Welcome to November and December’s PU Monthly Report, which combines everything worked on during the last two months of 2022.
Read on for everything done to round out last year, including new tech for Alpha 3.18, updates to narrative content, and the development of all-new vehicles.
AI (Features)
AI Features ended the year supporting, investigating, and fixing bugs for Alpha 3.18.
AI (Tech)
During the last months of 2022, the AI Tech team progressed with features required for both the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42.
The team continued to iterate on more complex navigation links to extend the capabilities of NPCs and where they’re able to move to, including implementing adapters for airlocks and elevators. Now, NPCs will know that in order to traverse an airlock, they will need to interact with multiple consoles to adjust the pressure and open the door. For Elevators, navigation links were created to connect multiple floors. A navigation link was also created to request a reconnection with the navigation mesh triangles each time an elevator stops at a floor to allow NPCs to transition in and out. Based on navigation link connections, an NPC will now know how to request an elevator to go to a specific floor. New event notifications were also added, sent by the elevator when it arrives at a floor, so that the actor will know to get on or off.
At the end of the year, the base functionality for NPCs driving ground vehicles was completed. NPCs can now move to a vehicle and get into the driver’s seat, find a path suitable for the size of the vehicle, and drive along it. This work involved the creation of a new Subsumption task, a new movement request type, and updating the movement planner to know how to process the request. The team also added new functionality to the navigation systems that marks entities to be ignored during navigation-mesh generation.
NPC perception was another major topic worked on toward the end of the year. The team implemented a new adapter for action areas to specify lightness/darkness, which will influence NPCs' visual perception.
A new extender to propagate engine sounds as stimuli was also created, which will make NPCs aware of vehicles in their proximity. This was the first step toward behaviors that react to ground vehicles and spaceships.
While working on perception improvements, the devs fixed AI visual perception through glass. Now, NPCs will be able to detect targets behind glass and also understand that, in order to shoot at them, they need to move to the other side.
For locomotion, improvements continued on the sharp-turn assets and how they’re triggered for alien characters or at walking speeds. Related to this, work began on ‘following’ tech, which will be used in connection with the buddy AI behavior. For this, the team improved soft stops, collision avoidance with players, and speed handling based on the leader’s change in speed.
For the Apollo Subsumption tool, new functionality was added to create and modify the Subsumption mastergraph. A lot of feedback from the designers was implemented, including the addition of an interface to create roles and sub-roles, find reference functionality, improved interaction with functions and the multigraph tab, and improvements to grid snapping.
Animation
The end of 2022 saw Facial Animation supporting various trailers and other needs. They also shot motion capture for some background character animations that will be used in the PU.
Art (Characters)
At the end of 2022, Character Art finished tasks for the frontier workwear outfits and frontier undersuits. They also fixed various bugs related to clipping.
Character Concept Art polished concept handoffs for the frontier outfits and continued with concept exploration on fauna and the Duster faction.
Art (Ships)
In the US, the Ship team made the finishing touches to the Drake Corsair. Once complete, they moved onto the whitebox stages of two new vehicles. For one, they brainstormed several options for entering and exiting. Whitebox began on a new production vehicle too.
The UK team completed their pass on the salvage feature, ensuring all major visual and gameplay issues were resolved for ship exteriors.
They then began work on the Crusader Spirit, which is progressing through the whitebox phase.
“The biggest challenge has been ensuring that the escape raft on the VIP variant is fully functional at this early stage so we can avoid extra work in the future.” Ship Team
The bulk of whitebox work was also completed for an unannounced vehicle, and development began on an all-new small ship.
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Community
The Community team started November with a Cargo Refactor AMA, which included details of the new Soft Death mechanic.
They then supported the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo (IAE) 2952, including publishing the Best in Show Prizes, an in-depth IAE Traveler's Guide, the Free Fly Schedule, updates to the New Player Guide, and a dedicated IAE 2952 FAQ. They also launched a Drake-themed screenshot contest, where players faced a unique challenge each day of the expo.
Following their reveals at IAE, the team curated and published Q&A posts for the Drake Cutter, the Anvil C8R Pisces, and the RSI Galaxy.
In the approach to the holidays, Community released the Luminalia Calendar and Luminalia 2952 referral bonus. They also supported the Luminalia Screenshot Contest, Luminalia Holiday Card Contest, and Holiday Mayhem at Jumptown.
