{"data":{"id":18719,"title":"Star Citizen Monthly Report: May 2022","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/18719-Star-Citizen-Monthly-Report-May-2022","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/18719","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/18719","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":9,"translations":{"en_EN":"PU Monthly Report\nMay 2022\nWelcome to May\u2019s PU Monthly Report! Naturally, Invictus Launch Week was a feature on many teams\u2019 agendas last month, but significant progress was made on plenty of upcoming content and features too, including new locations, unannounced vehicles, and persistent tech. Read on for all the details.\n\nAI (Content)\nThroughout May, the AI Content team focused on improving the visuals of general AI locomotion. The animation director identified 'locomotion overlays and fidgets' (animations blended with movement animations) as a vital area of improvement. So, the team authored 40 new overlays, including scalp scratching, knuckle cracking, and stretching. The overlays build on the walk-cycle work completed earlier in the year to provide more visually pleasing AI locomotion.\n\nAlongside this, AI Content began using the dynamic conversations tech recently delivered by AI Tech, which allows groups of AI to spontaneously begin conversations. The aim is to have this implemented across a variety of usables. Three use-cases have been created so far: the four-person mess-hall table, the idle spot, and the arcade machine.\n\nAI (Tech)\nAI Tech worked on spaceship functionalities, including several improvements to quantum travel and quantum boost. Now, ships can accelerate while spooling before the actual jump. This functionality was also exposed as an assignment for missions.\n\nThe team cleaned up and activated several feature test-maps into the main game-dev stream. These maps were validated to ensure the team can better track features that might be impacted by the changes of different teams.\n\nFor Subsumption, focus was on improving the usability of editing conversations (or coordinated subactivities). The internal representation of the GUID and SuperGUIDs was improved too.\n\nBuilding on last month\u2019s work, feedback was addressed regarding NPCs pushing trolleys. The team now have better control over what forces are applied to the trolley by using an angular and two linear PID controllers. They also improved the exact positioning logic at the end of a path and added stuck detector usage.\n\nFor Human combat, an initial skeleton of the DefendArea assignment was implemented to allow the designers to specify areas that NPCs can use for their behaviors. For example, guards will use this to understand which zones they should patrol.\n\nOcclusion calculation was restored to stop NPCs from ignoring hidden enemies while shooting, which will help them preserve ammunition and prevent individual targets from being overly targeted (unless fire control is forcing the shooting).\n\nThe team also improved the friendly-fire validation and can now assign different factions different behaviors. This includes \u201cbad guys\u201d only trying to preserve the life of their group, while \u201cgood guys\u201d also trying to avoid hitting neutral factions, like civilians.\n\nSeveral fixes to the usable code were added, including one causing NPCs to use usables they were not authorized to use. They also extended the usable code to allow them to set up slotting functionalities through loadout entries, allowing them to access item ports not exposed directly in Data-Forge. For example, setting up a Gladius as a usable with varying inspection usables depending on whether missiles are equipped or not.\n\nAI (Vehicle Features)\nThe AI Vehicle Features team completed the flight AI tool. This enables the developers to control and set up specific AI scenarios across various ships. They're currently porting the new dive attack maneuver to the combat pilot AI, which allows \u2018reckless\u2019 and \u2018aggressive\u2019 pilots fighting against capital ships to dynamically choose this maneuver when required.\n\nThey also made changes to the way they apply the backwash thruster effect as it was negatively affecting AI. Now, it controls forces by the size of the ship\u2019s surfaces, so smaller ships have less of an impact on larger ships.\n\nAnimation\nFor the PU, the Facial Animation team finished off performances for various in-game emotes, worked on a new mission giver, and created the facial animations for female vendors and male and female workers.\n\nArt (Characters)\nCharacter Art spent the month wrapping up Q2 assets, which included work on several armor variants. They also continued to work on the Pyro frontier outfits.\n\nArt (Ships)\nLast month, the UK team began improving the damage maps on all ships in preparation for the salvage mechanic. Development also continued on several vehicles:\n\nAn unannounced ground vehicle progressed into final art and design, while a new ship entered the early greybox stage, with work on the cockpit and dashboard progressing well.\n\nThe Banu Merchantman continued to move through greybox, with May\u2019s focus on the ship\u2019s exterior art. The team are currently working on the underside and the look and feel of its wings.\n\nThe Argo SRV began production and is nearing whitebox-complete, with the final whitebox review scheduled soon.\n\nIn the US, the team continued building the Drake Corsair. On the interior, major passes were completed on the turret airlock and manned-turret cabin, while most of the crew quarters were finished, including the captain\u2019s quarters near the cockpit. The entire cargo hold was blocked out and details are currently being added. The main airlock\/staging room on the starboard side of the ship was also completed.\n\nOn the exterior, progress was made on the greybox, including the nacelles and main\/retro thrusters. Development began on the landing gear and remote turrets too.\n\nCommunity\nThe Community team spent had another busy month in May with much focus directed towards supporting sentiment tracking and messaging for Invictus Launch Week and it's related publishes.\n\nThey published the Manufacturer Free Fly Schedule and a Spectrum FAQ before updating the Welcome Hub, Welcome Back Pilot page, and the New Player Comm-link for those making their first visits to the \u2018verse. Everything was compiled in the Invictus Launch Week Details page.\n\nIn tandem with the event, they held a screenshot contest and the 2952 Dunlow Derby race (in full collaboration with the racing community - SCR.GG) and further supported Invictus 2952 with sentiment tracking and server status communications. They also announced the winners of the MISC Bumper Sticker and the Tour of Stanton contests that began at the end of April.\n\nThe team also updated the Roadmap's Release View to reflect the rollout of key technologies in 2022, as mentioned in the latest Letter from the Chairman.\n\nA few team members had the opportunity to attend the Be@con event (an epic community-organized meetup\/convention) in Belgium and meet members of the wonderful community in person again.\n\n\"We had an absolute blast and want to thank everyone who came out and said hello. It was great seeing everyone in person again, and we can't wait for the \"Bar Citizen World Tour\" this Summer!\" - Community Team\n\nThey also hosted the Drake Mule and Anvil Legionnaire Q&As, giving the community the opportunity to ask the vehicle\u2019s developers their most burning questions.\nWork also continues on the new Community Hub, with steps being taken to port the work from a staging environment to the live servers (but not visible to non-staff). This is a huge step because it means the new Community Hub is actually populating with real player content. The team is continuing to relay feedback and assist in the overall design, to prepare for its public debut in the very near future.\nLooking a bit ahead, the team is deep in planning for this year's Foundation Festival, Ship Showdown, upcoming Dynamic Events, and much more.\n\nEngine\nIn May, the Physics team added a new dynamic entity (ropeentity_ex) to simulate a rope running over a pulley wheel. As an optimization, round-robin free lists were added for factories to reduce contention when creating or destroying objects. Additionally, vehicle pad normals are now cached to speed up collision processing.\n\nOn the renderer, work on the Gen12 transition continued. APIs for transient resource sets and various transient buffer types further matured and all relevant client code was updated to make use of them. The Gen12 pipeline to render cube maps was enabled, and Gen12 support for fog volumes and various other render nodes was also enabled. A new reflection buffer API was implemented and worker contexts were established throughout the client code. Resource sets are no longer unnecessarily created and material updates are not pushed into processing queues if there isn't anything to update. Support in debug comparison code was added for stencil state checks, skinned objects, and forward stage.