FOUNDRY 42: UK
ENGINEERING
After the hectic run in to the holidays, this month allowed the team time to do some much needed housekeeping and organization. They spent a lot of effort working on performance optimizations to help improve the player’s experience. There isn’t one magic bullet to resolve this, rather lots of small improvements that will add up to a bigger improvement. Some of that is moving more code over from the old update functions, which run on the main thread, to the batched update model allowing them to use all the threads. Another improvement they made was reducing the work the animation system does by finding all the areas where a character’s skeleton is updated unnecessarily.
The team made progress on object container streaming, which allows large areas of the game like a planet or space station to load in the background as the player approaches it. This will help performance, decrease load times, and reduce the amount of memory required to run the game. One of the major challenges is making all the existing entity components able to initialize in a background thread safely. The process involves taking a lot of legacy code and converting it over, and there’s a lot of legacy components. It also means finally removing all Lua from the game and converting it into C++.
The Engineering Team has also been doing a pass on the usables, and especially how they get set up by the designers/artists/animators. After implementing a large number of them, they’ve targeted several areas where the implementation can be improved and easier to debug when things go wrong. It will also make them more modular. They can even take some of the functionality outside of the usable tech to use in other areas of the game.
GRAPHICS
This month, the Graphics Team worked through fixes for issues that came to light during the release of 3.0 and the Squadron 42 Vertical Slice. Many of these fixes related to the render-to-texture system, which is heavily used for the UI. These fixes should improve the resolution and anti-aliasing. The other major push was to improve render profiling and video memory tools to assist the Art and Graphics team to help optimize the game. Their main focus has been ensuring they can report a variety of statistics that are specific to each development team, for example, the number of polygons used for characters or the total texture memory used by the prop team. This helps the large and dispersed Art Teams understand how they’re affecting performance and therefore aid in improving it. They also did some optimization work, and made a big improvement to the ‘depth-pass’ algorithm. Now, each frame applies a heuristic to every mesh to determine which will make the best ‘occluders’ that can be rendered first to obscure any other meshes to reduce ‘overdraw’ (the process of re-rendering the same pixel multiple times).
In parallel to the UI fixes and optimization, the team has been doing R&D work on several new shaders, which they’re about to start full production on in February. These new shaders will help unify and simplify the art-workflow across various teams, allow more dynamic shaders that can correctly react to different environmental conditions (dirt, sand, mud), and apply wear/tear consistently between asset types with convincing visuals. These shaders will also enable several new features for the art team that should result in more interesting visuals on large man-made structures and more physically based blending of many materials on natural/organic assets.
UI
January allowed the UI Team time to step back and assess what was achieved at the end of last year.
MFD/Visor displays are a feature that needs additional work to bring them to the quality level the game strives for. The UI Visual Team has been set up to work closely with the Graphics Team in order to polish this feature for 3.1.
The team is also heavily focused on the
PMA/VMA apps. With the release of the two apps in 3.0, they have been able to gather both internal and external feedback in order to ensure they are heading in the correct direction. A sprint team has been set up with the initial focus on bugfxing the
VMA to ensure its functionality before additional features are implemented.
SHIPS

The Ship team pushed forward on a number of ships that are slated to be in the 3.1 patch including the Reclaimer and Razor as well as ones slated for future releases like the Hammerhead, vicious Vanduul Blade fighter and Origin’s luxurious 600i. Artists worked to lock down the interior and exterior layouts and begin to work out the various materials needed to bring the ships to life. It’s not only new ships on the docket, some of the classics are in the process of being updated to the current ship spec, one of which, the Aegis Avenger, was prominently featured in last year’s Vertical Slice preview.
VFX

The Anvil Terrapin is the first ship of the year to get the
VFX treatment, as they prepare it for flight ready status. They’re working on effects for thrusters, damage and a deathmask that’s using some new debris assets.
On the weapons front, the Gemini R97 ballistic shotgun had its
VFX first Pass, including muzzle, tracer and impact effects. There’s also been a heavy focus on planning and schedules for the year ahead, and making sure the
VFX tasks are aligned with everyone else’s.
ENVIRONMENT

The team continued developing the Utilitarian Hangar Common Elements. Now that they have established a robust set of metrics that will work in many different locations, the hangars went to the Concept team for visual refinement. The shape language and scale reads have matured significantly from the initial kickoff concepts, which means that the hangars are working as enormous, functional and impressive structures much better than expected. The next stage is Greybox, where they will dial in details, materials, and lighting reads.
Elsewhere, the team made significant leaps with the Procedural Layout tool functionality being worked on by our Tech Art Team. The tool has matured to where it’s being used by the whole team to generate many varied and interesting rest stop interior layouts. It’s providing a ‘tailored randomness’ that allows the team to both direct a layout’s flow from an art and design perspective but also introduce enough unpredictability that layouts can be truly varied and different every time. As the team works to build more of the assets needed, the potential variety in layouts only gets more and more diverse.
DERBY ANIMATION
Following some initial organization and documentation work, the fledgling Gameplay Story team got stuck into a couple of scenes that were chosen to act as a test bed. They enjoyed the technical & animation challenges involved and are looking forward to working more closely with Design to get these scenes working correctly in game. They also started work on scenes that are more critical to Squadron 42’s story and are looking to expand and develop the GP Story team going forward.
AUDIO
Ships: The Audio Department have been supporting the
SFX requirements for the Anvil Terrapin and Aegis Reclaimer including thrusters, mechanical elements, ambience and UI.
Outposts / Rest Stops: The Audio Department completed a polish pass on outpost ambiences and
SFX to ensure that audio responds to power level. They are currently prototyping audio responding to weather e.g. a storm outside an outpost could cause the structure to bow, bend and rattle. They supported the procedural tech used to build the rest stop stations actioning
SFX passes on the rest stop building blocks to ensure any and all configurations meet the minimum quality bar. Future polish passes are planned.
Weapons: The Audio Department has had a big push to improve the audio response of weapons in different planetside locations by fleshing out weapon tails and reflections for both the 1st and 3rd person perspectives.
Music: They are also in the processes of drafting a composition request for a new Star Marine music suite, which will provide unique support for all game modes and dynamically react to gameplay.
Code: The Audio Code Team has been busy on an optimization pass to achieve better overall performance by improving audio bank loading and reducing the Wwise object and zone object count in the audio system. In addition, the team has been working on improvements to our audio dev tech.