{"data":{"id":18519,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: November & December 2021","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/18519-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-November-December-2021","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/18519","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/18519","channel":"Feedback","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":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report\nNovember & December 2021\nThis 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.\n\nTO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS\n\nSUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 01:19:2022\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits\n\nWelcome to November\/December\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to security behaviors, cinematics, and varying forms of combat.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI Content\nFor Squadron 42, AI Content focused on the deck crew and security AI behaviors.\n\nThe deck crew activity brings life and movement to hangars and landing pads, with each character being assigned a specialized role, including:\n\nOrdnance: Responsible for a ship\u2019s weapons and rearmament\n\nMechanics: In charge of repairs and maintenance\n\nAir Traffic Controllers: Assigns landing zones to inbound craft and more\n\nThe next step is to build on the basic functionality to make the whole crew work together to restore full functionality to damaged ships and vehicles.\n\nThe security behavior controls player and NPC access to specific areas, with the team investigating how to use the reputation system to determine where characters are allowed to go. For example, guards can now check the criminality, rank, and affinity of those who approach and act accordingly, whether they deny or allow access, or salute a character of higher rank. The first implementation is a military guard, but this activity will be used for bouncers and \u2018mall cops\u2019 in the future after additional mo-cap has been processed.\n\nAI Features\nThe past couple of months saw AI Features focus on improving Human combat. This involved adjusting the perception systems to support NPCs perceiving dead or incapacitated bodies and implementing a behavior so they react as intended. If not already in combat, the first AI to find the body will go and check on them and then trigger investigative behaviors to search for the perpetrator. In the future, some incapacitated bodies will be able to be revived, healed, or released from captivity by an appropriate agent.\n\nIn support of the weapons training behavior, which includes using firing range simulators, the AI needs to be able to target neutral, non-agent targets tagged for a particular lane so that different agents can use simulators at the same time. This involved updating the observable and perception components to make them more data-driven and compatible with the firing ranges. These changes also make it easier to support other targetable objects in the future, such as objects that agents might want to sabotage or destroy to further the gameplay.\n\nFor Vanduul combat, a section of gameplay was completed where enemy perception is reduced when searching for the player. This led to discussions of how to implement low visibility and other sense reductions across the board. They then prototyped the initial implementation for this specific gameplay use, which will also be used as a springboard for fully developing the feature. Vanduul perception and investigation progressed too.\n\nOn the animation side, the team continued work with mo-cap for cowering and surrender animations, hit reactions from different stances, the speed protocol of animations for dead-body reactions, and Vanduul attack and search animations. A lot of data requires polish and integration into existing animations, with particular care being made to check that animations start and end in poses consistent with the most common use cases so that blending is as smooth as possible.\n\nAnimation\nTowards the end of the year, Animation worked on Vanduul and Human combat and made improvements to Human AI locomotion.\n\nThe Facial team continued with quality passes on animations affected by improvements to character head geometry, while the Mo-Cap team supported a story shoot and are currently solving that gathered data.\n\nGameplay Story worked alongside Level Design to implement and correct various story scenes that play throughout gameplay.