Progress was made on crucial upcoming features (that will also affect the PU): ‘Fire discipline’ influences the firing behavior of gunners and pilots – the idea being that surrounding events and actions alter the behavior between the extremes of ‘trigger happy’ and ‘parsimonious’. For target selection, the team added two new elements – ‘self-preservation’, which prioritizes attacking the most dangerous enemy combatant, and ‘defend ally’, which monitors friendly ships and AI and attacks players causing the most damage. AI security behavior has also been refined for security and interdiction missions to cover every event that could happen during a mission (of which there are many!).

Archon Station’s central hub received significant attention too, including early explorations of lighting and atmosphere. The aim is to have this social space feel as alive as possible and to accurately portray the fact thousands of people live and visit every day.

Development of the comma array exterior is coming to a close, with particular attention being given to how the player freely traverses the area while being “funneled” to locations that show of the scale and grandeur.

Gas cloud work continued too, with Design working out their modular set requirements for the basic traversal areas. On the art front, the team are merging this tech with some of the asteroid belts players come across in the campaign. The reason being that some of them have solar winds and need to have movement, affect ship flight characteristics, and so on.

Finally, some of the team began early work on one of the main planetary locations – a brutalist building with impressive scale.

Continuing from last month, the team worked with new code and tools that enable blending in and out of mo-cap from locomotion. They’re already putting it to good use and bringing more scenes to the ‘implementation complete’ stage, which means a scene’s state machine is done, approved, and the animation editing for each fragment reflects that. Even small scenes often require pre-scene idles, intros, dialogue options, waiting idles, resolves, post-scene idles, and more, so reaching ‘implementation complete’ is an important milestone. However, the scene is not fully complete in this state, but is ‘functionally’ finished and can be played through as designed. The next stage is for Level Design to implement the scene into the mission flow and review, feedback, and polish.

Two large changes were also done in-code: the hero cast and ships received ‘Hero Global Unique IDs’, which enables the team to move away from a proxy placeholder entity workflow. They can now also create ‘child object container layers’ in the editor that can easily fly with a ship or zone without having to wait for client mode to verify it works. These changes allow, for example, a fistfight scene play out on top of a Gladius wing while the player is flying the ship. They also received new editor code that brings them closer to a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) workflow.

The Actor Feature Team continued iterating on unarmed melee combat, including looking into a heavy attack and creating windows of opportunity for punching, dodging, and blocking. To refine timing, they created a test level where they can have multiplayer melee fights (set in a bar of course).

The Engine Team worked on support for tri-mesh splitting to optimize collisions and intersection tests, continued work on geometry instancing, and optimized the application of networked states as part of the ongoing physics update. They also added raycaster support for collisions on overlapping zones. Recent optimizations to physics include making vehicles ‘go to sleep’ when landed, not updating ship physical entity if parts move slightly, not looping through all rigid entities during the ‘apply state from network’ part of the physics step, and introducing the first step of box pruning.

They also continued removing the global render state along with graphic and fidelity planning and prep and added support for libunwind on Linux for more readable callstacks when DGS crashes. They also continued support for SOCS, with entity stability improvements, remove/respawn single aggregates to memory, and general game code support.

For Rendering, they improved the anti-flicker heuristic for TSAA, which now uses the cumulative moving average for the first four frames to obtain faster convergence after history resets. They researched atmosphere artifacts at the horizon and made several major improvements. Some issues remain and will be fixed by a slightly different approach to atmosphere rendering that will unify the atmosphere, ground fog, and eventually clouds. Part of the research for this new approach involved implementing a ground truth solution for atmosphere light ‘in-scattering’ (single-scatter precise + multi-scatter approximation). For the procedural planet tool, they implemented a layout generation recorder for the designers that allows the visualization of collision issues in the layout of space stations and other locations.

Level Design are still polishing the chapters that include traversal and exploration along with focusing on the combat experience. The Spaceflight Team are currently developing combat spaces with Art and the points of interest where quantum travel will be seen, with focus soon shifting from level layout to the player cockpit experience as more AI behaviors make it into the game.

They’re also anticipating that testing will be required for the new ship AI formations feature. This system is already being used to a degree in the PU, but will need further functionality and destructive testing for SQ42.

Alongside preparation and planning, head rigging was further developed, new tools were delivered to make internal processes easier, and comm calls were improved. The team in Germany also supported Cinematics with bug fixes and provided several loadouts and prop rigs to help them finalize animations.

The VFX Tech Art Team (again with Art and Design) continued work on the gas cloud tools needed for The Coil. There are still a few minor issues being addressed, though everything is working in-engine as intended.