{"data":{"id":18725,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: May 2022","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/18725-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-May-2022","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/18725","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/18725","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\nMay 2022\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 06:01:2022\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits.\n\nWelcome to May\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to first-person combat, locomotion, and Shubin station.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Content)\nLast month, AI Content\u2019s main focus was on adding background life to Shubin station. Part of this involved motion-capturing actor performances for the commuter behavior.\n\n\u201cWe captured people patiently waiting for a tram to arrive and getting frustrated when it didn't come on time, sleeping across benches, and falling asleep in their seats. These are all things you might expect to see on a subway.\u201d AI Content Team\n\nThey then wrapped up work on the arcade machine, which was reviewed to ensure the team were happy with the amount of animation variety. The main aim of this is to prevent the player from seeing any repeated animations. The next step is to hand the usable to the UI team for the finishing touches, including the on-screen visuals of games played, scoreboards, and game-over screens.\n\nBug fixing and feature work continued for the deck crew, with the team enabling the AI to interact with the Gladius\u2019 rear fuel port. Next month, they\u2019re aiming to add a pushable diagnostic cart and dynamic conversations to the behavior.\n\nAI (Features)\nFor the Vanduul, AI Features continued to refine and improve the close-combat and cat-and-mouse gameplay sections. They also utilized the recent mo-cap sessions to take existing block-out animations and add variety and detail, processing the results and integrating new animations into the existing gameplay.\n\nOn the Human combat side, the team worked with Design to implement the new weapon accuracy system that will give greater control to the designers, particularly over difficulty and playability. Previously, weapons would fire directly down the barrel and any inaccuracy would have to come through the simulation of wrong aiming direction, the seek time of the character\u2019s aiming, and recoil. They\u2019re now looking to implement a more controllable accuracy system that takes various factors into consideration when choosing if a shot hits or misses, including distance to target, how long the target has been seen, the angle to the shooter, and the base accuracy of the AI that\u2019s firing. Once the decision to hit or miss has been taken, an appropriate firing direction will be chosen. This will give the designers much more flexibility to create engaging and enjoyable scenarios. For example, they can select how likely off-screen NPCs are to hit the player, as being shot from offscreen isn\u2019t a fun experience.\n\nFor Human animation, the team continued to iterate on the pistol animation set using the overlay approach, which is already seeing benefits to memory, iteration time, and effort.\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 are 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\nThe Facial Animation team spent the month making improvements to a number of Squadron 42 characters.\n\nThe Motion Capture team shot scenes for level events alongside the Story team. They also worked with the Gameplay team on Vanduul combat and pre-post-vis for searching, which involved bringing the designers, coders, and animators together with the Vanduul actor for a mo-cap session. This allowed the teams to quickly try out new ideas and improve the existing version of the Vanduul character.\n\nThe data from the mo-cap session was then worked on and added into the game as close to the on-set performance as possible. The team are currently adjusting the animations for weight and game balance and adding any required additional micro-transitions.\n\nThey also worked on AI pistol animations, making overlays that will properly work on the stocked base-set to more efficiently produce pistol gameplay. They also converted the male spec-ops assets to female versions.\n\nOn the gameplay side, Animation progressed with various social AI aspects, including beds, the chow-line, arcade machine assets, female characters sitting on bar stools, standing console updates, drinking in various useables, and more. AI locomotion progressed too, with the team testing overlays on the base cycles so NPCs appear to think about what they\u2019re doing rather than just moving forward.