Squadron 42 Monthly Report: April 2019
Undefined Undefined Monthly ReportsContent
This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We’re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.
Attention Recruits,
What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Operatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Intelligence suggests we’ve uncovered intel on operations concerning the Vanduul, combat AI, volumetric gas cloud tech, and more.
The information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.
UEE Naval High Command
AI
April saw the AI Team begin to improve the pipeline for dynamic (interactive) scenes. The goal is to make it easier for the animators and designers to create scenes and use them in a dynamic setup through subsumption in the level scripting phase. Improvements were also made to the blending between dynamic scenes during NPC locomotion; the team now evaluates the starting pose of the mo-cap animation at a more granular level for more accuracy. A project to optimize usables began that will eventually allow the team to cache animation and navigation data for interactive objects and improve runtime usage. This will be most useful in densely-populated areas like landing zones and space stations. The team are also looking to improve the compilation times for subsumption task nodes and extend the Tactical Point System to allow the time-sliced evaluation of game-code-defined functionalities.
Away from optimization, human combat AI was refactored to allow a more modular approach to the definition of tactics and behavior. The aim of this is to give the designers an efficient template that they can expand on and customize as they like.
Audio
Ship AI implemented new pilot skill levels to vary the agility of enemy ships and determine how they balance self-preservation and aggression. Improvements were also made to how non-player traffic behaves around landing zones.
Animation (Technical)
The Technical Animation team worked towards revamping the source control integration inside Maya with the view to supporting different Perforce workstreams (traditionally, this hasn’t been possible in technical animation). The ‘DNA’ system that powers character customization is also being converted to run in Maya. Although difficult, these projects are progressing well. Work on the Vanduul facial rig is beginning in earnest again, with the team receiving great support from the Character Art department. They have new meshes and textures to experiment with and are currently reauthoring the whole facial expression set. Finally, Tech Animation have been helping to make sure combat works correctly, NPCs are able to navigate environments, and props articulate as they should.
Art (Characters)
Throughout April, the team continued polishing characters while aligning task priorities with the Cinematics and Gameplay Story teams. This will give them visibility of how Shotgun and Jira interfaces are managed and help to improve overall visibility. Finishing touches were added to the Vanduul armor and the team are currently exploring the Xi’an. Work also continues on the material library, which affects all armors and outfits and will allow further improvements to visual quality. In a similar vein, tools for the hair pipeline are being built and tested to help artists author higher-quality hair.
Art (Weapons)
Last month, Weapon Art finished the Behring S38 pistol, Apocalypse Arms Animus missile launcher, and Klaus & Werner Lumin V submachine gun.
Cinematics
Aside from continuing with general cinematic creation, the team undertook support code work to get motion-capture scenes blending correctly to and from certain locomotion stances and AI situations. The Tools Team started a project to give better cinematic control over ships. They can now open full ships in the editor and select any entity on them, add it to the TrackView timeline, and animate it (something that required proxy placeholders before).
As mentioned last month, the team now has a working break-free cinematic mode that lets players switch between filmic or first-person viewpoints. Time was spent last month setting it up to work with the briefings the player receives from superior officers throughout the campaign. The mixture of first-person viewpoint and player-character reaction affords opportunities to show little moments and that would otherwise be lost if the scene was experienced entirely from a fixed perspective.
Engineering
The Actor Feature Team continued their work on the next iteration of jumping. This time, they concentrated on making jumping from heights look and feel more realistic by removing ‘flappy’ arms and improving the way weapons are held while falling. They also implemented an ‘anticipation’ animation based on velocity, which will improve the transition from falling to landing. March’s work on takedowns also continued, with the team implementing block-outs for both barehand and knife takedowns when the victim is prone. The AI Feature Team finalized the implementation of non-player interactive scenes and are now working on the setup for scenes with player interaction. Ship AI have also been working with Physics to start implementing a new 3D pathfinding algorithm that can utilize the info in the physics grid to plot a course. They started implementing formation flying with support from the EU Vehicle Team and have been helping out with the tools that preview video comms in ships and select characters, ships, and dialog to make sure the animation, lighting, and camera positions work correctly. They’ve been experimenting with camera movement in comms calls to make them feel more alive too.
The Programming Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
Gameplay Story
The Gameplay Story team had a productive month and were able to implement 13 scenes to a high standard. They also tested several scenes that take place on the bridge of the Idris, with characters interacting well with their seats and flight controls.
Graphics
The Graphics Team split their time throughout April between features and optimization. Features-wise, they implemented a physically-based detail mapping technique for the organic shader that intelligently blends and scales micro-details to match the overall macro surface textures authored by the artists. This allows for logical and varied details on organic assets with minimal artist setup. Extremes in brightness for video comms were fixed via better HDR color reproduction too. On the optimization front, they made three major improvements to the volumetric gas cloud tech: significantly more efficient brick culling for shadows via rasterization, resolution up-scaling to save fill-rate, and aggressive node pruning to save memory.
Level Design
The Level Design team went through a lot of pipeline optimization to streamline production of the required social AI behaviors, which involved forming a mini-team to tackle the mountain of required useables (these are vital to the implementation of crew schedules and behaviors that make the game’s social spaces believable and realistic). The Art and Design teams mapped out all space-based points of interest and action bubbles to ensure they have beautiful and astronomically-correct backgrounds. Lastly, they made a number of new senior hires that will make a positive difference to their output in the coming months.
Narrative
Narrative worked through an assortment of editorial selects for key campaign characters. They also worked closely with Character Art on key lore to help ground the fiction behind some of the latest concept work and wrote several set-dressing documents to guide environmental storytelling. They reviewed several chapter’s narrative moments with Design and made further progress on their ongoing task to complete all in-game text, too.
QA
QA continued to provide direct support to the Cinematics Team whenever issues affecting their cutscene workflow were encountered. More additions were made to the cinematics ‘zoo’ map mentioned last month, including all remaining ‘small’ ships. They’re now working on creating reliable test levels with specific TrackView functionality. Eventually, these levels will be implemented into the TestRunner feature tests made specifically for TrackView cinematics. Changes made within the feature stream for combat AI were also tested to ensure that existing cutscenes wouldn’t be affected once they were ported into the game build. A few issues were also tested that could’ve broken the TrackView tool itself and crashes were investigated that were introduced as a result of the change.
Tech Art
Alongside profiling and squashing bugs for Alpha 3.5, the Engineering Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality-fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They continued to collect system-wide context switch information to aid in performance analysis and parallel processing optimization (though just on Linux for now). Various improvements and robustness changes for crash digest computation were made too, the results of which will be used in Sentry.
The team also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
UI
During April, the UI team supported the Environment Team with various graphic design needs. This involved constructing background display screens for Aciedo station and branding and decal pass for Archon Station’s interior.
VFX
Last month, VFX worked on improvements to screen interference. In particular, adding on and off sequences for comms calls for the Cinematics and Design teams. They worked with the Art Team to block out some key destruction sequences and are continuing to flesh out environmental effects. Iteration on the gas cloud toolset continues, which will ensure the tools deliver everything required to flesh out related locations, such as The Coil. The VFX Team also continued work on cinematics. This currently consists of supporting the Cinematics Team by creating a custom tool written in Houdini to help further automate their process. Once complete, the designers will be able to model a rough layout shape, run the mesh through the tool, and have it convert to a 3D gas cloud volume without the need to work inside Houdini at all.
Covert Intel
Well, my baby’s number one, but I’m gonna dance with three or four.
WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
Attention Recruits,
What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Operatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Intelligence suggests we’ve uncovered intel on operations concerning the Vanduul, combat AI, volumetric gas cloud tech, and more.