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe SQ42 Character Art team focused on completing the Navy faction, which involved updating and finalizing major characters and outfits. The Navy makes up around half of all characters in the campaign, with the majority being \u2018hero\u2019 tier characters, so it will be a significant milestone when complete.\n\nCinematics\nFor the Cinematics team, the end of the year involved continuing larger staging tasks and progressing with scenes started at the beginning of Q4.\nFor the opening chapter, the Engine team delivered a cinematic-specific ship object container for use with VFX. The required effects are packaged into the ship itself so aren't as demanding on performance, allowing several to be added to a scene without affecting performance. The ships don\u2019t have any features or mechanics linked to them, so they can be fired upon or destroyed without creating issues elsewhere.\nAn escape pod was reworked to give a better view outside, while work progressed on a scene involving a tram.\nThe team improved the way conversations are hinted at and then triggered, creating a speech-bubble-style icon to show players important characters they can talk to in more populated areas. As players can interact with most crew members, this enables them to find key characters and conversations without approaching every NPC. They\u2019re currently deciding how the display will be oriented and how to lead players to the ideal approach direction for specific characters.\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.\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.\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.\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.\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.\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 (Gameplay)\nThe SQ42 Feature team continued developing the in-game character customizer, improving support for head selection and hair, and supporting the Design team with transition animations and the user interface.\nThey undertook R&D on the conversation inner thought, primarily on how it appears when players approach an NPC and whether there are any restrictions on where it triggers from. They also optimized some cinematic-heavy scenes, including simplifying ways to create \u2018lightweight\u2019 vehicles, improving multithreaded sequence batch updating, and checking they\u2019re not loading more than necessary.\n\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story began November updating poses to maintain and polish several scenes.\nThey then received a significant amount of mo-cap that was shot at the end of October, which allowed them to make a number of anticipated updates to several scenes across various chapters.\nThey also overhauled one of the walk-and-talk sections in chapter 5 to give them greater control of the animation. This took a lot of work but helped the chapter progress well.\nThey also took on two new scenes in chapter 14 that take place in a busy environment. They started their pass prototyping the other animation and activities going on around the scenes themselves.\nA new and improved turret metric was devised, allowing the team to confidently update scenes featuring turrets, and they began implementing new audio and face and body animations into random-to-NPC scenes.\n\u201cIt\u2019s been surprising to see how much final audio improves a scene, and it\u2019s great that our NPC characters can now reply to the cast characters.\u201d Gameplay Story\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 too.\nSpecifically for SQ42, the team supported Cinematics by optimizing letter-box rendering in cutscenes, investigating issues with camera cut brightness, and looking into image stabilization for offline rendering.\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.\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.\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, and 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.\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\nLevel Design\nThe Space\/Dogfight team worked on flight components for chapters that focus on points of interest, expanding some of the investigation gameplay in the game's early chapters. They also worked alongside the other feature teams to refine turret gameplay.\nThe FPS team focused on getting FPS components playing through without blockers and implemented the additional features delivered in the last quarter of 2021.\nThe Social Design team continued with the significant task of implementing all in-game scenes, which will be the case for many months to come.