\n\nR&D locomotion improvements continued, while custom locomotion fixes were made for certain named characters. They also progressed with zero-g, heavy landings to ledges from jumps, and helmet usage.\n\nArt (Characters)\nCharacter Art spent May working on UEE Navy outfits and Screaming Galson armors. They\u2019re also working alongside the Graphics team on the final version of the hair shader.\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. Support 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 to track callers of semaphore waits and file reads. Support to collect peaks was also added (to prioritize optimization tasks). 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\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story spent May working through mo-cap from the session in April. This allowed them to complete numerous small updates to various scenes, including some for chapters one and five. A technically challenging scene involving two characters unloading crates from a spaceship was finished and is looking great in-game.\n\nThey also delivered a substantial new scene for chapter five that features the player getting into an elevator. Finally for Gameplay Story, incremental improvements were made to the walk and talk animations to keep the characters looking natural and alive.\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 optimizations 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\nLevel Design\nLast month, the FPS team completed the layouts of two key chapters. Once implemented, they\u2019ll be ready for final balancing and testing. Some of them also moved on to finalizing content for the next set of chapters ahead of next quarter\u2019s goals.\n\nThe Space\/Dogfight Team expanded their focus to the first half of the game, implementing recently completed and polished mechanics, with the aim being to have a large section of the game fully playable.\n\nThe Social Design team continued their ongoing tasks of implementing all in-game scenes.\n\nNarrative\nNarrative continued their in-depth level reviews last month, including a moment-to-moment breakdown of a specific chapter to discuss any remaining narrative needs to support the latest gameplay. This included two revised puzzle scenarios and a tutorial sequence to account for possible hints and\/or dialogue support the player may need.\n\n\u201cOne of the challenges of game writing is ensuring that we provide assistance when called for without spoiling the fun of the player solving the problems presented.\u201d Narrative Team\n\nFor the revised scripts completed last month, the team finished recording scratch placeholder audio using developers as stand-in performers. The Design team will then place these in-game and begin testing the level flow. Depending on feedback, additional revisions and adjustments may be needed.\n\nThe team also dedicated time to further broadening some of the narrative collectibles that players will be rewarded with if they thoroughly explore the various levels in-game.\n\nFinally, the team worked to update the overall schedule in order to account for the recent script improvements and narrative adjustments, which is instrumental for the Production team to ensure deadlines are properly projected.\n\nQA\nQA supported the Cinematics team by reproducing issues found during development and chasing up outstanding bugs still causing issues. They also worked on bug validation and reporting and continued to make video recordings for review.\n\nFor AI, the team worked on several narrative scenes to confirm fixes and that the general flow is consistent. Checklist testing also began, with QA now regularly testing FPS and ship sections featuring the Vanduul.\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\nUI\nThe UI artists and designers worked on a variety of screens for two key levels. Some are at the early stages, where they take the specs from the game design teams and concept the layout and visual style. Others are nearly complete, with UI working alongside the designers to hook up graphics and animations to react to the player\u2019s input. The team are also working to refine their processes so they can create future screens more efficiently.\n\nNew door panels were created that will be used throughout SQ42, while the programmers developed AR boxouts \u2013 popup information that floats over the game screen to give more information about selected things.\n\nVFX\nMay saw the VFX team continue to work closely with the Art and Design teams. Two larger levels received a clean-up VFX pass.\n\n\u201cThis is good practice when a level has existed for a long time and has lots of older content. This basically brings a level up to date, ensuring there are no ugly or unoptimized effects still in there.