\n\n\u201cSpeaking of the forward stage, a lot of work went into it this month and we hope to enable it soon.\u201d Engine Team\n\nSupport for eye overlay pass was added too.\n\nThe Gen12 port of planet ground fog was completed and Gen12 ports of atmospheric and volumetric cloud rendering commenced. Additional improvements to planet terrain height map rendering and spherical cloud and planet terrain shadow rendering were made.\n\nOn the core engine, various improvements were made to the profiling system to better analyze fibers and their preemption, and to track callers of semaphore waits and file reads. Support to collect peaks was also added (to prioritize optimization tasks). Various optimizations from recent performance captures on the PTU were implemented. Also, power scaling is now disabled for all threads the engine spawns with normal or time-critical priority, which helps thread scheduling (main, render, physics, batch worker, etc.) and improves performance. Additional optimizations were made, including removing the final lock in the background job manager, checking authority requirements when activating component updates based on ECUS events, and skipping updates of hidden entities. Lastly, improvements were made to reduce the size of Windows executables and their symbol files.\n\nThe remainder of the time was spent supporting and bug fixing Alpha 3.17.\n\nFeatures (Arena Commander)\nAlongside progressing with scanning improvements, the team fixed bugs, most notably those that had been affecting the gameplay of Arena Commander and Star Marine.\n\n\u201cContinual feedback from the community regarding these areas of the game has been hugely helpful and is greatly appreciated by our team!\u201d Feature Team\n\nImprovements to the racing mode were made too, which are planned for an upcoming release.\n\nFeatures (Characters & Weapons)\nIn May, the team continued updating the scanning feature, improving the visual effects when triggering a ping wave while on foot and how it highlights different contacts. Interactable items and points of interest critical to mission progression will be highlighted too.\n\nThe team is also increasing the amount of information gathered from scanned objects. For example, a door will reveal its current state and if it can be affected via hacking, NPCs and other players will show the contents of their physical inventories, and player corpses will reveal their cause of death.\n\n\u201cHooking up all this data can be quite a time-consuming task as it requires a lot of data-mining of different systems and their variables. Part of the work is ensuring the addition of future data will be frictionless.\u201d Feature Team\n\nThe team also created a model for serializing damage maps online, which is required for salvaging. The client is able to make accurate predictions but can also rewind and replay applications of hits on the damage map. The server will still send the full map to a client when required but this prediction will keep the need to send full data to a minimum.\n\nFeatures (Vehicles)\nVehicle Features spent time throughout May working on Alpha 3.17 and Invictus Launch Week.\n\nOutside of release support, great progress was made on quantum travel boost, primarily making it feel right as ships accelerate and attempt to maintain heading. This feature also supports points of interest, allowing pilots to fly towards highlighted destinations.\n\nThe team are continuing to update persistent-tech features to use the new systems and fixing problems along the way (usually connected to systems such as streaming, networking, and persistence).\n\nGeneral balance work continued too, including a pass on general item health to stop ships from shutting down from explosions. They also continued to balance the refueling mechanic, deciding on the volume of fuel the Starfarer can carry and the sizes of ships it can refuel.\n\nThe setup and balance of the new ground-vehicle physics is progressing well. The team now have baseline handling and are laying out the remaining dependencies to make them game-ready.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nWork on damage maps continued last month, with the team focusing on debris creating its own map based on the parent map. They also implemented an interface for querying damage within an area and persistent snapshots as well as optimalizations for processing hits.\n\nFor Gen12, the team improved the viewport API and continued porting the region copy pass in RTT to Gen12. They enabled more stages\/systems to work with Vulkan, including material fallbacks and depth read back. Fixes were made for the tessellation output of organic shaders and planet array textures not using texture 2D arrays. They also refactored screen capture to work with Vulkan and updated to the latest SDK.\n\nWork continued on improving image tests, with CVARs being created to wait a custom number of frames before capturing to alleviate some of the timing issues seen on recent tests. They also investigated a number of performance-related issues, including a particle effect problem caused by a huge particle count and the cost of refraction resolves.\n\nA number of bugs were fixed in the RTT system, including a series of asserts caused by setting a large aspect ratio to an RTTO, as well as fixes for holo-volume sorting issues in the mobiGlas.\n\nThe team also continued improving shaders with experimental improvements to the hair-color model and Wear v2, including the addition of primer\/compliment in LayerBlend v2.\n\nLighting\nMay saw the Lighting team continuing to support the Siege of Orison mission.\n\n\u201cThe playable space of the mission is massive, which means a lot of lighting work goes into covering the whole area to provide an interesting and unique atmosphere at night and day while also ensuring good player visibility on objectives and AI.\u201d Lighting Team\n\nPolish and optimization were also done. The space being a fully man-made exterior location means a lot of light entities and shadows must be rendered, so the team spent time ensuring performance was smooth without too much visual sacrifice.\n\nThey also worked on the new derelict Reclaimer locations, which involved embedding them into the planet's surface and dressing and lighting each version.\n\nLocations (Montreal)\nThe Locations team spent the month working on the Reclaimer space missions and derelict Reclaimer settlement. They\u2019re currently polishing and bug fixing in preparation for their release, which will complete the initial proof of concept for the derelict settlements.\n\nThe next stage is to take the proof of concept and see how much more depth can be added, with variations to both environmental art and level design. They\u2019re also looking to add more module and habitation variations, more missions with different modifiers, and potentially new gameplay elements.\n\nThe 600i and Mercury derelict settlement, which will be located on Daymar, progressed well throughout the month. The Level Design team are currently looking at what the Environment Art team has done in preparation for adding missions and AI.\n\nThe rework of Lorville\u2019s cityscape is ongoing, with the team switching from concept\/pre-production to production.\n\nFinally for Locations, the building interiors mentioned in last month\u2019s report entered the concept phase.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re still in early days and are discussing how best to organise the conception so that concept art, environment art and level design all work together in the most efficient way. We\u2019re also defining what we want to tackle in the proof of concept and what should be our target. Everyone here is eager to tackle this challenge and find a way to add pockets of gameplay directly inside landing zones.\u201d Locations Team\n\nNarrative\nLast month, Narrative continued to work with Design on a handful of new missions and initiatives. This included discussing new mission archetypes and tackling the new-player experience to devise a system to introduce new players to the game\u2019s various mechanics.\n\nPreparations commenced for the upcoming motion-capture session scheduled for next month. This involved syncing with various teams to see if they had content ready to capture. Once complete, production began locking down dates and sourcing actors.\n\nNarrative also continued to release new lore content, starting with another Loremakers where the team answered community questions from Spectrum. This was followed by Homesick, a short story that originally appeared in Jump Point magazine, and an Empire Report detailing a scandal around the discovery of new life. The month ended with another batch of Galactapedia articles.