February's monthly report details the developer's work for the upcoming Alpha 3.17, improvements on the damage map system and salvage effects, progression on Pyro's space stations, and more. Read on for all the details.
AI Content
AI Content began closing down the first pass on the coffee-shop vendor. This is an example of the existing bartender behavior (with minor extensions) being used to deliver different shop experiences. In this instance, additional content was only required on the art, animation, and level-design sides. The team also added template particle effects, set up VFX animation triggers, and added the counter terminal to allow some more idle activity for the vendor. They’re currently devising additional coffee shop layouts and creating wildlines.
For the security behavior, the team added new wildlines, fixed the transition between ‘at ease' and ‘to attention,’ and playtested guard reactions to players moving around or loitering in front of restricted locations.
The vending-machine usable used in the eat-and-drink NPC flow progressed throughout February. This behavior allows certain NPCs to try to steal items from the usable and get frustrated if their attempt doesn’t succeed. The team also added malfunctions that cause items to not be delivered. Vending machines currently have a placeholder Building Blocks UI that changes whether the NPC is buying or attempting to steal.
For the medical and worker behaviors, the team began creating proper documentation to allow the Location teams to replicate the respawn vignette in multiple locations around the game.
AI Tech
AI Tech progressed with the planetary navigation mesh and navigation links discussed in last month’s report.
“We hope everybody enjoyed our presentation on the recent Inside Star Citizen where we showed the current state of the planetary navigation system. We are now developing a better priority system to help select which tiles should be processed first and are also working on some optimizations when querying navigation data on the planets.” AI Tech
Navigation links were also extended to include an easier way to debug additional markers, enabling the team to identify locations in space that can align specific animations to the environments. For example, when an NPC needs to jump to a rail to climb up to a higher location. In this instance, the character’s hand must perfectly align with the rail asset while using motion-warp technology to account for the required height.
On the Subsumption side, the team added interesting functionalities to allow mission logic to branch its flow based on what’s happening systemically in the world. They implemented a solution where mission logic can use NPC and EntityTracker variables to “listen” to broadcasted systemic events from specific agents. In support of this, systemic behaviors can now expose the information that they want missions or any other “listener” to be notified of.
Dynamic conversations progressed last month too, with the team exposing functionalities for activities to mark up areas where NPCs can talk to each other. When in usables that contain multiple characters, routing functionality retrieves all possible participants and then dynamically spawns conversations relevant to the available characters. NPC trolley push/pull was also updated - the Subsumption interface now allows the explicit ‘Push’ semantic as a move request, while improvements were made to path-follower precision.
While debugging movement issues related to NPCs ending up outside the playable area, new functionality was added to allow NPCs to store ‘breadcrumbs.’ This lets them trace back their most recent movements, allowing the team to better investigate what went wrong.
On the ship side, AI Features continued to work on functionality to allow ships to land anywhere. This month, they focused on dynamically placing landing splines to give a unique flavor to each ship type, as the splines can define some visual style. These splines are procedurally adjusted at runtime so that the environment is correctly evaluated and the spline lands the ship even in locations that contain major obstacles.
NPC locomotion improvements progressed well. 2022’s main initiative is to focus on key topics that the team have wanted to tackle for a while and ensure low-level systems are as robust as expected. For example, this month they focused on improving the basics for NPC-to-NPC collision, implementing a collision resolver that allows NPCs to detect when they're stuck and resolve the situation.
Alongside specific locomotion work, improvements to the ‘look’ and ‘aim’ components continued so that both can share as much of the same code, and therefore improvements, as possible.
Regarding the ongoing initiative to bring the Subsumption editor inside the main game engine editor, the team are currently in the narrow feedback phase. This involves going over the editor with the designers to fix bugs and address their initial feedback.
Animation
The Animation team worked through issues with vendors, security, vending machines, and cowering/surrender. They also progressed with general security and emote facial animations.
Art (Characters)
Character Art worked on a Subscriber flightsuit for Q3 and continued to develop the frontier outfits debuting with Pyro. They also created Nine Tails-themed material variants for use later in the year.
Concept Art wrapped up work on a salvage-specialist backpack and a selection of Pyro gang outfits before moving onto frontier outfits with the artists.
Art (Ships)
The UK-based Ship team progressed with the MISC Hull A, finalizing the interior lighting, completing LODs, and working on the damage pass.
The RSI Scorpius is close to final-art complete. The wings were finished and added to the main body with working animations, while the cockpit is currently in the polish phase with the final details being added. The LOD and damage passes are underway too.
The Banu Merchantman is now whitebox-complete and due to start greybox. The team are currently researching and developing materials to establish the ship’s final look.
