Best in Show-Tagen der IAE konnten auch die Finalisten des 2951 Ship Showdowns ihre exklusiven Bemalungen und Lederjacken mit nach Hause nehmen.\n\nIm Dezember unterst\u00fctzte die Community den Start von Alpha 3.16 und gab den Startschuss f\u00fcr die Luminalia-Feier. Au\u00dferhalb des Verses gab es t\u00e4gliche Geschenke \u00fcber den Luminalia-Kalender und zwei Wettbewerbe zum Thema Luminalia.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurde ein Patch Watch ver\u00f6ffentlicht, in dem einige der neuen Funktionen der Alpha 3.16 vorgestellt wurden, die nicht in der \u00f6ffentlichen Roadmap enthalten sind.\n\nENGINE\nIn den letzten beiden Monaten des Jahres 2021 hat das Physikteam an einer Vielzahl von Themen gearbeitet. Die Quantengitter wurden so ge\u00e4ndert, dass sie nun eines pro Sonnensystem verwenden. Au\u00dferdem erhielten sie Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Kastenabfragen. Die \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung von Gitter\u00fcberschneidungen wurde f\u00fcr Planeten und andere Entit\u00e4ten vereinheitlicht, und die Gitter\u00fcberg\u00e4nge wurden verbessert, um einen nat\u00fcrlichen \u00dcbergang zu Gittern zu erm\u00f6glichen, die keine direkten Eltern\/Kind-Gitter des aktuellen Gitters sind, aus dem der \u00dcbergang erfolgt. Au\u00dferdem wurden physikalische Beschr\u00e4nkungen zur Begrenzung des Neigungswinkels der Schwerkraft unterst\u00fctzt und es wurde damit begonnen, strukturelle Verbindungen auf CGAs zu unterst\u00fctzen. Au\u00dferdem wurde eine Quantenschrittfunktion f\u00fcr Raumschiffe implementiert und an ein Seil gebundene Wesen werden nicht mehr unn\u00f6tig aufgeweckt, wenn das Seil schlaff wird.\n\nZur Optimierung werden Benachrichtigungen nach dem Schritt und vernetzte Rigids jetzt parallel verarbeitet. Auch die Verarbeitung von Fahrzeugtreffern wurde verschoben, um eine Parallelisierung zu erm\u00f6glichen. Die gitter\u00fcbergreifende Kollisionserkennung wurde optimiert, um teure Geometriepr\u00fcfungen so weit wie m\u00f6glich zu vermeiden, und Asteroidenfelder verwenden jetzt die schnellere Hash-Funktion und speichern die Physik-Proxys ihrer Insassen im Cache, um \u00fcberfl\u00fcssige Komponentensuchen zu vermeiden. Schlie\u00dflich werden Physikereignisse jetzt effizienter gel\u00f6scht, nachdem sie verarbeitet wurden.\n\nIm Renderer wurde weiter an der Umstellung auf Gen12 gearbeitet. Zu den Fortschritten geh\u00f6ren Verbesserungen an den Instanzpuffern (Beseitigung von Indirektionen auf der GPU, Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Offset-basierte Pufferbindung, Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr verschiedene Pufferlayouts), nachdem sie bereits im Oktober optimiert worden waren. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Schattenunterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Lightweight Render Nodes hinzugef\u00fcgt. Lightweight Render Node Decals wurden ebenfalls auf Gen12 portiert und projizierte Decals wurden korrigiert. Ein G-Buffer-Copy-Pass wurde implementiert, unn\u00f6tige GPU-Updates wurden behoben und die Sichtbarkeit von Shader-Stages wurde verbessert, um weniger Stages zu kompilieren und zu binden. Render-Passes werden jetzt immer per Render-Graph \u00fcbermittelt und unterst\u00fctzen einen Fallback-Pass f\u00fcr den Fall, dass ein erforderliches PSO nicht kompiliert wird. Nebelvolumina und Skybox-Rendering wurden portiert, das Clip-Volumen-Rendering migriert, Render-Proxy-Schatten aktiviert und die Farbabstufung f\u00fcr Gen12 \u00fcberarbeitet. Schlie\u00dflich wurde die Sortierung der PSOs optimiert, was zu deutlich weniger API-Aufrufen beim Rendering f\u00fchrt.\n\nWas das Rendering von Atmosph\u00e4ren und Wolken angeht, wurde die Forschung und Entwicklung zur Reprojektion von Bilddaten ohne Bewegungsvektoren abgeschlossen, hat aber keine zufriedenstellenden Ergebnisse gebracht. Daher wird die Implementierung vorerst bei dem aktuellen Reprojizierungsschema bleiben. Um die Bildqualit\u00e4t dennoch zu verbessern, wurde mit der Rauschunterdr\u00fcckung der urspr\u00fcnglichen Raymarch-Ergebnisse begonnen, die in die Filterkette eingespeist werden, um endg\u00fcltige Bilder mit voller Aufl\u00f6sung zu erzeugen. Die Ergebnisse sehen vielversprechend aus und werden hoffentlich in einer der n\u00e4chsten PU-Versionen ver\u00f6ffentlicht werden. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Berechnung der Bestrahlungsst\u00e4rke f\u00fcr die atmosph\u00e4rische Beleuchtung verbessert; sie ber\u00fccksichtigt jetzt die Bodenalbedo und das reflektierte Sonnenlicht besser. Auch das Ein- und Ausblenden der Bodenalbedo wurde verbessert, was f\u00fcr gro\u00dfe Objekte in einer hohen Umlaufbahn wichtig ist. Generell wurde der Code in verschiedenen Bereichen vereinheitlicht und f\u00fcr die Integration in den Hauptentwicklungszweig vorbereitet, um die bevorstehende Umstellung des gesamten Atmosph\u00e4ren- und Wolken-Rendercodes auf Gen12 vorzubereiten.\n\nAuf der Seite der Core-Engine hat das Team den ersten Entwurf der entit\u00e4tszentrierten Komponentenaktualisierungsplanung vorgelegt, die bereits vielversprechende Leistungsergebnisse zeigt. Der Scheduler erkennt und meldet jetzt auch ung\u00fcltige Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten und bietet Optionen f\u00fcr verschiedene Szenarien der Aktualisierungsverarbeitung (nur Client\/Server usw.). Die h\u00e4ufig verwendeten Leistungsstatistiken (r_displayinfo) werden \u00fcberarbeitet. PageHeap (unser Heap zum Aufsp\u00fcren von Speicherfehlern) unterst\u00fctzt jetzt Entwicklerteam-Filter, damit Probleme leichter den Verantwortlichen f\u00fcr den entsprechenden Code zugeordnet werden k\u00f6nnen. Das Culling von Vis-Fl\u00e4chen wurde weiter verbessert und geht jetzt besser mit ung\u00fcltigen Formen um. Au\u00dferdem wurde daf\u00fcr gesorgt, dass die Engine-Ausnahme bei Stack-Besch\u00e4digungen, die von speziell vorbereiteten Spiel-Bin\u00e4rdateien gemeldet werden, korrekt aufgerufen wird (typischerweise zur Fehlersuche bei bestimmten Problemen w\u00e4hrend der PTU). Der Ladecode des Lokalisierungsmanagers wurde optimiert, und die Engine sammelt nun GPU-Timings als Teil der Telemetriedaten des Profilers, die von dem externen Profiling-Tool zur Analyse verwendet werden k\u00f6nnen. Und schlie\u00dflich wurden die Untersuchungen zur EASTL-Integration fortgesetzt.