{"data":{"id":19095,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: November & December 2022","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/transmission\/19095-Squadron-42-Monthly-Report-November-December-2022","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/19095","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/19095","channel":"Feedback","category":"Undefined","series":"None","images":[{"id":26651,"name":"STARCITIZEN_WHITE.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/y1f0boj8fak5rr\/source\/STARCITIZEN_WHITE.png","alt":"","size":73278,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2021-02-03T06:54:29+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/26651","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/26651\/similar"}],"images_count":1,"translations":{"en_EN":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report\nNovember & December 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 01:18:2023\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits.\n\nWelcome to November and December's Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including crowd control, fire propagation, and alien character development.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Content)\nToward the end of the year, the AI Content team completed a significant number of tasks for chapter 15. This included prototyping animations for crowds and combatants alongside developing several usables and animation sets for dejected characters around the level.\n\nThe welding engineer also received a lot of improvements; the team made an extensive pass on the animations and progressed with the technical challenges of getting the welding helmet, Multi-Tool parts, and welding effects working together.\n\nConsiderable work was also done to get a basic version of an AI character interacting with a variety of usables found in living spaces. The bridge crew behavior and animations also received further iteration and are now starting to look polished.\n\nAnimation supported AI Features with box carrying, which resulted in a number of significant visual improvements.\n\nA large amount of production and organization work was done too, resulting in a comprehensive animation schedule that details all the known work required for SQ42 to be content-complete. As part of this, the team will now implement usables and behaviors into the final game levels earlier in the pipeline.\n\nAI (Features)\nLast year, the team implemented AI functionality into manned turrets. Like other objects that NPCs need to be able to use, the turrets have been set up as usables, which describes the logic and animations required to use them. As with the player, animations are synchronized with the turret movement so that the AI grips the turret by its handles while rotating on the spot to aim horizontally and tilts the turret up and down to aim vertically.\n\nThe team also worked on implementing a wide range of panic, cower, and surrender behaviors for both unarmed civilians and enemy NPCs that have run out of ammunition and weapons. If an unarmed civilian sees that an enemy has an unholstered weapon, they will notify characters nearby using a wildline and then panic-run to a hidden point of cover. They will continue to run away from the enemy if their cover is compromised. Unarmed characters that hear this information will turn to react to the enemy and then panic themselves. By randomizing the speed at which the NPCs react, the devs can generate a natural-looking range of behaviors from a crowd responding to a threat.\n\nArmed enemies that have run out of ammo and weapons will run to cover while searching for valid ammo and weapons to pick up. Again, if their cover is exposed, they will reevaluate and run to a new position. If the player aims at an armed or unarmed NPC, they will stay on the spot but turn to face the player and move through a sequence of surrender animations whilst communicating with the player.\n\nAs part of combat, the team worked on the medic AI behaviors to allow NPCs to find incapacitated peers that need reviving and use med-pens to get them back into the fight. This involved bringing together numerous existing functionalities from various areas, including the usable system (\u2018use\u2019 channel to revive), consumable items (the med-pen), synchronized animations (between the two NPCs), ragdoll into animations (to allow characters to stand-up from ragdoll), and Subsumption (to script the behavior). The next stage is integrating this behavior with the standard \u2018react to presumed-dead bodies\u2019 behavior to generate more complex behaviors.\n\nAI Features also started work on a new non-human character. This involved creating a new core set of animations for the new creature and slotting it into an existing basic framework. From there, they were able to rapidly develop the core functionality, which was passed to the Design team for feedback.\n\nToward the end of the year, a few areas of work were revisited to tidy up loose ends. The first of these was the Vanduul investigation behavior. During the \u2018cat and mouse\u2019 gameplay section, the Vanduul will now investigate the floor vents in the room with different animations for different alertness levels.\n\nAfter feedback from the Design team, new functionalities were added for the accuracy calculation. This included adding a mercy timer, firing time, and time-since-seen accuracy modifiers: The mercy timer gives the player a fighting chance to escape from heavy fire by making the AI inaccurate for a set period when the player's health has reached a certain threshold. The firing-time accuracy modifier reduces the accuracy over firing periods for similar purposes. The time-since-seen accuracy modifier allows the player a grace period after moving out of cover during which the attackers\u2019 accuracy will be lower. The accuracy distance calculation was also changed to be curve-based for greater control.\n\nAI (Tech)\nDuring the last months of 2022, the AI Tech team progressed with features required for both the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42.\n\nThe team continued to iterate on more complex navigation links to extend the capabilities of NPCs and where they\u2019re able to move to, including implementing adapters for airlocks and elevators. Now, NPCs will know that in order to traverse an airlock, they will need to interact with multiple consoles to adjust the pressure and open the door. For Elevators, navigation links were created to connect multiple floors. A navigation link was also created to request a reconnection with the navigation mesh triangles each time an elevator stops at a floor to allow NPCs to transition in and out. Based on navigation link connections, an NPC will now know how to request an elevator to go to a specific floor. New event notifications were also added, sent by the elevator when it arrives at a floor, so that the actor will know to get on or off.\n\nAt the end of the year, the base functionality for NPCs driving ground vehicles was completed. NPCs can now move to a vehicle and get into the driver\u2019s seat, find a path suitable for the size of the vehicle, and drive along it. This work involved the creation of a new Subsumption task, a new movement request type, and updating the movement planner to know how to process the request. The team also added new functionality to the navigation systems that marks entities to be ignored during navigation-mesh generation.\n\nNPC perception was another major topic worked on toward the end of the year. The team implemented a new adapter for action areas to specify lightness\/darkness, which will influence NPCs' visual perception.\n\nA new extender to propagate engine sounds as stimuli was also created, which will make NPCs aware of vehicles in their proximity. This was the first step toward behaviors that react to ground vehicles and spaceships.\n\nWhile working on perception improvements, the devs fixed AI visual perception through glass. Now, NPCs will be able to detect targets behind glass and also understand that, in order to shoot at them, they need to move to the other side.\n\nFor locomotion, improvements continued on the sharp-turn assets and how they\u2019re triggered for alien characters or at walking speeds. Related to this, work began on \u2018following\u2019 tech, which will be used in connection with the buddy AI behavior. For this, the team improved soft stops, collision avoidance with players, and speed handling based on the leader\u2019s change in speed.