Finally, two unannounced vehicles are approaching greybox and final art respectively. The latter received work on the LODs and will receive final lighting, tints, and damage passes shortly.
In the US, the team spent most of their time finishing out the Drake Vulture, creating a series of paints and cut-in patterns to allow for a wider range of customization options. After addressing bugs, most of the team moved to finalizing LODs.
They also worked to create a quality bar for the Drake Corsair. An updated kit was created and the cockpit and mess hall were brought to final art. They also made design changes to the ship’s layout after seeing that some areas were negatively affecting the player experience, such as trapping players in the cockpit and manned turrets.
Art (Weapons)
The Weapons team continued to work on the extinguisher required for fire gameplay. They also completed a pass on all iron sights to improve them from gameplay and design standpoints, which will help players fire more accurately.
They’re currently wrapping up final art on the dedicated salvage tool.
Community
The Community Team started the month with a Jumptown 2.0 Infographic detailing what was achieved during the Dynamic Event. They also published XenoThreat Overview and New Player comm-links.
They then looked back to the launch of the most recent patch with the Alpha 3.16 Postmortem before supporting the in-lore Valentine’s Day equivalent, Coramor. They also held a Coramor contest challenging the community to complete Yuri’s final message.
The team then posed the community’s most-voted questions about Consolidated Outland’s new hoverbike to the developers in the HoverQuad Q&A.
At the beginning of the February Free Fly, the team supported the community with a detailed event schedule and details of the Free Fly Referral Bonus.
Lastly, development of the overhauled Community Hub continues, and the team is very excited to show more on this soon.
Engine
In February, the Physics team continued to work on soft bodies. Among other things, the system now allows visual skins to blend between skinned and simmed positions. The stepping rate of soft bodies was also increased to 120 Hz. Work continued on general physics optimizations, while improvements to wheeled vehicles progressed.
On the renderer, further progress was made on the transition to Gen12: The rendering of brushes into G-buffers is now enabled by default, support for transient vertex and constant buffers was added, and viewport handling in graphics passes improved. Tint support was added for massively instanced objects as well as render proxies. Further progress was made on porting HW skinning to Gen12. Additionally, CGAs can now render into RTTs and closeup RTTs are no longer rendered within the G-buffer stage (instead they will be rendered dynamically in G-buffer or forward stage depending on their distance to the camera). The team is also working to generalize some of the Gen12 concepts and changed the render pass API to be compatible with ‘VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering’.
Regarding atmosphere and cloud rendering, time was spent porting code over to Gen12. Planet terrain height maps (used for various effects including large-scale planet terrain shadows, VFX spawning, and ground fog) already render using the new Gen12 pass. This work will be completed shortly, after which passes for atmosphere, clouds, ground fog, and planet terrain shadows will be converted.
With the introduction of entity-centric component updates last month, time was spent further revising and improving related systems, such as the ECUS inspector. Contention in zone host updates was improved and update calls of various systems were shuffled around to reduce (or even prevent) stalls. Further optimizations include the deactivation of thread safety around function static variables on Linux DGS builds (matching the behavior of the Windows game client).
“We'll be monitoring the gains once live in the PU and are confident they will help server performance.” Engine Team
Additional improvements were made to the profiling tools and their integration into the engine along with collected telemetry visualization. Lastly, the team continued to refactor some of the engine's main header files. They’re running include-what-you-use passes to further reduce header dependencies and improve compilation times. Support was also given to Alpha 3.16 and 3.17.
Features (Characters & Weapons)
Throughout February, the Features team continued to develop salvage gameplay.
“The use of damage mapping, which was mentioned in a previous report, is showing a lot of promise. However, there is still work to be done to reach the level of fidelity and persistence we are looking for visually. The actual gameplay is progressing well too.” Features Team
Currently, the Multi-Tool (with salvage attachment) is used to salvage material from physical parts with damage maps and reapply the same material to repair them. Work also began on a dedicated salvage/repair tool that will offer better stats compared to the Multi-Tool attachment.
On the technical side, the team looked into improving movement synchronization when viewing other players. The priority is always to tackle complete-desync bugs where a player doesn't appear at all in the correct place, though this work involves improving how other players appear on a client's screen. The team are aiming to achieve improved fidelity without increasing latency and last month saw locally simulated characters reliably playing locomotion stop animations.
Features (Gameplay)
The EU PU team continued their polish work and integration tasks for refueling, which is launching in Alpha 3.17. Development also continued on the life support system and engineering gameplay. The team also took over vehicle functionalities for the salvage mechanic.
Features (Vehicles)
The Vehicle Feature team focused on technical initiatives for future releases throughout February. This included the transit system, which requires a rework to function under server meshing. This is because transit carriages need to simulate and continue operating when no one is around. This was previously solved by ensuring the carriages never stream out, unlike most objects. However, this isn’t possible with server meshing, so the team are exploring solutions to allow them to simulate when no one is around.