\n\nDie Teams haben sich auch mit der Optimierung der Kompilierzeit besch\u00e4ftigt. Einige der \u00c4nderungen bestehen in der Entfernung unn\u00f6tiger Header, die in den im gesamten Projekt verwendeten Headerdateien enthalten sind, in einer Bereinigung der Plattform-Header, in der Entfernung verschiedener Boost-Makros und in der Entfernung\/Ersetzung teurer, unn\u00f6tiger Makros, in der Neuimplementierung eines rekursiven Helper-Templates durch ein \u00e4quivalentes constexpr und in der Externalisierung gro\u00dfer if-else-Ketten. Au\u00dferdem wurden die Kompilierzeiten mit Clang neu analysiert und die Codedatei entsprechend in Uber-Dateien umverteilt.\n\nFEATURES (CHARAKTERE & WAFFEN)\nIm November und Dezember konzentrierte sich das Feature-Team auf die letzte Patch-Ver\u00f6ffentlichung des Jahres, wobei viel Arbeit in die Behebung von Fehlern floss, die h\u00e4ufig in Spieler-Feedback-Berichten angesprochen wurden. Au\u00dferdem f\u00fcgte das Team einige Funktionen f\u00fcr das Spielerinventar und den Status der Akteure hinzu, die es nicht in die erste Version geschafft hatten. F\u00fcr das Inventar wurden unter anderem Funktionen hinzugef\u00fcgt, die die Interaktion mit dem Client robuster machen, mit besserer Fehlerbehandlung und verbessertem Feedback. Eine wichtige Neuerung f\u00fcr den Status der Schauspieler war der \"Leichenmarker\", der den Spielern hilft, ihre Ausr\u00fcstung zu finden und wiederzufinden. Das Team hat auch am Verletzungssystem gearbeitet, um das medizinische Gameplay zu verbessern.\n\nEnde November wandte sich das Team der Bergung zu. Der Schwerpunkt lag zun\u00e4chst auf dem technischen Aspekt der visuellen Entfernung von Material aus einem Objekt und der Sicherstellung, dass der Zustand des Objekts zuverl\u00e4ssig gespeichert und wiederhergestellt werden kann, sowohl \u00fcber das Netzwerk als auch wenn das Objekt wieder einflie\u00dft. Dies wird derzeit mithilfe des Schadenskartensystems prototypisch umgesetzt.\n\nIm Laufe des Jahres wurde die Arbeit an dem Hacking-Minispiel fortgesetzt. Es hat mehrere Iterationen durchlaufen, wobei jeder Prototyp intern mit einer vereinfachten 2D-Darstellung im Spiel getestet wurde. Seitdem wurde es weiterentwickelt, um wettbewerbsf\u00e4higer zu sein und einige Spielmechanismen wie das Scannen zu nutzen. Da das Kernlayout des Minispiels \u00fcber die verschiedenen Prototypen hinweg ziemlich stabil geblieben ist, wurde damit begonnen, die Grafik online zu stellen. Die Konzepte daf\u00fcr wurden mehrfach \u00fcberarbeitet. Derzeit sieht es so aus, als ob der Spieler Skripte ausf\u00fchrt, um das Zielsystem programmgesteuert anzugreifen. Die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che, so wie sie derzeit aussieht, bietet dem Benutzer verschiedene Optionen zur Eingabe der verschiedenen Befehle.\n\nFEATURES (GAMEPLAY)\nDie Arbeit an den Gameplay-Features konzentrierte sich im November und Dezember stark auf Aufgaben f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung im Jahr 2022. Beim Verkauf von Gegenst\u00e4nden wurden erhebliche Fortschritte gemacht: Die Kioskoberfl\u00e4che steht kurz vor der Fertigstellung und der Backend-Code wird im ersten Quartal fertiggestellt.\n\nDie \u00dcberarbeitung der Fracht wird fortgesetzt, allerdings mit Unterbrechungen, da unterst\u00fctzende Arbeiten von anderen Teams online gehen. Das Team nutzt die Zeit zwischen diesen Spr\u00fcngen, um nach M\u00f6glichkeit an kleinen Qualit\u00e4tsverbesserungen zu arbeiten. Das Team hat auch an Jumptown 2.0 gearbeitet (und es ver\u00f6ffentlicht).\n\nFEATURES (FAHRZEUGE)\nGegen Ende des Jahres 2022 konzentrierten sich die Fahrzeugfunktionen auf die \u00dcberarbeitung der Grav-Levs. Im November wurde die Basisimplementierung fertiggestellt und die verf\u00fcgbaren Fahrr\u00e4der auf verbesserte Stabilit\u00e4t und Handhabung getrimmt. Im Dezember nahmen die Spieler\/innen das Feature in die Hand und meldeten Bugs, Probleme und Instabilit\u00e4ten, die behoben werden sollten. Dies f\u00fchrte zu massiven Verbesserungen in den Patches f\u00fcr Evocati und PTU.\n\n\"Wir sind unglaublich zufrieden damit, wie die Community uns geholfen hat, das Feature f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung zu optimieren. Es gibt noch einige Probleme, die wir bis 2022 beheben m\u00fcssen, aber im Gro\u00dfen und Ganzen sind wir sehr zufrieden mit dem Ergebnis der \u00dcberarbeitung.\" Fahrzeug-Features\n\nGegen Ende des Jahres haben einige Teammitglieder einen Blick in die Zukunft geworfen und technische \u00dcberarbeitungen f\u00fcr die Transitnetze und Sperrgebiete geplant und begonnen. Diese werden zwar keine gro\u00dfen \u00c4nderungen am Spielerlebnis mit sich bringen (vor allem im Falle des Transits), aber sie werden zu viel weniger Bugs und einer viel besseren allgemeinen Stabilit\u00e4t f\u00fchren. Solche \u00dcberarbeitungen sind notwendig, weil sie dem Team l\u00e4ngerfristig die M\u00f6glichkeit geben, sich auf neue Funktionen zu konzentrieren oder andere Aspekte des Spiels zu verbessern.\n\nDer letzte gro\u00dfe Schwerpunkt lag auf den Sprungpunkten, die gut vorankommen. Das Team arbeitet derzeit an \"abnormalen Ausg\u00e4ngen\", d. h. an Situationen, in denen der Spieler einen Sprungpunkt vorzeitig oder nicht auf die \u00fcbliche, sichere Weise verl\u00e4sst. Das kann zum Beispiel passieren, wenn ein Spieler hinten aus seinem Schiff f\u00e4llt, wenn der Sprungpunkt abgeschaltet wird oder wenn ein Sprungantrieb ausf\u00e4llt.\n\n\"Es ist ein kniffliges Problem, mit allen m\u00f6glichen F\u00e4llen vern\u00fcnftig und konsistent umzugehen, aber das Ergebnis ist ein Feature, das ein echtes Gef\u00fchl von Risiko und Gefahr vermittelt, deshalb ist es wichtig, dass wir es richtig machen.