\n\nFor the Apollo Subsumption tool, new functionality was added to create and modify the Subsumption mastergraph. A lot of feedback from the designers was implemented, including the addition of an interface to create roles and sub-roles, find reference functionality, improved interaction with functions and the multigraph tab, and improvements to grid snapping.\n\nAI (Vehicles)\nThe Vehicle Feature team worked on significant improvements and features for flight AI, including largely completing their work on several sections involving ships attacking actors on the ground.\n\nThis work revolves around a redesign of the core combat logic:\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re working toward a more varied and interesting ship combat experience than before, so we are planning out and making changes to combat AI and testing them in SQ42 to get the experience we want.\u201d AI Vehicle Team\n\nAnimation\nThe last months of 2022 saw Gameplay Animation working on Vanduul executions, zero-g player movement, and various animation sets for background life. They also added skill-level variation to takedowns alongside new weapons. They then shot mo-cap for a variety of additional scenes and gameplay needs and created facial animation for various story and background characters.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe concept artists worked on tattoo and armor variation concepts for the Screaming Galsons to help fill out the faction, and continued work on a key campaign character.\n\nThe artists also worked on the Screaming Galsons\u2019 armors along with the navy-pilot flightsuit and a new creature.\n\nTech Art skinned the main navy jumpsuit and paired assets for the deck crew, engineers, and gunners.\n\nArt (Environment)\nEnvironment Art approached content-complete on several chapter locations, including chapters 7 and 11.\n\nAsset kits are currently in progress to help flesh out space-scaping for the flight-based chapters, while Vanduul ship work continues as the team prepares to hand them over to be set up.\n\nEngine\nNovember and December were busy months for the Physics team. Aside from plenty of bug fixing and supporting Alpha 3.18, they worked on various optimizations. For example, the cost of performing part OBB vs grid cell overlap checks was amortized by performing them in one call for a grid node instead of cell by cell. Also, sub stepping for attached and AI-controlled NPCs on the server was disabled to bring back actor entity step performance. Several internal data structures were compacted and reordered for a smaller memory footprint and better member alignment.\n\nOn the renderer, the team enabled the Gen12 pipeline and scene rendering by default (this will be featured in Alpha 3.18), which is a major milestone on the road toward completing the Gen12 transition and providing a Vulkan backend. Following October\u2019s work on particles, further substantial progress was made. Gen12 refraction and half-resolution rendering support for GPU particles was added, the particle stage and GPU handler refactored, and particle shader background compilation was enabled. Furthermore, particles split for each hierarchy level are now updated in a way that ensures UAV resources stay consistent across each pass and don't change. Moreover, debug visualization code for various systems was ported to Gen12, and PSO caching for projectiles and particles was improved.\n\nRegarding atmosphere and volumetric clouds, an initial draft of a new temporal render mode was submitted and will continue to be worked on in the coming months to provide better rendering performance of raymarched volumetric clouds and atmosphere. Furthermore, various options for refined cloud shaping were brainstormed with Tech Art and will hopefully find their way into a release soon.\n\nOn core engine, the team completed work on v2 of p4k data file support for the engine, game, and tool side. On that note, the system now also provides an efficient lock mechanism for legacy pak files as well as much faster access to files inside pak files (embedded in the main p4k data file), both of which significantly improve the loading of object containers. Additionally, the mapping of threads on Intel CPUs with P\/E cores was rewritten - critical threads such as main, render, and network threads are ensured to always run on performance cores to avoid the otherwise poor performance on affected CPUs. These changes are currently being verified on the PTU. Also, support for page sizes larger than 4kb (aka huge pages) was added to the engine (at the moment on Linux only). It's currently used for stack, text, and data segments, as well as physics allocations. Using huge pages reduces the pressure on the TLB cache, the part of the CPU translating virtual to physical addresses, which should help with performance. With Clang, just moving the text segment to huge pages gave a 7% speedup. Furthermore, the latest version of Bink2 was integrated and a few audio related bugs fixed in video playback (manifesting themselves as random clicks during playback).\n\nAnother area that progressed well was the remote shader compile server used to build shader caches, etc. Due to increased usage of the server by development teams and the build process, proper support for fallback agents as well as server throttling was implemented to deal with times of extreme load and to allow for more distributed compilation. At that point, it also made sense to rewrite various parts of the server code to allow for more robustness, better logging, and increased performance. Lastly, shape unification was completed and entity area support was added. A copy\/paste bug in the entity aggregate manager that caused a lot of unnecessary memory access was fixed, and vis area loading was refactored to support batch conversion from previous versions of serialized vis area data.\n\nFeatures (Vehicle)\nThe last two months of the year saw Vehicle Features largely completing a full rework of quantum travel, which is being integrated into Squadron 42 for testing. This continues from the quantum boost feature mentioned in previous reports and significantly improves the overall feature implementation. They also supported the VFX team in integrating new effects for quantum travel.\n\nThey also worked on a \u2018recall\u2019 feature available to various military ships in the game. This uses the AI pathfinding tech used in the PU and will allow various SQ42 levels to be completed.\n\nVehicle Features then completed a significant refactor of the aiming system and are currently working with UI to implement new aiming reticles and pips to go alongside it. This will result in huge improvements in aiming accuracy and reliability. It\u2019s currently being tested to improve the combat experience.\n\nSignificant time toward the end of 2022 went into the multi-function display (MFD), heads-up display (HUD), and vehicle UI reworks.\n\n\u201cThe base MFD system is making huge strides and we\u2019ve partially implemented most of the core MFD screens for ships using the new Building Blocks system. We\u2019re just starting to build the new HUD, which deeply integrates with the MFD system with configuration options and MFD casting options.\u201d Vehicle Features Team\n\nControl surfaces continued development and, in the last two months, the team improved stalling and transitions. For example, when a ship detects it\u2019s about to stall, it can automatically enable thrusters to stop it from falling. Similarly, when a ship has detected it's going fast enough to sustain control surface flight, it can automatically shut down its maneuvering thrusters and start flying solely with control surfaces. This is greatly improving the atmospheric flight sections of the campaign.\n\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story worked on a range of different tasks during November and December, including preparing and shooting mo-cap to update various scenes. Mo-cap from previous shoots was also used. For example, to help characters climb back into ships after speaking with the player.\n\nA scene in chapter 8 was updated to ensure the character could interact with a variety of props instead of just performing visual inspections. The team made sure the character used AI poses to allow them to break out of the scene if needed. The character also interacts well with the Argo MPUV, meaning they can fly into the Idris before starting their scene.\n\nAnother area further explored was unholstering and holstering. This time, the team were able to make a character grab the Multi-Tool and datapad from the exact position it attaches to the character and place it back.