\n\nQA\nThe Manchester-based development side of QA focused on the Invictus Launch Week mission and continued to support the Alpha 3.17 and 3.17.1 releases by verifying fixes and stability issues, regressing resolved issues, and supporting the development teams.\n\nTowards the end of the month, planning and testing for Alpha 3.17.2 and 3.18 began. This involved working through QATRs for each patch\u2019s deliverables to ensure features are tested as much as possible before being published.\n\nThe Frankfurt-based QA team also tested the Siege of Orison mission and continued to support various development teams via their embedded testers.\n\nFor AI, integration checks were completed for updates to existing and new features, which were then added to the main branch. They also tested the AI used throughout the Siege of Orison mission.\n\nLocations QA tested the new mission location and expo halls. They also began working more with the editor to better support the team in creating test levels with relevant systems.\n\nFor the Engine team, focus was on PageHeap testing and locking down memory issues in-game. They also continued to learn more about Flowgraph and coding for future automation.\n\nThe Tools team continued to receive support with continued testing of DataForge, StarWords, ExcelCore, CopyBuild, and the sandbox editor.\n\nTools (Montreal)\nIn May, the integration of the Mighty Bridge into the editor was completed. This also allowed the deployment of the first official Mighty Bridge tool, Vegetation Scattering v1, which will allow teams to deploy vegetation without collisions, brushes, and entities on planetary surfaces and objects. This will be especially useful for derelict settlements and outposts but will still be used across many PU locations. The next step is to develop a tool for creating crashed ship craters and tails in the ground in less time and at higher fidelity.\n\nThe procedural location creation tool is also progressing well - the foundation is now a lot stronger and the team have begun creating basic layouts. They\u2019ve also moved to supporting corridors and corridor loops as well as supporting the various required templates (space stations, caves, underground facilities, etc.). The team\u2019s current goal is to get v1 to the designers and artists so they can gather feedback and get it production-ready.\n\nTech Animation\nThe Technical Animation team spent part of the month addressing small tasks that will ultimately improve the quality of life for all devs. Several of these revolve around the asset pipeline in Maya, which was refactored to both consolidate multiple workflows and galvanize the core pipeline code with the knowledge gained throughout production so far.\n\nOne of the team\u2019s new initiatives to load skin data from the engine\u2019s data files is yielding excellent results, with a 1200% speed increase in loading data.\n\nThey also continued with another long-standing initiative to replace slow rigging solutions with a new plugin.\n\n\u201cThis will see us redefine our workflows for creating rigs and see a much-needed improvement to character deformation throughout the game. It will take a long time to develop, but it\u2019s a worthwhile venture.\u201d Technical Animation\n\nUI\nMay saw the UI programmers support the various PU releases by fixing bugs and adding requested features. They also refactored backend code to support the persistent tech that will come online in Alpha 3.18.\n\n\nVFX\nMay saw the VFX team complete their work for Invictus Launch Week alongside tasks for the RSI Scorpius and Drake Mule.\n\nVFX Concept Art began work on the quantum travel rework. This included storyboarding the gameplay requirements at the different stages of the process, such as spooling up, entering, and exiting. They\u2019re currently investigating how it could look in-engine.","de_DE":"PU-Monatsbericht\nMai 2022\nWillkommen zum PU-Monatsbericht f\u00fcr den Monat Mai! Nat\u00fcrlich stand im letzten Monat die Invictus Launch Week auf der Agenda vieler Teams, aber auch bei vielen anderen kommenden Inhalten und Features wurden bedeutende Fortschritte gemacht, darunter neue Orte, unangek\u00fcndigte Fahrzeuge und persistente Technologien. Lies weiter, um alle Details zu erfahren.\n\nKI (Inhalt)\nIm Mai konzentrierte sich das KI-Inhaltsteam auf die Verbesserung der visuellen Darstellung der allgemeinen KI-Lokomotion. Der Animationsdirektor identifizierte \"Bewegungs\u00fcberlagerungen und Fidgets\" (Animationen, die mit Bewegungsanimationen gemischt werden) als einen wichtigen Bereich f\u00fcr Verbesserungen. Also hat das Team 40 neue Overlays entwickelt, darunter das Kratzen der Kopfhaut, das Knacken der Fingerkn\u00f6chel und das Dehnen. Die Overlays bauen auf der Anfang des Jahres abgeschlossenen Arbeit am Gehzyklus auf, um die KI-Lokomotion optisch ansprechender zu gestalten.\n\nAu\u00dferdem hat AI Content damit begonnen, die dynamische Konversationstechnologie von AI Tech zu nutzen, die es Gruppen von KI erm\u00f6glicht, spontan Gespr\u00e4che zu beginnen. Das Ziel ist es, diese Technologie in einer Vielzahl von Anwendungsf\u00e4llen einzusetzen. Bisher wurden drei Anwendungsf\u00e4lle geschaffen: der Vier-Personen-Tisch in der Kantine, der Leerlaufplatz und der Spielautomat.\n\nKI (Tech)\nDie KI-Abteilung hat an den Funktionen von Raumschiffen gearbeitet, darunter mehrere Verbesserungen der Quantenreise und des Quanten-Boosts. Jetzt k\u00f6nnen Schiffe vor dem eigentlichen Sprung beschleunigen, w\u00e4hrend sie sich aufschaukeln. Diese Funktion wurde auch als Aufgabe f\u00fcr Missionen freigeschaltet.\n\nDas Team bereinigte und aktivierte mehrere Feature-Test-Maps f\u00fcr den Hauptentwicklungsstrom des Spiels. Diese Karten wurden validiert, um sicherzustellen, dass das Team Funktionen, die von den \u00c4nderungen der verschiedenen Teams betroffen sein k\u00f6nnten, besser verfolgen kann.\n\nBei Subsumption lag der Schwerpunkt auf der Verbesserung der Benutzerfreundlichkeit bei der Bearbeitung von Unterhaltungen (oder koordinierten Unteraktivit\u00e4ten). Auch die interne Darstellung der GUID und SuperGUIDs wurde verbessert.\n\nAufbauend auf der Arbeit des letzten Monats wurde das Feedback zu NSCs, die Karren schieben, bearbeitet. Das Team hat jetzt eine bessere Kontrolle \u00fcber die Kr\u00e4fte, die auf den Wagen wirken, indem es einen Winkel- und zwei lineare PID-Regler verwendet. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Logik f\u00fcr die exakte Positionierung am Ende eines Weges verbessert und die Verwendung des Feststeckdetektors hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nF\u00fcr den menschlichen Kampf wurde ein erstes Skelett der DefendArea-Zuweisung implementiert, damit die Designer Bereiche festlegen k\u00f6nnen, die NSCs f\u00fcr ihr Verhalten nutzen k\u00f6nnen. Wachen k\u00f6nnen damit zum Beispiel festlegen, in welchen Bereichen sie patrouillieren sollen.\n\nDie Verdeckungsberechnung wurde wiederhergestellt, um zu verhindern, dass NSCs beim Schie\u00dfen versteckte Feinde ignorieren. Das hilft ihnen, Munition zu sparen und verhindert, dass einzelne Ziele \u00fcberm\u00e4\u00dfig anvisiert werden (es sei denn, die Feuerkontrolle erzwingt das Schie\u00dfen).\n\nDas Team hat auch die Friendly-Fire-Pr\u00fcfung verbessert und kann nun verschiedenen Fraktionen unterschiedliche Verhaltensweisen zuweisen. Dazu geh\u00f6rt, dass die \"B\u00f6sen\" nur versuchen, das Leben ihrer Gruppe zu sch\u00fctzen, w\u00e4hrend die \"Guten\" auch versuchen, neutrale Fraktionen wie Zivilisten nicht zu treffen.\n\nEs wurden mehrere Korrekturen am Nutzbarkeitscode vorgenommen, u. a. eine, die dazu f\u00fchrte, dass NSCs Nutzbarkeiten verwendeten, zu deren Verwendung sie nicht berechtigt waren. Au\u00dferdem wurde der benutzbare Code erweitert, damit sie \u00fcber Loadout-Eintr\u00e4ge Slotting-Funktionen einrichten k\u00f6nnen, die in Data-Forge nicht direkt zug\u00e4nglich sind. So kann zum Beispiel ein Gladius als verwendbare Waffe mit unterschiedlichen Inspektionsfunktionen eingerichtet werden, je nachdem, ob Raketen ausger\u00fcstet sind oder nicht.\n\nKI (Fahrzeugfunktionen)\nDas AI Vehicle Features Team hat das Flug-KI-Tool fertiggestellt. Damit k\u00f6nnen die Entwickler bestimmte KI-Szenarien f\u00fcr verschiedene Schiffe kontrollieren und einrichten. Derzeit wird das neue Sturzflugman\u00f6ver auf die Kampfpiloten-KI portiert, das es \"waghalsigen\" und \"aggressiven\" Piloten im Kampf gegen Gro\u00dfkampfschiffe erm\u00f6glicht, dieses Man\u00f6ver bei Bedarf dynamisch zu w\u00e4hlen.