\n\nNarrative\nThe Narrative team spent the bulk of the past few months dividing their time between content and planning. Work continued on tracking all line requests in preparation for capture later in the year.\nThey also began working alongside the dev teams to review and discuss levels, including the AI team to plan behaviors and archetypes. The writers will start building out scripts and creating placeholder audio in the new year.\n\nQA\nCinematics continued to rely on QA for regular chapter testing, with work throughout the last two months focusing on TrackView testing and ironing out many of the tool defects when rendering scenes. They also continued to test and review scenes to ensure quality doesn\u2019t diminish as development continues.\nWith the AI team splitting to cover more Sq42 development, the Frankfurt-based QA team moved to support them and is currently hiring to help with the increased workload. The team will still focus on behavior testing but will be expanding into level checks alongside QA in the UK.\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\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\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 team addressed various UI related bugs, crashes, and performance issues.\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.\nUI Tech continued work on the core technology for hacking, adding the ability to select and edit text in the UI.\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\nVFX\nVFX began working on a 'vertical slice' section of a key outdoor location. The collaboration with the Cinematics team also continued, with additions and refinements made to the epic battle scene mentioned in the previous report. They also decided to revisit some weapon effects requiring a visual update.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION","de_DE":"Geschwader 42 Monatsbericht\nNovember & Dezember 2021\nDies ist ein Querverweis auf den Bericht, der k\u00fcrzlich \u00fcber den monatlichen Squadron 42 Newsletter verschickt wurde. Wir ver\u00f6ffentlichen ihn ein zweites Mal als Comm-Link, damit die Community leichter darauf zur\u00fcckgreifen kann.\n\nTO: REKRUTEN DES GESCHWADERS 42\n\nSUBJ: ENTWICKLUNG UPDATE 01:19:2022\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO Geschwader 42 Rekruten\n\nWillkommen zum Entwicklungsbericht von Squadron 42 f\u00fcr November\/Dezember. Anbei findest du Details zu den neuesten Fortschritten in der Kampagne, einschlie\u00dflich Aktualisierungen des Sicherheitsverhaltens, der Filmsequenzen und der verschiedenen Kampfformen.\n\nVielen Dank f\u00fcr eure anhaltende Unterst\u00fctzung von Squadron 42.\n\nMit freundlichen Gr\u00fc\u00dfen,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nKI-Inhalt\nBei Squadron 42 konzentrierte sich der KI-Inhalt auf das Verhalten der Deckcrew und der Sicherheits-KI.\n\nDie Aktivit\u00e4ten der Deckbesatzung bringen Leben und Bewegung in die Hangars und Landepl\u00e4tze, wobei jedem Charakter eine spezielle Rolle zugewiesen wird, z. B:\n\nMunition: Verantwortlich f\u00fcr die Waffen und die Aufr\u00fcstung eines Schiffes\n\nMechaniker: Zust\u00e4ndig f\u00fcr Reparaturen und Wartung\n\nFluglotsen: Weist den ankommenden Flugzeugen Landezonen zu und mehr\n\nDer n\u00e4chste Schritt besteht darin, die Grundfunktionalit\u00e4t auszubauen, damit die gesamte Besatzung zusammenarbeiten kann, um die volle Funktionalit\u00e4t besch\u00e4digter Schiffe und Fahrzeuge wiederherzustellen.\n\nDas Sicherheitsverhalten kontrolliert den Zugang von Spielern und NSC zu bestimmten Bereichen. Das Team untersucht, wie das Reputationssystem genutzt werden kann, um zu bestimmen, wo Charaktere hingehen d\u00fcrfen. Zum Beispiel k\u00f6nnen die Wachen jetzt die Kriminalit\u00e4t, den Rang und die Affinit\u00e4t derjenigen \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen, die sich n\u00e4hern, und entsprechend handeln, ob sie den Zugang verweigern oder erlauben oder einen Charakter mit h\u00f6herem Rang gr\u00fc\u00dfen. Die erste Implementierung ist eine milit\u00e4rische Wache, aber diese Aktivit\u00e4t wird in Zukunft auch f\u00fcr T\u00fcrsteher und \"Mall Cops\" genutzt werden, nachdem weitere Mo-Caps bearbeitet wurden.