\n\nA number of updates were also made to characters in chapters 4 and 8. This involved utilizing the latest female walk cycle to enable the AI to seamlessly enter and exit scenes.\n\nA significant update was made to a scene in chapter 13, with the team adjusting animations to work with the final geometry of the level, making it so the character can speak to the player from a better position.\n\nA major review of scenes that had been worked on throughout the past year was done too. This led to increased animation quality, either by reusing the latest mo-cap or fixing what was already in place. Many new animations were created and polish passes were done on animations to further improve scenes alongside general maintenance and bug fixing.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nThe VFX Programming team began implementing new quantum travel and boost effects. These effects are now in a basic functional state and are triggering at generally the correct time. Work will continue to expose timing controls and implement the functionality for adapting the effects to any size ship.\n\nWork on the fire hazard system is ramping up again, starting with implementing requests for controlling fire and its propagation for design purposes. On the visual side, the team are currently planning out the work required for reaching the visual goals set by VFX Art.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Social team progressed well in the final months of 2022, including continued scene work on their assigned chapters. New onboarding documentation was also created to better support new starters.\n\nNarrative\nNovember and December were busy months for the Narrative team. Firstly, they had a weeklong performance capture shoot in the UK to close out capturing wildlines for one of the enemy factions as well as narrative content scenes for a set piece. They also picked up content to support the new dynamic conversation system that will provide exciting opportunities for NPCs to chat with each other. This opens a lot of opportunities for contextual conversations that can help maintain the illusion of life and storytelling outside of dedicated scripted scenes.\n\nThe team continued to hold reviews with the various design teams to develop updated scripts and provide placeholder recordings. This is to ensure lines are not only creating the right dramatic beats but are also clearly indicating what the player is meant to do in order to progress.\n\nNarrative also met with Characters to ensure that all necessary costumes have been requested to support the various chapters that specific NPCs appear in.\n\n\u201cBased on the scope of the script, it shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise that there are a lot of characters that the players will meet over the course of the game. This list is complicated by the fact that some of the characters will have a schedule that will drive them from work to rest, necessitating a variety of clothing to be available.\u201d Narrative Team\n\nTech Animation\nTech Animation spent the end of the year focusing on head-asset processing.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been taking some long-overdue actors and starting the internal processing procedure to create their likenesses. This includes creating over 78 scans per head asset and processing them to the neutral head asset. Some of these actors were scanned over seven years ago on the main shoot for SQ42, so they look quite different these days!\u201d Tech Animation Team\n\nThe team take these complex scans and break them down into individual muscle movements and apply them to the facial rig asset, ultimately including them in the gene pool to give more variety to the heads and faces seen in-game.\n\nVFX\nThrough November and December, the VFX team progressed with the particle library overhaul. This included creating a custom level showing all available effects, which is useful for other VFX artists to quickly view the effects libraries.\n\nThe artists also continued to support the Art and Design teams on key locations and cinematic scenes.\n\nElsewhere, working alongside the VFX programmers, the new quantum-travel effects were made functional (previously they were in-engine prototypes). Having seen these effects properly working, there is still some tweaking to be done to better match the prototype.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION","de_DE":"Geschwader 42 Monatsbericht\nNovember & Dezember 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 01:18:2023\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,\n\nFAO-Geschwader 42 Rekruten.\n\nWillkommen zum Entwicklungsbericht f\u00fcr das Geschwader 42 im November und Dezember. Anbei findest du Details zu den neuesten Fortschritten in der Kampagne, einschlie\u00dflich der Kontrolle von Menschenmengen, der Ausbreitung von Feuer und der Entwicklung von Alien-Charakteren.\n\nVielen Dank f\u00fcr deine kontinuierliche Unterst\u00fctzung von Squadron 42.\n\nMit freundlichen Gr\u00fc\u00dfen,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Inhalt)\nGegen Ende des Jahres hat das KI-Inhaltsteam eine gro\u00dfe Anzahl von Aufgaben f\u00fcr Kapitel 15 abgeschlossen. Dazu geh\u00f6rte das Prototyping von Animationen f\u00fcr Menschenmassen und K\u00e4mpfer sowie die Entwicklung mehrerer Usables und Animationssets f\u00fcr niedergeschlagene Charaktere im Level.\n\nDas Team hat die Animationen gr\u00fcndlich \u00fcberarbeitet und die technische Herausforderung gemeistert, den Schwei\u00dfhelm, die Multi-Tool-Teile und die Schwei\u00dfeffekte aufeinander abzustimmen.\n\nEs wurde auch viel Arbeit geleistet, um eine Grundversion einer KI-Figur zu erstellen, die mit einer Vielzahl von Gebrauchsgegenst\u00e4nden in den Wohnr\u00e4umen interagiert. Auch das Verhalten und die Animationen der Br\u00fcckenbesatzung wurden weiter \u00fcberarbeitet und sehen jetzt richtig gut aus.\n\nDie Animation unterst\u00fctzte die KI-Funktionen mit dem Tragen von Kisten, was zu einer Reihe von erheblichen visuellen Verbesserungen f\u00fchrte.\n\nEs wurde auch viel Produktions- und Organisationsarbeit geleistet. Das Ergebnis ist ein umfassender Animationsplan, in dem alle bekannten Arbeiten aufgef\u00fchrt sind, die erforderlich sind, damit SQ42 inhaltlich vollst\u00e4ndig ist. Als Teil davon wird das Team nun fr\u00fcher in der Pipeline Usables und Verhaltensweisen in die endg\u00fcltigen Spielstufen implementieren.\n\nKI (Funktionen)\nLetztes Jahr hat das Team KI-Funktionen in bemannte Gesch\u00fctzt\u00fcrme eingebaut. Wie andere Objekte, die NSCs nutzen k\u00f6nnen m\u00fcssen, wurden die Gesch\u00fctzt\u00fcrme als Usables eingerichtet, die die Logik und Animationen beschreiben, die f\u00fcr ihre Nutzung erforderlich sind. Wie beim Spieler sind die Animationen mit der Bewegung des Gesch\u00fctzturms synchronisiert, so dass die KI den Gesch\u00fctzturm an den Griffen packt und auf der Stelle dreht, um horizontal zu zielen, und den Turm nach oben und unten kippt, um vertikal zu zielen.\n\nDas Team arbeitete au\u00dferdem daran, eine Vielzahl von Panik-, Duck- und Kapitulationsverhalten f\u00fcr unbewaffnete Zivilisten und feindliche NSCs zu implementieren, denen die Munition und die Waffen ausgegangen sind. Wenn ein unbewaffneter Zivilist sieht, dass ein Feind eine Waffe im Anschlag hat, benachrichtigt er die Charaktere in der N\u00e4he mit einer Wildline und rennt dann in Panik zu einem versteckten Punkt mit Deckung. Wenn ihre Deckung gef\u00e4hrdet ist, rennen sie weiter vor dem Feind weg. Unbewaffnete Charaktere, die diese Information h\u00f6ren, drehen sich um, um auf den Feind zu reagieren und geraten dann selbst in Panik. Indem sie die Geschwindigkeit, mit der die NSCs reagieren, nach dem Zufallsprinzip bestimmen, k\u00f6nnen die Entwickler eine nat\u00fcrlich wirkende Bandbreite an Verhaltensweisen einer Menschenmenge erzeugen, die auf eine Bedrohung reagiert.\n\nBewaffnete Feinde, denen die Munition und die Waffen ausgegangen sind, rennen in Deckung und suchen nach Munition und Waffen, die sie aufheben k\u00f6nnen. Wenn ihre Deckung aufgedeckt wird, \u00fcberlegen sie es sich noch einmal anders und rennen zu einer neuen Position. Wenn der Spieler auf einen bewaffneten oder unbewaffneten NSC zielt, bleibt dieser auf der Stelle stehen, dreht sich aber zum Spieler um und durchl\u00e4uft eine Reihe von Kapitulationsanimationen, w\u00e4hrend er mit dem Spieler kommuniziert.