{"data":{"id":19518,"title":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report: September 2023","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/comm-link\/SCW\/19518-API","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-links\/19518","api_public_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/comm-links\/19518","channel":"Undefined","category":"Undefined","series":"None","images":[{"id":26651,"name":"STARCITIZEN_WHITE.png","rsi_url":"https:\/\/robertsspaceindustries.com\/media\/y1f0boj8fak5rr\/source\/STARCITIZEN_WHITE.png","alt":"","size":73278,"mime_type":"image\/png","last_modified":"2021-02-03T06:54:29+00:00","api_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/26651","similar_url":"https:\/\/api.star-citizen.wiki\/api\/comm-link-images\/26651\/similar"}],"images_count":4,"translations":{"en_EN":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report\nSeptember 2023\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 10:04:2023\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits.\n\nWelcome to September\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to female animations, fight sequences, and performance-capture data.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Features)\nAI Features began the month resolving an issue with Vanduul attacks not harming the player or friendly AI. They also fixed behavioral issues related to AI taking cover, which will also enhance the situational awareness of friendly AI when encountering enemies.\n\nThe team then began providing animation support for cover transitions for each of the in-game factions. Issues were also addressed with attack-and-defend areas to ensure that AI units correctly advance to or defend a designated location.\n\nSignificant progress was made on a key battle, with the team implementing behaviors to allow the enemy to learn from the player\u2019s actions. These learning behaviors will prevent players from exploiting specific actions to win. The team is also exploring design tweaks to the battle to enhance the overall experience.\n\nThroughout the month, the animators concentrated on improving male-to-female retargeting to ensure that female marines move naturally during combat.\n\nThey also continued to provide animation support for crouch locomotion. Now, when players adopt a stealthy playstyle, AI buddies will follow their actions and crouch accordingly.\n\nAI (Tech)\nAI Tech continued developing various features throughout September, including boids and the Apollo tool, and began focusing on performance improvements and polishing existing features.\n\nFor boids, the base structure that allows the designers to define boid states (wandering, fleeing, idling, dead, etc.) and transition between them was implemented. These transitions contain rules, including when they should be selected, and animation data, such as birds taking off and landing. Iteration was also done on suitable physics properties for boid agents that need to be affected by gravity to walk on terrain. The team also added health components to agents so players can damage and potentially kill them.\n\nFor the Apollo Subsumption tool, the team completed an error-reporting panel that will provide detailed information on behavior issues. This will help the designers to catch problems sooner and solve them more easily. Various quality-of-life improvements requested by the designers were implemented too.\n\nPerformance improvements were also made, with the team looking closely at systems that impact performance on dedicated servers. For example, optimizations were made to how navigation islands compute after parts of the navigation mesh are regenerated. For navigation volume, code was cleaned up and \u2018event dispatching\u2019 was moved to \u2018update job,\u2019 which better distributes to multiple threads. The team are currently investigating and implementing optimizations to planetary navigation generation and pathfinding request processing.\n\nNew functionality were added to the collision-avoidance system. Now, collision avoidance agents have support for skipping and ignoring lists, which is used when agents move together as a group.\n\nFor NPCs using trolleys, improvements were made to collision avoidance, and a new component was added to the trolley that will trigger the regeneration of navigation mesh when it stops moving.\n\nRegarding flowgraph Subsumption nodes, the team can now generate nodes with dynamic input based on Subsumption\u2019s event description. This will help the designers to write more complex behaviors for NPCs and missions.\n\nAI (Vehicles)\nVehicle AI spent September improving various elements of SQ42\u2019s gameplay. Last month\u2019s work involved reworking the fly-by-maneuver that the ship AI use in combat. It\u2019s now much more aggressive and can adapt to what the player is doing. At higher difficulty levels, the AI will do a \u2018skidded roll attack' during fly-bys, where they roll and strafe slightly as they approach, making them more difficult to hit.\n\nVehicle AI also exposed various features to the designers to help them tune and balance combat encounters, such as burst fire controls for ships. The AI can now also detect when a ship has entered soft death (disabled but not fully destroyed). Enemies will stop attacking in this case.