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurde die Art und Weise ge\u00e4ndert, wie der R\u00fccksto\u00dftriebwerkseffekt angewendet wird, da er sich negativ auf die KI auswirkte. Jetzt werden die Kr\u00e4fte nach der Gr\u00f6\u00dfe der Schiffsoberfl\u00e4che gesteuert, sodass kleinere Schiffe weniger Einfluss auf gr\u00f6\u00dfere Schiffe haben.\n\nAnimation\nF\u00fcr die PU hat das Team f\u00fcr Gesichtsanimation die Performances f\u00fcr verschiedene Emotes im Spiel fertiggestellt, an einem neuen Missionsgeber gearbeitet und die Gesichtsanimationen f\u00fcr weibliche Verk\u00e4ufer und m\u00e4nnliche und weibliche Arbeiter erstellt.\n\nKunst (Charaktere)\nDie Zeichner verbrachten den Monat mit der Fertigstellung der Q2-Assets, darunter auch die Arbeit an mehreren R\u00fcstungsvarianten. Au\u00dferdem arbeiteten sie weiter an den Pyro-Grenzoutfits.\n\nGrafik (Schiffe)\nIm letzten Monat begann das britische Team mit der Verbesserung der Schadenskarten aller Schiffe, um die Bergungsmechanik vorzubereiten. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Entwicklung an mehreren Fahrzeugen fortgesetzt:\n\nEin unangek\u00fcndigtes Bodenfahrzeug wurde fertiggestellt und entworfen, w\u00e4hrend ein neues Schiff in das fr\u00fche Greybox-Stadium eintrat und die Arbeit am Cockpit und Armaturenbrett gut voranschritt.\n\nDer Banu Merchantman befindet sich weiterhin in der Greybox-Phase, wobei der Schwerpunkt im Mai auf der Au\u00dfengestaltung des Schiffs lag. Zurzeit arbeitet das Team an der Unterseite und dem Aussehen der Fl\u00fcgel.\n\nDie Argo SRV hat mit der Produktion begonnen und steht kurz vor der Whitebox-Fertigstellung; die abschlie\u00dfende Whitebox-Pr\u00fcfung steht kurz bevor.\n\nIn den USA setzte das Team den Bau des Drake Corsair fort. Im Innenraum wurden die Luftschleuse des Turms und die Kabine des bemannten Turms fertiggestellt, w\u00e4hrend der gr\u00f6\u00dfte Teil der Mannschaftsunterk\u00fcnfte fertiggestellt wurde, einschlie\u00dflich des Kapit\u00e4nsquartiers in der N\u00e4he des Cockpits. Der gesamte Frachtraum wurde ausgeblockt und Details werden derzeit hinzugef\u00fcgt. Die Hauptluftschleuse\/der Bereitstellungsraum auf der Steuerbordseite des Schiffes wurde ebenfalls fertiggestellt.\n\nAn der Au\u00dfenseite wurden Fortschritte an der Greybox gemacht, einschlie\u00dflich der Gondeln und der Haupt-\/Retrotriebwerke. Die Entwicklung des Fahrwerks und der ferngesteuerten Gesch\u00fctzt\u00fcrme hat ebenfalls begonnen.\n\nCommunity\nDas Community-Team hatte im Mai einen weiteren arbeitsreichen Monat, in dem der Schwerpunkt auf der Unterst\u00fctzung der Stimmungslage und der Nachrichten f\u00fcr die Invictus Launch Week und die damit verbundenen Ver\u00f6ffentlichungen lag.\n\nSie haben den Zeitplan f\u00fcr die Freifl\u00fcge der Hersteller und eine Spektrum-FAQ ver\u00f6ffentlicht, bevor sie den Welcome Hub, die Welcome Back Pilot Seite und den New Player Comm-Link f\u00fcr diejenigen, die zum ersten Mal das Verse besuchen, aktualisiert haben. Alles wurde auf der Invictus Launch Week Details Seite zusammengefasst.\n\nParallel zum Event wurden ein Screenshot-Wettbewerb und das 2952 Dunlow-Derby-Rennen (in Zusammenarbeit mit der Renngemeinschaft - SCR.GG) veranstaltet und Invictus 2952 mit Sentiment-Tracking und Serverstatus-Kommunikation unterst\u00fctzt. Au\u00dferdem gaben sie die Gewinner des MISC Autoaufkleber-Wettbewerbs und der Tour of Stanton bekannt, die Ende April begonnen hatten.\n\nDas Team hat au\u00dferdem die Versions\u00fcbersicht der Roadmap aktualisiert, um die Einf\u00fchrung von Schl\u00fcsseltechnologien im Jahr 2022 zu ber\u00fccksichtigen, wie im letzten Brief des Vorsitzenden erw\u00e4hnt.\n\nEinige Teammitglieder hatten die Gelegenheit, an der Be@con (einem von der Community organisierten Treffen) in Belgien teilzunehmen und die Mitglieder der wunderbaren Community wieder pers\u00f6nlich zu treffen.\n\n\"Wir hatten einen Riesenspa\u00df und m\u00f6chten uns bei allen bedanken, die gekommen sind und uns gegr\u00fc\u00dft haben. Es war toll, alle wiederzusehen, und wir k\u00f6nnen die \"Bar Citizen World Tour\" diesen Sommer kaum erwarten! - Community Team\n\nDie Community hatte au\u00dferdem die M\u00f6glichkeit, den Entwicklern des Fahrzeugs ihre brennendsten Fragen zu stellen.\nDie Arbeit am neuen Community Hub wird ebenfalls fortgesetzt, wobei Schritte unternommen werden, um die Arbeit von einer Staging-Umgebung auf die Live-Server zu portieren (aber nicht sichtbar f\u00fcr Nicht-Mitarbeiter). Das ist ein gro\u00dfer Schritt, denn es bedeutet, dass der neue Community Hub mit echten Spielerinhalten gef\u00fcllt wird. Das Team ist weiterhin dabei, Feedback zu geben und am Gesamtdesign mitzuarbeiten, um sich auf das \u00f6ffentliche Deb\u00fct in naher Zukunft vorzubereiten.\nWas die Zukunft angeht, so steckt das Team mitten in den Planungen f\u00fcr das diesj\u00e4hrige Foundation Festival, den Ship Showdown, die kommenden Dynamic Events und vieles mehr.\n\nMotor\nIm Mai f\u00fcgte das Physikteam eine neue dynamische Entit\u00e4t (ropeentity_ex) hinzu, um ein Seil zu simulieren, das \u00fcber einen Flaschenzug l\u00e4uft. Zur Optimierung wurden freie Listen f\u00fcr Fabriken hinzugef\u00fcgt, um Konflikte bei der Erstellung oder Zerst\u00f6rung von Objekten zu reduzieren. Au\u00dferdem werden jetzt die Normalen der Fahrzeugfl\u00e4chen zwischengespeichert, um die Kollisionsberechnung zu beschleunigen.\n\nBeim Renderer wurde die Arbeit an der Gen12-Umstellung fortgesetzt. Die APIs f\u00fcr transiente Ressourcensets und verschiedene transiente Puffertypen wurden weiter ausgereift und der gesamte relevante Client-Code wurde aktualisiert, um sie zu nutzen. Die Gen12-Pipeline zum Rendern von W\u00fcrfelkarten wurde aktiviert und die Gen12-Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Nebelvolumina und verschiedene andere Renderknoten wurde ebenfalls aktiviert. Eine neue Reflection Buffer API wurde implementiert und Worker-Kontexte wurden im gesamten Client-Code eingerichtet. Ressourcens\u00e4tze werden nicht mehr unn\u00f6tigerweise erstellt und Materialaktualisierungen werden nicht mehr in die Verarbeitungswarteschlangen geschoben, wenn es nichts zu aktualisieren gibt. Im Debug-Vergleichscode wurde Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Schablonenzustands\u00fcberpr\u00fcfungen, geh\u00e4utete Objekte und die Vorw\u00e4rtsstufe hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\n\"Apropos Vorw\u00e4rtsphase: Daran wurde diesen Monat viel gearbeitet und wir hoffen, sie bald zu aktivieren. Engine Team\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurde die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr den Augen\u00fcberlagerungspass hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nDie Gen12-Portierung des Bodennebels auf dem Planeten wurde abgeschlossen und die Gen12-Portierung des atmosph\u00e4rischen und volumetrischen Wolkenrenderings wurde begonnen. Weitere Verbesserungen wurden beim Rendering der H\u00f6henkarte des Planetengel\u00e4ndes und beim Rendering der sph\u00e4rischen Wolken und Schatten des Planetengel\u00e4ndes vorgenommen.\n\nIn der Core-Engine wurden verschiedene Verbesserungen am Profiling-System vorgenommen, um Fasern und ihre Vorrangigkeit besser zu analysieren und die Aufrufer von Semaphore-Wartezeiten und Dateilesevorg\u00e4ngen zu verfolgen. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr das Sammeln von Spitzenwerten hinzugef\u00fcgt (um Optimierungsaufgaben zu priorisieren). Verschiedene Optimierungen aus den j\u00fcngsten Leistungsmessungen der PTU wurden implementiert. Au\u00dferdem ist die Leistungsskalierung jetzt f\u00fcr alle Threads, die die Engine mit normaler oder zeitkritischer Priorit\u00e4t erzeugt, deaktiviert, was die Planung der Threads (Main, Render, Physics, Batch Worker usw.) erleichtert und die Leistung verbessert. Weitere Optimierungen wurden vorgenommen, wie z. B. das Entfernen der letzten Sperre im Hintergrund-Jobmanager, die \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung der Berechtigungsanforderungen bei der Aktivierung von Komponentenaktualisierungen auf der Grundlage von ECUS-Ereignissen und das \u00dcberspringen von Aktualisierungen versteckter Entit\u00e4ten. Schlie\u00dflich wurden Verbesserungen vorgenommen, um die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe der ausf\u00fchrbaren Windows-Dateien und ihrer Symboldateien zu verringern.\n\nDer Rest der Zeit wurde f\u00fcr die Unterst\u00fctzung und Fehlerbehebung von Alpha 3.17 verwendet.\n\nFunktionen (Arena Commander)\nNeben den Verbesserungen beim Scannen hat das Team vor allem Fehler behoben, die das Gameplay von Arena Commander und Star Marine beeintr\u00e4chtigt haben.\n\n\"Das kontinuierliche Feedback aus der Community zu diesen Bereichen des Spiels war sehr hilfreich und wird von unserem Team sehr gesch\u00e4tzt!\" Feature-Team\n\nEs wurden auch Verbesserungen am Rennmodus vorgenommen, die f\u00fcr eine kommende Ver\u00f6ffentlichung geplant sind.