\n\nAls Teil des Kampfes hat das Team an der Sanit\u00e4ter-KI gearbeitet, damit die NSCs kampfunf\u00e4hige Mitspieler\/innen finden k\u00f6nnen, die wiederbelebt werden m\u00fcssen, und sie mit Hilfe von Sanit\u00e4tern wieder in den Kampf eingreifen k\u00f6nnen. Dazu mussten zahlreiche bestehende Funktionen aus verschiedenen Bereichen zusammengef\u00fchrt werden, darunter das nutzbare System (\"use\"-Kanal zur Wiederbelebung), verbrauchbare Gegenst\u00e4nde (der Med-Pen), synchronisierte Animationen (zwischen den beiden NSCs), Ragdoll-in-Animationen (damit die Charaktere von der Ragdoll aufstehen k\u00f6nnen) und Subsumption (um das Verhalten zu skripten). Der n\u00e4chste Schritt ist die Integration dieses Verhaltens mit dem Standardverhalten \"Reagieren auf vermeintlich tote K\u00f6rper\", um komplexere Verhaltensweisen zu erzeugen.\n\nAI Features hat auch mit der Arbeit an einem neuen nicht-menschlichen Charakter begonnen. Dazu wurde ein neuer Kernsatz von Animationen f\u00fcr die neue Kreatur erstellt und in ein bestehendes Grundger\u00fcst eingef\u00fcgt. Von dort aus konnten sie schnell die Kernfunktionalit\u00e4t entwickeln, die dann an das Designteam zur R\u00fcckmeldung weitergegeben wurde.\n\nGegen Ende des Jahres wurden einige Arbeitsbereiche wieder aufgegriffen, um lose Enden zu beseitigen. Der erste davon war das Verhalten der Vanduul-Untersuchung. W\u00e4hrend des \"Katz und Maus\"-Spielabschnitts untersuchen die Vanduul nun die L\u00fcftungssch\u00e4chte im Raum mit unterschiedlichen Animationen f\u00fcr verschiedene Aufmerksamkeitsstufen.\n\nNach dem Feedback des Design-Teams wurden neue Funktionalit\u00e4ten f\u00fcr die Genauigkeitsberechnung hinzugef\u00fcgt. Dazu geh\u00f6rten ein Gnadentimer, die Schusszeit und die Modifikatoren f\u00fcr die Genauigkeit seit dem letzten Mal: Der Gnadentimer gibt dem Spieler\/der Spielerin eine Chance, vor schwerem Beschuss zu fliehen, indem er\/sie die KI f\u00fcr einen bestimmten Zeitraum ungenau werden l\u00e4sst, wenn die Gesundheit des Spielers\/der Spielerin einen bestimmten Wert erreicht hat. Der Feuerzeit-Genauigkeitsmodifikator reduziert die Genauigkeit \u00fcber Feuerperioden f\u00fcr \u00e4hnliche Zwecke. Der Modifikator f\u00fcr die Genauigkeit nach der Zeit, in der der Spieler aus der Deckung kommt, gibt dem Spieler eine Schonfrist, in der die Genauigkeit der Angreifer geringer ist. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Berechnung der Treffsicherheitsdistanz ge\u00e4ndert, so dass sie nun auf einer Kurve basiert, um eine bessere Kontrolle zu erm\u00f6glichen.\n\nKI (Tech)\nIn den letzten Monaten des Jahres 2022 arbeitete das KI-Tech-Team an Funktionen, die sowohl f\u00fcr das Persistent Universe als auch f\u00fcr Squadron 42 ben\u00f6tigt werden.\n\nDas Team arbeitete weiter an komplexeren Navigationsverbindungen, um die F\u00e4higkeiten der NSCs und ihre Bewegungsm\u00f6glichkeiten zu erweitern, einschlie\u00dflich der Implementierung von Adaptern f\u00fcr Luftschleusen und Aufz\u00fcge. Jetzt wissen NSCs, dass sie, um eine Luftschleuse zu durchqueren, mit mehreren Konsolen interagieren m\u00fcssen, um den Druck einzustellen und die T\u00fcr zu \u00f6ffnen. F\u00fcr Aufz\u00fcge wurden Navigationslinks erstellt, um mehrere Stockwerke miteinander zu verbinden. Au\u00dferdem wurde ein Navigationslink erstellt, der jedes Mal, wenn ein Aufzug in einem Stockwerk anh\u00e4lt, eine erneute Verbindung mit den Dreiecken des Navigationsnetzes anfordert, damit die NSCs ein- und aussteigen k\u00f6nnen. Anhand der Navigationsverbindungen wei\u00df ein NSC nun, wie er einen Aufzug zu einem bestimmten Stockwerk anfordern kann. Au\u00dferdem wurden neue Ereignisbenachrichtigungen hinzugef\u00fcgt, die der Aufzug sendet, wenn er in einem Stockwerk ankommt, damit der Akteur wei\u00df, dass er ein- oder aussteigen muss.\n\nEnde des Jahres wurde die Basisfunktionalit\u00e4t f\u00fcr NSCs, die Bodenfahrzeuge fahren, fertiggestellt. NSCs k\u00f6nnen sich jetzt zu einem Fahrzeug bewegen und sich auf den Fahrersitz setzen, einen f\u00fcr die Gr\u00f6\u00dfe des Fahrzeugs geeigneten Weg finden und ihn entlangfahren. Diese Arbeit umfasste die Erstellung einer neuen Subsumption-Aufgabe, einer neuen Art von Bewegungsanforderung und die Aktualisierung des Bewegungsplaners, damit dieser wei\u00df, wie die Anforderung zu bearbeiten ist. Das Team f\u00fcgte auch neue Funktionen zu den Navigationssystemen hinzu, die Objekte markieren, die bei der Erstellung des Navigationsnetzes ignoriert werden sollen.\n\nDie NPC-Wahrnehmung war ein weiteres wichtiges Thema, an dem gegen Ende des Jahres gearbeitet wurde. Das Team hat einen neuen Adapter f\u00fcr Aktionsbereiche implementiert, mit dem Helligkeit\/Dunkelheit festgelegt werden kann, was die visuelle Wahrnehmung der NSCs beeinflussen wird.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurde ein neuer Extender entwickelt, der Motorenger\u00e4usche als Stimuli weitergibt und NSCs auf Fahrzeuge in ihrer N\u00e4he aufmerksam macht. Dies war der erste Schritt zu Verhaltensweisen, die auf Bodenfahrzeuge und Raumschiffe reagieren.\n\nW\u00e4hrend der Arbeit an den Wahrnehmungsverbesserungen haben die Entwickler auch die visuelle Wahrnehmung der KI durch Glas verbessert. Jetzt k\u00f6nnen NSCs Ziele hinter Glas erkennen und verstehen auch, dass sie auf die andere Seite gehen m\u00fcssen, um auf sie zu schie\u00dfen.\n\nBei der Fortbewegung wurden die Eigenschaften f\u00fcr scharfe Kurven und die Art und Weise, wie sie bei Alien-Charakteren oder bei Gehgeschwindigkeit ausgel\u00f6st werden, weiter verbessert. In diesem Zusammenhang wurde mit der Arbeit an der Verfolgungs-Technologie begonnen, die in Verbindung mit dem Verhalten der Kumpel-KI eingesetzt wird. Dazu verbesserte das Team das sanfte Anhalten, die Kollisionsvermeidung mit Spielern und die Handhabung der Geschwindigkeit, die auf der \u00c4nderung der Geschwindigkeit des Anf\u00fchrers basiert.\n\nF\u00fcr das Apollo Subsumption Tool wurden neue Funktionen hinzugef\u00fcgt, um den Subsumption Mastergraph zu erstellen und zu ver\u00e4ndern. Viele R\u00fcckmeldungen der Designer wurden umgesetzt, z. B. die Hinzuf\u00fcgung einer Schnittstelle zum Erstellen von Rollen und Unterrollen, die Funktion zum Auffinden von Referenzen, die verbesserte Interaktion mit Funktionen und der Registerkarte Multigraph sowie Verbesserungen beim Einrasten im Raster.\n\nKI (Fahrzeuge)\nDas Team f\u00fcr Fahrzeugfunktionen arbeitete an wichtigen Verbesserungen und Funktionen f\u00fcr die Flug-KI und schloss die Arbeit an mehreren Abschnitten ab, in denen Schiffe Akteure auf dem Boden angreifen.\n\nDiese Arbeit dreht sich um eine Umgestaltung der zentralen Kampflogik:\n\n\"Wir arbeiten an einem abwechslungsreicheren und interessanteren Schiffskampferlebnis als bisher. Deshalb planen wir \u00c4nderungen an der Kampf-KI und testen sie in SQ42, um das gew\u00fcnschte Erlebnis zu erreichen. KI-Fahrzeug-Team\n\nAnimation\nIn den letzten Monaten des Jahres 2022 arbeitete das Animationsteam an Vanduul-Exekutionen, Zero-G-Spielerbewegungen und verschiedenen Animations-Sets f\u00fcr das Hintergrundleben. Neben neuen Waffen wurden auch Takedowns auf verschiedenen Schwierigkeitsstufen hinzugef\u00fcgt. Au\u00dferdem wurden Mo-Cap-Aufnahmen f\u00fcr eine Reihe weiterer Szenen und Gameplay-Bed\u00fcrfnisse gemacht und Gesichtsanimationen f\u00fcr verschiedene Story- und Hintergrundfiguren erstellt.\n\nKunst (Charaktere)\nDie Concept Artists arbeiteten an Konzepten f\u00fcr Tattoos und R\u00fcstungsvariationen f\u00fcr die Screaming Galsons, um die Fraktion zu vervollst\u00e4ndigen, und setzten die Arbeit an einem wichtigen Kampagnencharakter fort.\n\nAu\u00dferdem arbeiteten sie an den R\u00fcstungen der Screaming Galsons, dem Fluganzug des Navy-Piloten und einer neuen Kreatur.\n\nTech Art hat den Hauptanzug der Marine geskinnt und Assets f\u00fcr die Deckcrew, die Ingenieure und die Kanoniere erstellt.\n\nKunst (Umwelt)\nDie Umgebungsgrafik n\u00e4herte sich dem Inhalt mehrerer Kapitelstandorte, einschlie\u00dflich Kapitel 7 und 11.\n\nDerzeit sind Asset-Kits in Arbeit, um die Raumgestaltung f\u00fcr die flugbasierten Kapitel zu vervollst\u00e4ndigen, w\u00e4hrend die Arbeit an den Vanduul-Schiffen fortgesetzt wird, da sich das Team darauf vorbereitet, sie zum Einrichten zu \u00fcbergeben.