Comm-Link - Roadmap Roundup - March 16, 2022

Roadmap Roundup - March 16, 2022

Roadmap Roundup
03/16/2022 - 1:00 PM

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

Every two weeks, we accompany the Roadmap update with a brief explanatory note to give you insight into the decision-making that led to any changes. This is part of an effort to make our communications more transparent, more specific, and more insightful for all of you who help to make Star Citizen and Squadron 42 possible.

With that said, let’s go ahead and dive into this week’s Roadmap Roundup!

-CIG Community Team

Notable Changes for March 16, 2022

Progress Tracker
Similar to the combining of the Live Mission Content Team and the Modular location team last year to create the EU Sandbox 1 team, another change is being made and a new team is being added to the Progress Tracker. Historically, content produced by Star Citizen Location teams has been comprised of Environment Art and Level Design disciplines. This has changed as of August last year, adding the Mission Design discipline as well as additional support from the AI Content team to the locations pipeline. They will be working together with level design and art to bring spaces to life with moment-to-moment gameplay.

What will be changing with this publish is the addition of Planet Content to these disciplines. The Planet Content Team is now being merged with EU Sandbox 2, which is newly added as of this publish. The Planet Content Team’s data will now end in Q1 2022, but will be maintained on the roadmap as a reference. Their deliverables have also been moved over to EU Sandbox 2, and this new team has also been added under Upstream on the Roadmap Companion Guide.

Planet Tech Team
A higher priority was placed on the continuing work on the internal tools that allow for far quicker generation of planet terrain, foliage, bodies of water, and more, mentioned in a recent Inside Star Citizen episode, in addition to the two new deliverables added below. To accommodate this, the following deliverables are being taken off of the Progress Tracker until they are properly prioritized and rescheduled for production:

Terrain Snow Displacement

Destructible Environments

The following deliverables have been added to the Progress Tracker:

Foliage Shader
Creating the ability to replace most current vegetation assets' materials with foliage shader versions as needed. This will both improve the general quality of foliage and vegetation, as well as allow for variation between seasons and climate conditions. This deliverable has been added to the Planet Tech Team's schedule.

Ocean Shader Improvements
Reworking the Ocean shader to use more physically accurate refraction and reflection with energy conservation, unifying the feature set with other water shaders, and balancing performance between orbital and close-up situations. This deliverable has been added to the Planet Tech Team's schedule.

That's all for this week! Join the discussion on Spectrum, and check out the Roadmap Companion Guide for more information on the Star Citizen Public Roadmap.