Squadron 42 Monthly Report
March 2023
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.

TO: SQUADRON 42 RECRUITS

SUBJ: DEVELOPMENT UPDATE 04:05:2023

REF: CIG UK, CIG DE, CIG LA, CIG TX,

FAO Squadron 42 Recruits.

Welcome to March’s Squadron 42 development report. Enclosed you will find details on the latest progress made across the campaign, including buddy AI, space mines, and augmented reality tech.

Thank you for your continued support of Squadron 42.

Sincerely,

CIG COMMUNICATIONS

AI (Content)
AI Content worked throughout March to refine AI behaviors and implement new features.

For the engineer, they enhanced various interactions and routines, which involved improving interactive entity positioning in the Idris Stanton and setting up a personal inventory for the ship’s engineer. The frequency and duration of the engineer's visits to key usables, like wall panels and work zones, were increased to create a more engaging experience.

Advancements were made on the utility behavior, including enabling AI to use trolleys in the Idris’ elevator. A locker entity was added too, where NPCs can change their outfits. AI now also use a datapad at the start of their shifts to enhance the realism of their routines.

AI Content implemented various leisure behaviors into the campaign’s capital ships and supported an initiative to change console UI screens based on AI animation. The team are currently working on clustering NPCs together for a more natural look at tables and seating areas. Security was also added to various game locations to add further depth.

Improved usables and interactions were added to the hygiene and medical behaviors. For example, the ‘sink’ usable now includes idle and usable actions for different use cases, whether a mirror is present or not. Additionally, AI can now enter and exit the sink usable and seated, angled console with or without a datapad, making medical interactions more realistic.

Finally, the janitor behavior, which was parked in 2021, was brought back.

AI (Features)
AI Features continued work on the buddy AI mentioned in previous reports. Last month’s tasks included supporting the buddy leading the player along a path and stopping and waiting for the player to catch up if they get too far ahead. They also improved the ‘following’ behavior to allow the designers to introduce specific points of interest for the buddy to move toward. This will be used in cramped situations, such as lifts and narrow corridors. It also helps to direct the behavior when the buddy needs to highlight certain views or points of interest.

AI Features also worked on two aspects of grenade use, the first of which is getting the AI to throw them. Now, AI in combat will perform a series of checks to determine if they should throw a grenade based upon the idea of flushing the target out from cover. The grenade path is determined and checked for collisions and the correct animations are played to ‘cook’ and then throw the grenade toward the target. Further work was also done to ensure this is something the AI can do by stepping out from high cover or standing up from low cover.

The second aspect enables the AI to behave appropriately when a grenade is thrown at them. This involves detecting when a grenade has landed, reacting to it (e.g. turning to face it and notifying other nearby AI), and then responding to it by moving to a safe position outside of the explosion radius.

Using the basis of the melee attack setup implemented for non-humanoid creatures, the behavior for humanoid melee combat was rapidly prototyped using the same structure. The benefit here is that any improvements will also improve the non-humanoid character combat. This includes identifying and fixing issues with motion warping, which is used to get the AI to lock on to the player while attacking so that it has the possibility of connecting.

Related to this, they worked on a specialized melee combat behavior for a specific encounter. This is more of a challenge and required bespoke animations specific to the situation. For example, player attacks will only be successful following an unsuccessful attack from the enemy.

AI Features also revisited a scenario featuring the Vanduul to integrate new tech to better play bespoke animations. Finally, the team completed the functionality groundwork for a key vehicle.

AI (Tech)
Throughout March, AI Tech made significant improvements to various navigation systems and AI tool features. This included implementing support for overriding agent-type properties for navigation mesh generation, which enables the designers to generate meshes inside narrow areas and create more complex levels. For example, NPCs will be able to follow or search for players inside vents.

Another related feature is navigation volume cost areas (NVCA), which will impact navigation-mesh generation and the dynamic path computed during movement requests. There are both static and dynamic NVCA types:

Static NVCAs are shapes/volumes preplaced by the level designers when they want certain areas to be preferred or avoided during pathfinding.

Dynamic NVCAs are shapes created at runtime based on player or NPC actions. For example, fire areas that can expand or shrink, or areas featuring obstacles placed by players.

AI Tech also continued to iterate and polish some otherwise completed features, including NPCs pushing trolleys and NPCs using transit systems and elevators (with or without trolleys). Support was also added for hover trolleys.

On the AI Tools side, the team iterated and added new functionality to the Apollo Subsumption tool. Some of the new functionality includes being able to reference engine component tags as part of the TagSelector variable. They also moved the graph map to its own tab, added icons to the outline tab for easier viewing, and added a prompt for unsaved changes.

For the Usable Coordinator, the team continued with quality-of-life improvements and updated UI functionality.

AI Tech also completed a pass on the recent idle-system improvements. Now, they can correctly mark up specific moments in idle animations where it’s safe to leave. This allows them to maintain the visual quality the animators expect without needing to wait for the idle animation to fully transition into the exit animation.

AI (Vehicle Features)
The Vehicle Feature team progressed with the combat AI rework. In previous months, they established a strong design for combat AI with new behavior trees for different types of combat. These were implemented in March.