\"\n\nGRAFIK & VFX-PROGRAMMIERUNG\nDas Grafikteam hat gegen Ende des letzten Jahres umfangreiche Arbeiten an Shadern und Materialien durchgef\u00fchrt. Einer der Hauptschwerpunkte war die Aktualisierung der volumetrischen Wasserbeleuchtung, damit sie \u00e4hnlich wie das volumetrische Nebelmodell funktioniert. Au\u00dferdem wurden mehrere Fehler bei den Wassermengen im Allgemeinen behoben. Auch dem Haar-Shader wurde Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet, da die Interaktion mit dem Volumen der Haarspangen aktualisiert wurde und die K\u00fcnstler\/innen durch die Emulation des alten Bildmaterials mit dem neuesten Shading-Modell nicht gezwungen waren, ihre Assets zu \u00fcberarbeiten. Die Shader-Konvertierung vom alten DX9-Stil wurde abgeschlossen und die Arbeit am opaken Eis-\/Kristall-Shader begonnen, um Qualit\u00e4ts- und Rendering-Probleme mit fr\u00fcheren Versuchen mit GlassPBR zu l\u00f6sen. Da er undurchsichtig ist, wird der Shader billig sein und ausgiebig genutzt werden k\u00f6nnen. Zum Beispiel in verstreuten Planetenfelsen und auf den B\u00f6den und W\u00e4nden des Banu Merchantman.\n\nF\u00fcr Gen12 hat das Team ein Fallback-Rendering-System namens \"Pass Group Fallbacks\" implementiert, das beim Kompilieren der Shader verwendet wird. F\u00fcr Vulkan wurde das Refactoring der GPU-Marker fortgesetzt, die API-Versionierung hinzugef\u00fcgt und Probleme mit Arrays von Ressourcen auf Vulkan behoben. Au\u00dferdem wurden Probleme mit der impliziten Overwolf-Schicht (DLL-Injektion) untersucht, die sich auf Spieler in Alpha 3.15.1 auswirkten.\n\nDie Entwicklung der Feuergefahr wurde fortgesetzt. Das VFX-Programmierteam hat Hitze und Temperatur in den Physik-Proxy verschoben, an der IR-Emission gearbeitet und verschiedene Fehler mit der Temperaturkomponente und der Look-at-Debug-Kamera behoben.\n\nIm Bereich Rettung wurde die Vernetzung von Schadenskartendaten untersucht und Platzhalterschnittstellen implementiert, um die Spielprogrammierer zu entlasten. An den wichtigsten Funktionen der Schadenskarte wird in Q1 gearbeitet.\n\nZahlreiche Aktualisierungen wurden an den Partikeln vorgenommen, darunter neue Steuerelemente f\u00fcr die Mesh-Partikel-Offset-Position und die Min-\/Max-Pixel, eine neue Option zur Auswahl von \"angeh\u00e4ngten Zonen\" von Partikelelementen und Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr das Seitenverh\u00e4ltnis von Partikeltexturen. Au\u00dferdem wurden Fehler bei blinkenden\/schwarzen Partikeln, bei der Berechnung von Emittergrenzen, bei der Platzierung von Entit\u00e4ten auf Planeten-OCs und bei Schockdiamanten behoben.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich wurden eine Reihe von Leistungsverbesserungen und Optimierungen am Emitter-Speicherverbrauch, an der Beanspruchung des Materialgl\u00fchens durch Entity-Effekte und an der Beanspruchung der Gaswolkenzone bei Zerst\u00f6rung und Aufprall-MFX vorgenommen.\n\nLICHT\nIm November und Dezember schloss das Beleuchtungsteam die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die IAE ab, die einen frischen und interessanten neuen Beleuchtungsstil f\u00fcr die bestehendas Verseammlungshallen beinhaltete.\n\n\"In dieser Phase geht es vor allem darum, jedes Schiff mit einem Licht-Rigg auszustatten, das es so gut wie m\u00f6glich zur Geltung bringt, und gleichzeitig die Renderbudgets einzuhalten, damit das Erlebnis reibungslos bleibt.\" Beleuchtungsteam\n\nAls das erledigt war, ging das Team dazu \u00fcber, das Schiffsteam zu unterst\u00fctzen, indem es sich verschiedene \u00e4ltere Schiffe anschaute und deren Beleuchtungs-Setups optimierte und ihnen den letzten Schliff gab. Diese Aufgabe war gr\u00f6\u00dftenteils erfolgreich, allerdings m\u00fcssen noch technische Probleme und Bugs bei einigen Schiffen beseitigt werden, bevor weitere Fortschritte gemacht werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nZum Abschluss des Jahres arbeitete das Team wieder an den Raumstationen von Pyro, wobei es sich diesmal mehr mit der Entwicklung des Aussehens und visuellen Benchmarks besch\u00e4ftigte und die Jumptown 2.0-Standorte mit aktualisiertem Bildmaterial unterst\u00fctzte.\n\nNARRATIVE\nVor der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Alpha 3.16 arbeitete das Narrative-Team eng mit dem Design-Team zusammen, um die Sprachaufnahmen f\u00fcr Ruto und die anderen Sicherheitsbeauftragten f\u00fcr Jumptown 2.0 zu schreiben und aufzunehmen (was bereits in einer Folge von Data Cache angedeutet wurde).\n\nNarrative trafen sich mit Mission Features, um mit der Arbeit an zus\u00e4tzlichen Missionsinhalten zu beginnen. Sie legten fest, welche Art von Text ben\u00f6tigt wird und diskutierten Inhalte f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Dynamic Events. Gemeinsam mit Character Art arbeiteten sie an der kommenden Kleidung im Frontier-Stil, die vor allem an den R\u00e4ndern der Gesellschaft zu finden sein wird, z. B. auf weniger gastfreundlichen Planeten oder in Gebieten ohne viel Handel. Es wurde beschlossen, dass sie zwar von der Mode auf der Erde und Terra beeinflusst sein wird, aber dennoch eine ganz eigene \u00c4sthetik hat.\n\nDas Team hat Namen und Beschreibungen f\u00fcr verschiedene Gegenst\u00e4nde und Komponenten erstellt und die Dokumentation der fiktiven Elemente des gesamten Universums vervollst\u00e4ndigt.\n\nWie \u00fcblich gab es auch mehrere Spectrum-Meldungen: Das Team beantwortete einige der wichtigsten Fragen aus dem \"Ask a Dev\"-Forum in Loremaker's Community Questions, die Galactapedia erhielt ein weiteres Update und die letzte Ausgabe von Something Every Tuesday besch\u00e4ftigte sich mit der j\u00e4hrlichen Tradition des Traveler's Day.\n\nPROPS\nDas Requisitenteam hat weiter an der Pyro-Station gearbeitet. Dazu geh\u00f6rten die Verfeinerung der neuen M\u00fcll-Assets, die Erstellung eines modularen Sets f\u00fcr die improvisierten Marktschalter, Heizungs- und Beleuchtungsrequisiten und andere Verkleidungs- und Geschmackselemente wie Generatoren und Sicherungsk\u00e4sten.\n\nAu\u00dferdem schlossen sie die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr zus\u00e4tzliche Missionsrequisiten f\u00fcr unterirdische Einrichtungen f\u00fcr das Mission Feature Team ab und polierten mehrere Krankenhausrequisiten zusammen mit dem Team in Montreal.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich wurden erste Whitebox-Arbeiten f\u00fcr die kommenden verschlie\u00dfbaren\/verlootbaren Kisten und Fracht f\u00fcr die laufende \u00dcberarbeitung der Fracht durchgef\u00fchrt.