In support of some of Alpha 3.18’s lesser-publicized features, the Community published three Patch Watch posts, detailing Balancing Keys, Continued Lawlessness, and the latest iteration of Jumptown.
The team also spent time working on a few new web-based programs, and further improvements coming to the Guide System, Community Hub, and Spectrum.
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Engine
November and December were busy months for the Physics team. Aside from plenty of bug fixing and supporting Alpha 3.18, they worked on various optimizations. For example, the cost of performing part OBB vs grid cell overlap checks was amortized by performing them in one call for a grid node instead of cell by cell. Also, sub stepping for attached and AI-controlled NPCs on the server was disabled to bring back actor entity step performance. Several internal data structures were compacted and reordered for a smaller memory footprint and better member alignment.
On the renderer, the team enabled the Gen12 pipeline and scene rendering by default (this will be featured in Alpha 3.18), which is a major milestone on the road toward completing the Gen12 transition and providing a Vulkan backend. Following October’s work on particles, further substantial progress was made. Gen12 refraction and half-resolution rendering support for GPU particles was added, the particle stage and GPU handler refactored, and particle shader background compilation was enabled. Furthermore, particles split for each hierarchy level are now updated in a way that ensures UAV resources stay consistent across each pass and don't change. Moreover, debug visualization code for various systems was ported to Gen12, and PSO caching for projectiles and particles was improved.
Regarding atmosphere and volumetric clouds, an initial draft of a new temporal render mode was submitted and will continue to be worked on in the coming months to provide better rendering performance of raymarched volumetric clouds and atmosphere. Furthermore, various options for refined cloud shaping were brainstormed with Tech Art and will hopefully find their way into a release soon.
On core engine, the team completed work on v2 of p4k data file support for the engine, game, and tool side. On that note, the system now also provides an efficient lock mechanism for legacy pak files as well as much faster access to files inside pak files (embedded in the main p4k data file), both of which significantly improve the loading of object containers. Additionally, the mapping of threads on Intel CPUs with P/E cores was rewritten - critical threads such as main, render, and network threads are ensured to always run on performance cores to avoid the otherwise poor performance on affected CPUs. These changes are currently being verified on the PTU. Also, support for page sizes larger than 4kb (aka huge pages) was added to the engine (at the moment on Linux only). It's currently used for stack, text, and data segments, as well as physics allocations. Using huge pages reduces the pressure on the TLB cache, the part of the CPU translating virtual to physical addresses, which should help with performance. With Clang, just moving the text segment to huge pages gave a 7% speedup. Furthermore, the latest version of Bink2 was integrated and a few audio related bugs fixed in video playback (manifesting themselves as random clicks during playback).
Another area that progressed well was the remote shader compile server used to build shader caches, etc. Due to increased usage of the server by development teams and the build process, proper support for fallback agents as well as server throttling was implemented to deal with times of extreme load and to allow for more distributed compilation. At that point, it also made sense to rewrite various parts of the server code to allow for more robustness, better logging, and increased performance. Lastly, shape unification was completed and entity area support was added. A copy/paste bug in the entity aggregate manager that caused a lot of unnecessary memory access was fixed, and vis area loading was refactored to support batch conversion from previous versions of serialized vis area data.
The remainder of the time was spent supporting Alpha 3.18.
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Features (Arena Commander)
The majority of the team’s end-of-year focus was on making final improvements for Alpha 3.18.
Work continued on the classic race refactor, including taking the Snake Pit, Euterpe Icebreaker, and Miner's Lament courses to play-testable states. This allowed Features to collect feedback from several other teams. A refactor of the race manager and checkpoint system then began, with the aim to create a more robust, future-proof system that can be used by the PU teams to create races around the ‘verse. Design also began developing additional variants of holographic checkpoints and directional arrows for each track, which will vary in style to best suit the setting. Finally for racing, work was completed on the Old Vanderval, Rikkord Memorial Raceway, and Defford Link racetracks.
Improvements were made to the new frontend, including a new window for game-mode selection, an updated style, and the restoration of singleplayer using a rewritten lobby system that also supports multiplayer. This allows other teams to use the new frontend Arena Commander feature stream for greater feedback.
Investigation then began into adding turrets to the Jericho Station and Dying Star maps to either assist or hinder the player in Vanduul and Pirate Swarm game modes. Work was also done to speed up and ease the process of taking locations from the Persistent Universe and have them featured as maps in Arena Commander, which is currently being used for several upcoming racetracks.