\n\nKI-Funktionen\nIn den letzten Monaten lag der Schwerpunkt der KI-Features auf der Verbesserung des menschlichen Kampfes. Dabei wurden die Wahrnehmungssysteme so angepasst, dass NSCs tote oder kampfunf\u00e4hige K\u00f6rper wahrnehmen k\u00f6nnen, und ein Verhalten implementiert, mit dem sie wie vorgesehen reagieren. Wenn sie sich nicht bereits im Kampf befinden, wird die erste KI, die die Leiche findet, nach ihr sehen und dann ein Ermittlungsverhalten ausl\u00f6sen, um nach dem T\u00e4ter zu suchen. In Zukunft werden einige kampfunf\u00e4hige Leichen von einem geeigneten Agenten wiederbelebt, geheilt oder aus der Gefangenschaft befreit werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nZur Unterst\u00fctzung des Waffentrainings, zu dem auch die Nutzung von Schie\u00dfstand-Simulatoren geh\u00f6rt, muss die KI in der Lage sein, neutrale, nicht-agentenbezogene Ziele, die f\u00fcr eine bestimmte Bahn markiert sind, anzuvisieren, damit verschiedene Agenten die Simulatoren gleichzeitig nutzen k\u00f6nnen. Dazu mussten die Beobachtungs- und Wahrnehmungskomponenten aktualisiert werden, um sie datengesteuerter und mit den Schie\u00dfst\u00e4nden kompatibel zu machen. Diese \u00c4nderungen machen es auch einfacher, in Zukunft andere anvisierbare Objekte zu unterst\u00fctzen, z. B. Objekte, die Agenten sabotieren oder zerst\u00f6ren wollen, um das Spiel voranzutreiben.\n\nF\u00fcr den Vanduul-Kampf wurde ein Abschnitt des Gameplays fertiggestellt, in dem die Wahrnehmung der Feinde bei der Suche nach dem Spieler eingeschr\u00e4nkt ist. Dies f\u00fchrte zu Diskussionen dar\u00fcber, wie man eine geringe Sichtweite und andere Wahrnehmungseinschr\u00e4nkungen im gesamten Spiel umsetzen kann. Anschlie\u00dfend wurde ein Prototyp f\u00fcr diese spezielle Spielanwendung erstellt, der auch als Sprungbrett f\u00fcr die vollst\u00e4ndige Entwicklung der Funktion dienen wird. Auch die Wahrnehmung und Erkundung der Vanduul machte Fortschritte.\n\nAuf der Animationsseite arbeitete das Team weiter mit mo-cap an den Animationen f\u00fcr das Zusammenkauern und die Kapitulation, an den Trefferreaktionen aus verschiedenen Stellungen, am Geschwindigkeitsprotokoll der Animationen f\u00fcr Totstellreaktionen und an den Angriffs- und Suchanimationen der Vanduul. Viele Daten m\u00fcssen aufpoliert und in bestehende Animationen integriert werden. Dabei wird besonders darauf geachtet, dass die Animationen in Posen beginnen und enden, die den h\u00e4ufigsten Anwendungsf\u00e4llen entsprechen, damit die \u00dcberblendung so reibungslos wie m\u00f6glich verl\u00e4uft.\n\nAnimation\nGegen Ende des Jahres hat die Animation an den K\u00e4mpfen der Vanduul und der Menschen gearbeitet und Verbesserungen an der Fortbewegung der menschlichen KI vorgenommen.\n\nDas Facial-Team setzte die Qualit\u00e4tspr\u00fcfung der Animationen fort, die von den Verbesserungen an der Kopfgeometrie der Charaktere betroffen waren, w\u00e4hrend das Mo-Cap-Team einen Story-Dreh unterst\u00fctzte und derzeit die gesammelten Daten auswertet.\n\nGameplay Story arbeitete zusammen mit dem Level Design an der Umsetzung und Korrektur verschiedener Story-Szenen, die w\u00e4hrend des Spiels spielen.\n\nKunst (Charaktere)\nDas SQ42 Character Art Team konzentrierte sich auf die Fertigstellung der Navy-Fraktion, was die Aktualisierung und Fertigstellung der wichtigsten Charaktere und Outfits beinhaltete. Die Marine macht etwa die H\u00e4lfte aller Charaktere in der Kampagne aus, wobei die meisten von ihnen \"Helden\" sind, sodass die Fertigstellung ein wichtiger Meilenstein sein wird.\n\nCinematics\nF\u00fcr das Cinematics-Team ging es Ende des Jahres darum, gr\u00f6\u00dfere Inszenierungsaufgaben fortzusetzen und die zu Beginn des vierten Quartals begonnenen Szenen voranzutreiben.\nF\u00fcr das Er\u00f6ffnungskapitel lieferte das Engine-Team einen Cinematic-spezifischen Schiffsobjekt-Container f\u00fcr die Verwendung mit VFX. Die ben\u00f6tigten Effekte sind in das Schiff selbst gepackt und stellen daher keine gro\u00dfen Anforderungen an die Leistung, so dass mehrere Effekte zu einer Szene hinzugef\u00fcgt werden k\u00f6nnen, ohne die Leistung zu beeintr\u00e4chtigen. Die Schiffe haben keine Funktionen oder Mechanismen, die mit ihnen verbunden sind, so dass sie beschossen oder zerst\u00f6rt werden k\u00f6nnen, ohne dass es an anderer Stelle zu Problemen kommt.\nEine Rettungskapsel wurde \u00fcberarbeitet, um eine bessere Sicht nach drau\u00dfen zu erm\u00f6glichen, w\u00e4hrend die Arbeit an einer Szene mit einer Stra\u00dfenbahn fortgesetzt wurde.\nDas Team verbesserte die Art und Weise, wie Gespr\u00e4che angedeutet und dann ausgel\u00f6st werden, indem es ein Symbol im Stil einer Sprechblase schuf, um den Spielern wichtige Charaktere anzuzeigen, mit denen sie in bev\u00f6lkerten Gebieten sprechen k\u00f6nnen. Da die Spieler\/innen mit den meisten Besatzungsmitgliedern interagieren k\u00f6nnen, k\u00f6nnen sie so wichtige Charaktere und Gespr\u00e4che finden, ohne jeden NSC ansprechen zu m\u00fcssen. Derzeit wird entschieden, wie die Anzeige ausgerichtet sein wird und wie die Spieler\/innen die ideale Ann\u00e4herungsrichtung f\u00fcr bestimmte Charaktere finden k\u00f6nnen.