\n\nQA\nDas Hauptaugenmerk von QA lag auf der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung von Alpha 3.15.1 und 3.16 auf den PTU- und LIVE-Servern. Die Alpha 3.16 war jedoch nicht stabil genug, also wurde beschlossen, die Alpha 3.15.x zu verwenden und bestimmte Funktionen st\u00fcckweise einzubauen. Das funktionierte gut, und so wurde die interne Zweig-ID 3.15.2 (extern 3.16.0 genannt) auf die PTU- und LIVE-Server \u00fcbertragen, zusammen mit mehreren 3.16-Funktionen in einem viel stabileren Build. Es wurde auch Zeit damit verbracht, zus\u00e4tzliche Teammitglieder einzustellen, da die Abteilung expandiert.\n\nSYSTEMISCHE DIENSTE & TOOLS\nIm November und Dezember hat Systemic Services & Tools die Arbeit an den Optimierungen f\u00fcr Wirtschaft, Tools und KI-Simulationen abgeschlossen und die Tools aufpoliert. Im ersten Quartal werden diese Tools um neue Funktionen erweitert, von denen einige im Januarbericht n\u00e4her erl\u00e4utert werden.\n\nDie Arbeiten an der Implementierung des neuen Verkaufssystems wurden abgeschlossen. Dazu musste das bestehende Shopsystem \u00fcberarbeitet werden, das als Grundlage f\u00fcr die erste Implementierung dienen wird, die in K\u00fcrze ver\u00f6ffentlicht werden soll.\n\nDas gesamte Team hat dazu beigetragen, die Dienste zu stabilisieren und eine der stabilsten Patch-Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen zu gew\u00e4hrleisten, die es bisher gegeben hat, indem verschiedene Probleme mit dem neuen Super pCache und anderen Backend-Diensten und -Systemen behoben wurden.\n\nTECH ANIMATION\nZum Abschluss des Jahres hat sich das Team von Tech Animation vorgenommen, alle Head-Assets auf die neue Pipeline zu aktualisieren, um die vollst\u00e4ndige \u00dcberarbeitung des DNA-Systems vorzubereiten. Dies ist eine langj\u00e4hrige Initiative, die hoffentlich Anfang 2022 abgeschlossen sein wird.\n\n\"Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, m\u00fcssen wir jedes einzelne Kopf-Asset im Spiel neu erstellen und \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen, ob es noch so funktioniert, wie wir es vorhaben. Das ganze Team arbeitet mit Hochdruck daran, die Ziellinie zu erreichen\". Technische Animation\n\nParallel dazu begann das Team damit, die Animationsdatenbanken zu bereinigen, indem es mehrere hundert alte Verweise auf Animationsobjekte aus den Datenbanken entfernte. Tech Animation unterst\u00fctzte auch weiterhin die verschiedenen Feature-Teams mit eingebetteten Mitarbeitern.\n\nUI\nGegen Ende des Jahres unterst\u00fctzten die UI-Feature- und Tech-Teams die Alpha-Versionen 3.15 und 3.16, indem sie Bugs, Abst\u00fcrze und Leistungsprobleme im Zusammenhang mit den ASOP-Terminals, den Mietkiosken, der Fahrzeugmanagement-App und dem Inventarsystem behoben. Sie haben auch andere Teams bei ihren UI-bezogenen Problemen unterst\u00fctzt.\n\nSie aktualisierten weiterhin Funktionen f\u00fcr persistentes Streaming und unterst\u00fctzten die visuelle Umsetzung des Tank-HUDs.\n\nEs wurden Fortschritte bei der Kerntechnologie und den Funktionen der neuen Starmap erzielt. Sie f\u00fcgten zum Beispiel Steuerelemente f\u00fcr die Anzeige hinzu, mit denen die relative Entfernung, die Ausrichtung und der Ma\u00dfstab ge\u00e4ndert werden k\u00f6nnen, sowie die M\u00f6glichkeit, ausgew\u00e4hlte Objekte in einen angemessenen Rahmen zu setzen.\n\nDie UI-Techniker arbeiteten weiter an der Kerntechnologie f\u00fcr das Hacken und f\u00fcgten die M\u00f6glichkeit hinzu, Text in der Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che auszuw\u00e4hlen und zu bearbeiten.\n\nDer neue Building Blocks-Editor ging gegen Ende des Jahres in die Vorproduktion, was die Arbeit an UIs effizienter und entwicklerfreundlicher machen wird. Au\u00dferdem wurden weitere Building Blocks-Funktionen hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nAuf der k\u00fcnstlerischen Seite hat das Team eine Vielzahl neuer Konzepte f\u00fcr das mobiGlas, die AR-Marker, die Starmap, die Aegis-HUD-Modi und das Origin-HUD erstellt. Au\u00dferdem wurden aktualisierte Icons f\u00fcr das Rechtssystem entworfen.\n\nVFX\nGegen Ende des Jahres arbeitete das VFX-Team an einer kompletten Effektsuite f\u00fcr die Aegis Redeemer, einschlie\u00dflich ihrer einzigartigen \"Nussknacker\"-Triebwerke. Au\u00dferdem haben sie die Effekte f\u00fcr eine Bombe der Gr\u00f6\u00dfe 3 f\u00fcr eine zuk\u00fcnftige Ver\u00f6ffentlichung erstellt.\n\n\"Sie ist nicht ganz so zerst\u00f6rerisch wie die Size 10, aber m\u00e4chtig genug, um Aufsehen zu erregen!\" VFX-Team\n\nDie Arbeiten an der Karte \"Sterbender Stern\" des Arena Commanders wurden ebenfalls abgeschlossen, einschlie\u00dflich einer spektakul\u00e4ren neuen Version des Sterns selbst.\n\nAn anderer Stelle wurden die Effekte der Planetenst\u00fcrme weiter optimiert, damit sie das Licht noch nat\u00fcrlicher aufnehmen k\u00f6nnen. Schlie\u00dflich wurde mit der Forschung und Entwicklung f\u00fcr die Bergungsarbeiten begonnen.","zh_CN":"PU Monthly Reports\nNovember & December 2021\nWelcome to the first PU Monthly Report of 2022! We always start the year off looking back on the last couple of months of development, so the reports below highlight work undertaken throughout November and December, 2021. We\u2019ll also publish January\u2019s report at the usual time early next month, so keep an eye out soon for the next installment!\n\nAI CONTENT\nThe AI team as a whole closed out the year creating feature testmaps for AI behaviors and usables.\n\nFeature testmaps are new autonomous testing processes that run each day and print out reports, which are hugely beneficial to the team as they enable them to identify bugs significantly quicker than before.\n\n\u201cA significant challenge we always had on the team was understanding when an issue was specific to a certain feature or if an external change from another team caused the problem. Patterns identified by the feature tests will solve this problem.\" AI Team\n\nCurrently, the team are testing approximately 50 usables and 20 AI behaviors that can be interacted with by the player. Typically, a usable has between three and six directions characters can approach them from and the same number they exit from, each playing a different animation. With such a high number of permutations, automating the process was essential. The team will soon move to more advanced feature tests for the more complicated behaviors, such as the bartender, engineer, and security guard.