The team supported the Soft Death feature. A refactor of the ‘GameRulesRoundsModule’ began, which allows Star Marine's Last Stand mode to have multiple rounds. This refactor enables it in all game modes should the Design team choose. Duel Mode will be the first to utilize this and will allow players to begin a new round with a restocked ship after each kill.
Work was also completed on the reworked system used to ban or allow vehicles and weapons in each game mode. This system provides greater customization for the developers, such as setting up a new mode that only allows a certain vehicle. This is used in Alpha 3.18 during Filtered Duel Mode, Squadron Battle, and Battle Royale to only allow small and medium combat ships. The first pass on new death cameras, which point to the player that killed you while moving and zooming dynamically, was submitted and enabled for all game modes too.
Finally, work was submitted for an unannounced update to a classic Arena Commander mode, which will be further detailed in the coming months.
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Features (Characters & Weapons)
Throughout November, the team added support for tractor beams snapping boxes onto cargo grids. This included a holographic preview to assist with moving loot into a ship.
They also revisited the feature behind dragging an unconscious body into a medical bed. This is being made more generic so that bodies can be placed into other appropriately sized objects. As part of this, several improvements are being made to the flow itself to make it more robust and forgiving.
The team also supported the upcoming patch release with improvements to player respawn and the reconnection flow. Additional time was spent ensuring all new inventory UI features are working as expected too. The team then investigated issue logs for a bug that caused the inventory UI to load indefinitely, with multiple fixes being added to the build.
On the technical animation side, additional features were added to the inverse-kinematics (IK) system to allow for more of the mo-cap performance to come through. This will help when adjusting limbs via IK while doing actions such as pressing buttons or manipulating weapon attachments. These kinds of dynamic IK-driven adjustments are required to avoid enforcing very strict metrics to environments, weapons, and gadgets.
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Features (Gameplay)
Toward the end of the year, Gameplay Features worked on hull scraping for Alpha 3.18, including reacting to feedback threads on Spectrum and adjusting gameplay to match the goals for the first iteration of Salvage. Additionally, filler-station functionality was expanded to allow players to create several useful items for hull scraping.
The team also continued with Resource Management, including life support and artificial gravity. This included a redesign of the previous engineering UI (last seen at CitizenCon) to give a clearer, more modern design to support the vast amount of functionalities that will be expected.
Additionally, groundwork began for vehicle tractor beams. The next steps will be creating the tractor-beam UI and expanding the feature to support its proper functionalities.
The mining update continued, with changes made to the Argo MOLE and MISC Prospector to create bigger differences between the individual and multiplayer aspects. The first rebalancing pass was done for all mining heads, sub-items, and gadgets to support the updated approach to resource distribution. This involves new variances for minables to ensure they’re distributed in a more controlled fashion throughout Stanton and support future crafting releases.
Features (Mission)
Mission Features spent the end of the year enacting improvements and bug fixes to missions for Alpha 3.18, including issues seen on YouTube, Twitch, Reddit, and Spectrum alongside Issue Council reports.
Using feedback from Evocati and Wave 1 PTU, they also implemented analytics events into time-trial missions and began analyzing the results to balance the missions’ target times. This data is also being used to determine the final unlock order for when mission progression is implemented. This analytics reviewing and balancing will continue until it’s live.
For Security Post Kareah, the team addressed an issue with a secret item not working correctly. They also changed the way the datapad on the security chief spawned and adjusted the turrets as they were respawning too quickly. The trespass timer length was also increased. The team are currently looking into an issue with missions not generating for the Crusader Mercenary scope and are continuing to investigate other known issues that have been raised.
Features (Vehicles)
The Vehicle Feature team worked towards porting the transit system to Alpha 3.18’s new persistent tech system. Most of the core work was completed before the holidays, though some improvements continue to be implemented. Most recently, they allowed trains to slow down and wait for transit ahead of them on the track. This should fix issues with trains overlapping.
The team also implemented new set-up tools for vehicles, which allow the designers to see how the automated thruster algorithms use each thruster on a ship. This is used to see how certain thrusters are being used to move in specific directions and make necessary changes to get ships to fly how they want.
Graphics & VFX Programming & Planet Tech
The VFX Programming team focused on finishing the damage map work for hull scraping. This mostly involved bug fixing and performance improvements alongside reworking the debug options for damage maps and documenting the various amendments made for the hull-scraping project. Improvements were also made to visuals, networking, serialization, and damage maps in various edge cases found during PTU testing.
