PU Monthly Report
January 2022
Hot on the heels of November/December’s PU Report, January’s publication details everything done in the opening month of 2022. From the final stages of upcoming features to opening tasks for exciting future content, there’s a wealth of information to get your teeth into.

AI Content
AI Content began 2022 by completing their ‘speed protocol’ pass on the arcade and vending machines. Speed protocol is a CIG animation term that describes the implementation of motion capture data in a fast but rough way. Replacing blockout animations with new speed assets gives the team their first impression of what the final usable and behavior will look like and allows them to verify if the speed, length, and performance will deliver what’s intentioned.

The vending machine is a food and drink item provider used by hungry and thirsty NPCs. The current implementation provides a single fizzy drink option but after this groundwork is done, the team will be able to rapidly implement more consumables such as alcoholic drinks, noodles, soup, and sandwiches.

“We’re pleased with the results - the AI animation feels natural, though the hardest part was keeping the AI looking realistic while waiting for the item to dispense from the machine. The next step is to implement NPCs that steal from the machines and frustrated NPCs that shake them after they fail to dispense.” AI Content

The arcade machine is a usable that NPCs can interact with as part of the ‘leisure’ activity, which is used when they aren’t assigned to a particular job. The initial iteration allows NPCs to play multiple rounds of a game before ending victorious or with a ‘game over.' This is reflected in their animations, with cheerfulness or disappointment depending on the outcome.

Both machines passed the current sign-off stage and have moved into the implementation and polish phases.

AI Tech
In January, AI Tech continued with the first implementation of planetary navigation. The designers are currently testing the feature in concrete use-cases and providing feedback to improve usability.

The team dedicated time to optimizing the tile adjacency calculation. When a navigation mesh tile calculation is done in one frame, new data replaces the old calculation. The close-by edges of the triangles are then processed to validate which one should be considered the same and allow NPCs to transition from one another.

On the ship side, the team started work to enable NPC spaceships to land at random planetary locations. The aim is to allow players to request reinforcements, be rescued, or be given a lift somewhere.

AI Tech continued to bring the Subsumption editor into the game engine, with the designers now actively involved in using the tool. Work will continue for a few more sprints as the team remove blockers and prepare to move onto the next phase.

For NPC locomotion, a plan was devised to address the majority of existing locomotion issues. One critical part is utilizing feature testmaps to verify all locomotion functionality. For example, automatically verifying NPCs moving along paths, moving to destinations, moving and aiming, and moving and looking.

Alongside this, they split collision types between players and AI to enable proper collision without characters getting stuck. For example, in narrow corridors and doorways. Though collision avoidance is a complex topic that will be solved through multiple, interconnected systems, this is a step towards verifying some of the existing functionalities and seeing how they can be best utilized. They also continued looking at unifying the look and aim component.

While continuing support for NPCs using trolleys, the team worked on simplifying the way NPCs push objects before moving to another location, leaving the objects behind. This involved investigating several use-cases to allow all the systems (TrackView, editor simulation, Subsumption behaviors, etc.) to work together so that NPCs have a consistent way of understanding their state and intention.

An inverted index data structure was implemented to allow the Subsumption XML library to efficiently cache different data and index it based on its associated tags. This was necessary to implementing an efficient conversation search. The goal is to provide a way to correctly select appropriate conversations between multiple NPCs based on the topics they want to talk about, their roles, their locations, and more.

Bugs and issues were also fixed for the Alpha 3.16.1 release.

Animation
The Animation team began the year fixing issues with the bartender and patrons and creating the vendor behavior, the first of which is a basic coffee vendor. They also worked on animation for the security behavior and progressed with the arcade and vending machine useables.

On the facial front, time was dedicated to creating facial animations for various useables.

“If you notice NPCs no longer giving you the thousand-mile stare all the time, thank the Facial team!” Animation Team

Art (Characters)
January saw the artists wrap up concepts for the XenoThreat and Headhunters gang outfits for Pyro. They also finished the concept for a backpack intended to work with the upcoming salvage mechanics. The character artists progressed with the frontier-style clothing for Pyro, upcoming Subscriber items, and Nine Tails asset variants.