\u201d VFX Team\n\nThey also continued work on a highly complex destruction sequence, which is progressing well.\n\nFinally, the VFX Tech Art team reviewed the gas cloud setup to ensure it\u2019s still functioning as expected and investigated cross-team options for in-game destruction.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION","de_DE":"Geschwader 42 Monatsbericht\nMai 2022\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 06:01:2022\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO-Geschwader 42 Rekruten.\n\nWillkommen zum Entwicklungsbericht f\u00fcr Squadron 42 im Mai. Anbei findest du Details zu den neuesten Fortschritten in der Kampagne, einschlie\u00dflich Updates f\u00fcr den Ego-Kampf, die Fortbewegung und die Shubin-Station.\n\nWir danken euch f\u00fcr eure anhaltende Unterst\u00fctzung von Squadron 42.\n\nMit freundlichen Gr\u00fc\u00dfen,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Inhalt)\nIm letzten Monat lag der Schwerpunkt von AI Content darauf, dem Bahnhof Shubin mehr Leben im Hintergrund zu verleihen. Dazu geh\u00f6rte auch das Motion-Capturing von Schauspielern, die das Verhalten der Pendler darstellen.\n\n\"Wir haben Menschen gefilmt, die geduldig auf eine Stra\u00dfenbahn warten und frustriert sind, wenn sie nicht p\u00fcnktlich kommt, die auf B\u00e4nken schlafen und in ihren Sitzen einschlafen. Das sind alles Dinge, die man in einer U-Bahn erwarten w\u00fcrde.\" AI Content Team\n\nAnschlie\u00dfend wurde die Arbeit am Spielautomaten abgeschlossen und \u00fcberpr\u00fcft, ob das Team mit der Vielfalt der Animationen zufrieden war. Damit soll vor allem verhindert werden, dass sich die Animationen f\u00fcr den Spieler wiederholen. Der n\u00e4chste Schritt ist die \u00dcbergabe an das UI-Team f\u00fcr den letzten Feinschliff, einschlie\u00dflich der Bildschirmdarstellung der gespielten Spiele, der Anzeigetafeln und der Game-over-Bildschirme.\n\nDas Team hat die Fehlerbehebung und die Arbeit an den Funktionen f\u00fcr die Deckcrew fortgesetzt und die KI in die Lage versetzt, mit dem hinteren Treibstoffanschluss des Gladius zu interagieren. Im n\u00e4chsten Monat sollen ein schiebbarer Diagnosewagen und dynamische Gespr\u00e4che zum Verhalten hinzugef\u00fcgt werden.\n\nKI (Funktionen)\nBei den Vanduul hat die KI-Abteilung die Nahk\u00e4mpfe und das Katz-und-Maus-Spiel weiter verfeinert und verbessert. Au\u00dferdem haben sie die letzten Mo-Cap-Sitzungen genutzt, um die bestehenden Block-Out-Animationen zu bearbeiten und mit mehr Vielfalt und Details zu versehen, um die Ergebnisse zu verarbeiten und die neuen Animationen in das bestehende Gameplay zu integrieren.\n\nIm Bereich der menschlichen K\u00e4mpfe arbeitete das Team mit dem Designteam zusammen, um das neue System f\u00fcr die Waffengenauigkeit zu implementieren, das den Designern mehr Kontrolle gibt, insbesondere \u00fcber den Schwierigkeitsgrad und die Spielbarkeit. Bisher wurden die Waffen direkt aus dem Lauf abgefeuert und jede Ungenauigkeit musste durch die Simulation einer falschen Zielrichtung, der Suchzeit des Charakters und des R\u00fccksto\u00dfes ausgeglichen werden. Jetzt soll ein besser kontrollierbares Genauigkeitssystem implementiert werden, das bei der Entscheidung, ob ein Schuss trifft oder nicht, verschiedene Faktoren ber\u00fccksichtigt, z. B. die Entfernung zum Ziel, wie lange das Ziel bereits gesehen wurde, den Winkel zum Sch\u00fctzen und die Grundgenauigkeit der feuernden KI. Sobald die Entscheidung \u00fcber Treffer oder Fehlschuss gefallen ist, wird eine geeignete Schussrichtung gew\u00e4hlt. Das gibt den Designern viel mehr Flexibilit\u00e4t, um fesselnde und unterhaltsame Szenarien zu erstellen. Sie k\u00f6nnen z. B. festlegen, wie wahrscheinlich es ist, dass NSCs au\u00dferhalb des Bildschirms den Spieler\/die Spielerin treffen, denn es macht keinen Spa\u00df, von au\u00dferhalb des Bildschirms beschossen zu werden.\n\nBei der Menschenanimation hat das Team die Pistolenanimation mit Hilfe des Overlay-Ansatzes weiter verbessert, was sich bereits jetzt positiv auf Speicherplatz, Iterationszeit und Aufwand auswirkt.\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 aufladen. 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, ber\u00fccksichtigt. 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 nutzbare Code so erweitert, dass 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\nDas Team f\u00fcr Gesichtsanimation hat den Monat damit verbracht, eine Reihe von Charakteren der Squadron 42 zu verbessern.