The Planet Tech team focused on polishing river tech and improving resource streaming performance with a new and more aggressive threading model that guarantees a stall-free experience. Additionally, maintenance was done to stabilize the Rastar tool.
More recently, work began on the asteroid SDF to introduce support for new primitives. The team also progressed with hardware-assisted terrain instancing to improve the CPU submission time footprint.
A new local space for terrain vertices representation was introduced, which will improve floating point precisions and accelerate other internal operations.
Finally, the team began looking at offscreen techniques to achieve a localized water simulation model for water-object interactions.
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Lighting
Throughout November and December, the Lighting team completed day and night lighting passes for the time-trial racetracks. They also continued to improve all lighting aspects of the colonial outposts. This involves a lot of interior and exterior work to ensure that they fit the environment and create the intended cold or cozy feeling within the buildings.
After small changes were made to the Jumptown Dynamic Event, a lighting pass was done on a few areas to bring them back up to the current standard and ensure that the new additions fit the existing theme.
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In-Game Branding (Montreal)
The In-Game Branding team finished the year by completing several mandates. This included rebranding Security Post Kareah into a Crusader Security outpost and redesigning Area18’s navigational signage in support of the new-player experience.
Alongside the Environment, Narrative, and Marketing teams, In-Game Branding developed and implemented the visual identity for last year’s Drake-themed IAE event.
As well as working directly on in-game locations and events, the team continued to develop a catalog with guidelines for each in-game brand. The goal of this upcoming internal tool is to make it easier for everyone, from production to marketing, to access information about Star Citizen’s in-fiction companies and improve consistency across the project.
They ended the year working on the visual identity for this year's Invictus Launch Week, and continued the rework of Lorville.
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Locations (EU)
Throughout November and December, EU Locations 1 continued working on the rundown Pyro space station. With more designers now on the team, they made great progress on the layout of each room and are currently exploring interesting gameplay options across the location.
EU Locations 2 worked alongside the US-based PU team to add new cargo elevators into existing hangars, which will be used during the updated cargo gameplay.
Pre-production of the local law office location began, which will be essential for several upcoming gameplay loops. They also worked on IAE and the new-player experience, the latter of which involved improving existing landing zones for new visitors.
EU Sandbox 2 wrapped up the year with further exploration and experimentation for the underground facilities. They also finished the sand caves' visual target, worked to set the benchmark for rock caves in the PU, and began looking into improving and adding to microTech’s forest.
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Narrative
Toward the end of the year, the Narrative team assisted with the new Security Post Kareah and Klescher Rehabilitation mission content.
They then coordinated with Design on the new time-trial racing missions. Along with mission text, Narrative introduced Wildstar Racing into Star Citizen lore to create an organization responsible for arranging the races.
“Their backstory is that they began as a group of racing enthusiasts who would share vids of themselves racing on their favorite local tracks. Since then, they have grown into a sanctioned racing organization specializing in rally tracks and are widely recognized as an affordable proving ground for amateur racers to work towards competing in higher-profile leagues.” Narrative Team
For future patches, Narrative began planning new mining and salvage missions, which will help expand the career choices available through the Contract Manager. Work also continued on investigation missions, with several new mysteries for players to solve being developed. Additionally, the team discussed sandbox mission content, where players will encounter missions in the universe without accepting a specific contract beforehand.
The team also planned a reorganization of how in-game text is sorted. The internal tool developed to house all the game text strings is used by many different departments and it has become clear that a new folder structure would help clarify where certain strings should be placed. Now that planning is complete, the hope is to roll out the reorganization in the upcoming year. Time was also spent updating some of the detailed planetary conditions, such as temperature and atmospheric content, for upcoming star systems to more closely align with the intended gameplay and solar positioning.
The end of the year also brought a variety of lore, including a Portfolio about the History of the IAE, a new Clean Shot with predictions about the expo, a Loremakers: Community Questions, the Hazy Days short story, an A Word from Our Sponsors post featuring some Luminalia adverts, and a selection of Galactapedia posts for November and December.
Finally, the Narrative team also announced that 2023 will bring changes to the website’s lore release schedule.
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Interactables
The Interactables team continued their work on Pyro, creating more advanced and unique assets, including stalls that can be found in the rundown station.
Prototyping continued on deployables.
“These assets take a long time to figure out and overcome unforeseen challenges that are presented by other teams to ensure that they do not hinder gameplay.” Interactables Team
In December, fixes were made for the current in-game coffee machines. Soon, players will be able to take select cups to these machines and have infinite cups of coffee.