\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 Entit\u00e4ten, die an ein Seil gebunden sind, werden nicht mehr unn\u00f6tig geweckt, wenn das Seil schlaff wird.\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.\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.\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.\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 jetzt GPU-Timings als Teil der Telemetriedaten des Profilers, die von dem externen Profiling-Tool zur Analyse verwendet werden k\u00f6nnen. Schlie\u00dflich wurden die Untersuchungen zur EASTL-Integration fortgesetzt.\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 (Gameplay)\nDas SQ42-Feature-Team entwickelte den Charakteranpassungsmodus im Spiel weiter, verbesserte die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die Kopfauswahl und die Haare und unterst\u00fctzte das Design-Team bei den \u00dcbergangsanimationen und der Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che.\nSie haben an der inneren Konversation geforscht, vor allem daran, wie sie erscheint, wenn sich Spieler\/innen einem NSC n\u00e4hern, und ob es Einschr\u00e4nkungen gibt, von wo aus sie ausgel\u00f6st wird. Au\u00dferdem optimierten sie einige filmlastige Szenen, unter anderem durch die Vereinfachung der Erstellung \"leichter\" Fahrzeuge, die Verbesserung der Stapelaktualisierung von Multithreading-Sequenzen und die \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung, dass sie nicht mehr als n\u00f6tig geladen werden.\n\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story begann im November mit der Aktualisierung von Posen, um einige Szenen zu pflegen und zu polieren.\nEnde Oktober wurde eine betr\u00e4chtliche Menge an Mo-Cap-Material gedreht, was es ihnen erm\u00f6glichte, eine Reihe von erwarteten Aktualisierungen an mehreren Szenen in verschiedenen Kapiteln vorzunehmen.\nAu\u00dferdem \u00fcberarbeiteten sie einen der Walk-and-Talk-Abschnitte in Kapitel 5, um mehr Kontrolle \u00fcber die Animation zu haben. Das hat viel Arbeit gekostet, aber das Kapitel kam gut voran.\nIn Kapitel 14 nahmen sie zwei neue Szenen auf, die in einer belebten Umgebung spielen. Sie begannen mit dem Prototyping der anderen Animationen und Aktivit\u00e4ten, die in den Szenen selbst stattfinden.\nEs wurde eine neue und verbesserte Gesch\u00fctzturm-Metrik entwickelt, die es dem Team erm\u00f6glicht, Szenen mit Gesch\u00fctzt\u00fcrmen zu aktualisieren, und sie begannen damit, neue Audio-, Gesichts- und K\u00f6rperanimationen in Zufalls-NPC-Szenen zu implementieren.\n\"Es war \u00fcberraschend zu sehen, wie sehr der endg\u00fcltige Ton eine Szene verbessert, und es ist toll, dass unsere NSC-Charaktere jetzt den Darstellern antworten k\u00f6nnen\". Gameplay Story\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, die Assets zu \u00fcberarbeiten. Auch die Shader-Konvertierung vom alten DX9-Stil wurde abgeschlossen.\nSpeziell f\u00fcr SQ42 unterst\u00fctzte das Team Cinematics, indem es das Letterbox-Rendering in Zwischensequenzen optimierte, Probleme mit der Helligkeit von Kameraschnitten untersuchte und die Bildstabilisierung f\u00fcr das Offline-Rendering untersuchte.\nF\u00fcr Gen12 implementierte das Team ein Fallback-Rendering-System namens \"Pass Group Fallbacks\", 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 in Vulkan behoben.\nDas 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.\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 Partikel-Entit\u00e4ten und die Unterst\u00fctzung des Seitenverh\u00e4ltnisses 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.\nSchlie\u00dflich wurden eine Reihe von Leistungsverbesserungen und Optimierungen am Emitter-Speicherverbrauch, an der Beanspruchung von Materialgl\u00fchsperren durch Entity-Effekte und an der Beanspruchung von Gaswolkenzonen bei Zerst\u00f6rung und Aufprall-MFX vorgenommen.\n\nLeveldesign\nDas Space\/Dogfight-Team arbeitete an Flugkomponenten f\u00fcr Kapitel, die sich auf Points of Interest konzentrieren, und erweiterte damit einige der Erkundungsm\u00f6glichkeiten in den fr\u00fchen Kapiteln des Spiels. Au\u00dferdem arbeiteten sie mit den anderen Teams zusammen, um das Gameplay der Gesch\u00fctzt\u00fcrme zu verfeinern.