\n\nVarious tweaks, improvements, and updates were also made to enhance the overall game experience.\n\nAnimation\nThe Gameplay Animation team spent the month working on weapon first-selects, a key combat encounter, the military pilot Multi-Tool, spec-ops cover animations, female animations for missing player interactions, and fixes to the firing range\u2019s security behavior.\n\nThey also focused on cockpit- and environmental-interaction animations to increase immersion, pick-ups for AI medical and ship-hull interactions, and a variety of facial animations for flight combat and comms calls.\n\nAudio\nThe Dialogue team completed their performance-capture pick-up shoots and moved on to asset editing and mastering. Content was captured for the breathing system too, which is being prepared for implementation.\n\n\u201cThere was plenty of great quality content recorded to cap off a successful shoot.\u201d Audio Team\n\nFocus was also given to the Actor Status and asset mastering, and planning began for walla recording sessions to add background chatter to the game's more populated areas.\n\nThe SFX team continued efforts to fill environments with ambience in line with their sprint milestones.\n\nThe game\u2019s weapons are currently being implemented with relevant sound effects and the first audio passes on in-game VFX began, such as lightning strikes.\n\nThe tech required to implement sound into cinematics was also completed, with the team breaking down the effect requirements for chapter one to bolster the impressive cinematics with impactful audio.\n\nCode and tech work continued on the walla system, and numerous bugs were fixed too.\n\nEngine\nOn the renderer, transitions toward the final version of Gen12 continued. This included enabling the RenderGraph, which can utilize the GPU better with less CPU cost. The team also removed several legacy GPU access APIs, including MapAndWriteDiscard, which won\u2019t be supported by Gen12 due to low-level code complexity.\n\nFurthermore, the streaming system received improvements.\n\n\u201cWe no longer need to maintain a separate code path and instead update all our objects from within the rendering callback. This reduces code complexity, as we only need to maintain a single code path going forward, and reduces memory consumption as well.\u201d Engine Team\n\nThe team then added more strict debug modes and high-level checks for the ECUS code to detect and report potential race conditions earlier. Also on the entity-system side, more strict checks were added to entity access functions to ensure they only happen on threads where it\u2019s permitted.\n\nGameplay Story\nThe Gameplay Story team supported a performance-capture shoot and made improvements to a range of scenes across the campaign.\n\nThe team then used some of the new motion-capture data to create a scene with a key character entering and using an airlock. A long start idle was also added to a three-person scene early in the game, a console interaction was improved, and props were fixed and polished for a large mess-hall scene.\n\nA new way to trigger lines while animations are already playing was documented so it can be used in other areas across the game too.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nIn September, the Graphics team progressed with several in-development features. For example, the new water-simulation and rendering systems now have their fundamental building blocks complete and are currently being balanced to ensure they look good under the game\u2019s huge variety of conditions.\n\nThe R&D on Global Illumination was merged into the main branch to see it working across various locations.\n\nWork also continued on features such as fire support for entities, a screen space occlusion effect for gas clouds to increase their lighting detail, and support for Maelstrom, the new physics destruction system.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Level Design team continued to make progress on their Idris interstitials. Along with the usual bug fixing and scene iteration, they completed the backend of the Reputation system. Now, the Idris crew will track a player's reputation via interactions. For example, selecting a negative, neutral, or positive conversation option, or walking off mid-conversation.\n\nThe team then moved on to Fortunes Cross, using the background AI to enhance its \u201cpast-its-sell-by-date shopping mall at 4 am\u201d aesthetic. For example, they added NPCs lazily eating noodles, wearily sipping on a coffee, and carrying out shady transactions.\n\nThey also completed additional work on a social section in chapter one.\n\n\u201cWe have our narrative scenes set up but, to reinforce the tone, we now have the background crew carrying out maintenance and repairs, watching frontline reports, and writing messages to loved ones.\u201d Level Design Team\n\nNarrative\nNarrative spent the first half of the month supporting the recent performance-capture shoot. They also continued to meet with the various level designers and leads to make final tweaks based on the latest level updates.