Art (Ships)
In the UK, the Ship team progressed with the MISC Hull A, finalizing the cockpit and dashboard layout, exterior lighting, and all component bays. A vis-area pass was completed too.

The RSI Scorpius progressed throughout January, with most of the exterior now final-art complete. Significant effort went into the component bays and other hatches needed across the hull. The interior and wings are progressing well and are approaching final art.

The Banu Merchantman is approaching whitebox complete, with the team doing more in the whitebox phase due to the ship’s sheer size and complexity.

Plus, great progress was made on the unannounced vehicle mentioned last month, while another began its whitebox phase.

The US-based team moved the Drake Vulture through final art, lighting both the interior and exterior and finishing the wear and damage passes. They’re currently closing out LODs and cleaning up loose items in preparation for release.

The Consolidated Outland HoverQuad received final polish and received a few minor additions to the dashboard and thrusters.

The team progressed with final art for the Drake Corsair’s cockpit and mess hall. They’re currently working through solutions for adding chowline features and other ship items to the limited space of the mess hall. They also polished the walls, framework, and canopy frame for the cockpit.

Community
The Community team kicked off the year by announcing the winners of the Manufacturer Season's Greetings, 2951 Luminalia Screenshots, and Payday Videos contests.

They also supported the release of Alpha 3.16.1 with a Patch Watch that offered additional insight into the Derelict Ship puzzles and a CDF infographic for the upcoming XenoThreat Dynamic Event. They also published their usual This Month in Star Citizen post, showcasing all the highlights coming in February.

In addition, the Community team kicked off Lunar New Year 2022 and Red Festival 2952 alongside the Red Festival 2952 Screenshot Contest.

Outside of events, the team took time to evaluate the effectiveness of the Guide System, and worked to set out a plan for improvements/new additions, including exploring additional incentives. They also took a deep dive into a holistic look at engagement and sentiment throughout 2021, establishing goals set to raise the bar even higher in 2022.

Lastly, the team has been hyper-focused on a complete overhaul of the web-based Community Hub, which will soon become a one-stop-shop for all things community content, events, and more (it's super cool).

Engine
In January, the Physics teams prepared for the configuration and setup of sim and cloth skins via item ports. Furthermore, code was restructured to allow mesh baking on soft body instances within the animation system. For vehicles, anti-flip measures were implemented for “turtling” vehicles using physical movement. The vehicle inspector tool that's used for development now also allows the team to control stiffness properties.

For the renderer, further progress was made on the transition to Gen12. Various instance buffers are now precreated to prevent slowdowns at runtime that were caused if created on demand per frame. Render support for not-yet-streamed-in meshes was added. CGA attachments now also render via Gen12. Support for GBuffer decals was added, and empty render passes can now be skipped in the render graph. Additionally, various optimizations for the reference counting of PSO cache instances during rendering were committed. The team are now looking at supporting HW skinning for Gen12.

Regarding atmosphere and cloud rendering, last month's code cleanup for back integration was completed and the latest code (including various improvements to features and optimized techniques that are still in progress) was submitted to the main development branch. The adoption of volumetric clouds in Squadron 42 revealed an issue with parameters passing into relevant systems during level loading, which was fixed. The next steps are looking at another new idea for data reprojection and to start porting code to Gen12.

On the core systems, the team refactored the recently introduced arena allocator into a buddy allocator. The entity component update scheduler's (ECUS) visibility culling was improved and old ECUS code was removed now that the new entity-centric component update code is actively used. Furthermore, the job manager's wake-up code was further optimized. Part of the team is currently working on area and tag refactoring as well as continuing to investigate a potential integration of EASTL.

Features (Characters & Weapons)
The start of the year saw the Features team wrapping up code-driven inverse kinematics (IK). This feature offers an alternative to the existing animation-driven IK by using asset-specific mark-up instead of skeleton joints to drive the IK targets and blends at run-time. This will allow for reduced joints in skeletons, which is good for performance but also greatly improves iteration time when trying different IK solutions. The name comes from code assigning meaning to the asset mark-up, so the animated feature and its gameplay logic are working hand in hand.