\nDas FPS-Team konzentrierte sich darauf, die FPS-Komponenten ohne Blocker durchzuspielen und implementierte die zus\u00e4tzlichen Features, die im letzten Quartal 2021 geliefert wurden.\nDas Social Design Team fuhr mit der bedeutenden Aufgabe fort, alle In-Game-Szenen zu implementieren, was noch viele Monate lang der Fall sein wird.\n\nNarrative\nDas Narrative Team verbrachte den Gro\u00dfteil der letzten Monate damit, seine Zeit zwischen Inhalt und Planung aufzuteilen. Die Arbeit an der Verfolgung aller Zeilenanfragen wurde fortgesetzt, um die Erfassung sp\u00e4ter im Jahr vorzubereiten.\nAu\u00dferdem hat das Team begonnen, gemeinsam mit den Entwicklungsteams die Levels zu \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen und zu besprechen, einschlie\u00dflich des KI-Teams, um Verhaltensweisen und Archetypen zu planen. Die Autoren werden im neuen Jahr mit der Erstellung von Skripten und Platzhalter-Audio beginnen.\n\nQA\nIn den letzten zwei Monaten konzentrierte sich die Arbeit auf TrackView-Tests und die Beseitigung vieler Toolfehler beim Rendern von Szenen. Au\u00dferdem testeten und \u00fcberpr\u00fcften sie weiterhin Szenen, um sicherzustellen, dass die Qualit\u00e4t im Laufe der Entwicklung nicht nachl\u00e4sst.\nDa sich das KI-Team aufgespalten hat, um die Entwicklung von Sq42 voranzutreiben, ist das QA-Team in Frankfurt umgezogen, um es zu unterst\u00fctzen, und stellt derzeit neue Mitarbeiter\/innen ein, um die gestiegene Arbeitsbelastung zu bew\u00e4ltigen. Das Team wird sich weiterhin auf Verhaltenstests konzentrieren, aber zusammen mit der QA in Gro\u00dfbritannien die Levelpr\u00fcfungen ausweiten.\n\nTech Animation\nZum Abschluss des Jahres hat sich das Tech Animation-Team 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\"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\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 k\u00fcmmerte sich das UI-Feature- und Tech-Team um verschiedene UI-bezogene Bugs, Abst\u00fcrze und Leistungsprobleme.\nEs wurden Fortschritte bei der Kerntechnologie und den Funktionen der neuen Starmap erzielt. So wurden z. B. Steuerelemente f\u00fcr die Anzeige hinzugef\u00fcgt, mit denen die relative Entfernung, die Ausrichtung und der Ma\u00dfstab ge\u00e4ndert werden k\u00f6nnen, sowie die M\u00f6glichkeit, ausgew\u00e4hlte Objekte entsprechend einzurahmen.\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.\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\nVFX\nDie VFX-Abteilung begann mit der Arbeit an einem \"vertikalen Schnitt\" f\u00fcr einen wichtigen Au\u00dfenschauplatz. Die Zusammenarbeit mit dem Cinematics-Team wurde ebenfalls fortgesetzt und die im letzten Bericht erw\u00e4hnte epische Schlachtszene wurde erg\u00e4nzt und verfeinert. Sie beschlossen auch, einige Waffeneffekte zu \u00fcberarbeiten, die ein visuelles Update ben\u00f6tigten.\n\nWIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT...\n\/\/ ENDE DER \u00dcBERTRAGUNG","zh_CN":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report\nNovember & December 2021\nThis 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.\n\nTO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS\n\nSUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 01:19:2022\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits\n\nWelcome to November\/December\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to security behaviors, cinematics, and varying forms of combat.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI Content\nFor Squadron 42, AI Content focused on the deck crew and security AI behaviors.\n\nThe deck crew activity brings life and movement to hangars and landing pads, with each character being assigned a specialized role, including:\n\nOrdnance: Responsible for a ship\u2019s weapons and rearmament\n\nMechanics: In charge of repairs and maintenance\n\nAir Traffic Controllers: Assigns landing zones to inbound craft and more\n\nThe next step is to build on the basic functionality to make the whole crew work together to restore full functionality to damaged ships and vehicles.\n\nThe security behavior controls player and NPC access to specific areas, with the team investigating how to use the reputation system to determine where characters are allowed to go. For example, guards can now check the criminality, rank, and affinity of those who approach and act accordingly, whether they deny or allow access, or salute a character of higher rank. The first implementation is a military guard, but this activity will be used for bouncers and \u2018mall cops\u2019 in the future after additional mo-cap has been processed.