\n\n\u201cIt was an intense three-week shoot, but it yielded some fantastic performances and moments that will really enrich the overall experience. During the shoot, we also welcomed back some of our original supporting cast for some final pickups.\u201d Narrative Team\n\nThe footage captured at the shoot is currently making its way through the content pipeline as editorial selects are pulled and passed along to the Animation and Audio teams.\n\nAdditional wildlines based on combat-AI feedback and Vanduul content were also captured to fill in areas and supply more specific dialogue to support gameplay.\n\nWith the shoot complete, the team continued tackling many of the game\u2019s text needs, from Galactapedia entries to environmental storytelling and collectibles. The team is also passing along script revisions to the Localization team.\n\nR&D\nThe R&D team worked on a variety of important updates to the game engine that will be shown to the community soon.\n\nTech Animation\nTech Animation supported numerous teams across the project with a wide variety of animation tasks, including asset implementation and maintenance.\n\nGreat progress was made on creating and implementing creatures. As part of this, work was done on toolsets for rigging and physics proxy authoring and implementation.\n\nComms calls and dialogue were a major focus in September too, with the goal being to create content at speed.\n\n\u201cThis has been hugely successful and collates many lengthy manual processes into a singular toolset with a great user interface.\u201d Tech Art\/Animation Team\n\nFinally, they continued to provide additional faces for the game to source from, providing much more variation to NPC populations.\n\nUI\nThe UI team looked at conversation text, updating its style to match the rest of the game-level screens, such as the radial menus. And, after a lot of iteration trying to find the perfect style, a direction for the Drake cockpit UI was unanimously approved and will soon move into production.\n\nThe team also began adding \u2018AI fluff\u2019 screens into some of the main levels of the game.\n\n\u201cOverall, they look great, though we\u2019ve spotted a few areas for improvement and have been working on adding some extra variety as well as improving the underlying system so that we can use a single design on differently shaped physical screens. For example, we can make an engineering screen that fits on portrait, 16:9, or super-widescreen terminals in the level.\u201d UI Team\n\nThe team also polished the visuals and ironed out issues with the visor and vehicle HUDs as they\u2019re used in-game and come up against unexpected situations.\n\nThey\u2019re currently polishing the map and radar systems, improving the visuals and usability.\n\nVFX\nLast month, VFX continued working with Art and Design on several locations, helping to add extra polish. They also continued fine-tuning the fire-propagation effects.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION","de_DE":"Geschwader 42 Monatsbericht\nSeptember 2023\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: ENTWICKLUNGS-UPDATE 10:04:2023\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,\n\nFAO-Geschwader 42 Rekruten.\n\nWillkommen zum Entwicklungsbericht f\u00fcr Squadron 42 im September. Anbei findest du Details zu den neuesten Fortschritten in der Kampagne, einschlie\u00dflich Updates f\u00fcr weibliche Animationen, Kampfsequenzen und Leistungserfassungsdaten.\n\nVielen Dank f\u00fcr eure anhaltende Unterst\u00fctzung von Squadron 42.\n\nMit freundlichen Gr\u00fc\u00dfen,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nKI (Features)\nDie KI-Features haben zu Beginn des Monats ein Problem behoben, bei dem Angriffe von Vanduul weder dem Spieler noch der befreundeten KI geschadet haben. Au\u00dferdem wurden Verhaltensprobleme im Zusammenhang mit der KI, die in Deckung geht, behoben, was das Situationsbewusstsein der KI verbessert, wenn sie auf Feinde trifft.\n\nDann begann das Team damit, Animationen f\u00fcr die Deckungs\u00fcberg\u00e4nge der einzelnen Fraktionen im Spiel zu erstellen. Au\u00dferdem wurden Probleme mit Angriffs- und Verteidigungsbereichen behoben, um sicherzustellen, dass die KI-Einheiten korrekt zu einem bestimmten Ort vorr\u00fccken oder ihn verteidigen.\n\nBei einer wichtigen Schlacht wurden gro\u00dfe Fortschritte gemacht: Das Team implementierte Verhaltensweisen, die es dem Feind erm\u00f6glichen, aus den Aktionen des Spielers zu lernen. Dieses Lernverhalten wird verhindern, dass Spieler\/innen bestimmte Aktionen ausnutzen, um zu gewinnen. Das Team pr\u00fcft au\u00dferdem, wie es den Kampf so gestalten kann, dass er ein besseres Spielerlebnis bietet.\n\nIm Laufe des Monats konzentrierten sich die Animatoren auf die Verbesserung des Retargetings von M\u00e4nnern zu Frauen, um sicherzustellen, dass sich weibliche Marinesoldaten im Kampf nat\u00fcrlich bewegen.\n\nAu\u00dferdem haben sie die Animation f\u00fcr die geduckte Fortbewegung weiter verbessert. Wenn die Spieler\/innen nun einen verstohlenen Spielstil w\u00e4hlen, folgen die KI-Kameraden ihren Aktionen und ducken sich entsprechend.\n\nKI (Tech)\nDie KI-Abteilung entwickelte im September verschiedene Funktionen weiter, darunter Boids und das Apollo-Tool, und konzentrierte sich auf Leistungsverbesserungen und den Feinschliff bestehender Funktionen.