Another significant undertaking nearing completion is a full fidelity pass on the player animations used when grabbing something from the suit or putting it back. For example, a grenade from a chest slot or MedPen from a side pocket. There are a large number of poses to consider for the various stances the player may assume and the conditions they may be in, such as running while drunk or crouching while injured. Currently, the team are reviewing the timings to hit the sweet spot of responsive and fast interaction without losing animation quality and readability.

Features (Gameplay)
In January, the EU team continued to work on ship-to-ship refueling for release. The remaining bugs for the laser trip mine were fixed in support of derelicts, while the last issues with mining gadgets were attended to.

Additional work for loot generation began that will allow NPCs to carry procedurally generated items in their pockets. This also included adding the ability for the Mission Feature team to control the items in NPC inventories. Development of the engineering gameplay loop and life support kicked off too.

The US team worked on item selling and reputation gameplay improvements along with background tasks for the Q2 cargo refactor.

Features (Vehicles)
In January, Vehicle Features finalized the grav-lev update.

“The release of the grav-lev rework last year was very successful but there were still some issues we wanted to work on. The most significant being the issue of bikes jumping around and moving wildly when players got off. This was due to a sampling rate issue with harmonic motion only occurring on the server due to its framerate. Fixing it proved quite challenging and required us to refactor some parts of the new grav-lev code. This was completed in early January and the fix, among others, will come in the Alpha 3.16.1 patch.” Vehicle Features Team

Alongside grav-lev, the team worked on additional goals including jump points, restricted areas, and the transit-system refactor. They also supported the EUPU team with their work on resource networks, exploring how to integrate the system into vehicles to improve how power, heat, fuel, and other resources work.

Graphics & VFX Programming
The Graphics and VFX Programming team continued to work on shaders, with various improvements to screen space reflections resulting in much sharper and stable reflections with softer falloff where they can’t be calculated. They also cleaned up the volumetric lighting shader for water and continued to iterate on new wear shaders with the various art teams.

For render-to-texture (RTT), fixes were implemented to async creation/deletion relating to streaming and reference counting.

For Gen12, the team fixed multiple issues including particles not being visible and various cubemap problems. They added support for particle GPU refraction and split render-passes to inject another pass, began testing Gen12 shadows, and investigated issues with RTT in Gen12. They also began converting the game’s post-effect system and G-force effect.

For Vulkan, the team looked at validation/regression issues and investigated the spec of Vulkan 1.3.

The VFX team focused on damage map work, code interface support for the Weapons team, and made a start on the CPU damage map. They also continued with the fire-hazard feature, investigating issues with the fire igniter not working and fixing issues with resetting fire.

Lighting
The Lighting team began the year making headway into the performance optimizations planned for all landing zones. This time, they focused on the main domes of New Babbage, simplifying lighting setups where possible.

Locations
The Montreal-based Locations team started 2022 polishing and debugging the derelict crash sites.

“We want to thank the community for the comments and feedback given through Issue Council, Spectrum, Reddit, Twitch, etc. during the PTU. This allowed us to tweak the crash sites in various ways: Making the lootboxes more visible, doing a lighting pass so navigation is easier at night, revisiting the lootbox content (ammo should now be the same as the gun offered in the lootbox and there should be more scopes and muzzles spawning), fixing some layout issues where some of you would get stuck, and generally adding more laser mines to the various sites.” Locations Team

They also wrapped up their work on the upcoming hospital locations. This involved putting the finishing touches to the Maria Pure of Heart Hospital in Lorville, adding variations to the space clinics, and finishing the Levski clinic so it’s ready to ship once the location is available. Part of the team has since moved on to preproduction and proof-of-concept for Derelicts v2.

Montreal Tools Team
Montreal’s Tools team completed their Mighty Bridge tool, which is the integration of Houdini into the editor. This allows various teams to use Houdini to create new tools that will help content creation across development. For example, the Tools team is using it to develop the ‘procedural locations creation tool’ alongside developing solutions that will be used for derelicts and other locations.