\n\nFeatures (Charaktere & Waffen)\nIm Mai aktualisierte das Team die Scan-Funktion weiter und verbesserte die visuellen Effekte beim Ausl\u00f6sen einer Ping-Welle zu Fu\u00df und die Hervorhebung verschiedener Kontakte. Interaktionsf\u00e4hige Gegenst\u00e4nde und interessante Punkte, die f\u00fcr den Missionsfortschritt wichtig sind, werden ebenfalls hervorgehoben.\n\nDas Team erh\u00f6ht auch die Anzahl der Informationen, die von gescannten Objekten gesammelt werden. Eine T\u00fcr verr\u00e4t zum Beispiel ihren aktuellen Zustand und ob sie gehackt werden kann, NSCs und andere Spieler\/innen zeigen den Inhalt ihres Inventars an und Spieler\/innen-Leichen verraten ihre Todesursache.\n\n\"Die Verkn\u00fcpfung all dieser Daten kann ziemlich zeitaufw\u00e4ndig sein, da sie eine Menge Data-Mining von verschiedenen Systemen und ihren Variablen erfordert. Ein Teil der Arbeit besteht darin, sicherzustellen, dass das Hinzuf\u00fcgen zuk\u00fcnftiger Daten reibungslos funktioniert.\" Feature Team\n\nDas Team hat auch ein Modell f\u00fcr die Online-Serialisierung von Schadenskarten entwickelt, die f\u00fcr die Bergung erforderlich ist. Der Client ist in der Lage, genaue Vorhersagen zu treffen, kann aber auch Anwendungen von Treffern auf der Schadenskarte zur\u00fcckspulen und erneut abspielen. Der Server sendet bei Bedarf immer noch die vollst\u00e4ndige Karte an den Client, aber durch die Vorhersage wird die Notwendigkeit, vollst\u00e4ndige Daten zu senden, auf ein Minimum reduziert.\n\nFeatures (Fahrzeuge)\nDie Fahrzeugfunktionen haben den ganzen Mai \u00fcber an der Alpha 3.17 und der Invictus Launch Week gearbeitet.\n\nAbgesehen von der Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung wurden gro\u00dfe Fortschritte beim Quanten-Reise-Boost gemacht, vor allem damit es sich richtig anf\u00fchlt, wenn Schiffe beschleunigen und versuchen, den Kurs zu halten. Diese Funktion unterst\u00fctzt auch Points of Interest, mit denen Piloten zu markierten Zielen fliegen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDas Team arbeitet weiterhin an der Aktualisierung der Persistententechnologie, um die neuen Systeme zu nutzen, und behebt dabei Probleme (meist im Zusammenhang mit Systemen wie Streaming, Netzwerken und Persistenz).\n\nAuch an der allgemeinen Balance wurde weiter gearbeitet, u. a. an der Gesundheit von Gegenst\u00e4nden, um zu verhindern, dass Schiffe durch Explosionen au\u00dfer Gefecht gesetzt werden. Auch die Betankungsmechanik wurde weiter ausbalanciert, indem die Menge an Treibstoff, die der Starfarer transportieren kann, und die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe der Schiffe, die er auftanken kann, festgelegt wurden.\n\nDer Aufbau und die Balance der neuen Bodenfahrzeugphysik kommen gut voran. Das Team verf\u00fcgt nun \u00fcber eine Basis f\u00fcr die Handhabung und legt die verbleibenden Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten fest, um sie spielf\u00e4hig zu machen.\n\nGrafik & VFX-Programmierung\nDie Arbeit an den Schadenskarten wurde im letzten Monat fortgesetzt, wobei sich das Team darauf konzentrierte, dass Tr\u00fcmmer eine eigene Karte auf Basis der \u00fcbergeordneten Karte erstellen. Au\u00dferdem wurden eine Schnittstelle zur Abfrage von Schaden innerhalb eines Gebiets und dauerhafte Schnappsch\u00fcsse sowie Optimierungen f\u00fcr die Verarbeitung von Treffern implementiert.\n\nF\u00fcr Gen12 verbesserte das Team die Ansichtsfenster-API und setzte die Portierung des Region Copy Pass in RTT auf Gen12 fort. Sie erm\u00f6glichten mehr Stufen\/Systeme, die mit Vulkan funktionieren, einschlie\u00dflich Material Fallbacks und Tiefenr\u00fccklesung. Es wurden Korrekturen f\u00fcr die Tessellierungsausgabe organischer Shader und Planetenarray-Texturen vorgenommen, die keine 2D-Texturarrays verwenden. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Bildschirmaufnahme \u00fcberarbeitet, damit sie mit Vulkan funktioniert, und auf das neueste SDK aktualisiert.\n\nDie Arbeit an der Verbesserung der Bildtests wurde fortgesetzt. Es wurden CVARs erstellt, die eine bestimmte Anzahl von Bildern abwarten, bevor sie aufgenommen werden, um einige der Timing-Probleme, die bei den letzten Tests auftraten, zu beheben. Au\u00dferdem wurde eine Reihe von leistungsbezogenen Problemen untersucht, darunter ein Problem mit Partikeleffekten, das durch eine hohe Partikelanzahl und die Kosten f\u00fcr die Brechungsaufl\u00f6sung verursacht wurde.\n\nIm RTT-System wurde eine Reihe von Fehlern behoben, darunter eine Reihe von Meldungen, die durch die Einstellung eines gro\u00dfen Seitenverh\u00e4ltnisses f\u00fcr eine RTTO verursacht wurden, sowie Probleme bei der Sortierung von Holo-Volumen im mobiGlas.\n\nDas Team hat auch die Shader weiter verbessert und experimentelle Verbesserungen am Haarfarbmodell und an Wear v2 vorgenommen, darunter die Hinzuf\u00fcgung von Primer\/Compliment in LayerBlend v2.\n\nBeleuchtung\nIm Mai hat das Beleuchtungsteam die Mission \"Belagerung von Orison\" weiter unterst\u00fctzt.\n\n\"Die spielbare Fl\u00e4che der Mission ist riesig, was bedeutet, dass viel Beleuchtungsarbeit in das gesamte Gebiet flie\u00dft, um eine interessante und einzigartige Atmosph\u00e4re bei Tag und Nacht zu schaffen und gleichzeitig eine gute Sichtbarkeit der Spieler auf die Ziele und die KI zu gew\u00e4hrleisten.\" Beleuchtungsteam\n\nAuch an der Politur und Optimierung wurde gearbeitet. Da es sich um einen vollst\u00e4ndig von Menschenhand geschaffenen Au\u00dfenbereich handelt, m\u00fcssen viele Lichtobjekte und Schatten gerendert werden, weshalb das Team viel Zeit damit verbrachte, eine reibungslose Leistung ohne zu gro\u00dfe visuelle Einbu\u00dfen sicherzustellen.\n\nSie arbeiteten auch an den neuen verlassenen Reclaimer-Standorten, die in die Oberfl\u00e4che des Planeten eingebettet wurden, und beleuchteten jede Version.\n\nSchaupl\u00e4tze (Montreal)\nDas Locations-Team hat den Monat damit verbracht, an den Reclaimer-Weltraummissionen und der verlassenen Reclaimer-Siedlung zu arbeiten. Derzeit wird an den Missionen gefeilt und es werden Fehler behoben, um die Ver\u00f6ffentlichung vorzubereiten, mit der der erste Proof of Concept f\u00fcr die verlassenen Siedlungen abgeschlossen sein wird.\n\nIn der n\u00e4chsten Phase wird das Konzept weiterentwickelt, um zu sehen, wie viel mehr Spieltiefe durch Variationen der Umgebungsgestaltung und des Leveldesigns hinzugef\u00fcgt werden kann. Au\u00dferdem sollen weitere Modul- und Siedlungsvarianten, mehr Missionen mit verschiedenen Modifikatoren und m\u00f6glicherweise neue Gameplay-Elemente hinzugef\u00fcgt werden.\n\nDie verlassene Siedlung 600i und Mercury, die sich auf Daymar befinden wird, kam im Laufe des Monats gut voran. Das Level Design Team schaut sich derzeit an, was das Environment Art Team gemacht hat, um sich auf die neuen Missionen und die KI vorzubereiten.\n\nDie \u00dcberarbeitung des Stadtbildes von Lorville ist im Gange, wobei das Team von der Konzept-\/Vorproduktion zur Produktion \u00fcbergeht.\n\nBei den Locations sind die im letzten Bericht erw\u00e4hnten Innenr\u00e4ume der Geb\u00e4ude in die Konzeptphase eingetreten.\n\n\"Wir befinden uns noch in der Anfangsphase und diskutieren, wie wir die Konzeption am besten organisieren k\u00f6nnen, damit Konzeptkunst, Umgebungsgrafik und Leveldesign so effizient wie m\u00f6glich zusammenarbeiten. Wir legen auch fest, was wir im Proof of Concept angehen wollen und was unser Ziel sein sollte. Jeder hier ist begierig darauf, diese Herausforderung zu meistern und einen Weg zu finden, wie wir direkt in den Landezonen neue Spielm\u00f6glichkeiten schaffen k\u00f6nnen.\" Standorte Team\n\nNarrative\nIm letzten Monat hat das Team Narrative zusammen mit dem Designteam an einer Handvoll neuer Missionen und Initiativen gearbeitet. Dabei wurden neue Missionsarchetypen diskutiert und ein System entwickelt, mit dem neue Spieler in die verschiedenen Spielmechaniken eingef\u00fchrt werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDie Vorbereitungen f\u00fcr die Motion-Capture-Session, die f\u00fcr den n\u00e4chsten Monat geplant ist, haben begonnen. Dazu mussten wir uns mit verschiedenen Teams absprechen, um zu sehen, ob sie Inhalte f\u00fcr die Aufnahmen bereit hatten. Sobald das erledigt war, begann die Produktion mit der Festlegung der Termine und der Suche nach Schauspielern.\n\nNarrative hat auch weiterhin neue Inhalte ver\u00f6ffentlicht, angefangen mit einem weiteren Loremakers, in dem das Team Fragen der Community von Spectrum beantwortet hat. Es folgten Homesick, eine Kurzgeschichte, die urspr\u00fcnglich im Jump Point Magazin erschien, und ein Empire Report, in dem es um einen Skandal rund um die Entdeckung von neuem Leben ging. Der Monat endete mit einer weiteren Reihe von Galactapedia-Artikeln.