The information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.
UEE Naval High Command
AI
April saw the AI Team begin to improve the pipeline for dynamic (interactive) scenes. The goal is to make it easier for the animators and designers to create scenes and use them in a dynamic setup through subsumption in the level scripting phase. Improvements were also made to the blending between dynamic scenes during NPC locomotion; the team now evaluates the starting pose of the mo-cap animation at a more granular level for more accuracy. A project to optimize usables began that will eventually allow the team to cache animation and navigation data for interactive objects and improve runtime usage. This will be most useful in densely-populated areas like landing zones and space stations. The team are also looking to improve the compilation times for subsumption task nodes and extend the Tactical Point System to allow the time-sliced evaluation of game-code-defined functionalities.
Away from optimization, human combat AI was refactored to allow a more modular approach to the definition of tactics and behavior. The aim of this is to give the designers an efficient template that they can expand on and customize as they like.
Audio
Ship AI implemented new pilot skill levels to vary the agility of enemy ships and determine how they balance self-preservation and aggression. Improvements were also made to how non-player traffic behaves around landing zones.
Animation (Technical)
The Technical Animation team worked towards revamping the source control integration inside Maya with the view to supporting different Perforce workstreams (traditionally, this hasn’t been possible in technical animation). The ‘DNA’ system that powers character customization is also being converted to run in Maya. Although difficult, these projects are progressing well. Work on the Vanduul facial rig is beginning in earnest again, with the team receiving great support from the Character Art department. They have new meshes and textures to experiment with and are currently reauthoring the whole facial expression set. Finally, Tech Animation have been helping to make sure combat works correctly, NPCs are able to navigate environments, and props articulate as they should.
Art (Characters)
Throughout April, the team continued polishing characters while aligning task priorities with the Cinematics and Gameplay Story teams. This will give them visibility of how Shotgun and Jira interfaces are managed and help to improve overall visibility. Finishing touches were added to the Vanduul armor and the team are currently exploring the Xi’an. Work also continues on the material library, which affects all armors and outfits and will allow further improvements to visual quality. In a similar vein, tools for the hair pipeline are being built and tested to help artists author higher-quality hair.
Art (Weapons)
Last month, Weapon Art finished the Behring S38 pistol, Apocalypse Arms Animus missile launcher, and Klaus & Werner Lumin V submachine gun.
Cinematics
Aside from continuing with general cinematic creation, the team undertook support code work to get motion-capture scenes blending correctly to and from certain locomotion stances and AI situations. The Tools Team started a project to give better cinematic control over ships. They can now open full ships in the editor and select any entity on them, add it to the TrackView timeline, and animate it (something that required proxy placeholders before).
As mentioned last month, the team now has a working break-free cinematic mode that lets players switch between filmic or first-person viewpoints. Time was spent last month setting it up to work with the briefings the player receives from superior officers throughout the campaign. The mixture of first-person viewpoint and player-character reaction affords opportunities to show little moments and that would otherwise be lost if the scene was experienced entirely from a fixed perspective.
Engineering
The Actor Feature Team continued their work on the next iteration of jumping. This time, they concentrated on making jumping from heights look and feel more realistic by removing ‘flappy’ arms and improving the way weapons are held while falling. They also implemented an ‘anticipation’ animation based on velocity, which will improve the transition from falling to landing. March’s work on takedowns also continued, with the team implementing block-outs for both barehand and knife takedowns when the victim is prone. The AI Feature Team finalized the implementation of non-player interactive scenes and are now working on the setup for scenes with player interaction. Ship AI have also been working with Physics to start implementing a new 3D pathfinding algorithm that can utilize the info in the physics grid to plot a course. They started implementing formation flying with support from the EU Vehicle Team and have been helping out with the tools that preview video comms in ships and select characters, ships, and dialog to make sure the animation, lighting, and camera positions work correctly. They’ve been experimenting with camera movement in comms calls to make them feel more alive too.
The Programming Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
Gameplay Story
The Gameplay Story team had a productive month and were able to implement 13 scenes to a high standard. They also tested several scenes that take place on the bridge of the Idris, with characters interacting well with their seats and flight controls.
Graphics
The Graphics Team split their time throughout April between features and optimization. Features-wise, they implemented a physically-based detail mapping technique for the organic shader that intelligently blends and scales micro-details to match the overall macro surface textures authored by the artists. This allows for logical and varied details on organic assets with minimal artist setup. Extremes in brightness for video comms were fixed via better HDR color reproduction too. On the optimization front, they made three major improvements to the volumetric gas cloud tech: significantly more efficient brick culling for shadows via rasterization, resolution up-scaling to save fill-rate, and aggressive node pruning to save memory.
Level Design
The Level Design team went through a lot of pipeline optimization to streamline production of the required social AI behaviors, which involved forming a mini-team to tackle the mountain of required useables (these are vital to the implementation of crew schedules and behaviors that make the game’s social spaces believable and realistic). The Art and Design teams mapped out all space-based points of interest and action bubbles to ensure they have beautiful and astronomically-correct backgrounds. Lastly, they made a number of new senior hires that will make a positive difference to their output in the coming months.
Narrative
Narrative worked through an assortment of editorial selects for key campaign characters. They also worked closely with Character Art on key lore to help ground the fiction behind some of the latest concept work and wrote several set-dressing documents to guide environmental storytelling. They reviewed several chapter’s narrative moments with Design and made further progress on their ongoing task to complete all in-game text, too.
QA
QA continued to provide direct support to the Cinematics Team whenever issues affecting their cutscene workflow were encountered. More additions were made to the cinematics ‘zoo’ map mentioned last month, including all remaining ‘small’ ships. They’re now working on creating reliable test levels with specific TrackView functionality. Eventually, these levels will be implemented into the TestRunner feature tests made specifically for TrackView cinematics. Changes made within the feature stream for combat AI were also tested to ensure that existing cutscenes wouldn’t be affected once they were ported into the game build. A few issues were also tested that could’ve broken the TrackView tool itself and crashes were investigated that were introduced as a result of the change.
Tech Art
Alongside profiling and squashing bugs for Alpha 3.5, the Engineering Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality-fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They continued to collect system-wide context switch information to aid in performance analysis and parallel processing optimization (though just on Linux for now). Various improvements and robustness changes for crash digest computation were made too, the results of which will be used in Sentry.
The team also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
UI
During April, the UI team supported the Environment Team with various graphic design needs. This involved constructing background display screens for Aciedo station and branding and decal pass for Archon Station’s interior.
VFX
Last month, VFX worked on improvements to screen interference. In particular, adding on and off sequences for comms calls for the Cinematics and Design teams. They worked with the Art Team to block out some key destruction sequences and are continuing to flesh out environmental effects. Iteration on the gas cloud toolset continues, which will ensure the tools deliver everything required to flesh out related locations, such as The Coil. The VFX Team also continued work on cinematics. This currently consists of supporting the Cinematics Team by creating a custom tool written in Houdini to help further automate their process. Once complete, the designers will be able to model a rough layout shape, run the mesh through the tool, and have it convert to a 3D gas cloud volume without the need to work inside Houdini at all.
Covert Intel
Well, my baby’s number one, but I’m gonna dance with three or four.
WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
Dies ist ein Querverweis auf den Bericht, der kürzlich über den monatlichen Squadron 42 Newsletter verschickt wurde. Wir veröffentlichen dies ein zweites Mal als Comm-Link, um es der Community zu erleichtern, auf die man zurückgreifen kann.