The team also integrated workflow improvements to Robohesse, a tool used to facilitate more stable development builds and the editor toolbar used by the designers.

Narrative
Narrative started the year writing scripts for a new mission type in anticipation of an upcoming motion-capture session. They also worked closely with Design on a new Dynamic Event, walking through the dialogue and what would trigger each line. Once complete, they drafted scripts for the event’s various characters.

The team also recorded new announcement sets to improve the ambient life across several upcoming locations. Additional lore was required for Lorville’s environmental set dressing too.

Elsewhere, the team continued to support Design with text for various game items. New lore dispatches were published, including a Traveler’s Day themed Something Every Tuesday and an Empire Report detailing a shakeup within the Addison administration. They also planned 2022’s dispatch and Jump Point content.

Systemic Services & Tools
Systemic Services & Tools (SST) started the year working on various internal tools, including a visualizer for certain parts of the simulation. Work was done to make older internal tools easier to access through CopyBuild, and development on automation and scheduling for Dynamic Events began that will be used when manual activation isn't appropriate.

Development on the various services from last year was completed, while direct connection work was done to help alleviate certain bottlenecks in the backend. Support for the selling feature is still underway, with SST working closely with the gameplay teams on the final elements.

Tech Animation
Tech Animation spent January addressing long-standing issues and upgraded all team members to the latest version of Maya. This transition created some complications with the source files, which were addressed.

The team had the mandate of batch-upgrading all Maya animations (around 41000). Legacy character sets were the root cause of some bad animation parsing on file load, so these were dealt with at the same time.

“Our animation repository is now in the best state it’s been in a long time, and our users have moved over to the new software with minimal problems.” Tech Animation Team

UI
In January, the UI Feature and Tech teams supported the release of Alpha 3.16.1 and XenoThreat by addressing bugs, crashes, and performance issues. They also started transferring ownership of some UI features to the SQ42 Feature Team to fast-track their development.

For refueling gameplay, polishing was done on the MISC Starfarer’s screens and support was given to the EUPU team to address any outstanding issues. Work on the new Starmap continued, with progress made on concepts, prototypes, and core technology.

The team continued building the core systems for the new AR markers while working on icons for the various marker types and states. Like many other teams, they continued to update features to support Persistent Streaming and worked closely with the Persistent Tech team to ensure they were on schedule.

UI Tech continued developing additional Building Blocks features, some of which will be used in the hacking feature. Additional planning went into the pre-production process of the new Building Blocks editor too, which involved creating wireframes.

Finally, additional concepts for the new mobiGlas and Origin UI styles were created and iterated on.

Vehicle Tech
The Vehicle Tech team worked on bugs for Alpha 3.16.1, including XenoThreat and its new ship content. Attention was also given to fixing ship-related quality-of-life issues in the gameplay experience.

In addition, tasks were completed for the upcoming radar and scanning improvements, which will make it easier and more fun to locate and find various entities across space, including receiving better feedback results for the scanner operator.

Finally for Vehicle Tech, major work on future doors and connected components progressed, which will create a unified system of items that are more easily implemented by designers and artists.

“This is particularly important as some of our vehicles were created using some legacy systems that don’t always work well with the concept of the room system or portals. As our ships are essentially flying superstructures of connected rooms and spaces, the need to optimize this system has become quite evident - no one wants a door control panel to become inoperable or to get stuck in an entrance elevator!” Vehicle Tech Team

VFX
VFX started the year with a full pass on the Consolidated Outland HoverQuad. They also took the opportunity to work on improvements to the wake effects for all hover vehicles. As this requires code changes from both the VFX and Vehicle Programming teams, it will be rolled out in a future release. They also continued to work on effects for the salvage tool, moving into the production phase.

The team also cleaned up some of the older particle libraries being used in several locations, such as derelict ships. This included converting several particle effects from the CPU to the GPU, which gives performance benefits but also allows the artists to make visual improvements where necessary.