\n\nF\u00fcr Boids wurde die Basisstruktur implementiert, die es den Designern erm\u00f6glicht, Boid-Zust\u00e4nde (wandernd, fliehend, tr\u00e4ge, tot usw.) zu definieren und zwischen ihnen zu wechseln. Diese \u00dcberg\u00e4nge enthalten Regeln, z. B. wann sie ausgew\u00e4hlt werden sollen, und Animationsdaten, wie z. B. startende und landende V\u00f6gel. Es wurde auch an geeigneten physikalischen Eigenschaften f\u00fcr Boid-Agenten gearbeitet, die von der Schwerkraft beeinflusst werden m\u00fcssen, um auf dem Gel\u00e4nde zu laufen. Das Team f\u00fcgte den Agenten auch Gesundheitskomponenten hinzu, damit die Spieler sie besch\u00e4digen und m\u00f6glicherweise t\u00f6ten k\u00f6nnen.\n\nF\u00fcr das Apollo Subsumption Tool hat das Team eine Fehlermeldung erstellt, die detaillierte Informationen zu Verhaltensproblemen liefert. Das hilft den Designern, Probleme fr\u00fcher zu erkennen und leichter zu l\u00f6sen. Auch verschiedene von den Designern gew\u00fcnschte Verbesserungen der Lebensqualit\u00e4t wurden umgesetzt.\n\nAuch die Leistung wurde verbessert, wobei das Team die Systeme, die die Leistung auf dedizierten Servern beeinflussen, genau unter die Lupe genommen hat. So wurde zum Beispiel optimiert, wie Navigationsinseln berechnet werden, nachdem Teile des Navigationsnetzes neu generiert wurden. F\u00fcr das Navigationsvolumen wurde der Code bereinigt und das \"Event Dispatching\" wurde in den \"Update Job\" verlagert, der sich besser auf mehrere Threads verteilt. Das Team untersucht und implementiert derzeit Optimierungen f\u00fcr die Erzeugung der Planetennavigation und die Verarbeitung von Pfadfindungsanfragen.\n\nDas System zur Kollisionsvermeidung wurde um neue Funktionen erweitert. Die Agenten zur Kollisionsvermeidung k\u00f6nnen jetzt Listen \u00fcberspringen und ignorieren, wenn sich die Agenten gemeinsam als Gruppe bewegen.\n\nF\u00fcr NSCs, die Karren benutzen, wurde die Kollisionsvermeidung verbessert und dem Karren wurde eine neue Komponente hinzugef\u00fcgt, die die Regeneration des Navigationsnetzes ausl\u00f6st, wenn er sich nicht mehr bewegt.\n\nBei den Flowgraph Subsumption-Knoten kann das Team jetzt Knoten mit dynamischer Eingabe auf der Grundlage der Ereignisbeschreibung von Subsumption erzeugen. Das wird den Designern helfen, komplexere Verhaltensweisen f\u00fcr NSCs und Missionen zu schreiben.\n\nKI (Fahrzeuge)\nDie Fahrzeug-KI hat im September verschiedene Elemente des Gameplays von SQ42 verbessert. Im letzten Monat wurde das Vorbeiflugman\u00f6ver \u00fcberarbeitet, das die Schiffs-KI im Kampf einsetzt. Sie ist jetzt viel aggressiver und kann sich dem anpassen, was der Spieler tut. Auf h\u00f6heren Schwierigkeitsgraden f\u00fchrt die KI bei Vorbeifl\u00fcgen eine \"Schleuderrollen-Attacke\" durch, bei der sie sich beim Anflug leicht dreht und ausweicht, sodass sie schwerer zu treffen ist.\n\nDie Fahrzeug-KI hat den Designern auch verschiedene Funktionen zur Verf\u00fcgung gestellt, um die Kampfbegegnungen abzustimmen und auszubalancieren, wie z. B. die Steuerung des Sperrfeuers f\u00fcr Schiffe. Die KI kann jetzt auch erkennen, wenn ein Schiff in den Soft Death \u00fcbergeht (au\u00dfer Gefecht gesetzt, aber nicht vollst\u00e4ndig zerst\u00f6rt). In diesem Fall h\u00f6ren die Feinde auf, es anzugreifen.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurden verschiedene Optimierungen, Verbesserungen und Aktualisierungen vorgenommen, um das Spielerlebnis insgesamt zu verbessern.\n\nAnimation\nDas Gameplay-Animationsteam hat den Monat damit verbracht, an der Erstauswahl von Waffen, einer wichtigen Kampfbegegnung, dem Milit\u00e4rpiloten-Multi-Tool, den Deckungsanimationen von Spec-Ops, den weiblichen Animationen f\u00fcr fehlende Spielerinteraktionen und den Korrekturen am Sicherheitsverhalten des Schie\u00dfplatzes zu arbeiten.\n\nAu\u00dferdem konzentrierten sie sich auf Animationen f\u00fcr Cockpit- und Umgebungsinteraktionen, um die Immersion zu erh\u00f6hen, auf Pickups f\u00fcr KI-Medizin und Schiffsrumpf-Interaktionen sowie auf eine Vielzahl von Gesichtsanimationen f\u00fcr Flugk\u00e4mpfe und Kommunikationsgespr\u00e4che.\n\nAudio\nDas Dialog-Team schloss die Aufnahmen f\u00fcr die Performance-Captures ab und machte sich an die Bearbeitung und das Mastering der Assets. Es wurden auch Inhalte f\u00fcr das Atemsystem aufgenommen, das derzeit f\u00fcr die Implementierung vorbereitet wird.\n\n\"Es wurden viele qualitativ hochwertige Inhalte aufgenommen, um einen erfolgreichen Dreh zu beenden. Audio-Team\n\nDer Fokus lag auch auf dem Actor Status und dem Asset Mastering, und es wurde mit der Planung von Walla-Aufnahmen begonnen, um die Hintergrundger\u00e4usche in den bev\u00f6lkerten Gebieten des Spiels zu verst\u00e4rken.\n\nDas SFX-Team bem\u00fchte sich weiterhin darum, die Umgebungen mit Atmosph\u00e4re zu f\u00fcllen, um die Meilensteine des Sprints zu erreichen.\n\nDie Waffen des Spiels werden derzeit mit den entsprechenden Soundeffekten versehen und die ersten Audiodurchl\u00e4ufe f\u00fcr die VFX im Spiel, wie z. B. Blitzeinschl\u00e4ge, begannen.\n\nDie Technik, die f\u00fcr die Implementierung von Sound in Cinematics ben\u00f6tigt wird, wurde ebenfalls fertiggestellt. Das Team hat die Anforderungen an die Effekte f\u00fcr das erste Kapitel heruntergebrochen, um die beeindruckenden Cinematics mit eindrucksvollem Sound zu untermauern.