Achtung Rekruten,
Was Sie hier lesen werden, sind die neuesten Informationen über die Weiterentwicklung der Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Mitarbeiter auf der ganzen Welt sammelten die notwendigen Informationen, um Ihnen diesen Fortschrittsbericht zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Intelligenz deutet darauf hin, dass wir Informationen über Operationen bezüglich der Vanduul, der Bekämpfung der KI, der volumetrischen Gaswolkentechnik und mehr aufgedeckt haben.
Die in dieser Mitteilung enthaltenen Informationen sind äußerst sensibel, und es ist von größter Bedeutung, dass sie nicht in die falschen Hände geraten. Alle Datensätze nach dem Lesen löschen.
UEE Naval Oberkommando
KI
Im April begann das KI-Team, die Pipeline für dynamische (interaktive) Szenen zu verbessern. Ziel ist es, den Animatoren und Designern die Erstellung von Szenen zu erleichtern und sie in einem dynamischen Setup durch Unterordnung in der Level-Scripting-Phase zu verwenden. Auch die Überblendung zwischen dynamischen Szenen während der NSC-Bewegung wurde verbessert; das Team bewertet nun die Ausgangsposition der Mo-Cap-Animation auf einer granulareren Ebene für mehr Genauigkeit. Ein Projekt zur Optimierung von Usables begann, das es dem Team schließlich ermöglichen wird, Animations- und Navigationsdaten für interaktive Objekte zwischenzuspeichern und die Laufzeitnutzung zu verbessern. Dies wird vor allem in dicht besiedelten Gebieten wie Landezonen und Raumstationen nützlich sein. Das Team arbeitet auch daran, die Kompilierungszeiten für Subsumption Task Nodes zu verbessern und das Tactical Point System zu erweitern, um die zeitliche Auswertung von spielcode-definierten Funktionalitäten zu ermöglichen.
Abseits der Optimierung wurde die menschliche KampfkI überarbeitet, um einen modulareren Ansatz für die Definition von Taktik und Verhalten zu ermöglichen. Ziel ist es, den Designern eine effiziente Vorlage zu geben, die sie beliebig erweitern und anpassen können.
Audio
Die SchiffskI implementierte neue Fertigkeiten für Piloten, um die Agilität feindlicher Schiffe zu variieren und zu bestimmen, wie sie Selbsterhaltung und Aggression ausbalancieren. Außerdem wurde das Verhalten des Nicht-Player-Verkehrs in den Landezonen verbessert.
Animation (technisch)
Das Team der Technischen Animation arbeitete an der Überarbeitung der Versionskontrollintegration in Maya, um verschiedene Perforce-Workstreams zu unterstützen (traditionell war dies in der technischen Animation nicht möglich). Das DNA-System, das die Charakteranpassung unterstützt, wird ebenfalls auf Maya umgestellt. Obwohl schwierig, kommen diese Projekte gut voran. Die Arbeit an der Vanduul-Gesichtsrigg beginnt wieder ernsthaft, wobei das Team von der Abteilung Character Art große Unterstützung erhält. Sie haben neue Netze und Texturen, mit denen sie experimentieren können, und schreiben derzeit das gesamte Mimikset neu. Schließlich hat Tech Animation geholfen, sicherzustellen, dass der Kampf korrekt funktioniert, NSCs in der Lage sind, in Umgebungen zu navigieren und Requisiten so zu artikulieren, wie sie sollten.
Kunst (Charaktere)
Während des gesamten Monats April setzte das Team das Polieren der Charaktere fort und richtete die Aufgabenprioritäten mit den Teams Cinematics und Gameplay Story aus. Dies gibt ihnen einen Überblick darüber, wie die Shotgun- und Jira-Schnittstellen verwaltet werden und trägt dazu bei, die allgemeine Sichtbarkeit zu verbessern. Der Vanduul-Rüstung wurden letzte Feinheiten hinzugefügt, und das Team erkundet derzeit den Xi'an. Auch an der Materialbibliothek wird weiter gearbeitet, die alle Rüstungen und Outfits betrifft und eine weitere Verbesserung der visuellen Qualität ermöglichen wird. In ähnlicher Weise werden Werkzeuge für die Haarpipeline entwickelt und getestet, um Künstlern zu helfen, hochwertigeres Haar zu schreiben.
Kunst (Waffen)
Im vergangenen Monat beendete Weapon Art die Behring S38 Pistole, den Apocalypse Arms Animus Raketenwerfer und das Maschinengewehr Klaus & Werner Lumin V.
Kinematiken
Abgesehen von der Fortsetzung der allgemeinen filmischen Arbeit übernahm das Team Support Code-Arbeiten, um Motion-Capture-Szenen zu erhalten, die korrekt zu und von bestimmten Bewegungshaltungen und KI-Situationen passen. Das Tools-Team startete ein Projekt, um eine bessere filmische Kontrolle über Schiffe zu ermöglichen. Sie können nun komplette Schiffe im Editor öffnen und jedes beliebige Objekt auswählen, es zur TrackView-Timeline hinzufügen und animieren (was zuvor Proxy-Platzhalter erforderte).
Wie bereits im letzten Monat erwähnt, verfügt das Team nun über einen funktionierenden, pausenlosen Kinomodus, in dem die Spieler zwischen filmischen und persönlichen Standpunkten wechseln können. Die Zeit, die letzten Monat damit verbracht wurde, es einzurichten, um mit den Briefings zu arbeiten, die der Spieler während der gesamten Kampagne von vorgesetzten Offizieren erhält. Die Mischung aus First-Person-Perspektive und Spieler-Charakter-Reaktion bietet die Möglichkeit, kleine Momente zu zeigen, die sonst verloren gehen würden, wenn die Szene ganz aus einer festen Perspektive erlebt würde.
Ingenieurwesen
Das Actor Feature Team setzte seine Arbeit an der nächsten Iteration des Springens fort. Diesmal konzentrierten sie sich darauf, das Springen aus der Höhe realistischer zu gestalten, indem sie "flatterhafte" Arme entfernten und die Art und Weise, wie Waffen beim Fallen gehalten werden, verbesserten. Sie implementierten auch eine auf Geschwindigkeit basierende Antizipationsanimation, die den Übergang vom Fallen zur Landung verbessern wird. Die Arbeit von March an Takedowns wurde ebenfalls fortgesetzt, wobei das Team Block-Outs für Barhand- und Messer-Takedowns implementierte, wenn das Opfer anfällig ist. Das KI Feature Team hat die Implementierung von interaktiven Szenen ohne Spieler abgeschlossen und arbeitet nun an der Einrichtung von Szenen mit Spielerinteraktion. Die SchiffskI hat auch mit der Physik zusammengearbeitet, um mit der Implementierung eines neuen 3D-Pfadfindungsalgorithmus zu beginnen, der die Informationen im Physikgitter nutzen kann, um einen Kurs zu zeichnen. Sie begannen mit Unterstützung des EU-Fahrzeugteams mit der Implementierung von Formationsflügen und halfen bei den Werkzeugen, die Videokommandos in Schiffen vorab anzeigen und Charaktere, Schiffe und Dialoge auswählen, um sicherzustellen, dass die Animations-, Beleuchtungs- und Kamerapositionen korrekt funktionieren. Sie haben mit der Bewegung der Kamera in Kommunikationsaufrufen experimentiert, um ihnen ein lebendigeres Gefühl zu geben.