\n\nMotor\nNovember und Dezember waren arbeitsreiche Monate f\u00fcr das Physikteam. Neben einer Menge Fehlerbehebungen und der Unterst\u00fctzung der Alpha 3.18 wurde an verschiedenen Optimierungen gearbeitet. So wurden zum Beispiel die Kosten f\u00fcr die \u00dcberpr\u00fcfung der \u00dcberlappung von OBB-Teilen und Gitterzellen in einem einzigen Aufruf f\u00fcr einen Gitterknoten amortisiert, anstatt Zelle f\u00fcr Zelle. Au\u00dferdem wurde das Sub-Stepping f\u00fcr angeh\u00e4ngte und KI-gesteuerte NSCs auf dem Server deaktiviert, um die Leistung der Actor-Entity-Steps zu verbessern. Mehrere interne Datenstrukturen wurden komprimiert und neu geordnet, um den Speicherplatzbedarf zu verringern und die Ausrichtung der Mitglieder zu verbessern.\n\nBeim Renderer aktivierte das Team standardm\u00e4\u00dfig die Gen12-Pipeline und das Rendering von Szenen (dies wird in Alpha 3.18 eingef\u00fchrt), was ein wichtiger Meilenstein auf dem Weg zum Abschluss der Gen12-Umstellung und der Bereitstellung eines Vulkan-Backends ist. Nach der Arbeit an den Partikeln im Oktober wurden weitere wichtige Fortschritte erzielt. Die Gen12-Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Refraktion und Rendering mit halber Aufl\u00f6sung f\u00fcr GPU-Partikel wurde hinzugef\u00fcgt, die Partikelstufe und der GPU-Handler wurden \u00fcberarbeitet und die Hintergrundkompilierung der Partikel-Shader wurde aktiviert. Au\u00dferdem werden die f\u00fcr jede Hierarchiestufe aufgeteilten Partikel jetzt so aktualisiert, dass die UAV-Ressourcen bei jedem Durchlauf gleich bleiben und sich nicht ver\u00e4ndern. Au\u00dferdem wurde der Debug-Visualisierungscode f\u00fcr verschiedene Systeme auf Gen12 portiert und das PSO-Caching f\u00fcr Projektile und Partikel wurde verbessert.\n\nIm Bereich Atmosph\u00e4re und volumetrische Wolken wurde ein erster Entwurf f\u00fcr einen neuen temporalen Rendering-Modus eingereicht, an dem in den kommenden Monaten weiter gearbeitet wird, um eine bessere Rendering-Leistung von raymarkierten volumetrischen Wolken und der Atmosph\u00e4re zu erreichen. Au\u00dferdem wurden zusammen mit Tech Art verschiedene Optionen f\u00fcr eine verfeinerte Wolkengestaltung er\u00f6rtert, die hoffentlich bald ihren Weg in eine Ver\u00f6ffentlichung finden werden.\n\nBei der Core-Engine hat das Team die Arbeit an der zweiten Version der p4k-Datenunterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr die Engine, das Spiel und die Tools abgeschlossen. In diesem Zusammenhang bietet das System jetzt auch einen effizienten Lock-Mechanismus f\u00fcr alte pak-Dateien und einen viel schnelleren Zugriff auf Dateien innerhalb von pak-Dateien (eingebettet in die p4k-Hauptdatei), was das Laden von Objektcontainern erheblich verbessert. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Zuordnung von Threads auf Intel-CPUs mit P\/E-Kernen neu geschrieben - kritische Threads wie Haupt-, Render- und Netzwerk-Threads werden nun immer auf Leistungskernen ausgef\u00fchrt, um die sonst schlechte Leistung auf betroffenen CPUs zu vermeiden. Diese \u00c4nderungen werden derzeit auf der PTU verifiziert. Au\u00dferdem wurde die Engine um die Unterst\u00fctzung von Seitengr\u00f6\u00dfen gr\u00f6\u00dfer als 4kb (auch bekannt als \"huge pages\") erweitert (derzeit nur unter Linux). Sie wird derzeit f\u00fcr Stack-, Text- und Datensegmente sowie f\u00fcr Physikzuweisungen verwendet. Die Verwendung gro\u00dfer Seiten verringert den Druck auf den TLB-Cache, den Teil der CPU, der virtuelle in physische Adressen \u00fcbersetzt, was die Leistung verbessern sollte. Mit Clang f\u00fchrte allein das Verschieben des Textsegments auf riesige Seiten zu einem Geschwindigkeitszuwachs von 7 %. Au\u00dferdem wurde die neueste Version von Bink2 integriert und einige Fehler im Zusammenhang mit der Audiowiedergabe behoben (die sich als zuf\u00e4llige Klicks w\u00e4hrend der Wiedergabe \u00e4u\u00dfern).\n\nEin weiterer Bereich, in dem gute Fortschritte erzielt wurden, war der Remote-Shader-Compile-Server, der zum Erstellen von Shader-Caches usw. verwendet wird. Aufgrund der zunehmenden Nutzung des Servers durch die Entwicklungsteams und den Build-Prozess wurde eine angemessene Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Fallback-Agenten sowie eine Server-Drosselung implementiert, um mit Zeiten extremer Last umzugehen und eine verteiltere Kompilierung zu erm\u00f6glichen. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt war es auch sinnvoll, verschiedene Teile des Servercodes neu zu schreiben, um mehr Robustheit, bessere Protokollierung und h\u00f6here Leistung zu erreichen. Schlie\u00dflich wurde die Vereinheitlichung der Formen abgeschlossen und die Unterst\u00fctzung von Entity-Bereichen hinzugef\u00fcgt. Ein Copy\/Paste-Fehler im Entity-Aggregate-Manager, der viele unn\u00f6tige Speicherzugriffe verursachte, wurde behoben, und das Laden von Vis-Areas wurde \u00fcberarbeitet, um die Batch-Konvertierung von fr\u00fcheren Versionen serialisierter Vis-Areas-Daten zu unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nFunktionen (Fahrzeug)\nIn den letzten beiden Monaten des Jahres wurde bei den Fahrzeug-Features die vollst\u00e4ndige \u00dcberarbeitung der Quantenfahrt abgeschlossen, die nun zum Testen in Squadron 42 integriert wird. Es handelt sich dabei um eine Fortsetzung des in fr\u00fcheren Berichten erw\u00e4hnten Quantenboost-Features und verbessert die Implementierung des Features insgesamt erheblich. Au\u00dferdem unterst\u00fctzten sie das VFX-Team bei der Integration neuer Effekte f\u00fcr die Quantenfahrt.\n\nAu\u00dferdem arbeiteten sie an einer \"R\u00fcckruf\"-Funktion, die f\u00fcr verschiedene Milit\u00e4rschiffe im Spiel verf\u00fcgbar ist. Diese nutzt die KI-Pfadfindungstechnologie, die in der PU verwendet wird, und erm\u00f6glicht es, verschiedene SQ42-Levels zu absolvieren.\n\nVehicle Features hat das Zielsystem grundlegend \u00fcberarbeitet und arbeitet derzeit mit der Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che zusammen, um neue Zielfernrohre und Pips zu implementieren, die das System erg\u00e4nzen. Dies wird die Zielgenauigkeit und -zuverl\u00e4ssigkeit erheblich verbessern. Es wird derzeit getestet, um das Kampferlebnis zu verbessern.\n\nGegen Ende des Jahres 2022 wurde viel Zeit in die \u00dcberarbeitung des Multifunktionsdisplays (MFD), des Heads-up-Displays (HUD) und der Fahrzeug-UI investiert.\n\n\"Das Basis-MFD-System macht gro\u00dfe Fortschritte und wir haben die meisten MFD-Bildschirme f\u00fcr Schiffe mithilfe des neuen Building Blocks-Systems teilweise implementiert. Wir fangen gerade erst an, das neue HUD zu bauen, das mit Konfigurationsoptionen und MFD-Wurfoptionen tief in das MFD-System integriert ist.\" Team Fahrzeugfunktionen\n\nDie Entwicklung der Steuerfl\u00e4chen wurde fortgesetzt und in den letzten zwei Monaten hat das Team das Abw\u00fcrgen und die \u00dcberg\u00e4nge verbessert. Wenn ein Schiff z. B. feststellt, dass es ins Stocken zu geraten droht, kann es automatisch die Schubd\u00fcsen aktivieren, um es vor dem Absturz zu bewahren. Wenn ein Schiff feststellt, dass es schnell genug fliegt, um den Steuerfl\u00e4chenflug aufrechtzuerhalten, kann es automatisch seine Man\u00f6vriertriebwerke abschalten und nur noch mit den Steuerfl\u00e4chen fliegen. Das verbessert die atmosph\u00e4rischen Flugabschnitte in der Kampagne erheblich.\n\nGameplay Story\nDie Abteilung Gameplay Story arbeitete im November und Dezember an einer Reihe verschiedener Aufgaben, darunter die Vorbereitung und der Dreh von Mo-Cap f\u00fcr die Aktualisierung verschiedener Szenen. Auch Mo-Cap von fr\u00fcheren Drehs wurde verwendet. Zum Beispiel, um den Charakteren zu helfen, wieder in die Schiffe zu steigen, nachdem sie mit dem Spieler gesprochen haben.\n\nEine Szene in Kapitel 8 wurde aktualisiert, um sicherzustellen, dass die Spielfigur mit einer Vielzahl von Requisiten interagieren kann, anstatt nur visuelle Inspektionen durchzuf\u00fchren. Das Team hat daf\u00fcr gesorgt, dass die Figur KI-Posen verwendet, damit sie bei Bedarf aus der Szene ausbrechen kann. Die Figur interagiert auch gut mit dem Argo-MPUV, so dass sie in die Idris fliegen kann, bevor sie ihre Szene beginnt.\n\nEin weiterer Bereich, der weiter erforscht wurde, war das Entriegeln und Holstern. Diesmal konnte das Team eine Figur dazu bringen, das Multi-Tool und das Datapad genau an der Stelle zu nehmen, an der es an der Figur befestigt war, und es wieder zur\u00fcckzustellen.\n\nAuch an den Charakteren in Kapitel 4 und 8 wurden einige Aktualisierungen vorgenommen. Dazu geh\u00f6rte die Verwendung des neuesten weiblichen Gehzyklus, damit die KI Szenen nahtlos betreten und verlassen kann.\n\nEin wichtiges Update wurde an einer Szene in Kapitel 13 vorgenommen. Das Team passte die Animationen an die endg\u00fcltige Geometrie des Levels an, so dass die Spielfigur aus einer besseren Position mit dem Spieler sprechen kann.