\n\nDie Arbeit am Code und an der Technik des Walla-Systems wurde fortgesetzt und zahlreiche Bugs wurden behoben.\n\nEngine\nAm Renderer wurde der \u00dcbergang zur endg\u00fcltigen Version von Gen12 fortgesetzt. Dazu geh\u00f6rte die Aktivierung des RenderGraphs, der die GPU besser ausnutzen kann und weniger CPU-Kosten verursacht. Das Team entfernte au\u00dferdem mehrere veraltete GPU-Zugriffs-APIs, darunter MapAndWriteDiscard, die aufgrund der Komplexit\u00e4t des Low-Level-Codes von Gen12 nicht mehr unterst\u00fctzt werden.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurde das Streaming-System verbessert.\n\n\"Wir m\u00fcssen keinen separaten Codepfad mehr pflegen und aktualisieren stattdessen alle unsere Objekte innerhalb des Rendering-Callbacks. Das reduziert die Komplexit\u00e4t des Codes, da wir in Zukunft nur noch einen einzigen Codepfad pflegen m\u00fcssen, und verringert auch den Speicherverbrauch.\" Engine-Team\n\nDas Team f\u00fcgte dann strengere Debug-Modi und High-Level-Checks f\u00fcr den ECUS-Code hinzu, um potenzielle Race Conditions fr\u00fcher zu erkennen und zu melden. Auch auf der Seite des Entity-Systems wurden strengere Pr\u00fcfungen f\u00fcr Entity-Zugriffsfunktionen hinzugef\u00fcgt, um sicherzustellen, dass sie nur in Threads ausgef\u00fchrt werden, in denen dies erlaubt ist.\n\nGameplay Story\nDas Gameplay-Story-Team unterst\u00fctzte ein Performance-Capture-Shooting und nahm Verbesserungen an einer Reihe von Szenen in der Kampagne vor.\n\nDas Team nutzte dann einige der neuen Motion-Capture-Daten, um eine Szene zu erstellen, in der ein Hauptcharakter eine Luftschleuse betritt und benutzt. Au\u00dferdem wurde eine lange Leerlaufzeit in einer Drei-Personen-Szene zu Beginn des Spiels hinzugef\u00fcgt, eine Konsoleninteraktion wurde verbessert und Requisiten wurden f\u00fcr eine gro\u00dfe Messehallenszene repariert und poliert.\n\nEine neue Methode zum Ausl\u00f6sen von Zeilen, w\u00e4hrend Animationen bereits laufen, wurde dokumentiert, damit sie auch in anderen Bereichen des Spiels verwendet werden kann.\n\nGrafik & VFX-Programmierung\nIm September machte das Grafikteam Fortschritte bei mehreren in der Entwicklung befindlichen Features. So sind zum Beispiel die grundlegenden Bausteine der neuen Wassersimulation und des Rendering-Systems fertiggestellt und werden derzeit ausbalanciert, um sicherzustellen, dass sie unter den verschiedensten Bedingungen im Spiel gut aussehen.\n\nDie Forschungs- und Entwicklungsarbeiten an der globalen Beleuchtung wurden mit dem Hauptzweig zusammengelegt, um zu sehen, wie sie an verschiedenen Orten funktioniert.\n\nAu\u00dferdem wurde an Features wie der Feuerunterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Entit\u00e4ten, einem Screen-Space-Occlusion-Effekt f\u00fcr Gaswolken, um deren Beleuchtungsdetails zu verbessern, und der Unterst\u00fctzung f\u00fcr Maelstrom, das neue Physik-Zerst\u00f6rungssystem, gearbeitet.\n\nLeveldesign\nDas Level Design Team machte weitere Fortschritte bei den Idris-Interstitials. Neben der \u00fcblichen Fehlerbehebung und der \u00dcberarbeitung der Szenen wurde auch das Backend des Rufsystems fertiggestellt. Jetzt kann die Idris-Crew den Ruf eines Spielers \u00fcber Interaktionen verfolgen. Zum Beispiel, wenn du eine negative, neutrale oder positive Gespr\u00e4chsoption ausw\u00e4hlst oder wenn du mitten im Gespr\u00e4ch abhaust.\n\nAnschlie\u00dfend ging das Team zu Fortunes Cross \u00fcber und nutzte die Hintergrund-KI, um die \u00c4sthetik des \"Einkaufszentrums um 4 Uhr morgens\" zu verbessern. Sie f\u00fcgten zum Beispiel NSCs hinzu, die faul Nudeln essen, m\u00fcde an einem Kaffee nippen und zwielichtige Gesch\u00e4fte abwickeln.\n\nAu\u00dferdem haben sie die Arbeit an einem sozialen Abschnitt im ersten Kapitel fortgesetzt.\n\n\"Wir haben unsere erz\u00e4hlerischen Szenen eingerichtet, aber um den Ton zu verst\u00e4rken, haben wir jetzt die Hintergrundcrew, die Wartungs- und Reparaturarbeiten durchf\u00fchrt, die Berichte der Front beobachtet und Nachrichten an ihre Lieben schreibt.\" Level Design Team\n\nNarrative\nDas Team von Narrative verbrachte die erste Monatsh\u00e4lfte mit der Unterst\u00fctzung des j\u00fcngsten Performance-Capture-Drehs. Au\u00dferdem trafen sie sich weiterhin mit den verschiedenen Level-Designern und -Leitern, um auf der Grundlage der letzten Level-Updates letzte Optimierungen vorzunehmen.\n\n\"Es war ein intensiver, dreiw\u00f6chiger Dreh, aber er hat einige fantastische Performances und Momente hervorgebracht, die das Gesamterlebnis wirklich bereichern werden. W\u00e4hrend der Dreharbeiten konnten wir auch einige unserer urspr\u00fcnglichen Nebendarsteller f\u00fcr einige letzte Aufnahmen zur\u00fcckgewinnen.\" Narrative Team\n\nDas bei den Dreharbeiten aufgenommene Material durchl\u00e4uft derzeit die Content-Pipeline und wird von der Redaktion ausgew\u00e4hlt und an die Animations- und Audioteams weitergeleitet.\n\nZus\u00e4tzliche Wildlines, die auf dem Feedback der Kampf-KI basieren, und Vanduul-Inhalte wurden ebenfalls aufgenommen, um Gebiete zu f\u00fcllen und spezifischere Dialoge zur Unterst\u00fctzung des Gameplays zu liefern.