\n\nDas Motion-Capture-Team drehte zusammen mit dem Story-Team Szenen f\u00fcr Level-Events. Au\u00dferdem arbeiteten sie mit dem Gameplay-Team an den Vanduul-K\u00e4mpfen und dem Pre-Post-Vis f\u00fcr die Suche. Dazu brachten sie die Designer, Programmierer und Animatoren mit dem Vanduul-Darsteller zu einer Mo-Cap-Sitzung zusammen. So konnten die Teams schnell neue Ideen ausprobieren und die bestehende Version des Vanduul-Charakters verbessern.\n\nDie Daten aus der Mo-Cap-Sitzung wurden dann bearbeitet und so nah wie m\u00f6glich an die Darstellung am Set ins Spiel eingef\u00fcgt. Zurzeit passt das Team die Animationen f\u00fcr Gewicht und Spielbalance an und f\u00fcgt alle erforderlichen zus\u00e4tzlichen Mikro\u00fcberg\u00e4nge hinzu.\n\nSie haben auch an den KI-Pistolenanimationen gearbeitet und Overlays erstellt, die auf dem best\u00fcckten Basisset richtig funktionieren, um das Pistolenspiel effizienter zu gestalten. Sie haben auch die m\u00e4nnlichen Spec-Ops-Assets in weibliche Versionen umgewandelt.\n\nAuf der Gameplay-Seite wurden verschiedene soziale KI-Aspekte animiert, darunter Betten, die Essenslinie, Arcade-Automaten, weibliche Charaktere, die auf Barhockern sitzen, stehende Konsolen-Updates, Trinken in verschiedenen Nutzr\u00e4umen und mehr. Auch bei der KI-Bewegung gab es Fortschritte: Das Team testete \u00dcberlagerungen der Basiszyklen, damit die NSCs anscheinend dar\u00fcber nachdenken, was sie tun, und sich nicht nur vorw\u00e4rts bewegen.\n\nDie Fortbewegung von F&E-Mitarbeitern wurde weiter verbessert, und f\u00fcr bestimmte Charaktere wurden benutzerdefinierte Fortbewegungsoptionen festgelegt. Au\u00dferdem wurden Fortschritte bei der Schwerelosigkeit, schweren Landungen auf Vorspr\u00fcngen und der Verwendung von Helmen gemacht.\n\nKunst (Charaktere)\nCharacter Art hat im Mai an den Outfits der UEE Navy und den R\u00fcstungen der Screaming Galson gearbeitet. Au\u00dferdem arbeiten sie zusammen mit dem Grafikteam an der endg\u00fcltigen Version des Haar-Shaders.\n\nEngine\nIm Mai f\u00fcgte das Physikteam eine neue dynamische Entit\u00e4t (ropeentity_ex) hinzu, um ein Seil zu simulieren, das \u00fcber ein Flaschenzugrad l\u00e4uft. Als Optimierung wurden Round-Robin-Free-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. Ressourcensets 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. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr den Augen-Overlay-Pass hinzugef\u00fcgt.\n\nDie Gen12-Portierung des Bodennebels auf dem Planeten wurde abgeschlossen und mit der Gen12-Portierung des atmosph\u00e4rischen und volumetrischen Wolkenrenderings wurde begonnen. Weitere Verbesserungen wurden beim Rendering der H\u00f6henkarte des Planetengel\u00e4ndes und beim Rendering von 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 Vorrangstellung 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). Au\u00dferdem ist die Leistungsskalierung jetzt f\u00fcr alle Threads deaktiviert, die die Engine mit normaler oder zeitkritischer Priorit\u00e4t erzeugt, was die Planung der Threads (Main, Render, Physics, Batch Worker usw.) erleichtert und die Leistung verbessert. Weitere Optimierungen wurden vorgenommen, z. B. das Entfernen der letzten Sperre im Hintergrundjobmanager, 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\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story hat den Mai damit verbracht, das Mo-Cap aus der Sitzung im April zu bearbeiten. So konnten sie zahlreiche kleine Aktualisierungen an verschiedenen Szenen vornehmen, darunter einige f\u00fcr die Kapitel eins und f\u00fcnf. Eine technisch anspruchsvolle Szene, in der zwei Charaktere Kisten aus einem Raumschiff ausladen, wurde fertiggestellt und sieht im Spiel gro\u00dfartig aus.\n\nSie lieferten auch eine umfangreiche neue Szene f\u00fcr Kapitel f\u00fcnf, in der der Spieler in einen Aufzug steigt. Im Bereich Gameplay Story schlie\u00dflich wurden die Lauf- und Sprechanimationen verbessert, damit die Charaktere nat\u00fcrlich und lebendig aussehen.\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 f\u00fcr die Abfrage von Sch\u00e4den 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 es, dass mehr Stufen\/Systeme 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\nLeveldesign\nIm letzten Monat hat das FPS-Team die Layouts von zwei wichtigen Kapiteln fertiggestellt. Sobald sie implementiert sind, werden sie f\u00fcr das endg\u00fcltige Balancing und Testen bereit sein. Einige von ihnen arbeiteten auch an der Fertigstellung der Inhalte f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chsten Kapitel, bevor die Ziele f\u00fcr das n\u00e4chste Quartal erreicht werden.\n\nDas Space\/Dogfight-Team konzentrierte sich auf die erste H\u00e4lfte des Spiels und implementierte die k\u00fcrzlich fertiggestellten und ausgefeilten Mechaniken, mit dem Ziel, einen gro\u00dfen Teil des Spiels vollst\u00e4ndig spielbar zu machen.\n\nDas Social Design Team setzte seine Arbeit an der Implementierung aller Szenen im Spiel fort.