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurden die Szenen, an denen im letzten Jahr gearbeitet worden war, gr\u00fcndlich \u00fcberarbeitet. Dadurch konnte die Qualit\u00e4t der Animationen verbessert werden, indem entweder das neueste Mo-Cap verwendet oder das, was bereits vorhanden war, verbessert wurde. Es wurden viele neue Animationen erstellt und die Animationen aufpoliert, um die Szenen weiter zu verbessern und allgemeine Wartungsarbeiten und Fehler zu beheben.\n\nGrafik & VFX-Programmierung\nDas VFX-Programmierteam begann mit der Implementierung neuer Quantenreise- und Boost-Effekte. Diese Effekte sind jetzt in einem funktionsf\u00e4higen Grundzustand und werden im Allgemeinen zum richtigen Zeitpunkt ausgel\u00f6st. Die Arbeit wird fortgesetzt, um die Timing-Kontrollen freizulegen und die Funktionalit\u00e4t zu implementieren, mit der die Effekte an jede Schiffsgr\u00f6\u00dfe angepasst werden k\u00f6nnen.\n\nDie Arbeit am Feuergef\u00e4hrdungssystem nimmt wieder Fahrt auf und beginnt mit der Implementierung von Anforderungen zur Kontrolle des Feuers und seiner Ausbreitung f\u00fcr Designzwecke. Auf der visuellen Seite plant das Team derzeit die Arbeit, die erforderlich ist, um die von VFX Art gesetzten visuellen Ziele zu erreichen.\n\nLevel Design\nDas Sozialteam kam in den letzten Monaten des Jahres 2022 gut voran und setzte die Arbeit an den ihnen zugewiesenen Kapiteln fort. Au\u00dferdem wurde eine neue Onboarding-Dokumentation erstellt, um Neueinsteiger\/innen besser zu unterst\u00fctzen.\n\nNarrative\nNovember und Dezember waren arbeitsreiche Monate f\u00fcr das Narrative Team. Zum einen fand ein einw\u00f6chiger Performance-Capture-Dreh in Gro\u00dfbritannien statt, um die Aufnahme von Wildlinien f\u00fcr eine der feindlichen Fraktionen abzuschlie\u00dfen, und zum anderen wurden Szenen f\u00fcr ein Set Piece aufgenommen. Au\u00dferdem haben sie Inhalte f\u00fcr das neue dynamische Konversationssystem aufgenommen, das den NSCs spannende M\u00f6glichkeiten bietet, miteinander zu reden. Dies er\u00f6ffnet viele M\u00f6glichkeiten f\u00fcr kontextbezogene Gespr\u00e4che, die dazu beitragen k\u00f6nnen, die Illusion von Leben und Erz\u00e4hlung au\u00dferhalb von geskripteten Szenen aufrechtzuerhalten.\n\nDas Team hat weiterhin Besprechungen mit den verschiedenen Design-Teams abgehalten, um aktualisierte Skripte zu entwickeln und Platzhalter-Aufnahmen zu erstellen. Damit soll sichergestellt werden, dass die Zeilen nicht nur die richtigen dramatischen Beats erzeugen, sondern auch klar angeben, was der Spieler tun soll, um weiterzukommen.\n\nDie Narrative haben sich auch mit den Charakteren getroffen, um sicherzustellen, dass alle notwendigen Kost\u00fcme f\u00fcr die verschiedenen Kapitel, in denen bestimmte NSCs auftreten, angefordert wurden.\n\n\"Angesichts des Umfangs des Drehbuchs sollte es nicht \u00fcberraschen, dass die Spieler\/innen im Laufe des Spiels auf eine Vielzahl von Charakteren treffen werden. Diese Liste wird durch die Tatsache verkompliziert, dass einige der Charaktere einen Zeitplan haben, der sie von der Arbeit bis zur Erholung treibt, so dass eine Vielzahl von Kleidungsst\u00fccken zur Verf\u00fcgung stehen muss.\" Erz\u00e4hlerteam\n\nTechnische Animation\nDas Tech Animation Team hat sich Ende des Jahres auf die Bearbeitung von Kopf-Assets konzentriert.\n\n\"Wir haben uns einige l\u00e4ngst \u00fcberf\u00e4llige Schauspieler geschnappt und mit dem internen Bearbeitungsprozess begonnen, um ihre Konterfeis zu erstellen. Dazu geh\u00f6rt, dass wir \u00fcber 78 Scans pro Kopf-Asset erstellen und sie zu einem neutralen Kopf-Asset verarbeiten. Einige dieser Schauspieler wurden vor \u00fcber sieben Jahren bei den Hauptdreharbeiten f\u00fcr SQ42 gescannt, sie sehen also heute ganz anders aus!\" Tech Animation Team\n\nDas Team zerlegt diese komplexen Scans in einzelne Muskelbewegungen und wendet sie auf das Gesichts-Rig-Asset an, um sie schlie\u00dflich in den Gen-Pool einzubringen und den K\u00f6pfen und Gesichtern im Spiel mehr Vielfalt zu verleihen.\n\nVFX\nIm November und Dezember machte das VFX-Team Fortschritte bei der \u00dcberarbeitung der Partikelbibliothek. Dazu geh\u00f6rte auch die Erstellung einer benutzerdefinierten Ebene, in der alle verf\u00fcgbaren Effekte angezeigt werden, damit andere VFX-K\u00fcnstler die Effektbibliotheken schnell einsehen k\u00f6nnen.\n\nAu\u00dferdem unterst\u00fctzten die Artists die Art- und Design-Teams bei wichtigen Drehorten und Filmszenen.\n\nIn Zusammenarbeit mit den VFX-Programmierern wurden auch die neuen Quantenreise-Effekte funktionsf\u00e4hig gemacht (zuvor waren sie Prototypen in der Engine). Nachdem wir gesehen haben, dass diese Effekte richtig funktionieren, m\u00fcssen wir sie noch optimieren, damit sie dem Prototyp besser entsprechen.\n\nWIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT WIEDER...\n\/\/ ENDE DER \u00dcBERTRAGUNG","zh_CN":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report\nNovember & December 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 01:18:2023\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits.\n\nWelcome to November and December's Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including crowd control, fire propagation, and alien character development.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Content)\nToward the end of the year, the AI Content team completed a significant number of tasks for chapter 15. This included prototyping animations for crowds and combatants alongside developing several usables and animation sets for dejected characters around the level.\n\nThe welding engineer also received a lot of improvements; the team made an extensive pass on the animations and progressed with the technical challenges of getting the welding helmet, Multi-Tool parts, and welding effects working together.\n\nConsiderable work was also done to get a basic version of an AI character interacting with a variety of usables found in living spaces. The bridge crew behavior and animations also received further iteration and are now starting to look polished.\n\nAnimation supported AI Features with box carrying, which resulted in a number of significant visual improvements.\n\nA large amount of production and organization work was done too, resulting in a comprehensive animation schedule that details all the known work required for SQ42 to be content-complete. As part of this, the team will now implement usables and behaviors into the final game levels earlier in the pipeline.\n\nAI (Features)\nLast year, the team implemented AI functionality into manned turrets. Like other objects that NPCs need to be able to use, the turrets have been set up as usables, which describes the logic and animations required to use them. As with the player, animations are synchronized with the turret movement so that the AI grips the turret by its handles while rotating on the spot to aim horizontally and tilts the turret up and down to aim vertically.\n\nThe team also worked on implementing a wide range of panic, cower, and surrender behaviors for both unarmed civilians and enemy NPCs that have run out of ammunition and weapons. If an unarmed civilian sees that an enemy has an unholstered weapon, they will notify characters nearby using a wildline and then panic-run to a hidden point of cover. They will continue to run away from the enemy if their cover is compromised. Unarmed characters that hear this information will turn to react to the enemy and then panic themselves. By randomizing the speed at which the NPCs react, the devs can generate a natural-looking range of behaviors from a crowd responding to a threat.\n\nArmed enemies that have run out of ammo and weapons will run to cover while searching for valid ammo and weapons to pick up. Again, if their cover is exposed, they will reevaluate and run to a new position. If the player aims at an armed or unarmed NPC, they will stay on the spot but turn to face the player and move through a sequence of surrender animations whilst communicating with the player.\n\nAs part of combat, the team worked on the medic AI behaviors to allow NPCs to find incapacitated peers that need reviving and use med-pens to get them back into the fight. This involved bringing together numerous existing functionalities from various areas, including the usable system (\u2018use\u2019 channel to revive), consumable items (the med-pen), synchronized animations (between the two NPCs), ragdoll into animations (to allow characters to stand-up from ragdoll), and Subsumption (to script the behavior). The next stage is integrating this behavior with the standard \u2018react to presumed-dead bodies\u2019 behavior to generate more complex behaviors.