\n\nNach Abschluss der Dreharbeiten arbeitete das Team weiter an vielen Texten f\u00fcr das Spiel, von Galactapedia-Eintr\u00e4gen bis hin zu Umgebungsgeschichten und Sammelobjekten. Das Team gibt auch Skript\u00fcberarbeitungen an das Lokalisierungsteam weiter.\n\nF&E\nDas F&E-Team arbeitete an einer Reihe von wichtigen Aktualisierungen der Spiel-Engine, die der Community bald vorgestellt werden.\n\nTechnische Animation\nTech Animation unterst\u00fctzte zahlreiche Teams im gesamten Projekt mit einer Vielzahl von Animationsaufgaben, einschlie\u00dflich der Implementierung und Pflege von Assets.\n\nGro\u00dfe Fortschritte wurden bei der Erstellung und Implementierung von Kreaturen gemacht. In diesem Zusammenhang wurde an Toolsets f\u00fcr das Rigging und die Erstellung und Implementierung von Physik-Proxys gearbeitet.\n\nAuch im September standen Gespr\u00e4che und Dialoge im Mittelpunkt, mit dem Ziel, Inhalte schnell zu erstellen.\n\n\"Das war ein gro\u00dfer Erfolg, denn es fasst viele langwierige manuelle Prozesse in einem einzigen Toolset mit einer gro\u00dfartigen Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che zusammen.\" Tech Art\/Animation Team\n\nDar\u00fcber hinaus wurden weitere Gesichter f\u00fcr das Spiel erstellt, um die NSC-Populationen abwechslungsreicher zu gestalten.\n\nUI\nDas UI-Team hat sich die Konversationstexte angesehen und ihren Stil an den Rest der Bildschirme auf Spielebene angepasst, z. B. an die Radialmen\u00fcs. Und nach vielen Iterationen auf der Suche nach dem perfekten Stil wurde eine Richtung f\u00fcr die Benutzeroberfl\u00e4che des Drake-Cockpits einstimmig angenommen und wird bald in Produktion gehen.\n\nDas Team hat au\u00dferdem damit begonnen, einige der Hauptlevel des Spiels mit \"KI-Fluff\"-Bildschirmen zu versehen.\n\n\"Insgesamt sehen sie gro\u00dfartig aus, aber wir haben ein paar verbesserungsw\u00fcrdige Bereiche entdeckt und arbeiten daran, zus\u00e4tzliche Vielfalt hinzuzuf\u00fcgen und das zugrunde liegende System zu verbessern, damit wir ein einziges Design f\u00fcr unterschiedlich geformte physische Bildschirme verwenden k\u00f6nnen. So k\u00f6nnen wir zum Beispiel einen technischen Bildschirm erstellen, der auf Hochformat-, 16:9- oder Superbreitbild-Terminals im Level passt.\" UI-Team\n\nDas Team hat auch an der Grafik gefeilt und Probleme mit dem Visier und den Fahrzeug-HUDs behoben, die im Spiel verwendet werden und auf unerwartete Situationen sto\u00dfen.\n\nDerzeit wird an den Karten- und Radarsystemen gefeilt, um die Optik und die Benutzerfreundlichkeit zu verbessern.\n\nVFX\nIm letzten Monat arbeiteten die VFX-Leute weiter mit Art und Design an mehreren Schaupl\u00e4tzen und gaben ihnen den letzten Schliff. Au\u00dferdem wurde an der Feinabstimmung der Feuerausbreitungseffekte gearbeitet.\n\nWIR SEHEN UNS N\u00c4CHSTEN MONAT WIEDER...\n\/\/ ENDE DER \u00dcBERTRAGUNG","zh_CN":"Squadron 42 Monthly Report\nSeptember 2023\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 10:04:2023\n\nREF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,\n\nFAO Squadron 42 Recruits.\n\nWelcome to September\u2019s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including updates to female animations, fight sequences, and performance-capture data.\n\nThank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.\n\nSincerely,\n\nCIG COMMUNICATIONS\n\nAI (Features)\nAI Features began the month resolving an issue with Vanduul attacks not harming the player or friendly AI. They also fixed behavioral issues related to AI taking cover, which will also enhance the situational awareness of friendly AI when encountering enemies.\n\nThe team then began providing animation support for cover transitions for each of the in-game factions. Issues were also addressed with attack-and-defend areas to ensure that AI units correctly advance to or defend a designated location.\n\nSignificant progress was made on a key battle, with the team implementing behaviors to allow the enemy to learn from the player\u2019s actions. These learning behaviors will prevent players from exploiting specific actions to win. The team is also exploring design tweaks to the battle to enhance the overall experience.\n\nThroughout the month, the animators concentrated on improving male-to-female retargeting to ensure that female marines move naturally during combat.\n\nThey also continued to provide animation support for crouch locomotion. Now, when players adopt a stealthy playstyle, AI buddies will follow their actions and crouch accordingly.\n\nAI (Tech)\nAI Tech continued developing various features throughout September, including boids and the Apollo tool, and began focusing on performance improvements and polishing existing features.\n\nFor boids, the base structure that allows the designers to define boid states (wandering, fleeing, idling, dead, etc.) and transition between them was implemented. These transitions contain rules, including when they should be selected, and animation data, such as birds taking off and landing. Iteration was also done on suitable physics properties for boid agents that need to be affected by gravity to walk on terrain. The team also added health components to agents so players can damage and potentially kill them.