\n\nAI Content continued to improve the bartenders and patrons for Alpha 3.16 and added more drink options, including Cuba Libres and Mai Tais. \u2018Busy work\u2019 animations were also devised to increase variety when the bartender isn\u2019t serving patrons. There are now 10 different animations, including stretching, glass cleaning, and shelf organizing. Idle facial expressions were also added to the patron and bartender.\n\nAI Content also began implementing animation assets for the vending and arcade machines, and started closing out the coffee shop usables.\n\nAI FEATURES\nAI Features worked on feature test levels, setting up tests to repeat with different starting conditions, such as equipping AI with different weapons. Alongside identifying and fixing bugs before they become an issue, the feature test levels are useful for showing other teams existing functionality and how to use it. As they become more familiar with the technology, they\u2019ll begin to cover existing functionality to maintain quality across the board.\n\nThe team also investigated and fixed issues with the bartender behavior, including \u2018popping\u2019 issues when moving between different areas of the bar.\n\nAI TECH\nAI finished their work on the initial version of planetary navigation, which contains all the base elements required for it to be used in-game. Once implemented, navigation mesh will be created on planetary surfaces around actors and NPCs, who are able to use it to find paths and move along them. Improvements were added for both generation processes and the pathfinder to work with this new tech too.\n\nThe team continued to refactor the AI weapon controller used by ship AI, this time focusing on improving missile turrets and accuracy. New collision avoidance tech (the AI navigation obstacle) was also added for use in narrow areas and spaces with complex concave objects. This involved adding simplified primitive shapes (like spheres and boxes) that can be used by the collision avoidance system.\n\nThe team also went back to the AI trolley push\/pull feature to help the designers begin using it, which involved adjusting the path follower and creating a feature test map.AI Tech continued to refine the path follower tech, specifically the social AI element, improving functionality by setting usables linked to a path. NPCs will be able to follow the path and stop to use the linked usables. Alongside this, they investigated and fixed several issues with NPC aiming, looking, and locomotion; most of which involved synchronization issues between the servers and clients.\n\nProgress was made on the Subsumption editor tool. The team now have all the base elements in place so the designers and programmers can start using it to create missions and NPC behaviors.\n\nANIMATION\nThroughout November and December, Animation worked on the Kahix missile launcher and weapon select\/deselect, improved the player crouch motion, idle animations, and drunk locomotion, and further developed mining gadgets.\n\nFor AI, the team worked on the cowering, surrender, mess hall, and patron animation sets. Tasks were completed for vendors and bartenders, the multi-tool work zone set, security blocking and directing players, vent searching, vandalizing objects, and medical behavior. They also blocked out NPCs reacting to dead bodies.\n\nOn the facial-animation side, they progressed with general security lines, animations for idles and workers, vendors, and medical behaviors. The Motion Capture team continued to solve data for transversals and ill or injured AI, and worked with Marketing on various videos and promotions.\n\nART (CHARACTERS)\nThe Character Art team wrapped up a visual update to the DNA head archetypes, which should see improvements to heads and eyes in Alpha 3.17.\n\nSome of the team focused on the frontier-style outfits for Pyro, while others worked on a series of generic Stanton outfits from the backlog that will begin to appear in-game shortly.\n\nThe Tech team worked with Graphics on the second version of the \u2018layerblend\u2019 shader to improve wear and dirt tech.\n\nART (SHIPS)\nIn the UK, the Ship Team progressed well with the MISC Hull A, bringing most of the interior to the final art stage. The landing gear and extending cargo mechanism (along with LODs) were completed and are now ready to hand over to Tech Art.\n\nThe Hull C moved through the pipeline too and is currently approaching its greybox review. Work throughout December included converting materials to hard-surface shaders, adding control panels throughout the ship, and refining the pilot seat for optimal visibility.\n\nThroughout November, the RSI Scorpius moved through the whitebox phase before greybox work commenced in December. Most of the exterior was completed by the end of the year, including the wings, thrusters, landing gear, and canopy.\n\nAn all-new vehicle progressed through whitebox, while the Banu Merchantman progressed towards greybox.\n\nTints and holo-viewers were worked on too, along with polish and bug fixing for the Alpha 3.16 release.\n\nIn the US, the Drake Vulture\u2019s interior reached final art, with just a lighting pass remaining. The exterior colors and wear were worked on, as were LODs for the landing gear, while the internal damage pass began.\n\nThe Drake Corsair moved into greybox, and art was finalized for the cockpit and mess hall.\n\nAUDIO\nAudio's main focus was on IAE, with early November seeing them wrap up sound effects for various vehicles and weapons. Specifically, the Crusader Ares, Aegis Redeemer, and Argo Raft each received ambiances, animation, and thruster SFX passes.\n\nAfter the event, Area18\u2019s hospital was given a sound pass and a PA system to enhance the medical feel of the environment. Effects were added to the Drake Cutlass Steel and the final VO was added to character breathing.\n\nThe Audio Code team continued to work towards the first release of Claudius.\n\nCOMMUNITY\nThe Community team kicked off November supporting the Alpha 3.15 release with a comm-link detailing the new hospitals, medical gameplay, and updated healing system. They also hosted a Server Meshing & Persistent Streaming Q&A as a follow-up to the CitizenCon 2951 panel, with a lot of additional information and answers to the community's most up-voted questions.