Das Programmierteam arbeitete am Rendern, verbesserte das zeitliche Dither-Muster, um das Rauschen auf Haarkarten zu reduzieren, fügte Unterstützung für Varianztexturen für Planet Tech v4 hinzu und machte verschiedene Qualitätskorrekturen für gather-basierte DOFs. Sie haben auch mit der globalen Zustandsbereinigung des Render-Threads begonnen (eine Voraussetzung für den Low-Level-Renderer und den Renderpass-Refaktor). Sie begannen auch, sich mit der Verfeinerung der physikalischen Geometrieinstanz zu befassen, um den Speicherbedarf zu reduzieren. Wenn dies abgeschlossen ist, wird der Speicherverbrauch in räumlichen und planetarischen Gittern reduziert und die Physik-Engine generell optimiert.
Gameplay-Geschichte
Das Gameplay Story-Team hatte einen produktiven Monat und konnte 13 Szenen auf hohem Niveau umsetzen. Sie testeten auch mehrere Szenen, die auf der Brücke des Idris spielen, wobei die Charaktere gut mit ihren Sitzen und Flugkontrollen interagieren.
Grafiken
Das Grafik-Team teilte seine Zeit im April auf Funktionen und Optimierung auf. In Bezug auf die Funktionen implementierten sie eine physikalisch basierte Detailkartierungstechnik für den organischen Shader, die Mikrodetails intelligent vermischt und skaliert, um sie an die von den Künstlern erstellten Makro-Oberflächentexturen anzupassen. Dies ermöglicht logische und vielfältige Details zu organischen Assets mit minimaler Künstlerausstattung. Extreme Helligkeitswerte bei Videokommentaren wurden ebenfalls durch eine bessere HDR-Farbwiedergabe behoben. Auf der Optimierungsseite haben sie drei wesentliche Verbesserungen an der volumetrischen Gaswolkentechnik vorgenommen: eine deutlich effizientere Ziegelsortierung für Schatten durch Rasterung, eine Auflösungs-Upskalierung zur Einsparung der Füllrate und eine aggressive Knotenbeschneidung zur Speicheroptimierung.
Leveldesign
Das Level Design Team durchlief eine Vielzahl von Pipeline-Optimierungen, um die Produktion der erforderlichen sozialen KI-Verhaltensweisen zu rationalisieren, was die Bildung eines Mini-Teams beinhaltete, um den Berg der benötigten Nutzbarkeiten zu bewältigen (diese sind entscheidend für die Implementierung von Crewplänen und Verhaltensweisen, die die sozialen Räume des Spiels glaubwürdig und realistisch machen). Die Kunst- und Designteams haben alle weltraumgestützten Points of Interest und Action-Bubbles ausgearbeitet, um sicherzustellen, dass sie einen schönen und astronomisch korrekten Hintergrund haben. Schließlich haben sie eine Reihe von neuen Führungskräften eingestellt, die in den kommenden Monaten einen positiven Einfluss auf ihre Produktion haben werden.
Narrativ
Narrative arbeitete eine Reihe von redaktionellen Auswahlen für wichtige Kampagnencharaktere durch. Sie arbeiteten auch eng mit Character Art an Schlüsselüberlieferungen zusammen, um die Fiktion hinter einigen der neuesten Konzeptarbeiten zu begründen, und schrieben mehrere Set-Dressing-Dokumente, um das Erzählen von Umweltgeschichten zu unterstützen. Sie besprachen die erzählerischen Momente mehrerer Kapitel mit Design und machten weitere Fortschritte bei ihrer laufenden Aufgabe, auch den gesamten In-Game-Text zu vervollständigen.
QA
QA leistete weiterhin direkte Unterstützung für das Cinematics-Team, wenn Probleme mit dem Cutscene Workflow auftraten. Die im letzten Monat erwähnte Kinokarte "Zoo" wurde um weitere Ergänzungen ergänzt, einschließlich aller übrigen "kleinen" Schiffe. Sie arbeiten nun daran, zuverlässige Testebenen mit spezifischen TrackView-Funktionen zu erstellen. Schließlich werden diese Ebenen in die TestRunner-Funktionstests implementiert, die speziell für TrackView-Kinematiken entwickelt wurden. Änderungen, die innerhalb des Feature-Streams für die Kampf-KI vorgenommen wurden, wurden ebenfalls getestet, um sicherzustellen, dass bestehende Cutscenes nicht beeinträchtigt werden, sobald sie in das Game Build portiert wurden. Es wurden auch einige Probleme getestet, die das TrackView-Tool selbst hätten brechen können, und es wurden Abstürze untersucht, die als Folge der Änderung eingeführt wurden.
Technische Kunst
Neben dem Profiling und Squashing von Bugs für Alpha 3.5 arbeitete das Engineering-Team an Rendering, der Verbesserung des zeitlichen Dither-Musters zur Reduzierung von Rauschen auf Haarkarten, der Unterstützung von Varianztexturen für Planet Tech v4 und der Erstellung verschiedener Qualitäts-Fixes für gather-basierte DOFs. Sie haben auch mit der globalen Zustandsbereinigung des Render-Threads begonnen (eine Voraussetzung für den Low-Level-Renderer und den Renderpass-Refaktor). Sie sammelten weiterhin systemweite Kontextwechselinformationen, um die Leistungsanalyse und die Optimierung der Parallelverarbeitung zu unterstützen (vorerst jedoch nur unter Linux). Verschiedene Verbesserungen und Robustheitsänderungen für die Berechnung von Crash-Digests wurden ebenfalls vorgenommen, deren Ergebnisse in Sentry verwendet werden.
Das Team begann auch, sich mit der Verfeinerung der physikalischen Geometrieinstanz zu befassen, um den Speicherbedarf zu reduzieren. Wenn dies abgeschlossen ist, wird der Speicherverbrauch in räumlichen und planetarischen Gittern reduziert und die Physik-Engine generell optimiert.
UI
Im April unterstützte das UI-Team das Environment Team bei verschiedenen Grafikdesign-Anforderungen. Dazu gehörte die Konstruktion von Hintergrund-Displays für den Bahnhof Aciedo sowie von Branding- und Decal-Pass für den Innenraum der Archon Station.
VFX
Letzten Monat arbeitete VFX an Verbesserungen der Bildschirminterferenz. Insbesondere das Hinzufügen von An- und Abschaltsequenzen für Kommunikation erfordert die Teams Cinematics und Design. Sie haben mit dem Art Team zusammengearbeitet, um einige wichtige Zerstörungssequenzen zu blockieren und die Umweltauswirkungen weiter zu konkretisieren. Die Iteration des Gas-Cloud-Toolset geht weiter, wodurch sichergestellt wird, dass die Tools alles liefern, was erforderlich ist, um verwandte Standorte, wie z.B. The Coil, auszufüllen. Das VFX-Team setzte auch die Arbeit an den Kinofilmen fort. Dies besteht derzeit darin, das Cinematics-Team durch die Entwicklung eines benutzerdefinierten Tools in Houdini zu unterstützen, um den Prozess weiter zu automatisieren. Nach Fertigstellung können die Designer eine grobe Layoutform modellieren, das Mesh durch das Tool laufen lassen und es in ein 3D-Gaswolkenvolumen umwandeln lassen, ohne dass in Houdini gearbeitet werden muss.
Verdeckte Intel
Nun, mein Baby ist die Nummer eins, aber ich werde mit drei oder vier tanzen.
WIR SEHEN UNS NÄCHSTEN MONAT.....