“This is a very iterative process that involves a lot of playtesting. We’ve already done playtests of the most critical behaviors and, so far, it’s looking way better than before. Combat is closer, more engaging, and there is much more movement. We’ll be continuing this in the next month.” AI Vehicle Features Team

The team also supported gas clouds. AI ships are now able to detect that they’ve entered a gas cloud accidentally and prioritize getting out. However, certain alien ships have the ability to freely enter gas clouds, which will be built into their behaviors.

Animation
In March, Animation worked on AI grenade throwing, healing between AI characters, and the Titan mechanized platform. They also progressed with various background character life animations and activities, including NPCs moving crates and boxes and entering swivel chairs. Work was also done on NPCs attacking the player with knives and melee attacks and takedowns. The medical behavior and player’s prone movement were further developed too.

The ongoing fauna work continued; Animation delivered blockouts for an alien creature and will shortly move on to tasks for a dog. Mo-cap was also shot for various narrative scenes and gameplay elements.

On the facial side, the team continued to work through a large amount of new content added to the game by Narrative, with a focus on bringing more life to the game.

Engine
In March, the Physics team worked on the consistent handling of wheeled vehicles between different gravity fields. Additionally, further improvements were made to OBB box pruning, while lock stealing in the geometry intersection code was reworked. Data integrity regarding the mass assigned to physical geometry was tightened, and a method was implemented to find the parts of an entity that a rope is attached to between sessions. An optional update of grid space part bounds during reposition was added. This should save significant time during collision detection if thousands of crates attempt to collide with a ship consisting of several thousand parts.

On the renderer, more code was refactored for Gen12. Transient constant buffers are now used in more code. For example, in SSDO and motion blur. The processing of tessellated objects was improved so it will no longer execute unnecessarily. A lot of legacy render code was removed (deferred shading, shadow rendering, etc), and support for debug viz of antialiasing and shadow mask rendering was added.

Improvements to the temporal render mode for atmospheric and volumetric clouds continued. This included improvements to stabilize color neighborhoods for reprojection and transmittance profiles.

On the core engine, the remote shader compiler server received a final round of substantial performance improvements. The exception handler was extended to better deal with recently occurring silent crashes. Based on the memory tracking information made available by Alpha 3.18 PTU, a new custom system allocator (to replace jemalloc) was implemented, which significantly reduces observed overallocation and fragmentation. This is currently in test. Further improvements were made to huge pages support. Work on streaming system improvements and the new memory-tracking tool continued too.

The remainder of the time was spent supporting Alpha 3.18.

Features (Gameplay)
In March, Gameplay Features implemented multiple user profiles, separated out metadata and global progress (such as achievements), and added the in-game option to reload from the last checkpoint.

As part of the ongoing cargo crane work, they began implementing a system to remotely control a vehicle without having to sit in its seat and directly pilot it.

They also swapped out the old vehicle radar and replaced it with the new Starmap, which allows players to zoom and interact the same way as viewing it on the mobiGlas. Also for the mobiGlas, personal status, achievements, and homepage apps were implemented alongside some of the homepage widgets, including mission objectives and personal status. An ‘app link’ hyperlink was also created to give quick access to in-app elements without having to manually navigate to them.

Features (Vehicles)
Last month the Vehicle Features team completed space mines, which appear in several areas throughout the campaign.

“This is deeply integrated with bombs and the Missile Operator Mode in ships, so the feature has not been very complex to complete. We will be working with the level designers to integrate it with various scenarios in the game soon.” Vehicle Features Team

The new quantum travel feature, which was enabled game-wide in SQ42 last month, received feedback from the directors and testers. This was addressed alongside bug fixing to create the overall desired experience. Vehicle Features also worked closely with VFX to integrate new visual effects for quantum.

In February, the team began working with a new visor UI rendering method. Last month, they began implementing it, complete with augmented reality (AR) elements, such as gun reticles, and HUD elements, like the velocity tape. This new UI is contextual, simplified, and integrates with the new multi-function display (MFD) system. This is almost ready to be enabled in-game, which will lead to more feedback and testing from other devs.

MFDs also progressed well. Now that the underlying tech is complete, the team began connecting various game systems, including the Radar and Scanning feature.

“Radar and Scanning is a big one and we’re making some changes to how that system interacts with UI to get it all shown in the MFDs. Our goal similarly is to get the new MFD system enabled game-wide for testing sooner rather than later.”

The Wingman Commands feature progressed, which allows players to give orders to supporting pilots, such as ‘attack this target’, ‘form up’, or ‘defend this target’. This feature combines elements of AI, UI, and dialogue and is nearing completion.

The ongoing radar and scanning tasks progressed too. Last month, Vehicle Features worked with Level Design to determine what they need from radar and scanning to make the levels work.

Gameplay Story
Gameplay Story’s focus in March was using new mo-cap to build a complete maintenance loop for the deck crew. This enables the AI to push a mobile ladder into position, use it to climb on top of a Gladius, then come down and return the ladder.

“This was quite complicated and took a lot of time to get right, but the end result is looking very good in-game.” Gameplay Story

Alongside this, they made a number of smaller updates to idles and pose matching across several chapters.