\n\nTo celebrate the launch of IAE 2951, the team published the Free Fly schedule, FAQ, and infographic to help players get to and enjoy the event. During IAE, they compiled several Q&As for ship reveals, including the Anvil Spartan, Argo RAFT, and MISC Odyssey. The IAE's Best in Show days also saw the finalists of the 2951 Ship Showdown take home their exclusive liveries and leather jackets.\n\nIn December, Community supported the launch of Alpha 3.16 and kicked off the Luminalia celebration. Outside the \u2018verse, they provided daily gifts via the Luminalia Calendar and hosted two Luminalia themed contests.\n\nThey also published a Patch Watch spotlighting some of Alpha 3.16\u2019s new features that don't appear on the Public Roadmap.\n\nENGINE\nDuring the last two months of 2021, the Physics team worked on a variety of topics. Quantum grids were changed to use one per solar system. They also received support for box queries. Grid overlap checks were unified for planets and other entities, and grid transitions were improved to allow a natural transition into grids that aren\u2019t a direct parent\/child of the current grid to transition from. Moreover, physics constraints received support for limiting the gravity tilt angle and work began to support structural joints on CGAs. Also, a quantum step function for spaceships was implemented and entities tied to a rope are no longer unnecessarily woken up when the rope becomes slack.\n\nFor optimizations, physics post-step notifications and networked rigids are now processed in parallel. Similarly, vehicle hit processing was moved to allow parallelization. Cross-grid collision detection was optimized to avoid expensive geometry checks as much as possible, and asteroid fields now use the faster hash function and cache physics proxies of their occupants to prevent redundant component lookups. Lastly, physics events are now more efficiently deleted after being processed.\n\nOn the renderer, further work was done on the transition to Gen12. Progress included improvements to instance buffers (indirections on GPU removed, support for offset-based buffer binding, support for different buffer layouts) after they had previously been optimized in October. Furthermore, shadow support for lightweight render nodes was added. Lightweight render node decals were also ported to Gen12 and projected decals were fixed. A G buffer copy pass was implemented, unnecessary GPU updates were fixed, and shader stage visibility was improved to compile and bind fewer stages. Render passes are now always submitted via render graph and support a fallback pass in case any required PSO isn't compiled. Fog volumes and skybox rendering were ported, clip volume rendering migrated, render proxy shadow enabled, and color grading refactored for Gen12. Lastly, the sorting of PSOs was tweaked, resulting in significantly fewer API calls during rendering.\n\nRegarding atmosphere and cloud rendering, R&D on the reprojection of frame data without the need for motion vectors was completed but didn't yield satisfactory results. Therefore, the implementation will stick with the current reprojection scheme for the time being. To improve image quality nonetheless, research started on noise reduction of the original raymarch results that are fed into the filter chain to produce final full-resolution images. Results look promising and will hopefully be shared in a coming PU release. Additionally, irradiance computation for atmospheric lighting was improved; it now better integrates ground albedo and reflected sunlight. Lodding and fade out of ground albedo was also improved, which is important for large objects in high orbit. In general, code was unified in various areas and prepared for integration upstream into the main development branch as preparation for the coming transition of all atmosphere and cloud render code to Gen12.\n\nOn the core engine side, the team submitted the first draft of entity-centric component update scheduling, which is already showing promising performance results. The scheduler now also catches and reports invalid dependencies and provides options for various update processing scenarios (client\/server only, etc). The commonly used performance stats (r_displayinfo) are being reworked. PageHeap (our heap to track memory corruptions) now supports dev team filters so issues can be more easily assigned to the owners of related code. Vis area culling received additional improvements and now better handles invalid shapes. Additionally, care was taken to ensure the engine's exception is correctly invoked in case of stack corruptions reported by specially prepared game binaries (typically for debugging certain issues during PTU). The localization manager's loading code was optimized, and the engine now collects GPU timings as part of its profiler telemetry data that can be consumed for analysis by the external profiling tool. Lastly, investigations regarding EASTL integration continued.\n\nThe teams also looked into compile-time optimizations. Some of the changes consist of the removal of unnecessary headers included in common header files used throughout the project, a cleanup of platform headers, removal of various boost cruft and removal\/replacement of expensive unnecessary macros, reimplementation of a recursive helper template by an equivalent constexpr, and the externalization of huge if-else chains. Moreover, compile times were re-analyzed via clang and code file was redistributed to uber files accordingly.\n\nFEATURES (CHARACTERS & WEAPONS)\nThroughout November and December, the Feature team focused on the final patch release of the year, with a lot of work going into fixing bugs frequently raised in player feedback reports. The team also added some of the player inventory and actor status features that didn't make the first release. For the inventory, this included features to make interactions with the client more robust, with better failure handling and improved feedback. For actor status, an important addition was the \u2018corpse marker,\u2019 which helps players locate and recover their equipment. The team also worked on the injury system to make medical gameplay more impactful.