\n\nFor the Apollo Subsumption tool, the team completed an error-reporting panel that will provide detailed information on behavior issues. This will help the designers to catch problems sooner and solve them more easily. Various quality-of-life improvements requested by the designers were implemented too.\n\nPerformance improvements were also made, with the team looking closely at systems that impact performance on dedicated servers. For example, optimizations were made to how navigation islands compute after parts of the navigation mesh are regenerated. For navigation volume, code was cleaned up and \u2018event dispatching\u2019 was moved to \u2018update job,\u2019 which better distributes to multiple threads. The team are currently investigating and implementing optimizations to planetary navigation generation and pathfinding request processing.\n\nNew functionality were added to the collision-avoidance system. Now, collision avoidance agents have support for skipping and ignoring lists, which is used when agents move together as a group.\n\nFor NPCs using trolleys, improvements were made to collision avoidance, and a new component was added to the trolley that will trigger the regeneration of navigation mesh when it stops moving.\n\nRegarding flowgraph Subsumption nodes, the team can now generate nodes with dynamic input based on Subsumption\u2019s event description. This will help the designers to write more complex behaviors for NPCs and missions.\n\nAI (Vehicles)\nVehicle AI spent September improving various elements of SQ42\u2019s gameplay. Last month\u2019s work involved reworking the fly-by-maneuver that the ship AI use in combat. It\u2019s now much more aggressive and can adapt to what the player is doing. At higher difficulty levels, the AI will do a \u2018skidded roll attack' during fly-bys, where they roll and strafe slightly as they approach, making them more difficult to hit.\n\nVehicle AI also exposed various features to the designers to help them tune and balance combat encounters, such as burst fire controls for ships. The AI can now also detect when a ship has entered soft death (disabled but not fully destroyed). Enemies will stop attacking in this case.\n\nVarious tweaks, improvements, and updates were also made to enhance the overall game experience.\n\nAnimation\nThe Gameplay Animation team spent the month working on weapon first-selects, a key combat encounter, the military pilot Multi-Tool, spec-ops cover animations, female animations for missing player interactions, and fixes to the firing range\u2019s security behavior.\n\nThey also focused on cockpit- and environmental-interaction animations to increase immersion, pick-ups for AI medical and ship-hull interactions, and a variety of facial animations for flight combat and comms calls.\n\nAudio\nThe Dialogue team completed their performance-capture pick-up shoots and moved on to asset editing and mastering. Content was captured for the breathing system too, which is being prepared for implementation.\n\n\u201cThere was plenty of great quality content recorded to cap off a successful shoot.\u201d Audio Team\n\nFocus was also given to the Actor Status and asset mastering, and planning began for walla recording sessions to add background chatter to the game's more populated areas.\n\nThe SFX team continued efforts to fill environments with ambience in line with their sprint milestones.\n\nThe game\u2019s weapons are currently being implemented with relevant sound effects and the first audio passes on in-game VFX began, such as lightning strikes.\n\nThe tech required to implement sound into cinematics was also completed, with the team breaking down the effect requirements for chapter one to bolster the impressive cinematics with impactful audio.\n\nCode and tech work continued on the walla system, and numerous bugs were fixed too.\n\nEngine\nOn the renderer, transitions toward the final version of Gen12 continued. This included enabling the RenderGraph, which can utilize the GPU better with less CPU cost. The team also removed several legacy GPU access APIs, including MapAndWriteDiscard, which won\u2019t be supported by Gen12 due to low-level code complexity.\n\nFurthermore, the streaming system received improvements.\n\n\u201cWe no longer need to maintain a separate code path and instead update all our objects from within the rendering callback. This reduces code complexity, as we only need to maintain a single code path going forward, and reduces memory consumption as well.\u201d Engine Team\n\nThe team then added more strict debug modes and high-level checks for the ECUS code to detect and report potential race conditions earlier. Also on the entity-system side, more strict checks were added to entity access functions to ensure they only happen on threads where it\u2019s permitted.\n\nGameplay Story\nThe Gameplay Story team supported a performance-capture shoot and made improvements to a range of scenes across the campaign.\n\nThe team then used some of the new motion-capture data to create a scene with a key character entering and using an airlock. A long start idle was also added to a three-person scene early in the game, a console interaction was improved, and props were fixed and polished for a large mess-hall scene.