Improvements were also made to restricted areas, which involved reworking tools for the level designers to create restricted areas faster and easier. However, this will result in functional changes for players at some point. Minor improvements and updates were also made to features relating to upcoming ships.
Graphics & VFX Programming
The Graphics team continued their push on the Gen12 renderer, with a large portion of scene rendering enabled in the main branch. While this doesn’t have all the optimizations yet, it’s a crucial first step in seeing significant performance improvements. They’re currently awaiting engine optimizations on the main thread so they can get the most from the Gen12 improvements.
Both the Graphics and VFX Programming teams focused on improving the damage map system for the salvage and repair mechanics. These changes are extensive and require emulating the damage map system on the CPU as the server doesn’t have a GPU. They added various acceleration structures to keep things performant and compressed the data so it can be efficiently transferred over the network.
The team also continued making the shader authoring process more modular, developing the fire hazard system, and improving the auto test system to ensure they don’t introduce instability to the rest of the development team.
Lighting
Lighting began working on a major event planned for later in the year, progressing with various minor areas before the key locations are available for a full pass.
Progress was made on Pyro’s space stations, with the team focusing on look-dev work towards the colder and less hospitable corners of the locations.
Locations
February saw the Montreal-based team complete their work on the new medical locations, with the Maria Pure of Heart hospital on Lorville and the space clinic variations now ready for release. Levski’s hospital is considered complete for the time being, though the team will return for a final polish and debug pass closer to its release.
After completing the medical locations the team moved onto derelict settlements, completing the whitebox stage for the first proof-of-concept location based around a crashed Aegis Reclaimer. This first settlement is a way to build and validate a full production pipeline to eventually produce derelict settlements on a larger scale. The Art team is creating the visual target, the Design team began learning the mission system and Subsumption to allow them to populate the locations with gameplay, and the Tools team is building a suite of procedural tools to improve productivity and quality. The artists also began looking at a potential crash site with the Crusader Mercury and Origin 600i.
A rework of Lorville’s cityscape kicked off too. The objective is to first upgrade the visual quality of the cityscape and then pave the way for larger buildings with interiors. The current scale of the buildings prevents building interiors with gameplay inside them. By scaling them up, the team will be able to add interiors as needed.
Sandbox 1
The Sandbox team moved the new outposts down the pipeline and began playtesting with the wider team. Outposts are being placed on Pyro 3 for initial testing and layouts. Makeup and composition progressed, with Design iterating on feedback to the solidify gameplay experience.
“There’s still a way to go to a polished experience but it’s great to be able to play this as a more complete product than we have in the past.” Sandbox Team
The team also began to add a wider variety of static modules to mix up the sub-themes scattered around the outskirts of the outposts.
Elsewhere, Art began early whitebox on derelict outpost variations. The team want to give a feeling of age and history, so they’re creating several smaller exploration-driven spaces alongside the main occupied buildings.
Further work was done on Pyro’s skybox and Stanton’s Lagrange points too. The team also began pre-production on a wider variety of space debris and interesting space structures that will allow them to create more interesting exploration opportunities in space.
Narrative
Narrative continued scripting and capturing dialogue for an upcoming Dynamic Event. With multiple characters and several non-linear objectives, it’s one of the more complicated event scripts to date and required close coordination to ensure that every possible gameplay trigger was accounted for.
The team also supported Design on various upcoming features, like refueling, that require text, hints, and items. Additionally, new documentation was created for branding and environmental storytelling throughout the universe, including the Pyro system. Another focus was on proposing new mission character archetypes, with the hopes of eventually populating locations with new ways to interact with NPCs and find missions.
The team also continued to release lore, with February bringing a new episode of Plain Truth discussing the CDF’s recent efforts against XenoThreat and numerous new Galactapedia entries.
Player Relations
Player Relations spent February focusing on assisting players during the Xenothreat, Jumptown 2.0, and Free Fly events.
The team are also recruiting extensively for Live QA, tripling the number of team members to improve service stability and publish quality.
Props
Props spent February supporting Pyro’s space stations and appeared on Star Citizen Live to share some of their progress. They also completed props for events coming later in the year.
QA
QA’s primary publishing focus throughout February was on supporting live hotfixes and issues.
For development, they planned the publishing handoff process for the Alpha 3.17 patches alongside completing QATRs, new branching procedures, and checklists. The team’s branching policies were also revamped, and a branching checklist was created for use once integrations are complete to ensure the most stable and bug-free branch possible.