\n\nIn late November, the team moved on to salvaging. The initial focus was on the technical aspect of visually removing material from an object and ensuring its state can be reliably stored and recreated, both across the network and when the object streams back in again. This is currently being prototyped using the damage map system.\n\nThroughout the year, work on the hacking minigame continued. It has gone through multiple iterations, with each prototype being playtested internally using a simplified 2D in-game representation. It has since evolved to be more competitive, tying into some of the in-world gameplay mechanics like scanning. As the core layout of the minigame has remained fairly stable throughout the multiple prototypes, work began on bringing the visuals online. The concepts for this saw multiple iterations, with it currently looking like the player is executing scripts to programmatically attack the target system. The interface, as it currently stands, will offer the user different options to input the various commands.\n\nFEATURES (GAMEPLAY)\nGameplay Feature\u2019s work for November and December focused heavily on tasks for releases in 2022. Significant progress was made in enabling item selling, with the kiosk UI approaching completion and backend code trending towards completion in Q1.\n\nThe cargo rework is ongoing but intermittent as supporting work from other teams comes online. The team are using the time between these jumps to work on small quality-of-life fixes where possible. The team also worked on (and released) Jumptown 2.0.\n\nFEATURES (VEHICLES)\nTowards the end of 2022, Vehicle Features focused on the grav-lev rework. In November, they wrapped up the base implementation and tuned the available bikes for improved stability and handling. In December, players got a hold of the feature and flagged bugs, issues, and instabilities for fixing. This led to massive improvements throughout the Evocati and PTU patches.\n\n\u201cWe're incredibly pleased with how the community helped us hone in the feature for release. There are still some issues we need to fix up in 2022, but we're generally quite happy with how the rework turned out.\u201d Vehicle Features\n\nTowards the end of the year, some team members looked to the future with technical reworks being planned and started for the transit networks and restricted areas. While these won't result in significant changes to the player experience (particularly in the case of transit), they will result in far fewer bugs and much better general stability. These sorts of reworks are necessary because, longer-term, they free the team up to focus on either new features or improve other aspects of the game.\n\nThe last major focus was on jump points, which are progressing well. The team are currently working on 'abnormal exits,' which are situations where the player might exit a jump point prematurely or not in a usual, safe way. For example, a player falling out the back of their ship, the powering down of the jump point, or a jump drive failing.\n\n\u201cDealing with all the possible cases in a sensible and consistent way is a tricky problem, but the result is a feature that has a genuine sense of risk and danger to its use, so it's important we get it right.\u201d\n\nGRAPHICS & VFX PROGRAMMING\nThe Graphics team completed a significant amount of work on shaders and materials towards the end of last year, with one of the main focuses being updating volumetric water lighting so it works in a similar way to the volumetric fog model. There were also several bug fixes for water volumes in general. The hair shader also received attention due to updates to the hair clip volume interaction and efforts to prevent artists from having to rework assets through emulating the old visuals with the latest shading model. They completed the shader conversion from the old DX9 style and kicked off work on the opaque ice\/crystal shader to solve quality and rendering issues with previous attempts using GlassPBR. As it\u2019s opaque, the shader will be cheap to use extensively. For example, in scattered planetary rocks and the Banu Merchantman\u2019s floors and walls.\n\nFor Gen12, the team implemented a fallback rendering system called 'pass group fallbacks' for use when the shaders are compiling. For Vulkan, they continued with the GPU marker refactor, adding API versioning and fixing issues with arrays of resources on Vulkan. They also spent time investigating issues with the Overwolf implicit layer (DLL injection) that were impacting players in Alpha 3.15.1.\n\nDevelopment of the fire hazard feature continued, with the VFX Programming team moving heat and temperature to the physics proxy, working on IR emission, and fixing various bugs with the temperature component and look-at debug camera.\n\nSalvage-wise, an investigation was made into the networking of damage-map data as well as implementing placeholder interfaces to unblock the game coders. The main damage-map features are being worked on in Q1.\n\nNumerous updates were made to particles, including new controls for the mesh particle offset position and min\/max pixels, a new option to pick 'attached zones' of particle entities, particle texture aspect-ratio support. There were also bug fixes for flashing\/black particles, emitter bounds calculations, entity placement on planet OCs, and shock diamonds.\n\nFinally, a number of performance improvements and optimizations were made to emitter memory consumption, material glow lock contention from entity effects, and gas cloud zone contention on destruction and impact MFX.\n\nLIGHTING\nNovember and December saw the Lighting team wrap up support for IAE, which involved a fresh and interesting new lighting style for the existing convention halls.\n\n\u201cAt this stage, it's all about ensuring each ship has a light rig on it that shows it off as best as possible while maintaining render budgets to keep the experience smooth.