Achtung Rekruten,
Was Sie hier lesen werden, sind die neuesten Informationen über die Weiterentwicklung der Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Mitarbeiter auf der ganzen Welt sammelten die notwendigen Informationen, um Ihnen diesen Fortschrittsbericht zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Intelligenz deutet darauf hin, dass wir Informationen über Operationen bezüglich der Vanduul, der Bekämpfung der KI, der volumetrischen Gaswolkentechnik und mehr aufgedeckt haben.
Die in dieser Mitteilung enthaltenen Informationen sind äußerst sensibel, und es ist von größter Bedeutung, dass sie nicht in die falschen Hände geraten. Alle Datensätze nach dem Lesen löschen.
UEE Naval Oberkommando
KI
Im April begann das KI-Team, die Pipeline für dynamische (interaktive) Szenen zu verbessern. Ziel ist es, den Animatoren und Designern die Erstellung von Szenen zu erleichtern und sie in einem dynamischen Setup durch Unterordnung in der Level-Scripting-Phase zu verwenden. Auch die Überblendung zwischen dynamischen Szenen während der NSC-Bewegung wurde verbessert; das Team bewertet nun die Ausgangsposition der Mo-Cap-Animation auf einer granulareren Ebene für mehr Genauigkeit. Ein Projekt zur Optimierung von Usables begann, das es dem Team schließlich ermöglichen wird, Animations- und Navigationsdaten für interaktive Objekte zwischenzuspeichern und die Laufzeitnutzung zu verbessern. Dies wird vor allem in dicht besiedelten Gebieten wie Landezonen und Raumstationen nützlich sein. Das Team arbeitet auch daran, die Kompilierungszeiten für Subsumption Task Nodes zu verbessern und das Tactical Point System zu erweitern, um die zeitliche Auswertung von spielcode-definierten Funktionalitäten zu ermöglichen.
Abseits der Optimierung wurde die menschliche KampfkI überarbeitet, um einen modulareren Ansatz für die Definition von Taktik und Verhalten zu ermöglichen. Ziel ist es, den Designern eine effiziente Vorlage zu geben, die sie beliebig erweitern und anpassen können.
Audio
Die SchiffskI implementierte neue Fertigkeiten für Piloten, um die Agilität feindlicher Schiffe zu variieren und zu bestimmen, wie sie Selbsterhaltung und Aggression ausbalancieren. Außerdem wurde das Verhalten des Nicht-Player-Verkehrs in den Landezonen verbessert.
Animation (technisch)
Das Team der Technischen Animation arbeitete an der Überarbeitung der Versionskontrollintegration in Maya, um verschiedene Perforce-Workstreams zu unterstützen (traditionell war dies in der technischen Animation nicht möglich). Das DNA-System, das die Charakteranpassung unterstützt, wird ebenfalls auf Maya umgestellt. Obwohl schwierig, kommen diese Projekte gut voran. Die Arbeit an der Vanduul-Gesichtsrigg beginnt wieder ernsthaft, wobei das Team von der Abteilung Character Art große Unterstützung erhält. Sie haben neue Netze und Texturen, mit denen sie experimentieren können, und schreiben derzeit das gesamte Mimikset neu. Schließlich hat Tech Animation geholfen, sicherzustellen, dass der Kampf korrekt funktioniert, NSCs in der Lage sind, in Umgebungen zu navigieren und Requisiten so zu artikulieren, wie sie sollten.
Kunst (Charaktere)
Während des gesamten Monats April setzte das Team das Polieren der Charaktere fort und richtete die Aufgabenprioritäten mit den Teams Cinematics und Gameplay Story aus. Dies gibt ihnen einen Überblick darüber, wie die Shotgun- und Jira-Schnittstellen verwaltet werden und trägt dazu bei, die allgemeine Sichtbarkeit zu verbessern. Der Vanduul-Rüstung wurden letzte Feinheiten hinzugefügt, und das Team erkundet derzeit den Xi'an. Auch an der Materialbibliothek wird weiter gearbeitet, die alle Rüstungen und Outfits betrifft und eine weitere Verbesserung der visuellen Qualität ermöglichen wird. In ähnlicher Weise werden Werkzeuge für die Haarpipeline entwickelt und getestet, um Künstlern zu helfen, hochwertigeres Haar zu schreiben.
Kunst (Waffen)
Im vergangenen Monat beendete Weapon Art die Behring S38 Pistole, den Apocalypse Arms Animus Raketenwerfer und das Maschinengewehr Klaus & Werner Lumin V.
Kinematiken
Abgesehen von der Fortsetzung der allgemeinen filmischen Arbeit übernahm das Team Support Code-Arbeiten, um Motion-Capture-Szenen zu erhalten, die korrekt zu und von bestimmten Bewegungshaltungen und KI-Situationen passen. Das Tools-Team startete ein Projekt, um eine bessere filmische Kontrolle über Schiffe zu ermöglichen. Sie können nun komplette Schiffe im Editor öffnen und jedes beliebige Objekt auswählen, es zur TrackView-Timeline hinzufügen und animieren (was zuvor Proxy-Platzhalter erforderte).
Wie bereits im letzten Monat erwähnt, verfügt das Team nun über einen funktionierenden, pausenlosen Kinomodus, in dem die Spieler zwischen filmischen und persönlichen Standpunkten wechseln können. Die Zeit, die letzten Monat damit verbracht wurde, es einzurichten, um mit den Briefings zu arbeiten, die der Spieler während der gesamten Kampagne von vorgesetzten Offizieren erhält. Die Mischung aus First-Person-Perspektive und Spieler-Charakter-Reaktion bietet die Möglichkeit, kleine Momente zu zeigen, die sonst verloren gehen würden, wenn die Szene ganz aus einer festen Perspektive erlebt würde.
Ingenieurwesen
Das Actor Feature Team setzte seine Arbeit an der nächsten Iteration des Springens fort. Diesmal konzentrierten sie sich darauf, das Springen aus der Höhe realistischer zu gestalten, indem sie "flatterhafte" Arme entfernten und die Art und Weise, wie Waffen beim Fallen gehalten werden, verbesserten. Sie implementierten auch eine auf Geschwindigkeit basierende Antizipationsanimation, die den Übergang vom Fallen zur Landung verbessern wird. Die Arbeit von March an Takedowns wurde ebenfalls fortgesetzt, wobei das Team Block-Outs für Barhand- und Messer-Takedowns implementierte, wenn das Opfer anfällig ist. Das KI Feature Team hat die Implementierung von interaktiven Szenen ohne Spieler abgeschlossen und arbeitet nun an der Einrichtung von Szenen mit Spielerinteraktion. Die SchiffskI hat auch mit der Physik zusammengearbeitet, um mit der Implementierung eines neuen 3D-Pfadfindungsalgorithmus zu beginnen, der die Informationen im Physikgitter nutzen kann, um einen Kurs zu zeichnen. Sie begannen mit Unterstützung des EU-Fahrzeugteams mit der Implementierung von Formationsflügen und halfen bei den Werkzeugen, die Videokommandos in Schiffen vorab anzeigen und Charaktere, Schiffe und Dialoge auswählen, um sicherzustellen, dass die Animations-, Beleuchtungs- und Kamerapositionen korrekt funktionieren. Sie haben mit der Bewegung der Kamera in Kommunikationsaufrufen experimentiert, um ihnen ein lebendigeres Gefühl zu geben.