\n\nA new way to trigger lines while animations are already playing was documented so it can be used in other areas across the game too.\n\nGraphics & VFX Programming\nIn September, the Graphics team progressed with several in-development features. For example, the new water-simulation and rendering systems now have their fundamental building blocks complete and are currently being balanced to ensure they look good under the game\u2019s huge variety of conditions.\n\nThe R&D on Global Illumination was merged into the main branch to see it working across various locations.\n\nWork also continued on features such as fire support for entities, a screen space occlusion effect for gas clouds to increase their lighting detail, and support for Maelstrom, the new physics destruction system.\n\nLevel Design\nThe Level Design team continued to make progress on their Idris interstitials. Along with the usual bug fixing and scene iteration, they completed the backend of the Reputation system. Now, the Idris crew will track a player's reputation via interactions. For example, selecting a negative, neutral, or positive conversation option, or walking off mid-conversation.\n\nThe team then moved on to Fortunes Cross, using the background AI to enhance its \u201cpast-its-sell-by-date shopping mall at 4 am\u201d aesthetic. For example, they added NPCs lazily eating noodles, wearily sipping on a coffee, and carrying out shady transactions.\n\nThey also completed additional work on a social section in chapter one.\n\n\u201cWe have our narrative scenes set up but, to reinforce the tone, we now have the background crew carrying out maintenance and repairs, watching frontline reports, and writing messages to loved ones.\u201d Level Design Team\n\nNarrative\nNarrative spent the first half of the month supporting the recent performance-capture shoot. They also continued to meet with the various level designers and leads to make final tweaks based on the latest level updates.\n\n\u201cIt was an intense three-week shoot, but it yielded some fantastic performances and moments that will really enrich the overall experience. During the shoot, we also welcomed back some of our original supporting cast for some final pickups.\u201d Narrative Team\n\nThe footage captured at the shoot is currently making its way through the content pipeline as editorial selects are pulled and passed along to the Animation and Audio teams.\n\nAdditional wildlines based on combat-AI feedback and Vanduul content were also captured to fill in areas and supply more specific dialogue to support gameplay.\n\nWith the shoot complete, the team continued tackling many of the game\u2019s text needs, from Galactapedia entries to environmental storytelling and collectibles. The team is also passing along script revisions to the Localization team.\n\nR&D\nThe R&D team worked on a variety of important updates to the game engine that will be shown to the community soon.\n\nTech Animation\nTech Animation supported numerous teams across the project with a wide variety of animation tasks, including asset implementation and maintenance.\n\nGreat progress was made on creating and implementing creatures. As part of this, work was done on toolsets for rigging and physics proxy authoring and implementation.\n\nComms calls and dialogue were a major focus in September too, with the goal being to create content at speed.\n\n\u201cThis has been hugely successful and collates many lengthy manual processes into a singular toolset with a great user interface.\u201d Tech Art\/Animation Team\n\nFinally, they continued to provide additional faces for the game to source from, providing much more variation to NPC populations.\n\nUI\nThe UI team looked at conversation text, updating its style to match the rest of the game-level screens, such as the radial menus. And, after a lot of iteration trying to find the perfect style, a direction for the Drake cockpit UI was unanimously approved and will soon move into production.\n\nThe team also began adding \u2018AI fluff\u2019 screens into some of the main levels of the game.\n\n\u201cOverall, they look great, though we\u2019ve spotted a few areas for improvement and have been working on adding some extra variety as well as improving the underlying system so that we can use a single design on differently shaped physical screens. For example, we can make an engineering screen that fits on portrait, 16:9, or super-widescreen terminals in the level.\u201d UI Team\n\nThe team also polished the visuals and ironed out issues with the visor and vehicle HUDs as they\u2019re used in-game and come up against unexpected situations.\n\nThey\u2019re currently polishing the map and radar systems, improving the visuals and usability.\n\nVFX\nLast month, VFX continued working with Art and Design on several locations, helping to add extra polish. They also continued fine-tuning the fire-propagation effects.\n\nWE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...\n\/\/ END TRANSMISSION"},"links_count":0,"comment_count":0,"created_at":"2023-10-11T19:00:00+00:00","created_at_human":"2 years ago"},"meta":{"processed_at":"2026-05-07 19:00:13","valid_relations":["images","links"],"prev_id":19516,"next_id":19520}}