\u201d Lighting Team\n\nWith that done, the team moved on to providing support to the Ship team, which involved looking at various older ships and optimizing their lighting setups alongside another layer of polish. This task was mostly successful, though existing tech issues and bugs with some ships need to be ironed out before further progress can be made.\n\nTo wrap up the year, the team moved back to working on Pyro\u2019s space stations, this time exploring more look-development and visual benchmarks, and supported the Jumptown 2.0 locations with updated visuals.\n\nNARRATIVE\nBefore the release of Alpha 3.16, Narrative worked closely with Design to write and capture the voice content for Ruto and the other security reps in preparation for Jumptown 2.0 (which was teased earlier in an installment of Data Cache).\n\nNarrative met with Mission Features to start work on additional mission content, determining what kind of lines would be needed, and discussed content for future Dynamic Events. They worked alongside Character Art on the upcoming frontier-style clothing, which will be most common on the fringes of society, such as less-hospitable planets or areas without much commerce. It was decided that while it will be influenced by Earth and Terra fashion, it will have its own unique overall aesthetic.\n\nThe team provided names and descriptions for various items and components, and completed documentation on fictional elements of the overall universe.\n\nAs usual, there were several Spectrum dispatches too: The team answered some of the biggest questions from the Ask a Dev forum in Loremaker\u2019s Community Questions, the Galactapedia received another update, and the latest installment of Something Every Tuesday delved into the annual tradition of Traveler\u2019s Day.\n\nPROPS\nThe Props team continued to work on Pyro station. This included refining the new trash assets, creating a modular set for the improvised marketplace counters, heating and lighting props, and other dressing\/flavor elements such as generators and fuseboxes.\n\nThey also closed out support on additional underground facility mission props for the Mission Feature team and polished several hospital props alongside the team in Montreal.\n\nFinally, initial whitebox work was done for the upcoming lockable\/lootable crates and cargo for the ongoing cargo refactor.\n\nQA\nQA\u2019s primary publishing focus was getting Alpha 3.15.1 and 3.16 to the PTU and LIVE servers. However, Alpha 3.16 wasn\u2019t stable enough, so it was decided to use Alpha 3.15.x and piecemeal specific features in. This worked well, so the internal branch ID of 3.15.2 (externally called 3.16.0) was pushed to the PTU and LIVE with several 3.16 features in a much more stable build. Time was also spent hiring additional team members as the department expands.\n\nSYSTEMIC SERVICES & TOOLS\nIn November and December, Systemic Services & Tools wrapped up work on the Economy, Tools, and AI Simulation optimizations and tools polish. New functionality will be added to these tools in Q1, some of which will be detailed in January\u2019s report.\n\nWork began to wrap up implementation of the new selling gameplay system. This required an under-the-hood rework of the existing shop system, which will act as the foundation for the initial implementation that\u2019s planned for release shortly.\n\nThe whole team helped stabilize services and ensure one of the most stable patch releases yet, which was achieved by addressing various edge cases found with the new Super pCache and other backend services and systems.\n\nTECH ANIMATION\nTo close the year out, the Tech Animation team set a mandate to finish upgrading all head assets to the new pipeline in preparation for the full DNA system refactor. This is a long-standing initiative that will hopefully conclude in early 2022.\n\n\u201cTo get us there, we need to recreate every single head asset in the game and check it\u2019s still working as we intend. All hands are on deck for this one, with the whole team pushing to reach the finish line.\u201d Tech Animation\n\nAlongside this, the team began cleaning up the animation databases, which involved triaging several hundred old animation asset references from the databases. Tech Animation also continued to support the various feature teams with embedded staff.\n\nUI\nTowards the end of the year, the UI Feature and Tech teams supported the Alpha 3.15 and 3.16 releases by addressing bugs, crashes, and performance issues related to the ASOP terminals, rental kiosks, vehicle management app, and inventory system. They supported other teams with their UI-related issues too.\n\nThey continued to update features for persistent streaming and supported the visual implementation of the refueling HUD.\n\nProgress was made on the core tech and feature set of the new Starmap. For example, they added display controls to modify relative distance, orientation and scale, and the ability to frame selected objects appropriately.\n\nUI Tech continued work on the core technology for hacking, adding the ability to select and edit text in the UI.\n\nThe new Building Blocks editor entered pre-production towards the end of the year, which will make working on UIs more efficient and developer-friendly. Additionally, more Building Blocks features were added.\n\nOn the art side, the team created a variety of new concepts for the mobiGlas, AR markers, Starmap, Aegis HUD modes, and Origin HUD. Updated icons for the law system were concepted too.\n\nVFX\nTowards the end of the year, the VFX team worked on a full effects suite for the Aegis Redeemer, including its unique 'nutcracker' thrusters. They also created effects for a Size 3 bomb for a future release.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not quite as destructive as the Size 10, but it\u2019s powerful enough to cause a stir!\u201d VFX Team\n\nWork was also completed on Arena Commander's Dying Star map, including a spectacular new version of the star itself.\n\nElsewhere, further tweaks were made to the planetary storm effects to help them pick up the lighting more naturally. Finally, R&D for salvage commenced."},"links_count":0,"comment_count":0,"created_at":"2022-01-19T22:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"4 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 19:32:59","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":18514,"next_id":18518}}