Das Programmierteam arbeitete am Rendern, verbesserte das zeitliche Dither-Muster, um das Rauschen auf Haarkarten zu reduzieren, fügte Unterstützung für Varianztexturen für Planet Tech v4 hinzu und machte verschiedene Qualitätskorrekturen für gather-basierte DOFs. Sie haben auch mit der globalen Zustandsbereinigung des Render-Threads begonnen (eine Voraussetzung für den Low-Level-Renderer und den Renderpass-Refaktor). Sie begannen auch, sich mit der Verfeinerung der physikalischen Geometrieinstanz zu befassen, um den Speicherbedarf zu reduzieren. Wenn dies abgeschlossen ist, wird der Speicherverbrauch in räumlichen und planetarischen Gittern reduziert und die Physik-Engine generell optimiert.
Gameplay-Geschichte
Das Gameplay Story-Team hatte einen produktiven Monat und konnte 13 Szenen auf hohem Niveau umsetzen. Sie testeten auch mehrere Szenen, die auf der Brücke des Idris spielen, wobei die Charaktere gut mit ihren Sitzen und Flugkontrollen interagieren.
Grafiken
Das Grafik-Team teilte seine Zeit im April auf Funktionen und Optimierung auf. In Bezug auf die Funktionen implementierten sie eine physikalisch basierte Detailkartierungstechnik für den organischen Shader, die Mikrodetails intelligent vermischt und skaliert, um sie an die von den Künstlern erstellten Makro-Oberflächentexturen anzupassen. Dies ermöglicht logische und vielfältige Details zu organischen Assets mit minimaler Künstlerausstattung. Extreme Helligkeitswerte bei Videokommentaren wurden ebenfalls durch eine bessere HDR-Farbwiedergabe behoben. Auf der Optimierungsseite haben sie drei wesentliche Verbesserungen an der volumetrischen Gaswolkentechnik vorgenommen: eine deutlich effizientere Ziegelsortierung für Schatten durch Rasterung, eine Auflösungs-Upskalierung zur Einsparung der Füllrate und eine aggressive Knotenbeschneidung zur Speicheroptimierung.
Leveldesign
Das Level Design Team durchlief eine Vielzahl von Pipeline-Optimierungen, um die Produktion der erforderlichen sozialen KI-Verhaltensweisen zu rationalisieren, was die Bildung eines Mini-Teams beinhaltete, um den Berg der benötigten Nutzbarkeiten zu bewältigen (diese sind entscheidend für die Implementierung von Crewplänen und Verhaltensweisen, die die sozialen Räume des Spiels glaubwürdig und realistisch machen). Die Kunst- und Designteams haben alle weltraumgestützten Points of Interest und Action-Bubbles ausgearbeitet, um sicherzustellen, dass sie einen schönen und astronomisch korrekten Hintergrund haben. Schließlich haben sie eine Reihe von neuen Führungskräften eingestellt, die in den kommenden Monaten einen positiven Einfluss auf ihre Produktion haben werden.
Narrativ
Narrative arbeitete eine Reihe von redaktionellen Auswahlen für wichtige Kampagnencharaktere durch. Sie arbeiteten auch eng mit Character Art an Schlüsselüberlieferungen zusammen, um die Fiktion hinter einigen der neuesten Konzeptarbeiten zu begründen, und schrieben mehrere Set-Dressing-Dokumente, um das Erzählen von Umweltgeschichten zu unterstützen. Sie besprachen die erzählerischen Momente mehrerer Kapitel mit Design und machten weitere Fortschritte bei ihrer laufenden Aufgabe, auch den gesamten In-Game-Text zu vervollständigen.
QA
QA leistete weiterhin direkte Unterstützung für das Cinematics-Team, wenn Probleme mit dem Cutscene Workflow auftraten. Die im letzten Monat erwähnte Kinokarte "Zoo" wurde um weitere Ergänzungen ergänzt, einschließlich aller übrigen "kleinen" Schiffe. Sie arbeiten nun daran, zuverlässige Testebenen mit spezifischen TrackView-Funktionen zu erstellen. Schließlich werden diese Ebenen in die TestRunner-Funktionstests implementiert, die speziell für TrackView-Kinematiken entwickelt wurden. Änderungen, die innerhalb des Feature-Streams für die Kampf-KI vorgenommen wurden, wurden ebenfalls getestet, um sicherzustellen, dass bestehende Cutscenes nicht beeinträchtigt werden, sobald sie in das Game Build portiert wurden. Es wurden auch einige Probleme getestet, die das TrackView-Tool selbst hätten brechen können, und es wurden Abstürze untersucht, die als Folge der Änderung eingeführt wurden.
Technische Kunst
Neben dem Profiling und Squashing von Bugs für Alpha 3.5 arbeitete das Engineering-Team an Rendering, der Verbesserung des zeitlichen Dither-Musters zur Reduzierung von Rauschen auf Haarkarten, der Unterstützung von Varianztexturen für Planet Tech v4 und der Erstellung verschiedener Qualitäts-Fixes für gather-basierte DOFs. Sie haben auch mit der globalen Zustandsbereinigung des Render-Threads begonnen (eine Voraussetzung für den Low-Level-Renderer und den Renderpass-Refaktor). Sie sammelten weiterhin systemweite Kontextwechselinformationen, um die Leistungsanalyse und die Optimierung der Parallelverarbeitung zu unterstützen (vorerst jedoch nur unter Linux). Verschiedene Verbesserungen und Robustheitsänderungen für die Berechnung von Crash-Digests wurden ebenfalls vorgenommen, deren Ergebnisse in Sentry verwendet werden.
Das Team begann auch, sich mit der Verfeinerung der physikalischen Geometrieinstanz zu befassen, um den Speicherbedarf zu reduzieren. Wenn dies abgeschlossen ist, wird der Speicherverbrauch in räumlichen und planetarischen Gittern reduziert und die Physik-Engine generell optimiert.
UI
Im April unterstützte das UI-Team das Environment Team bei verschiedenen Grafikdesign-Anforderungen. Dazu gehörte die Konstruktion von Hintergrund-Displays für den Bahnhof Aciedo sowie von Branding- und Decal-Pass für den Innenraum der Archon Station.
VFX
Letzten Monat arbeitete VFX an Verbesserungen der Bildschirminterferenz. Insbesondere das Hinzufügen von An- und Abschaltsequenzen für Kommunikation erfordert die Teams Cinematics und Design. Sie haben mit dem Art Team zusammengearbeitet, um einige wichtige Zerstörungssequenzen zu blockieren und die Umweltauswirkungen weiter zu konkretisieren. Die Iteration des Gas-Cloud-Toolset geht weiter, wodurch sichergestellt wird, dass die Tools alles liefern, was erforderlich ist, um verwandte Standorte, wie z.B. The Coil, auszufüllen. Das VFX-Team setzte auch die Arbeit an den Kinofilmen fort. Dies besteht derzeit darin, das Cinematics-Team durch die Entwicklung eines benutzerdefinierten Tools in Houdini zu unterstützen, um den Prozess weiter zu automatisieren. Nach Fertigstellung können die Designer eine grobe Layoutform modellieren, das Mesh durch das Tool laufen lassen und es in ein 3D-Gaswolkenvolumen umwandeln lassen, ohne dass in Houdini gearbeitet werden muss.
Verdeckte Intel
Nun, mein Baby ist die Nummer eins, aber ich werde mit drei oder vier tanzen.
WIR SEHEN UNS NÄCHSTEN MONAT.....
This is a cross-post of the report that was recently sent out via the monthly Squadron 42 newsletter. We’re publishing this a second time as a Comm-Link to make it easier for the community to reference back to.
Attention Recruits,
What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Operatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Intelligence suggests we’ve uncovered intel on operations concerning the Vanduul, combat AI, volumetric gas cloud tech, and more.
The information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.