\n\nQA\nDie in Manchester ans\u00e4ssige Entwicklungsabteilung der QA konzentrierte sich auf die Mission Invictus Launch Week und unterst\u00fctzte weiterhin die Releases Alpha 3.17 und 3.17.1, indem sie Fehlerbehebungen und Stabilit\u00e4tsprobleme \u00fcberpr\u00fcfte, behobene Probleme r\u00fcckg\u00e4ngig machte und die Entwicklungsteams unterst\u00fctzte.\n\nGegen Ende des Monats begannen die Planungen und Tests f\u00fcr Alpha 3.17.2 und 3.18. Dazu geh\u00f6rte die Arbeit an den QATRs f\u00fcr die einzelnen Patches, um sicherzustellen, dass die Funktionen vor der Ver\u00f6ffentlichung so gut wie m\u00f6glich getestet werden.\n\nDas QA-Team in Frankfurt testete au\u00dferdem die Mission \"Belagerung von Orison\" und unterst\u00fctzte die verschiedenen Entwicklungsteams durch ihre eingebetteten Tester\/innen.\n\nF\u00fcr die KI wurden Integrationspr\u00fcfungen f\u00fcr Aktualisierungen bestehender und neuer Funktionen durchgef\u00fchrt, die dann in den Hauptzweig aufgenommen wurden. Sie testeten auch die KI, die in der Mission \"Belagerung von Orison\" eingesetzt wurde.\n\nDie QA f\u00fcr Orte testete den neuen Missionsort und die Ausstellungshallen. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Arbeit mit dem Editor intensiviert, um das Team bei der Erstellung von Testlevels mit relevanten Systemen besser zu unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nDas Engine-Team konzentrierte sich auf PageHeap-Tests und die Behebung von Speicherproblemen im Spiel. Au\u00dferdem lernten sie mehr \u00fcber Flowgraph und Kodierung f\u00fcr zuk\u00fcnftige Automatisierungen.\n\nDas Tools-Team erhielt weiterhin Unterst\u00fctzung beim Testen von DataForge, StarWords, ExcelCore, CopyBuild und dem Sandbox-Editor.\n\nTools (Montreal)\nIm Mai wurde die Integration der Mighty Bridge in den Editor abgeschlossen. Dies erm\u00f6glichte auch die Einf\u00fchrung des ersten offiziellen Mighty Bridge-Tools, Vegetation Scattering v1, mit dem Teams die Vegetation ohne Kollisionen, Pinsel und Entit\u00e4ten auf Planetenoberfl\u00e4chen und Objekten einsetzen k\u00f6nnen. Dies wird besonders f\u00fcr verlassene Siedlungen und Au\u00dfenposten n\u00fctzlich sein, aber auch an vielen anderen PU-Standorten eingesetzt werden. Der n\u00e4chste Schritt ist die Entwicklung eines Werkzeugs, mit dem abgest\u00fcrzte Schiffskrater und Heckteile im Boden in k\u00fcrzerer Zeit und mit h\u00f6herer Genauigkeit erstellt werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDas Tool zur prozeduralen Erstellung von Orten macht ebenfalls gute Fortschritte - die Grundlage ist jetzt viel stabiler und das Team hat damit begonnen, grundlegende Layouts zu erstellen. Au\u00dferdem werden jetzt auch Korridore und Korridorschleifen sowie die verschiedenen erforderlichen Vorlagen (Raumstationen, H\u00f6hlen, unterirdische Anlagen usw.) unterst\u00fctzt. Das derzeitige Ziel des Teams ist es, v1 an die Designer und K\u00fcnstler weiterzugeben, damit sie Feedback einholen und es produktionsreif machen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nTechnische Animation\nDas Team der Technischen Animation hat einen Teil des Monats damit verbracht, kleine Aufgaben zu erledigen, die letztendlich die Lebensqualit\u00e4t aller Entwickler\/innen verbessern werden. Einige davon drehen sich um die Asset-Pipeline in Maya, die \u00fcberarbeitet wurde, um mehrere Arbeitsabl\u00e4ufe zu konsolidieren und den Kerncode der Pipeline mit dem Wissen aus der bisherigen Produktion zu verkn\u00fcpfen.\n\nEine der neuen Initiativen des Teams zum Laden von Skin-Daten aus den Datendateien der Engine zeigt hervorragende Ergebnisse: Die Geschwindigkeit beim Laden der Daten wurde um 1200% erh\u00f6ht.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurde eine andere langj\u00e4hrige Initiative fortgesetzt, um langsame Rigging-L\u00f6sungen durch ein neues Plugin zu ersetzen.\n\n\"Damit werden wir unsere Arbeitsabl\u00e4ufe f\u00fcr die Erstellung von Rigs neu definieren und eine dringend ben\u00f6tigte Verbesserung der Charakterverformung im gesamten Spiel erreichen. Die Entwicklung wird viel Zeit in Anspruch nehmen, aber es ist ein lohnendes Unterfangen\". Technische Animation\n\nUI\nIm Mai haben die UI-Programmierer die verschiedenen PU-Versionen unterst\u00fctzt, indem sie Fehler behoben und gew\u00fcnschte Funktionen hinzugef\u00fcgt haben. Au\u00dferdem haben sie den Backend-Code \u00fcberarbeitet, um die persistente Technologie zu unterst\u00fctzen, die in Alpha 3.18 eingef\u00fchrt wird.\n\n\nVFX\nIm Mai schloss das VFX-Team seine Arbeit f\u00fcr die Invictus Launch Week ab und erledigte Aufgaben f\u00fcr den RSI Scorpius und den Drake Mule.\n\nDas VFX Concept Art Team begann mit der \u00dcberarbeitung der Quantenreise. Dazu geh\u00f6rte das Storyboarding der Spielanforderungen in den verschiedenen Phasen des Prozesses, wie z. B. das Aufspulen, der Eintritt und der Austritt. Zurzeit wird untersucht, wie das Ganze in der Engine aussehen k\u00f6nnte.","zh_CN":"PU Monthly Report\nMay 2022\nWelcome to May\u2019s PU Monthly Report! Naturally, Invictus Launch Week was a feature on many teams\u2019 agendas last month, but significant progress was made on plenty of upcoming content and features too, including new locations, unannounced vehicles, and persistent tech. Read on for all the details.\n\nAI (Content)\nThroughout May, the AI Content team focused on improving the visuals of general AI locomotion. The animation director identified 'locomotion overlays and fidgets' (animations blended with movement animations) as a vital area of improvement. So, the team authored 40 new overlays, including scalp scratching, knuckle cracking, and stretching. The overlays build on the walk-cycle work completed earlier in the year to provide more visually pleasing AI locomotion.\n\nAlongside this, AI Content began using the dynamic conversations tech recently delivered by AI Tech, which allows groups of AI to spontaneously begin conversations. The aim is to have this implemented across a variety of usables. Three use-cases have been created so far: the four-person mess-hall table, the idle spot, and the arcade machine.\n\nAI (Tech)\nAI Tech worked on spaceship functionalities, including several improvements to quantum travel and quantum boost. Now, ships can accelerate while spooling before the actual jump. This functionality was also exposed as an assignment for missions.\n\nThe team cleaned up and activated several feature test-maps into the main game-dev stream. These maps were validated to ensure the team can better track features that might be impacted by the changes of different teams.\n\nFor Subsumption, focus was on improving the usability of editing conversations (or coordinated subactivities). The internal representation of the GUID and SuperGUIDs was improved too.\n\nBuilding on last month\u2019s work, feedback was addressed regarding NPCs pushing trolleys. The team now have better control over what forces are applied to the trolley by using an angular and two linear PID controllers. They also improved the exact positioning logic at the end of a path and added stuck detector usage.\n\nFor Human combat, an initial skeleton of the DefendArea assignment was implemented to allow the designers to specify areas that NPCs can use for their behaviors. For example, guards will use this to understand which zones they should patrol.\n\nOcclusion calculation was restored to stop NPCs from ignoring hidden enemies while shooting, which will help them preserve ammunition and prevent individual targets from being overly targeted (unless fire control is forcing the shooting).\n\nThe team also improved the friendly-fire validation and can now assign different factions different behaviors. This includes \u201cbad guys\u201d only trying to preserve the life of their group, while \u201cgood guys\u201d also trying to avoid hitting neutral factions, like civilians.\n\nSeveral fixes to the usable code were added, including one causing NPCs to use usables they were not authorized to use. They also extended the usable code to allow them to set up slotting functionalities through loadout entries, allowing them to access item ports not exposed directly in Data-Forge. For example, setting up a Gladius as a usable with varying inspection usables depending on whether missiles are equipped or not.\n\nAI (Vehicle Features)\nThe AI Vehicle Features team completed the flight AI tool. This enables the developers to control and set up specific AI scenarios across various ships. They're currently porting the new dive attack maneuver to the combat pilot AI, which allows \u2018reckless\u2019 and \u2018aggressive\u2019 pilots fighting against capital ships to dynamically choose this maneuver when required.\n\nThey also made changes to the way they apply the backwash thruster effect as it was negatively affecting AI. Now, it controls forces by the size of the ship\u2019s surfaces, so smaller ships have less of an impact on larger ships.