\n\nAI Features\nThe past couple of months saw AI Features focus on improving Human combat. This involved adjusting the perception systems to support NPCs perceiving dead or incapacitated bodies and implementing a behavior so they react as intended. If not already in combat, the first AI to find the body will go and check on them and then trigger investigative behaviors to search for the perpetrator. In the future, some incapacitated bodies will be able to be revived, healed, or released from captivity by an appropriate agent.\n\nIn support of the weapons training behavior, which includes using firing range simulators, the AI needs to be able to target neutral, non-agent targets tagged for a particular lane so that different agents can use simulators at the same time. This involved updating the observable and perception components to make them more data-driven and compatible with the firing ranges. These changes also make it easier to support other targetable objects in the future, such as objects that agents might want to sabotage or destroy to further the gameplay.\n\nFor Vanduul combat, a section of gameplay was completed where enemy perception is reduced when searching for the player. This led to discussions of how to implement low visibility and other sense reductions across the board. They then prototyped the initial implementation for this specific gameplay use, which will also be used as a springboard for fully developing the feature. Vanduul perception and investigation progressed too.\n\nOn the animation side, the team continued work with mo-cap for cowering and surrender animations, hit reactions from different stances, the speed protocol of animations for dead-body reactions, and Vanduul attack and search animations. A lot of data requires polish and integration into existing animations, with particular care being made to check that animations start and end in poses consistent with the most common use cases so that blending is as smooth as possible.\n\nAnimation\nTowards the end of the year, Animation worked on Vanduul and Human combat and made improvements to Human AI locomotion.\n\nThe Facial team continued with quality passes on animations affected by improvements to character head geometry, while the Mo-Cap team supported a story shoot and are currently solving that gathered data.\n\nGameplay Story worked alongside Level Design to implement and correct various story scenes that play throughout gameplay.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe SQ42 Character Art team focused on completing the Navy faction, which involved updating and finalizing major characters and outfits. The Navy makes up around half of all characters in the campaign, with the majority being \u2018hero\u2019 tier characters, so it will be a significant milestone when complete.\n\nCinematics\nFor the Cinematics team, the end of the year involved continuing larger staging tasks and progressing with scenes started at the beginning of Q4.\nFor the opening chapter, the Engine team delivered a cinematic-specific ship object container for use with VFX. The required effects are packaged into the ship itself so aren't as demanding on performance, allowing several to be added to a scene without affecting performance. The ships don\u2019t have any features or mechanics linked to them, so they can be fired upon or destroyed without creating issues elsewhere.\nAn escape pod was reworked to give a better view outside, while work progressed on a scene involving a tram.\nThe team improved the way conversations are hinted at and then triggered, creating a speech-bubble-style icon to show players important characters they can talk to in more populated areas. As players can interact with most crew members, this enables them to find key characters and conversations without approaching every NPC. They\u2019re currently deciding how the display will be oriented and how to lead players to the ideal approach direction for specific characters.\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.\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.\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.\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.\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.\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 (Gameplay)\nThe SQ42 Feature team continued developing the in-game character customizer, improving support for head selection and hair, and supporting the Design team with transition animations and the user interface.