Following the resolution of blockers, they finalized a selection of scenes in the med-bay. This means that characters can now rotate in their chairs and open medical cupboards to interact with the props inside.

The team also finalized scenes with a character seamlessly climbing into an Argo ship, grabbing the controls, and flying away.

Graphics & VFX Programming
In March, the Graphics team completed a version of mesh generation from spline inputs, which will be used for jump point tunnels.

Various shader improvements were made, including recoloring skin using physically based melanin controls and adding the initial support for customizable makeup and tattoos. Improvements were also made to water reflection, refraction, and fogging.

Work began to unify the static and skinned mesh formats, which should lead to large draw call reductions on complex meshes. They also started to integrate new logic into each individual streaming system for testing. In addition, the Graphics team made various changes to the render-to-texture system, including new culling options that will be required for the interior-map feature.

For Vulkan, updates were made to the backend to help visual parity with DX11. Various debug modes were also added to Gen12 to surpass the functionality of the legacy renderer.

Meanwhile, the VFX Programming team continued their work on quantum travel and fire. Quantum travel effects now rotate correctly based on movement direction, and various visual improvements were made based on feedback. For the fire system, the framework for GPU fire particle spawning was added to allow for much greater particle counts. Entities can now exchange heat with the room they reside within too.

In addition, the VFX team continued improving their editor, adding the ability to reference effects from each other. They also made improvements to lightning effects in gas clouds.

The Planet Tech team progressed with water, iterating on the simulation quality and building a system to manage and combine simulations for water surfaces. Work on the asteroid system continued too, with the aim of achieving a much more flexible setup for shaping and distribution.

Narrative
The Narrative team spent time in March on an in-depth level review of one of the bigger sections of the game. Along with a focus on revising the script as needed, they looked at the moment-to-moment flow, ensuring the player knows what they’re supposed to do and where they’re headed next.

“While much of this information could be communicated through onscreen prompts and objective markers, if it doesn’t align with what the character is experiencing, there could be narrative dissonance. So, our goal is to ensure that information is presented as dietetically as possible so that the player and character’s motivation align, allowing them to feel fully immersed.” Narrative Team

As mentioned in last month’s report, the Narrative team was in the UK to oversee a mo-cap shoot to capture a wide variety of materials, including dynamic conversations. While there, they also held high-level discussions on the current state of the game’s script and finalized plans for polishing the last few remaining sections in coordination with the Design team’s level-flow adjustments. This helped the team to begin to accurately schedule the year’s upcoming mo-cap shoots, ensuring they have the needed scripts ready in advance.

UI
In March, the UI Art team created concepts for a new vehicle UI style and puzzle screens found across various levels. They’re currently prototyping a new ‘modular fluff screen’ system, which will allow them to create environmental screens that AI characters can interact with. They also began work on the new visor and lens visuals and added visual polish to several screens following a Feature team pass.

UI Tech completed work on the underlying systems for AR markers. The new visor and lens are also ready to hand over to the Feature teams and artists. Finally, they made incremental improvements to several areas, including text edit boxes, scrollbars, holo-volume interactions, and hyperlinks.

VFX
Last month, the VFX team paid particular attention to large-scale space locations, working closely with the Art team to provide several effects, including dangerous-looking lightning and debris from asteroid fields.

They also continued to clean up placeholder effects across several locations, swapping them out for bespoke versions that better match the environment.

WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH...
// END TRANSMISSION

--- Wed Apr 12 2023 22:00:00 GMT+0200	
+++ Wed Apr 12 2023 22:00:00 GMT+0200	
@@ -87,7 +87 @@
-The remainder of the time was spent supporting Alpha 3.18.In March, the Physics team worked on the consistent handling of wheeled vehicles between different gravity fields. Additionally, further improvements were made to OBB box pruning, while lock stealing in the geometry intersection code was reworked. Data integrity regarding the mass assigned to physical geometry was tightened, and a method was implemented to find the parts of an entity that a rope is attached to between sessions. An optional update of grid space part bounds during reposition was added. This should save significant time during collision detection if thousands of crates attempt to collide with a ship consisting of several thousand parts.
-
-On the renderer, more code was refactored for Gen12. Transient constant buffers are now used in more code. For example, in SSDO and motion blur. The processing of tessellated objects was improved so it will no longer execute unnecessarily. A lot of legacy render code was removed (deferred shading, shadow rendering, etc), and support for debug viz of antialiasing and shadow mask rendering was added.
-
-Improvements to the temporal render mode for atmospheric and volumetric clouds continued. This included improvements to stabilize color neighborhoods for reprojection and transmittance profiles.
-
-On the core engine, the remote shader compiler server received a final round of substantial performance improvements. The exception handler was extended to better deal with recently occurring silent crashes. Based on the memory tracking information made available by Alpha 3.18 PTU, a new custom system allocator (to replace jemalloc) was implemented, which significantly reduces observed overallocation and fragmentation. This is currently in test. Further improvements were made to huge pages support. Work on streaming system improvements and the new memory-tracking tool continued too.
+The remainder of the time was spent supporting Alpha 3.18.