\n\nNarrative\nDas Narrative-Team hat im letzten Monat seine ausf\u00fchrlichen Level-Reviews fortgesetzt. Dabei wurde ein bestimmtes Kapitel von einem Moment auf den anderen aufgeschl\u00fcsselt, um zu er\u00f6rtern, was f\u00fcr die Erz\u00e4hlung noch ben\u00f6tigt wird, um das aktuelle Gameplay zu unterst\u00fctzen. Dazu geh\u00f6rten zwei \u00fcberarbeitete R\u00e4tselszenarien und eine Tutorialsequenz, um m\u00f6gliche Hinweise und\/oder Dialoge zu ber\u00fccksichtigen, die die Spieler\/innen ben\u00f6tigen k\u00f6nnten.\n\n\"Eine der Herausforderungen beim Schreiben von Spielen ist es, sicherzustellen, dass wir Hilfe anbieten, wenn sie ben\u00f6tigt wird, ohne dem Spieler den Spa\u00df am L\u00f6sen der gestellten Aufgaben zu verderben.\" Narrative Team\n\nF\u00fcr die \u00fcberarbeiteten Skripte, die im letzten Monat fertiggestellt wurden, hat das Team die Aufnahme von Platzhalter-Audiodateien mit Entwicklern als Ersatzdarstellern abgeschlossen. Das Designteam wird diese dann im Spiel platzieren und mit dem Testen des Levelablaufs beginnen. Je nach Feedback k\u00f6nnen weitere \u00dcberarbeitungen und Anpassungen erforderlich sein.\n\nDas Team hat sich auch damit besch\u00e4ftigt, einige der erz\u00e4hlerischen Sammelobjekte zu erweitern, mit denen die Spieler\/innen belohnt werden, wenn sie die verschiedenen Level im Spiel gr\u00fcndlich erkunden.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich arbeitete das Team daran, den Zeitplan zu aktualisieren, um die j\u00fcngsten Skriptverbesserungen und erz\u00e4hlerischen Anpassungen zu ber\u00fccksichtigen, was f\u00fcr das Produktionsteam wichtig ist, um sicherzustellen, dass die Termine richtig geplant werden.\n\nQA\nDas QA-Team unterst\u00fctzte das Cinematics-Team, indem es Probleme reproduzierte, die w\u00e4hrend der Entwicklung aufgetreten waren, und noch nicht behobene Bugs aufsp\u00fcrte, die immer noch Probleme verursachen. Sie arbeiteten auch an der Fehlervalidierung und -berichterstattung und machten weiterhin Videoaufnahmen zur \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung.\n\nF\u00fcr die KI arbeitete das Team an mehreren erz\u00e4hlerischen Szenen, um die Fehlerbehebung zu best\u00e4tigen und sicherzustellen, dass der allgemeine Ablauf konsistent ist. Au\u00dferdem wurde mit dem Testen von Checklisten begonnen, wobei die QA nun regelm\u00e4\u00dfig FPS und Schiffsabschnitte mit den Vanduul testet.\n\nTechnische Animation\nDas Team der Technischen Animation hat einen Teil des Monats damit verbracht, sich um kleine Aufgaben zu k\u00fcmmern, die letztendlich die Lebensqualit\u00e4t f\u00fcr alle Entwickler 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 verbinden.\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\nUI\nDie UI-K\u00fcnstler und Designer haben an einer Vielzahl von Bildschirmen f\u00fcr zwei wichtige Level gearbeitet. Einige befinden sich in einem fr\u00fchen Stadium, in dem sie die Vorgaben der Spieldesignteams aufnehmen und das Layout und den visuellen Stil entwerfen. Andere sind fast fertig, wobei die UI mit den Designern zusammenarbeitet, um Grafiken und Animationen zu erstellen, die auf die Eingaben des Spielers reagieren. Das Team arbeitet auch daran, seine Prozesse zu verfeinern, damit es zuk\u00fcnftige Bildschirme effizienter erstellen kann.\n\nEs wurden neue T\u00fcrpaneele erstellt, die in SQ42 verwendet werden, w\u00e4hrend die Programmierer AR-Boxouts entwickelt haben - Popup-Informationen, die \u00fcber dem Spielbildschirm schweben, um mehr Informationen \u00fcber ausgew\u00e4hlte Dinge zu geben.\n\nVFX\nIm Mai arbeitete das VFX-Team weiterhin eng mit den Art- und Design-Teams zusammen. Zwei gr\u00f6\u00dfere Levels erhielten einen sauberen VFX-Pass.\n\n\"Das ist eine gute Methode, wenn ein Level schon lange existiert und viele \u00e4ltere Inhalte hat. Damit wird ein Level auf den neuesten Stand gebracht und sichergestellt, dass es keine h\u00e4sslichen oder nicht optimierten Effekte mehr gibt.\" VFX-Team\n\nSie haben auch die Arbeit an einer hochkomplexen Zerst\u00f6rungssequenz fortgesetzt, die gut voranschreitet.\n\nSchlie\u00dflich \u00fcberpr\u00fcfte das VFX Tech Art Team das Gaswolken-Setup, um sicherzustellen, dass es immer noch wie erwartet funktioniert, und untersuchte team\u00fcbergreifende Optionen f\u00fcr die Zerst\u00f6rung im Spiel.\n\nWIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT WIEDER...\n\/\/ ENDE DER \u00dcBERTRAGUNG","zh_CN":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report\nMay 2022\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 06:01:2022\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits.\n\nWelcome to May\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to first-person combat, locomotion, and Shubin station.