\n\nAI Features also started work on a new non-human character. This involved creating a new core set of animations for the new creature and slotting it into an existing basic framework. From there, they were able to rapidly develop the core functionality, which was passed to the Design team for feedback.\n\nToward the end of the year, a few areas of work were revisited to tidy up loose ends. The first of these was the Vanduul investigation behavior. During the \u2018cat and mouse\u2019 gameplay section, the Vanduul will now investigate the floor vents in the room with different animations for different alertness levels.\n\nAfter feedback from the Design team, new functionalities were added for the accuracy calculation. This included adding a mercy timer, firing time, and time-since-seen accuracy modifiers: The mercy timer gives the player a fighting chance to escape from heavy fire by making the AI inaccurate for a set period when the player's health has reached a certain threshold. The firing-time accuracy modifier reduces the accuracy over firing periods for similar purposes. The time-since-seen accuracy modifier allows the player a grace period after moving out of cover during which the attackers\u2019 accuracy will be lower. The accuracy distance calculation was also changed to be curve-based for greater control.\n\nAI (Tech)\nDuring the last months of 2022, the AI Tech team progressed with features required for both the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42.\n\nThe team continued to iterate on more complex navigation links to extend the capabilities of NPCs and where they\u2019re able to move to, including implementing adapters for airlocks and elevators. Now, NPCs will know that in order to traverse an airlock, they will need to interact with multiple consoles to adjust the pressure and open the door. For Elevators, navigation links were created to connect multiple floors. A navigation link was also created to request a reconnection with the navigation mesh triangles each time an elevator stops at a floor to allow NPCs to transition in and out. Based on navigation link connections, an NPC will now know how to request an elevator to go to a specific floor. New event notifications were also added, sent by the elevator when it arrives at a floor, so that the actor will know to get on or off.\n\nAt the end of the year, the base functionality for NPCs driving ground vehicles was completed. NPCs can now move to a vehicle and get into the driver\u2019s seat, find a path suitable for the size of the vehicle, and drive along it. This work involved the creation of a new Subsumption task, a new movement request type, and updating the movement planner to know how to process the request. The team also added new functionality to the navigation systems that marks entities to be ignored during navigation-mesh generation.\n\nNPC perception was another major topic worked on toward the end of the year. The team implemented a new adapter for action areas to specify lightness\/darkness, which will influence NPCs' visual perception.\n\nA new extender to propagate engine sounds as stimuli was also created, which will make NPCs aware of vehicles in their proximity. This was the first step toward behaviors that react to ground vehicles and spaceships.\n\nWhile working on perception improvements, the devs fixed AI visual perception through glass. Now, NPCs will be able to detect targets behind glass and also understand that, in order to shoot at them, they need to move to the other side.\n\nFor locomotion, improvements continued on the sharp-turn assets and how they\u2019re triggered for alien characters or at walking speeds. Related to this, work began on \u2018following\u2019 tech, which will be used in connection with the buddy AI behavior. For this, the team improved soft stops, collision avoidance with players, and speed handling based on the leader\u2019s change in speed.\n\nFor the Apollo Subsumption tool, new functionality was added to create and modify the Subsumption mastergraph. A lot of feedback from the designers was implemented, including the addition of an interface to create roles and sub-roles, find reference functionality, improved interaction with functions and the multigraph tab, and improvements to grid snapping.\n\nAI (Vehicles)\nThe Vehicle Feature team worked on significant improvements and features for flight AI, including largely completing their work on several sections involving ships attacking actors on the ground.\n\nThis work revolves around a redesign of the core combat logic:\n\n\u201cWe\u2019re working toward a more varied and interesting ship combat experience than before, so we are planning out and making changes to combat AI and testing them in SQ42 to get the experience we want.\u201d AI Vehicle Team\n\nAnimation\nThe last months of 2022 saw Gameplay Animation working on Vanduul executions, zero-g player movement, and various animation sets for background life. They also added skill-level variation to takedowns alongside new weapons. They then shot mo-cap for a variety of additional scenes and gameplay needs and created facial animation for various story and background characters.\n\nArt (Characters)\nThe concept artists worked on tattoo and armor variation concepts for the Screaming Galsons to help fill out the faction, and continued work on a key campaign character.\n\nThe artists also worked on the Screaming Galsons\u2019 armors along with the navy-pilot flightsuit and a new creature.\n\nTech Art skinned the main navy jumpsuit and paired assets for the deck crew, engineers, and gunners.\n\nArt (Environment)\nEnvironment Art approached content-complete on several chapter locations, including chapters 7 and 11.\n\nAsset kits are currently in progress to help flesh out space-scaping for the flight-based chapters, while Vanduul ship work continues as the team prepares to hand them over to be set up.\n\nEngine\nNovember and December were busy months for the Physics team. Aside from plenty of bug fixing and supporting Alpha 3.18, they worked on various optimizations. For example, the cost of performing part OBB vs grid cell overlap checks was amortized by performing them in one call for a grid node instead of cell by cell. Also, sub stepping for attached and AI-controlled NPCs on the server was disabled to bring back actor entity step performance. Several internal data structures were compacted and reordered for a smaller memory footprint and better member alignment.\n\nOn the renderer, the team enabled the Gen12 pipeline and scene rendering by default (this will be featured in Alpha 3.18), which is a major milestone on the road toward completing the Gen12 transition and providing a Vulkan backend. Following October\u2019s work on particles, further substantial progress was made. Gen12 refraction and half-resolution rendering support for GPU particles was added, the particle stage and GPU handler refactored, and particle shader background compilation was enabled. Furthermore, particles split for each hierarchy level are now updated in a way that ensures UAV resources stay consistent across each pass and don't change. Moreover, debug visualization code for various systems was ported to Gen12, and PSO caching for projectiles and particles was improved.\n\nRegarding atmosphere and volumetric clouds, an initial draft of a new temporal render mode was submitted and will continue to be worked on in the coming months to provide better rendering performance of raymarched volumetric clouds and atmosphere. Furthermore, various options for refined cloud shaping were brainstormed with Tech Art and will hopefully find their way into a release soon.\n\nOn core engine, the team completed work on v2 of p4k data file support for the engine, game, and tool side. On that note, the system now also provides an efficient lock mechanism for legacy pak files as well as much faster access to files inside pak files (embedded in the main p4k data file), both of which significantly improve the loading of object containers. Additionally, the mapping of threads on Intel CPUs with P\/E cores was rewritten - critical threads such as main, render, and network threads are ensured to always run on performance cores to avoid the otherwise poor performance on affected CPUs. These changes are currently being verified on the PTU. Also, support for page sizes larger than 4kb (aka huge pages) was added to the engine (at the moment on Linux only). It's currently used for stack, text, and data segments, as well as physics allocations. Using huge pages reduces the pressure on the TLB cache, the part of the CPU translating virtual to physical addresses, which should help with performance. With Clang, just moving the text segment to huge pages gave a 7% speedup. Furthermore, the latest version of Bink2 was integrated and a few audio related bugs fixed in video playback (manifesting themselves as random clicks during playback).