Progress was also made on a new template for an asset that will be integral to bounty hunting, which is running alongside Environment Art’s bounty-hunting office.
Finally, the team started pre-production on lootable content, including improving the current loot pool.
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Tech Art/Animation
At the end of 2022, Tech Art completed a dirt/wear pass for all cockpit glass to ensure the pilot’s vision isn’t obscured. A similar pass for turret glass is planned for a future update.
The Graphics team delivered mesh-tagging tech that will be used in Alpha 3.18 and beyond to fix various lighting issues on ship turrets, ramps, and doors. This enables the devs to tag a mesh that moves between zones to receive interior, exterior, or automatic transition lighting. This will help with most related problems. They also worked alongside the ship artists and engineers to enable shader damage for hull scraping on all vehicles in the game.
New ramp physics collision types were added to the Drake Corsair. One allows the tip of the ramp to ignore terrain, while a hidden wheel-only collision helps small vehicles and wheeled trolleys traverse gaps.
In the ship pipeline, the team closed out the Drake Vulture, while the Corsair and Cutter received updated debris, SDF volumes, landing systems, vis area/portal optimizations, new segmented turret vis-areas in turrets, and local grid and lift and ramp tech. The team also further developed the MISC Hull C’s interior walkway animation, which syncs with the exterior hull transform animation. The final walkway will be a skinned asset with 10 sliding rings connected by stretchy tubing.
Tech Animation spent the year’s latter months focusing on head-asset processing.
“We’ve been taking some long-overdue actors and starting the internal processing procedure to create their likenesses. This includes creating over 78 scans per head asset and processing them to the neutral head asset. Some of these actors were scanned over seven years ago on the main shoot for SQ42, so they look quite different these days!” Tech Animation Team
The team take these complex scans and break them down into individual muscle movements and apply them to the facial rig asset, ultimately including them in the gene pool to give more variety to the heads and faces seen in-game.
Online Services (Montreal)
The Online Services team spent the majority of November and December on Alpha 3.18 stabilization, performance improvements, and bug fixing.
Time was also spent time with the DevOps Publishing team, production-tuning the new services and new graph database used by Persistent Entity Streaming.
Significant effort was also spent tracking down edge cases in the new Character Repair that will replace the current Character Reset, with an emphasis of finding possible exploits and potential failure points in the process.
Live Tools (Montreal)
The Live Tools team focused on developing features related to Persistent Entity Streaming, including the new log-in flow module implemented into the network operation center. Now, users can manage entitlements directly through Hex, which is a major step forward.
Another tool related to Persistent Entity Streaming is the Entity Graph tool, which was further developed and implemented. This module offers the ability to search and visualize the various entities attached to a player or an account and the associated details.
Those new modules provide more versatility to Hex and contribute to making it a powerful tool for investigations and issues solving.
Turbulent (Web Platform)
The end of 2022 saw Turbulent adding to the Alexandria tool library with a new module called Grid. The Grid tool gives content creators another way to present information and was first used in the Luminalia calendar. The team also progressed well with the SSV project, which provides the ability to adjust the color palette of any themes.
“This tremendously complex project saw the dev and design teams come together in the most creative ways.” Turbulent Web Platform Team
They also continued to add to the manufacturing library, this time adding Origin Jumpworks.
Turbulent’s Experience team focused on reworking the initial new-user flow, from selecting a starter package to downloading and entering the game. December saw them start development after many months of design iteration and technical decision making.
The Community team continued to polish the Community Hub, with a majority of the new feature set to be released in early 2023, including better connection to large events and player-generated content.
Finally for Turbulent, the Architecture team put numerous hours into the PHP 8 upgrade. After six months in the making, it hit the production environment and was warmly welcomed by the wider development team.
VFX
Through November and December, the VFX team worked through tasks for Alpha 3.18. This included putting the finishing touches to new vehicles and lots of task-pool and snag-list fixes and tweaks. They also continued to support salvage effects, making adjustments after seeing some inconsistencies in backer footage of PTU Wave 1.
VFX also began to plan for the overwhelming-but-necessary restructuring of their generic effects libraries. These libraries contain the most commonly used effects, including smoke, steam, and sparks, and have become too bloated over the years. In the months ahead, the team will be reducing the number of individual effects living in the libraries while making visual improvements as they go along.