UEE Naval High Command
AI
April saw the AI Team begin to improve the pipeline for dynamic (interactive) scenes. The goal is to make it easier for the animators and designers to create scenes and use them in a dynamic setup through subsumption in the level scripting phase. Improvements were also made to the blending between dynamic scenes during NPC locomotion; the team now evaluates the starting pose of the mo-cap animation at a more granular level for more accuracy. A project to optimize usables began that will eventually allow the team to cache animation and navigation data for interactive objects and improve runtime usage. This will be most useful in densely-populated areas like landing zones and space stations. The team are also looking to improve the compilation times for subsumption task nodes and extend the Tactical Point System to allow the time-sliced evaluation of game-code-defined functionalities.
Away from optimization, human combat AI was refactored to allow a more modular approach to the definition of tactics and behavior. The aim of this is to give the designers an efficient template that they can expand on and customize as they like.
Audio
Ship AI implemented new pilot skill levels to vary the agility of enemy ships and determine how they balance self-preservation and aggression. Improvements were also made to how non-player traffic behaves around landing zones.
Animation (Technical)
The Technical Animation team worked towards revamping the source control integration inside Maya with the view to supporting different Perforce workstreams (traditionally, this hasn’t been possible in technical animation). The ‘DNA’ system that powers character customization is also being converted to run in Maya. Although difficult, these projects are progressing well. Work on the Vanduul facial rig is beginning in earnest again, with the team receiving great support from the Character Art department. They have new meshes and textures to experiment with and are currently reauthoring the whole facial expression set. Finally, Tech Animation have been helping to make sure combat works correctly, NPCs are able to navigate environments, and props articulate as they should.
Art (Characters)
Throughout April, the team continued polishing characters while aligning task priorities with the Cinematics and Gameplay Story teams. This will give them visibility of how Shotgun and Jira interfaces are managed and help to improve overall visibility. Finishing touches were added to the Vanduul armor and the team are currently exploring the Xi’an. Work also continues on the material library, which affects all armors and outfits and will allow further improvements to visual quality. In a similar vein, tools for the hair pipeline are being built and tested to help artists author higher-quality hair.
Art (Weapons)
Last month, Weapon Art finished the Behring S38 pistol, Apocalypse Arms Animus missile launcher, and Klaus & Werner Lumin V submachine gun.
Cinematics
Aside from continuing with general cinematic creation, the team undertook support code work to get motion-capture scenes blending correctly to and from certain locomotion stances and AI situations. The Tools Team started a project to give better cinematic control over ships. They can now open full ships in the editor and select any entity on them, add it to the TrackView timeline, and animate it (something that required proxy placeholders before).
As mentioned last month, the team now has a working break-free cinematic mode that lets players switch between filmic or first-person viewpoints. Time was spent last month setting it up to work with the briefings the player receives from superior officers throughout the campaign. The mixture of first-person viewpoint and player-character reaction affords opportunities to show little moments and that would otherwise be lost if the scene was experienced entirely from a fixed perspective.
Engineering
The Actor Feature Team continued their work on the next iteration of jumping. This time, they concentrated on making jumping from heights look and feel more realistic by removing ‘flappy’ arms and improving the way weapons are held while falling. They also implemented an ‘anticipation’ animation based on velocity, which will improve the transition from falling to landing. March’s work on takedowns also continued, with the team implementing block-outs for both barehand and knife takedowns when the victim is prone. The AI Feature Team finalized the implementation of non-player interactive scenes and are now working on the setup for scenes with player interaction. Ship AI have also been working with Physics to start implementing a new 3D pathfinding algorithm that can utilize the info in the physics grid to plot a course. They started implementing formation flying with support from the EU Vehicle Team and have been helping out with the tools that preview video comms in ships and select characters, ships, and dialog to make sure the animation, lighting, and camera positions work correctly. They’ve been experimenting with camera movement in comms calls to make them feel more alive too.
The Programming Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
Gameplay Story
The Gameplay Story team had a productive month and were able to implement 13 scenes to a high standard. They also tested several scenes that take place on the bridge of the Idris, with characters interacting well with their seats and flight controls.
Graphics
The Graphics Team split their time throughout April between features and optimization. Features-wise, they implemented a physically-based detail mapping technique for the organic shader that intelligently blends and scales micro-details to match the overall macro surface textures authored by the artists. This allows for logical and varied details on organic assets with minimal artist setup. Extremes in brightness for video comms were fixed via better HDR color reproduction too. On the optimization front, they made three major improvements to the volumetric gas cloud tech: significantly more efficient brick culling for shadows via rasterization, resolution up-scaling to save fill-rate, and aggressive node pruning to save memory.
Level Design
The Level Design team went through a lot of pipeline optimization to streamline production of the required social AI behaviors, which involved forming a mini-team to tackle the mountain of required useables (these are vital to the implementation of crew schedules and behaviors that make the game’s social spaces believable and realistic). The Art and Design teams mapped out all space-based points of interest and action bubbles to ensure they have beautiful and astronomically-correct backgrounds. Lastly, they made a number of new senior hires that will make a positive difference to their output in the coming months.
Narrative
Narrative worked through an assortment of editorial selects for key campaign characters. They also worked closely with Character Art on key lore to help ground the fiction behind some of the latest concept work and wrote several set-dressing documents to guide environmental storytelling. They reviewed several chapter’s narrative moments with Design and made further progress on their ongoing task to complete all in-game text, too.
QA
QA continued to provide direct support to the Cinematics Team whenever issues affecting their cutscene workflow were encountered. More additions were made to the cinematics ‘zoo’ map mentioned last month, including all remaining ‘small’ ships. They’re now working on creating reliable test levels with specific TrackView functionality. Eventually, these levels will be implemented into the TestRunner feature tests made specifically for TrackView cinematics. Changes made within the feature stream for combat AI were also tested to ensure that existing cutscenes wouldn’t be affected once they were ported into the game build. A few issues were also tested that could’ve broken the TrackView tool itself and crashes were investigated that were introduced as a result of the change.
Tech Art
Alongside profiling and squashing bugs for Alpha 3.5, the Engineering Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality-fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They continued to collect system-wide context switch information to aid in performance analysis and parallel processing optimization (though just on Linux for now). Various improvements and robustness changes for crash digest computation were made too, the results of which will be used in Sentry.
The team also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
UI
During April, the UI team supported the Environment Team with various graphic design needs. This involved constructing background display screens for Aciedo station and branding and decal pass for Archon Station’s interior.
VFX
Last month, VFX worked on improvements to screen interference. In particular, adding on and off sequences for comms calls for the Cinematics and Design teams. They worked with the Art Team to block out some key destruction sequences and are continuing to flesh out environmental effects. Iteration on the gas cloud toolset continues, which will ensure the tools deliver everything required to flesh out related locations, such as The Coil. The VFX Team also continued work on cinematics. This currently consists of supporting the Cinematics Team by creating a custom tool written in Houdini to help further automate their process. Once complete, the designers will be able to model a rough layout shape, run the mesh through the tool, and have it convert to a 3D gas cloud volume without the need to work inside Houdini at all.
Covert Intel
Well, my baby’s number one, but I’m gonna dance with three or four.
WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
Attention Recruits,
What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Operatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Intelligence suggests we’ve uncovered intel on operations concerning the Vanduul, combat AI, volumetric gas cloud tech, and more.
The information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.