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Content)\nLast month, AI Content\u2019s main focus was on adding background life to Shubin station. Part of this involved motion-capturing actor performances for the commuter behavior.\n\n\u201cWe captured people patiently waiting for a tram to arrive and getting frustrated when it didn't come on time, sleeping across benches, and falling asleep in their seats. These are all things you might expect to see on a subway.\u201d AI Content Team\n\nThey then wrapped up work on the arcade machine, which was reviewed to ensure the team were happy with the amount of animation variety. The main aim of this is to prevent the player from seeing any repeated animations. The next step is to hand the usable to the UI team for the finishing touches, including the on-screen visuals of games played, scoreboards, and game-over screens.\n\nBug fixing and feature work continued for the deck crew, with the team enabling the AI to interact with the Gladius\u2019 rear fuel port. Next month, they\u2019re aiming to add a pushable diagnostic cart and dynamic conversations to the behavior.\n\nAI (Features)\nFor the Vanduul, AI Features continued to refine and improve the close-combat and cat-and-mouse gameplay sections. They also utilized the recent mo-cap sessions to take existing block-out animations and add variety and detail, processing the results and integrating new animations into the existing gameplay.\n\nOn the Human combat side, the team worked with Design to implement the new weapon accuracy system that will give greater control to the designers, particularly over difficulty and playability. Previously, weapons would fire directly down the barrel and any inaccuracy would have to come through the simulation of wrong aiming direction, the seek time of the character\u2019s aiming, and recoil. They\u2019re now looking to implement a more controllable accuracy system that takes various factors into consideration when choosing if a shot hits or misses, including distance to target, how long the target has been seen, the angle to the shooter, and the base accuracy of the AI that\u2019s firing. Once the decision to hit or miss has been taken, an appropriate firing direction will be chosen. This will give the designers much more flexibility to create engaging and enjoyable scenarios. For example, they can select how likely off-screen NPCs are to hit the player, as being shot from offscreen isn\u2019t a fun experience.\n\nFor Human animation, the team continued to iterate on the pistol animation set using the overlay approach, which is already seeing benefits to memory, iteration time, and effort.\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 are 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\nThe Facial Animation team spent the month making improvements to a number of Squadron 42 characters.\n\nThe Motion Capture team shot scenes for level events alongside the Story team. They also worked with the Gameplay team on Vanduul combat and pre-post-vis for searching, which involved bringing the designers, coders, and animators together with the Vanduul actor for a mo-cap session. This allowed the teams to quickly try out new ideas and improve the existing version of the Vanduul character.\n\nThe data from the mo-cap session was then worked on and added into the game as close to the on-set performance as possible. The team are currently adjusting the animations for weight and game balance and adding any required additional micro-transitions.\n\nThey also worked on AI pistol animations, making overlays that will properly work on the stocked base-set to more efficiently produce pistol gameplay. They also converted the male spec-ops assets to female versions.\n\nOn the gameplay side, Animation progressed with various social AI aspects, including beds, the chow-line, arcade machine assets, female characters sitting on bar stools, standing console updates, drinking in various useables, and more. AI locomotion progressed too, with the team testing overlays on the base cycles so NPCs appear to think about what they\u2019re doing rather than just moving forward.\n\nR&D locomotion improvements continued, while custom locomotion fixes were made for certain named characters. They also progressed with zero-g, heavy landings to ledges from jumps, and helmet usage.\n\nArt (Characters)\nCharacter Art spent May working on UEE Navy outfits and Screaming Galson armors. They\u2019re also working alongside the Graphics team on the final version of the hair shader.\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. Support 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 to track callers of semaphore waits and file reads. Support to collect peaks was also added (to prioritize optimization tasks). 