\n\nAnother area that progressed well was the remote shader compile server used to build shader caches, etc. Due to increased usage of the server by development teams and the build process, proper support for fallback agents as well as server throttling was implemented to deal with times of extreme load and to allow for more distributed compilation. At that point, it also made sense to rewrite various parts of the server code to allow for more robustness, better logging, and increased performance. Lastly, shape unification was completed and entity area support was added. A copy\/paste bug in the entity aggregate manager that caused a lot of unnecessary memory access was fixed, and vis area loading was refactored to support batch conversion from previous versions of serialized vis area data.\n\nFeatures (Vehicle)\nThe last two months of the year saw Vehicle Features largely completing a full rework of quantum travel, which is being integrated into Squadron 42 for testing. This continues from the quantum boost feature mentioned in previous reports and significantly improves the overall feature implementation. They also supported the VFX team in integrating new effects for quantum travel.\n\nThey also worked on a \u2018recall\u2019 feature available to various military ships in the game. This uses the AI pathfinding tech used in the PU and will allow various SQ42 levels to be completed.\n\nVehicle Features then completed a significant refactor of the aiming system and are currently working with UI to implement new aiming reticles and pips to go alongside it. This will result in huge improvements in aiming accuracy and reliability. It\u2019s currently being tested to improve the combat experience.\n\nSignificant time toward the end of 2022 went into the multi-function display (MFD), heads-up display (HUD), and vehicle UI reworks.\n\n\u201cThe base MFD system is making huge strides and we\u2019ve partially implemented most of the core MFD screens for ships using the new Building Blocks system. We\u2019re just starting to build the new HUD, which deeply integrates with the MFD system with configuration options and MFD casting options.\u201d Vehicle Features Team\n\nControl surfaces continued development and, in the last two months, the team improved stalling and transitions. For example, when a ship detects it\u2019s about to stall, it can automatically enable thrusters to stop it from falling. Similarly, when a ship has detected it's going fast enough to sustain control surface flight, it can automatically shut down its maneuvering thrusters and start flying solely with control surfaces. This is greatly improving the atmospheric flight sections of the campaign.\n\nGameplay Story\nGameplay Story worked on a range of different tasks during November and December, including preparing and shooting mo-cap to update various scenes. Mo-cap from previous shoots was also used. For example, to help characters climb back into ships after speaking with the player.\n\nA scene in chapter 8 was updated to ensure the character could interact with a variety of props instead of just performing visual inspections. The team made sure the character used AI poses to allow them to break out of the scene if needed. The character also interacts well with the Argo MPUV, meaning they can fly into the Idris before starting their scene.\n\nAnother area further explored was unholstering and holstering. This time, the team were able to make a character grab the Multi-Tool and datapad from the exact position it attaches to the character and place it back.\n\nA number of updates were also made to characters in chapters 4 and 8. This involved utilizing the latest female walk cycle to enable the AI to seamlessly enter and exit scenes.\n\nA significant update was made to a scene in chapter 13, with the team adjusting animations to work with the final geometry of the level, making it so the character can speak to the player from a better position.\n\nA major review of scenes that had been worked on throughout the past year was done too. This led to increased animation quality, either by reusing the latest mo-cap or fixing what was already in place. Many new animations were created and polish passes were done on animations to further improve scenes alongside general maintenance and bug fixing.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nThe VFX Programming team began implementing new quantum travel and boost effects. These effects are now in a basic functional state and are triggering at generally the correct time. Work will continue to expose timing controls and implement the functionality for adapting the effects to any size ship.\n\nWork on the fire hazard system is ramping up again, starting with implementing requests for controlling fire and its propagation for design purposes. On the visual side, the team are currently planning out the work required for reaching the visual goals set by VFX Art.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Social team progressed well in the final months of 2022, including continued scene work on their assigned chapters. New onboarding documentation was also created to better support new starters.\n\nNarrative\nNovember and December were busy months for the Narrative team. Firstly, they had a weeklong performance capture shoot in the UK to close out capturing wildlines for one of the enemy factions as well as narrative content scenes for a set piece. They also picked up content to support the new dynamic conversation system that will provide exciting opportunities for NPCs to chat with each other. This opens a lot of opportunities for contextual conversations that can help maintain the illusion of life and storytelling outside of dedicated scripted scenes.\n\nThe team continued to hold reviews with the various design teams to develop updated scripts and provide placeholder recordings. This is to ensure lines are not only creating the right dramatic beats but are also clearly indicating what the player is meant to do in order to progress.\n\nNarrative also met with Characters to ensure that all necessary costumes have been requested to support the various chapters that specific NPCs appear in.\n\n\u201cBased on the scope of the script, it shouldn\u2019t come as a surprise that there are a lot of characters that the players will meet over the course of the game. This list is complicated by the fact that some of the characters will have a schedule that will drive them from work to rest, necessitating a variety of clothing to be available.\u201d Narrative Team\n\nTech Animation\nTech Animation spent the end of the year focusing on head-asset processing.\n\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been taking some long-overdue actors and starting the internal processing procedure to create their likenesses. This includes creating over 78 scans per head asset and processing them to the neutral head asset. Some of these actors were scanned over seven years ago on the main shoot for SQ42, so they look quite different these days!\u201d Tech Animation Team\n\nThe team take these complex scans and break them down into individual muscle movements and apply them to the facial rig asset, ultimately including them in the gene pool to give more variety to the heads and faces seen in-game.\n\nVFX\nThrough November and December, the VFX team progressed with the particle library overhaul. This included creating a custom level showing all available effects, which is useful for other VFX artists to quickly view the effects libraries.\n\nThe artists also continued to support the Art and Design teams on key locations and cinematic scenes.\n\nElsewhere, working alongside the VFX programmers, the new quantum-travel effects were made functional (previously they were in-engine prototypes). Having seen these effects properly working, there is still some tweaking to be done to better match the prototype.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":0,"created_at":"2023-01-25T19:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"3 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 19:14:09","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":19093,"next_id":19097}}