\nThey undertook R&D on the conversation inner thought, primarily on how it appears when players approach an NPC and whether there are any restrictions on where it triggers from. They also optimized some cinematic-heavy scenes, including simplifying ways to create \u2018lightweight\u2019 vehicles, improving multithreaded sequence batch updating, and checking they\u2019re not loading more than necessary.\n\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story began November updating poses to maintain and polish several scenes.\nThey then received a significant amount of mo-cap that was shot at the end of October, which allowed them to make a number of anticipated updates to several scenes across various chapters.\nThey also overhauled one of the walk-and-talk sections in chapter 5 to give them greater control of the animation. This took a lot of work but helped the chapter progress well.\nThey also took on two new scenes in chapter 14 that take place in a busy environment. They started their pass prototyping the other animation and activities going on around the scenes themselves.\nA new and improved turret metric was devised, allowing the team to confidently update scenes featuring turrets, and they began implementing new audio and face and body animations into random-to-NPC scenes.\n\u201cIt\u2019s been surprising to see how much final audio improves a scene, and it\u2019s great that our NPC characters can now reply to the cast characters.\u201d Gameplay Story\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 too.\nSpecifically for SQ42, the team supported Cinematics by optimizing letter-box rendering in cutscenes, investigating issues with camera cut brightness, and looking into image stabilization for offline rendering.\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.\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.\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, and 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.\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\nLevel Design\nThe Space\/Dogfight team worked on flight components for chapters that focus on points of interest, expanding some of the investigation gameplay in the game's early chapters. They also worked alongside the other feature teams to refine turret gameplay.\nThe FPS team focused on getting FPS components playing through without blockers and implemented the additional features delivered in the last quarter of 2021.\nThe Social Design team continued with the significant task of implementing all in-game scenes, which will be the case for many months to come.\n\nNarrative\nThe Narrative team spent the bulk of the past few months dividing their time between content and planning. Work continued on tracking all line requests in preparation for capture later in the year.\nThey also began working alongside the dev teams to review and discuss levels, including the AI team to plan behaviors and archetypes. The writers will start building out scripts and creating placeholder audio in the new year.\n\nQA\nCinematics continued to rely on QA for regular chapter testing, with work throughout the last two months focusing on TrackView testing and ironing out many of the tool defects when rendering scenes. They also continued to test and review scenes to ensure quality doesn\u2019t diminish as development continues.\nWith the AI team splitting to cover more Sq42 development, the Frankfurt-based QA team moved to support them and is currently hiring to help with the increased workload. The team will still focus on behavior testing but will be expanding into level checks alongside QA in the UK.\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\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\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 team addressed various UI related bugs, crashes, and performance issues.\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.\nUI Tech continued work on the core technology for hacking, adding the ability to select and edit text in the UI.\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\nVFX\nVFX began working on a 'vertical slice' section of a key outdoor location. The collaboration with the Cinematics team also continued, with additions and refinements made to the epic battle scene mentioned in the previous report. They also decided to revisit some weapon effects requiring a visual update.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":0,"created_at":"2022-01-26T18:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"4 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 19:32:41","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":18518,"next_id":18520}}