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\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story spent May working through mo-cap from the session in April. This allowed them to complete numerous small updates to various scenes, including some for chapters one and five. A technically challenging scene involving two characters unloading crates from a spaceship was finished and is looking great in-game.\n\nThey also delivered a substantial new scene for chapter five that features the player getting into an elevator. Finally for Gameplay Story, incremental improvements were made to the walk and talk animations to keep the characters looking natural and alive.\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 optimizations 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\nLevel Design\nLast month, the FPS team completed the layouts of two key chapters. Once implemented, they\u2019ll be ready for final balancing and testing. Some of them also moved on to finalizing content for the next set of chapters ahead of next quarter\u2019s goals.\n\nThe Space\/Dogfight Team expanded their focus to the first half of the game, implementing recently completed and polished mechanics, with the aim being to have a large section of the game fully playable.\n\nThe Social Design team continued their ongoing tasks of implementing all in-game scenes.\n\nNarrative\nNarrative continued their in-depth level reviews last month, including a moment-to-moment breakdown of a specific chapter to discuss any remaining narrative needs to support the latest gameplay. This included two revised puzzle scenarios and a tutorial sequence to account for possible hints and\/or dialogue support the player may need.\n\n\u201cOne of the challenges of game writing is ensuring that we provide assistance when called for without spoiling the fun of the player solving the problems presented.\u201d Narrative Team\n\nFor the revised scripts completed last month, the team finished recording scratch placeholder audio using developers as stand-in performers. The Design team will then place these in-game and begin testing the level flow. Depending on feedback, additional revisions and adjustments may be needed.\n\nThe team also dedicated time to further broadening some of the narrative collectibles that players will be rewarded with if they thoroughly explore the various levels in-game.\n\nFinally, the team worked to update the overall schedule in order to account for the recent script improvements and narrative adjustments, which is instrumental for the Production team to ensure deadlines are properly projected.\n\nQA\nQA supported the Cinematics team by reproducing issues found during development and chasing up outstanding bugs still causing issues. They also worked on bug validation and reporting and continued to make video recordings for review.\n\nFor AI, the team worked on several narrative scenes to confirm fixes and that the general flow is consistent. Checklist testing also began, with QA now regularly testing FPS and ship sections featuring the Vanduul.\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\nUI\nThe UI artists and designers worked on a variety of screens for two key levels. Some are at the early stages, where they take the specs from the game design teams and concept the layout and visual style. Others are nearly complete, with UI working alongside the designers to hook up graphics and animations to react to the player\u2019s input. The team are also working to refine their processes so they can create future screens more efficiently.\n\nNew door panels were created that will be used throughout SQ42, while the programmers developed AR boxouts \u2013 popup information that floats over the game screen to give more information about selected things.\n\nVFX\nMay saw the VFX team continue to work closely with the Art and Design teams. Two larger levels received a clean-up VFX pass.\n\n\u201cThis is good practice when a level has existed for a long time and has lots of older content. This basically brings a level up to date, ensuring there are no ugly or unoptimized effects still in there.\u201d VFX Team\n\nThey also continued work on a highly complex destruction sequence, which is progressing well.\n\nFinally, the VFX Tech Art team reviewed the gas cloud setup to ensure it\u2019s still functioning as expected and investigated cross-team options for in-game destruction.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":0,"created_at":"2022-06-08T18:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"3 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-04-28 18:10:15","valid_relations":["images","links","translations"],"prev_id":18723,"next_id":18726}}