Systemic Services & Tools
Systemic Services & Tools (SST) continued to work on various internal tools, wrapping up the development of automation and scheduling for Dynamic Events, which will be used when manual activation isn't appropriate.
Service-wise, they expanded the NPC tracker service to include various in-game events and make them available for future use.
Support for the selling feature continued, with SST working closely with the gameplay teams on the final elements, edge cases, and general polish.
Tech Animation
Following the upgrade to Maya 2022.3, Tech Animation took time to debug various issues, including one that caused Maya to freeze intermittently.
After this, they continued to drive the upgrade to the in-house DNA system.
“This has been an incredibly long process to refactor the systems to be data-driven and it’s very near to completion. Just a few tasks remain for us before we're able to commit to the testing procedure and integration into the main game.” Tech Animation
They also continued to process head assets in-house. They're trialing the scan processing, extraction algorithms, and toolsets with a completely new head asset with the aim to achieve a 1:1 likeness with the actor while retaining cross-rig animation compatibility.
Tech Animation also supported many other teams with their initiatives, including animation implementation and debug, animated asset creation, and the toolsets around these teams. This included outsourced vendor toolset collation, generation, and support.
February saw the team kick off new initiatives to speed up the animator’s workflow and offer new solutions to issues they have with some current pipelines. Firstly, an engine animation file importer that will give the team new ways to save or regenerate source data directly from engine animation, with the goal to be able to record animations in-engine and recreate them in Maya.
Secondly, they’re looking to create tooling to recreate and effectively import assets directly from the engine. They supported a loadout system in the Maya animation toolset that uses source data (Maya files) to add to and change the rig that the animators interact with. This allows them to animate to the attire that the character will be animated with in-game and achieve a higher fidelity of interaction.
Tools (Montreal)
In Montreal, the Tools team moved almost entirely onto the Mighty Bridge tech mentioned in last month's report, which will speed up development of the procedural location tool.
They also supported the Locations team with derelict settlements, iterating on tools to help with asset scattering. The Art team will use this tool to quickly scatter assets like ship debris and VFX to create interesting-looking locations. This tool will also be used in the production of other locations, like derelict outposts.
Turbulent (Game Services)
Turbulent’s Online Services team split their time between anti-cheat, login flow, and reputation system initiatives:
For anti-cheat, they implemented the new SDK to solve issues for Linux and Windows users using special characters. Anti-cheat logs have also been closely monitored and several hotfixes were made in preparation for infraction enforcement.
The login and document services were finalized for the overall login flow. These services constitute around a third of the overall effort needed for this project that aims to improve performance and fits into the wider global server-meshing project.
Following significant engagement during community events, performance improvements were made to the reputation service. The team also took the opportunity to shift the stack to follow changes in the stack made for server meshing.
The Live Tools team transitioned one of the key dev tools to new hosting technology, delivering minor feature improvements along the way. The Hex project (Game Master tool) made significant progress throughout the month, shifting the network operation center to its new UI and enabling all other tools in Hex to leverage the new UI structure.
Turbulent (Web Platform)
Last month, Turbulent pushed forward with backlog and tech-debt cleanup in preparation for the year ahead. They also worked to resolve current issues as well as expand the library to evolve components and give a more structured design system. They also prepared for upcoming in-game events, adding new features to better showcase vehicles.
UI
In February, the UI team progressed with the visuals and underlying features of the new Starmap. This included creating an in-editor concept and implementing the controls and marker icon transitions.
UI also began converting the visor and lens to Building Blocks, with many of the actor widgets being completed. Additional polish on the medical screens was undertaken, including new idle animations for the character model representing the player’s body. The UI Feature team made the final polish and bug-fixing passes on refueling too.
The UI Tech team continued refactoring the AR marker system, with the UI artists creating different icons. The functionality and developer experience for Building Blocks was further developed, with a variety of feature requests completed throughout the month.
Vehicle Tech
Vehicle Tech began February by fixing bugs for an upcoming release, including many issues involving network sync, vehicle damage, doors and elevators, and itemport validations.
Improved tools are being made to make implementing and fixing issues with doors and elevators easier, both within vehicles and space stations. When complete, it will help the developers fix issues without having to know the technical properties of these highly logic-driven items.
VFX
Last month, VFX continued their work on salvage effects, including using particle emitter strength curves to show when there’s nothing left to salvage in a chosen area. Aside from the gaping hole in the hull, the ember and particulate matter will stop spawning from the impact area. The artists are collaborating with the Weapons Feature team to create the best possible player experience when this feature goes live in a future release.
Elsewhere, pre-production was completed and production began on the MISC Hull A. An effects pass was done on the Maria Pure of Heart hospital, including a purification scanner that sterilizes the player when passing through the entrance. Effects support was given to a new destructible prop too.