\n\nAnimation\nFor the PU, the Facial Animation team finished off performances for various in-game emotes, worked on a new mission giver, and created the facial animations for female vendors and male and female workers.\n\nArt (Characters)\nCharacter Art spent the month wrapping up Q2 assets, which included work on several armor variants. They also continued to work on the Pyro frontier outfits.\n\nArt (Ships)\nLast month, the UK team began improving the damage maps on all ships in preparation for the salvage mechanic. Development also continued on several vehicles:\n\nAn unannounced ground vehicle progressed into final art and design, while a new ship entered the early greybox stage, with work on the cockpit and dashboard progressing well.\n\nThe Banu Merchantman continued to move through greybox, with May\u2019s focus on the ship\u2019s exterior art. The team are currently working on the underside and the look and feel of its wings.\n\nThe Argo SRV began production and is nearing whitebox-complete, with the final whitebox review scheduled soon.\n\nIn the US, the team continued building the Drake Corsair. On the interior, major passes were completed on the turret airlock and manned-turret cabin, while most of the crew quarters were finished, including the captain\u2019s quarters near the cockpit. The entire cargo hold was blocked out and details are currently being added. The main airlock\/staging room on the starboard side of the ship was also completed.\n\nOn the exterior, progress was made on the greybox, including the nacelles and main\/retro thrusters. Development began on the landing gear and remote turrets too.\n\nCommunity\nThe Community team spent had another busy month in May with much focus directed towards supporting sentiment tracking and messaging for Invictus Launch Week and it's related publishes.\n\nThey published the Manufacturer Free Fly Schedule and a Spectrum FAQ before updating the Welcome Hub, Welcome Back Pilot page, and the New Player Comm-link for those making their first visits to the \u2018verse. Everything was compiled in the Invictus Launch Week Details page.\n\nIn tandem with the event, they held a screenshot contest and the 2952 Dunlow Derby race (in full collaboration with the racing community - SCR.GG) and further supported Invictus 2952 with sentiment tracking and server status communications. They also announced the winners of the MISC Bumper Sticker and the Tour of Stanton contests that began at the end of April.\n\nThe team also updated the Roadmap's Release View to reflect the rollout of key technologies in 2022, as mentioned in the latest Letter from the Chairman.\n\nA few team members had the opportunity to attend the Be@con event (an epic community-organized meetup\/convention) in Belgium and meet members of the wonderful community in person again.\n\n\"We had an absolute blast and want to thank everyone who came out and said hello. It was great seeing everyone in person again, and we can't wait for the \"Bar Citizen World Tour\" this Summer!\" - Community Team\n\nThey also hosted the Drake Mule and Anvil Legionnaire Q&As, giving the community the opportunity to ask the vehicle\u2019s developers their most burning questions.\nWork also continues on the new Community Hub, with steps being taken to port the work from a staging environment to the live servers (but not visible to non-staff). This is a huge step because it means the new Community Hub is actually populating with real player content. The team is continuing to relay feedback and assist in the overall design, to prepare for its public debut in the very near future.\nLooking a bit ahead, the team is deep in planning for this year's Foundation Festival, Ship Showdown, upcoming Dynamic Events, and much more.\n\nEngine\nIn May, the Physics team added a new dynamic entity (ropeentity_ex) to simulate a rope running over a pulley wheel. As an optimization, round-robin free lists were added for factories to reduce contention when creating or destroying objects. Additionally, vehicle pad normals are now cached to speed up collision processing.\n\nOn the renderer, work on the Gen12 transition continued. APIs for transient resource sets and various transient buffer types further matured and all relevant client code was updated to make use of them. The Gen12 pipeline to render cube maps was enabled, and Gen12 support for fog volumes and various other render nodes was also enabled. A new reflection buffer API was implemented and worker contexts were established throughout the client code. Resource sets are no longer unnecessarily created and material updates are not pushed into processing queues if there isn't anything to update. Support in debug comparison code was added for stencil state checks, skinned objects, and forward stage.\n\n\u201cSpeaking of the forward stage, a lot of work went into it this month and we hope to enable it soon.\u201d Engine Team\n\nSupport for eye overlay pass was added too.\n\nThe Gen12 port of planet ground fog was completed and Gen12 ports of atmospheric and volumetric cloud rendering commenced. Additional improvements to planet terrain height map rendering and spherical cloud and planet terrain shadow rendering were made.\n\nOn the core engine, various improvements were made to the profiling system to better analyze fibers and their preemption, and to track callers of semaphore waits and file reads. Support to collect peaks was also added (to prioritize optimization tasks). Various optimizations from recent performance captures on the PTU were implemented. Also, power scaling is now disabled for all threads the engine spawns with normal or time-critical priority, which helps thread scheduling (main, render, physics, batch worker, etc.) and improves performance. Additional optimizations were made, including removing the final lock in the background job manager, checking authority requirements when activating component updates based on ECUS events, and skipping updates of hidden entities. Lastly, improvements were made to reduce the size of Windows executables and their symbol files.\n\nThe remainder of the time was spent supporting and bug fixing Alpha 3.17.\n\nFeatures (Arena Commander)\nAlongside progressing with scanning improvements, the team fixed bugs, most notably those that had been affecting the gameplay of Arena Commander and Star Marine.\n\n\u201cContinual feedback from the community regarding these areas of the game has been hugely helpful and is greatly appreciated by our team!\u201d Feature Team\n\nImprovements to the racing mode were made too, which are planned for an upcoming release.\n\nFeatures (Characters & Weapons)\nIn May, the team continued updating the scanning feature, improving the visual effects when triggering a ping wave while on foot and how it highlights different contacts. Interactable items and points of interest critical to mission progression will be highlighted too.\n\nThe team is also increasing the amount of information gathered from scanned objects. For example, a door will reveal its current state and if it can be affected via hacking, NPCs and other players will show the contents of their physical inventories, and player corpses will reveal their cause of death.\n\n\u201cHooking up all this data can be quite a time-consuming task as it requires a lot of data-mining of different systems and their variables. Part of the work is ensuring the addition of future data will be frictionless.\u201d Feature Team\n\nThe team also created a model for serializing damage maps online, which is required for salvaging. The client is able to make accurate predictions but can also rewind and replay applications of hits on the damage map. The server will still send the full map to a client when required but this prediction will keep the need to send full data to a minimum.\n\nFeatures (Vehicles)\nVehicle Features spent time throughout May working on Alpha 3.17 and Invictus Launch Week.\n\nOutside of release support, great progress was made on quantum travel boost, primarily making it feel right as ships accelerate and attempt to maintain heading. This feature also supports points of interest, allowing pilots to fly towards highlighted destinations.\n\nThe team are continuing to update persistent-tech features to use the new systems and fixing problems along the way (usually connected to systems such as streaming, networking, and persistence).\n\nGeneral balance work continued too, including a pass on general item health to stop ships from shutting down from explosions. They also continued to balance the refueling mechanic, deciding on the volume of fuel the Starfarer can carry and the sizes of ships it can refuel.\n\nThe setup and balance of the new ground-vehicle physics is progressing well. The team now have baseline handling and are laying out the remaining dependencies to make them game-ready.