UEE Naval High Command
AI
April saw the AI Team begin to improve the pipeline for dynamic (interactive) scenes. The goal is to make it easier for the animators and designers to create scenes and use them in a dynamic setup through subsumption in the level scripting phase. Improvements were also made to the blending between dynamic scenes during NPC locomotion; the team now evaluates the starting pose of the mo-cap animation at a more granular level for more accuracy. A project to optimize usables began that will eventually allow the team to cache animation and navigation data for interactive objects and improve runtime usage. This will be most useful in densely-populated areas like landing zones and space stations. The team are also looking to improve the compilation times for subsumption task nodes and extend the Tactical Point System to allow the time-sliced evaluation of game-code-defined functionalities.
Away from optimization, human combat AI was refactored to allow a more modular approach to the definition of tactics and behavior. The aim of this is to give the designers an efficient template that they can expand on and customize as they like.
Audio
Ship AI implemented new pilot skill levels to vary the agility of enemy ships and determine how they balance self-preservation and aggression. Improvements were also made to how non-player traffic behaves around landing zones.
Animation (Technical)
The Technical Animation team worked towards revamping the source control integration inside Maya with the view to supporting different Perforce workstreams (traditionally, this hasn’t been possible in technical animation). The ‘DNA’ system that powers character customization is also being converted to run in Maya. Although difficult, these projects are progressing well. Work on the Vanduul facial rig is beginning in earnest again, with the team receiving great support from the Character Art department. They have new meshes and textures to experiment with and are currently reauthoring the whole facial expression set. Finally, Tech Animation have been helping to make sure combat works correctly, NPCs are able to navigate environments, and props articulate as they should.
Art (Characters)
Throughout April, the team continued polishing characters while aligning task priorities with the Cinematics and Gameplay Story teams. This will give them visibility of how Shotgun and Jira interfaces are managed and help to improve overall visibility. Finishing touches were added to the Vanduul armor and the team are currently exploring the Xi’an. Work also continues on the material library, which affects all armors and outfits and will allow further improvements to visual quality. In a similar vein, tools for the hair pipeline are being built and tested to help artists author higher-quality hair.
Art (Weapons)
Last month, Weapon Art finished the Behring S38 pistol, Apocalypse Arms Animus missile launcher, and Klaus & Werner Lumin V submachine gun.
Cinematics
Aside from continuing with general cinematic creation, the team undertook support code work to get motion-capture scenes blending correctly to and from certain locomotion stances and AI situations. The Tools Team started a project to give better cinematic control over ships. They can now open full ships in the editor and select any entity on them, add it to the TrackView timeline, and animate it (something that required proxy placeholders before).
As mentioned last month, the team now has a working break-free cinematic mode that lets players switch between filmic or first-person viewpoints. Time was spent last month setting it up to work with the briefings the player receives from superior officers throughout the campaign. The mixture of first-person viewpoint and player-character reaction affords opportunities to show little moments and that would otherwise be lost if the scene was experienced entirely from a fixed perspective.
Engineering
The Actor Feature Team continued their work on the next iteration of jumping. This time, they concentrated on making jumping from heights look and feel more realistic by removing ‘flappy’ arms and improving the way weapons are held while falling. They also implemented an ‘anticipation’ animation based on velocity, which will improve the transition from falling to landing. March’s work on takedowns also continued, with the team implementing block-outs for both barehand and knife takedowns when the victim is prone. The AI Feature Team finalized the implementation of non-player interactive scenes and are now working on the setup for scenes with player interaction. Ship AI have also been working with Physics to start implementing a new 3D pathfinding algorithm that can utilize the info in the physics grid to plot a course. They started implementing formation flying with support from the EU Vehicle Team and have been helping out with the tools that preview video comms in ships and select characters, ships, and dialog to make sure the animation, lighting, and camera positions work correctly. They’ve been experimenting with camera movement in comms calls to make them feel more alive too.
The Programming Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
Gameplay Story
The Gameplay Story team had a productive month and were able to implement 13 scenes to a high standard. They also tested several scenes that take place on the bridge of the Idris, with characters interacting well with their seats and flight controls.
Graphics
The Graphics Team split their time throughout April between features and optimization. Features-wise, they implemented a physically-based detail mapping technique for the organic shader that intelligently blends and scales micro-details to match the overall macro surface textures authored by the artists. This allows for logical and varied details on organic assets with minimal artist setup. Extremes in brightness for video comms were fixed via better HDR color reproduction too. On the optimization front, they made three major improvements to the volumetric gas cloud tech: significantly more efficient brick culling for shadows via rasterization, resolution up-scaling to save fill-rate, and aggressive node pruning to save memory.
Level Design
The Level Design team went through a lot of pipeline optimization to streamline production of the required social AI behaviors, which involved forming a mini-team to tackle the mountain of required useables (these are vital to the implementation of crew schedules and behaviors that make the game’s social spaces believable and realistic). The Art and Design teams mapped out all space-based points of interest and action bubbles to ensure they have beautiful and astronomically-correct backgrounds. Lastly, they made a number of new senior hires that will make a positive difference to their output in the coming months.
Narrative
Narrative worked through an assortment of editorial selects for key campaign characters. They also worked closely with Character Art on key lore to help ground the fiction behind some of the latest concept work and wrote several set-dressing documents to guide environmental storytelling. They reviewed several chapter’s narrative moments with Design and made further progress on their ongoing task to complete all in-game text, too.
QA
QA continued to provide direct support to the Cinematics Team whenever issues affecting their cutscene workflow were encountered. More additions were made to the cinematics ‘zoo’ map mentioned last month, including all remaining ‘small’ ships. They’re now working on creating reliable test levels with specific TrackView functionality. Eventually, these levels will be implemented into the TestRunner feature tests made specifically for TrackView cinematics. Changes made within the feature stream for combat AI were also tested to ensure that existing cutscenes wouldn’t be affected once they were ported into the game build. A few issues were also tested that could’ve broken the TrackView tool itself and crashes were investigated that were introduced as a result of the change.
Tech Art
Alongside profiling and squashing bugs for Alpha 3.5, the Engineering Team worked on rendering, enhancing the temporal dither pattern to reduce noise on hair cards, adding variance texture support for planet tech v4, and making various quality-fixes for gather-based DOF. They also progressed with the render thread global state cleanup (a prerequisite for the low-level renderer and render pass refactor). They continued to collect system-wide context switch information to aid in performance analysis and parallel processing optimization (though just on Linux for now). Various improvements and robustness changes for crash digest computation were made too, the results of which will be used in Sentry.
The team also began to look into refining physics geometry instancing to reduce memory requirements. When finished, this will reduce the memory used in spatial and planetary grids and generally optimize the physics engine.
UI
During April, the UI team supported the Environment Team with various graphic design needs. This involved constructing background display screens for Aciedo station and branding and decal pass for Archon Station’s interior.
VFX
Last month, VFX worked on improvements to screen interference. In particular, adding on and off sequences for comms calls for the Cinematics and Design teams. They worked with the Art Team to block out some key destruction sequences and are continuing to flesh out environmental effects. Iteration on the gas cloud toolset continues, which will ensure the tools deliver everything required to flesh out related locations, such as The Coil. The VFX Team also continued work on cinematics. This currently consists of supporting the Cinematics Team by creating a custom tool written in Houdini to help further automate their process. Once complete, the designers will be able to model a rough layout shape, run the mesh through the tool, and have it convert to a 3D gas cloud volume without the need to work inside Houdini at all.
Covert Intel
Well, my baby’s number one, but I’m gonna dance with three or four.
WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…
Links
No links available.
Images
12
video/mp4
Metadata
- CIG ID
- 17086
- Channel
- Undefined
- Category
- Undefined
- Series
- Monthly Reports
- Comments
- 12
- Published
- 6 years ago (2019-05-24T00:00:00+00:00)