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nWork on damage maps continued last month, with the team focusing on debris creating its own map based on the parent map. They also implemented an interface for querying damage within an area and persistent snapshots as well as optimalizations for processing hits.\n\nFor Gen12, the team improved the viewport API and continued porting the region copy pass in RTT to Gen12. They enabled more stages\/systems to work with Vulkan, including material fallbacks and depth read back. Fixes were made for the tessellation output of organic shaders and planet array textures not using texture 2D arrays. They also refactored screen capture to work with Vulkan and updated to the latest SDK.\n\nWork continued on improving image tests, with CVARs being created to wait a custom number of frames before capturing to alleviate some of the timing issues seen on recent tests. They also investigated a number of performance-related issues, including a particle effect problem caused by a huge particle count and the cost of refraction resolves.\n\nA number of bugs were fixed in the RTT system, including a series of asserts caused by setting a large aspect ratio to an RTTO, as well as fixes for holo-volume sorting issues in the mobiGlas.\n\nThe team also continued improving shaders with experimental improvements to the hair-color model and Wear v2, including the addition of primer\/compliment in LayerBlend v2.\n\nLighting\nMay saw the Lighting team continuing to support the Siege of Orison mission.\n\n\u201cThe playable space of the mission is massive, which means a lot of lighting work goes into covering the whole area to provide an interesting and unique atmosphere at night and day while also ensuring good player visibility on objectives and AI.\u201d Lighting Team\n\nPolish and optimization were also done. The space being a fully man-made exterior location means a lot of light entities and shadows must be rendered, so the team spent time ensuring performance was smooth without too much visual sacrifice.\n\nThey also worked on the new derelict Reclaimer locations, which involved embedding them into the planet's surface and dressing and lighting each version.\n\nLocations (Montreal)\nThe Locations team spent the month working on the Reclaimer space missions and derelict Reclaimer settlement. They\u2019re currently polishing and bug fixing in preparation for their release, which will complete the initial proof of concept for the derelict settlements.\n\nThe next stage is to take the proof of concept and see how much more depth can be added, with variations to both environmental art and level design. They\u2019re also looking to add more module and habitation variations, more missions with different modifiers, and potentially new gameplay elements.\n\nThe 600i and Mercury derelict settlement, which will be located on Daymar, progressed well throughout the month. The Level Design team are currently looking at what the Environment Art team has done in preparation for adding missions and AI.\n\nThe rework of Lorville\u2019s cityscape is ongoing, with the team switching from concept\/pre-production to production.\n\nFinally for Locations, the building interiors mentioned in last month\u2019s report entered the concept phase.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re still in early days and are discussing how best to organise the conception so that concept art, environment art and level design all work together in the most efficient way. We\u2019re also defining what we want to tackle in the proof of concept and what should be our target. Everyone here is eager to tackle this challenge and find a way to add pockets of gameplay directly inside landing zones.\u201d Locations Team\n\nNarrative\nLast month, Narrative continued to work with Design on a handful of new missions and initiatives. This included discussing new mission archetypes and tackling the new-player experience to devise a system to introduce new players to the game\u2019s various mechanics.\n\nPreparations commenced for the upcoming motion-capture session scheduled for next month. This involved syncing with various teams to see if they had content ready to capture. Once complete, production began locking down dates and sourcing actors.\n\nNarrative also continued to release new lore content, starting with another Loremakers where the team answered community questions from Spectrum. This was followed by Homesick, a short story that originally appeared in Jump Point magazine, and an Empire Report detailing a scandal around the discovery of new life. The month ended with another batch of Galactapedia articles.\n\nQA\nThe Manchester-based development side of QA focused on the Invictus Launch Week mission and continued to support the Alpha 3.17 and 3.17.1 releases by verifying fixes and stability issues, regressing resolved issues, and supporting the development teams.\n\nTowards the end of the month, planning and testing for Alpha 3.17.2 and 3.18 began. This involved working through QATRs for each patch\u2019s deliverables to ensure features are tested as much as possible before being published.\n\nThe Frankfurt-based QA team also tested the Siege of Orison mission and continued to support various development teams via their embedded testers.\n\nFor AI, integration checks were completed for updates to existing and new features, which were then added to the main branch. They also tested the AI used throughout the Siege of Orison mission.\n\nLocations QA tested the new mission location and expo halls. They also began working more with the editor to better support the team in creating test levels with relevant systems.\n\nFor the Engine team, focus was on PageHeap testing and locking down memory issues in-game. They also continued to learn more about Flowgraph and coding for future automation.\n\nThe Tools team continued to receive support with continued testing of DataForge, StarWords, ExcelCore, CopyBuild, and the sandbox editor.\n\nTools (Montreal)\nIn May, the integration of the Mighty Bridge into the editor was completed. This also allowed the deployment of the first official Mighty Bridge tool, Vegetation Scattering v1, which will allow teams to deploy vegetation without collisions, brushes, and entities on planetary surfaces and objects. This will be especially useful for derelict settlements and outposts but will still be used across many PU locations. The next step is to develop a tool for creating crashed ship craters and tails in the ground in less time and at higher fidelity.\n\nThe procedural location creation tool is also progressing well - the foundation is now a lot stronger and the team have begun creating basic layouts. They\u2019ve also moved to supporting corridors and corridor loops as well as supporting the various required templates (space stations, caves, underground facilities, etc.). The team\u2019s current goal is to get v1 to the designers and artists so they can gather feedback and get it production-ready.\n\nTech Animation\nThe Technical Animation team spent part of the month addressing small tasks that will ultimately improve the quality of life for all devs. Several of these revolve around the asset pipeline in Maya, which was refactored to both consolidate multiple workflows and galvanize the core pipeline code with the knowledge gained throughout production so far.\n\nOne of the team\u2019s new initiatives to load skin data from the engine\u2019s data files is yielding excellent results, with a 1200% speed increase in loading data.\n\nThey also continued with another long-standing initiative to replace slow rigging solutions with a new plugin.\n\n\u201cThis will see us redefine our workflows for creating rigs and see a much-needed improvement to character deformation throughout the game. It will take a long time to develop, but it\u2019s a worthwhile venture.\u201d Technical Animation\n\nUI\nMay saw the UI programmers support the various PU releases by fixing bugs and adding requested features. They also refactored backend code to support the persistent tech that will come online in Alpha 3.18.\n\n\nVFX\nMay saw the VFX team complete their work for Invictus Launch Week alongside tasks for the RSI Scorpius and Drake Mule.\n\nVFX Concept Art began work on the quantum travel rework. This included storyboarding the gameplay requirements at the different stages of the process, such as spooling up, entering, and exiting. They\u2019re currently investigating how it could look in-engine."},"links_count":0,"comment_count":0,"created_at":"2022-06-02T02:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"3 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 19:26:39","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":18718,"next_id":18721}}