AI (Combat)
Though a significant portion of the AI Team’s work is relevant for both SQ42 and the PU, some ongoing tasks are exclusive to the single-player campaign. This includes continued iterations on Vanduul melee behavior, which now automatically evaluates the suitability of specific special actions (dodging, jump attacks, melee attacks, etc.).
Regarding melee attacks, damage is now triggered by collision with the weapon’s blade to enable timing and assets to be tweaked and adjusted. The Vanduul lance has several states that can be utilized by the behavior, including extending it when preparing for melee attacks or keeping it collapsed when firing or aiming. These weapon state modifications are triggered by the behavior based on general context. Vanduul health was also further developed to reflect the different skeleton and activate the correct damage when it receives hits to different areas.
AI (Social)
For social AI, the recently devised bridge crew behavior now uses operator seat functionalities. The team are currently using this scenario to extend the seated actor state to support some usable functionalities. For example, they have extended the idle/fidget system on top of operator seats to allow the animators more freedom to bring life to seated scenarios.
SQ42-specific behaviors and functionalities were set up for vendor characters as well. Work also started on usables for the mess hall that will allow NPCs to collect and consume food systemically. When complete, NPCs will be able to collect cutlery and plates, serve themselves food, and then occupy seats to eat and drink.
Animation
Animation spent the month working on object and grenade throwing, knockdowns and knockbacks, and several new weapons. They further developed the weapons master, capital ship seat interaction, the bartender, and AI ship inspections. They also made great inroads into the NPC ammo retrieval mentioned last month, Vanduul combat, and female player faces and emotes. Interrupts were added to several chapters as part of ongoing scene work too.
Art (Characters)
The Character Team revisited a few key heads, cleaning up skin textures, refining hair, and are currently working with tech animation and cinematics to address facial animations. Some of these revisions may impact other departments, so all changes are modular and easy to roll back. This work will inform the process of reviewing other SQ42 characters and updates in the future.
Aliens-wise, the character artists finished modeling and texturing the Vanduul armor and passed it to the tech artists for rigging.
“So far work on the Vanduul looks fantastic and we are very excited about it.” -The Character Team
They also began coordinating with Tech Animation on the Xi’an race, ironing out major anatomy and animation issues.
Art (Weapons)
Weapon Art’s SQ42 focus throughout August was on the Vanduul lance, which consisted of looking at the weapon’s materials. A new concept for a medical device used in some of the larger ships was completed too.
Audio
August saw a refactor to the footsteps system to improve the audio on different surfaces, making it more responsive to player movement. They’re also improving the granularity and structure of the music system to improve transitions between music content based on what’s happening in a gameplay context.
Time was dedicated to the Lombard effect; a newly developed system detects louder volumes and large amounts of noise in-game and makes dialogue louder automatically so that players don’t need to do it manually. Audio also supported the VFX Team on triggering sounds when particles are generated on the GPU. Currently, if a particle is generated on the GPU, audio cannot efficiently play or sync. This ongoing work will remedy that.
Cinematics
August saw work continue on the character lighting rig used by scenes that don’t require a full manual pass, with more rules defined and edge cases identified. They also began investigating how the automatic depth-of-field focus system chooses which character is of interest during conversations. For filmic scenes (where the cinematic designer directs the camera), focus is selected and controlled manually. However, conversational scenes (where the player can freely roam around) can move out of focus if the player looks past them. Careful consideration is taken to ensure this doesn’t happen due to another character being classed as a ‘higher priority.’
Several scenes moved past the ‘implementation complete’ phase and into production. Once production is complete, scenes are fully playable and deemed almost shippable, though a final pass is required to tweak and finalize lighting, VFX, UI, and animation.
Attention was also given to sequences that play out if the player reaches a ‘game over’ condition due to behavior not befitting a UEE naval officer.
Engineering
In August, the Engineering Team added support for SDF-based local physics grids and SDF sets, interior grid markup for SDFs in the resource compiler, and g-force calculation for all actor entities. They also added a separate g-force collision calculation to the actor entity, new visualization modes to help development, and ‘inspect’ and ‘modify’ properties of static and rigid entities. The option to export bit-voxel geometry via the mesh setup and save it inside CGF was added too.
Optimization-wise, they worked on multi-threaded RC bit-voxel baking, which saves a few hundred bytes on every CPhysicalEntity instance and improves cache locality by reordering members. They also saved four bytes per physical-placeholder instance, disabled debug validation in the final release, moved large geometry into a dedicated bucket during grid population, improved bit-voxel tree-box calculation by using blocks instead of individual voxels, and optimized tree traversals in grid checks
The Systems Team added an API to the crash handler that allows the dumping of cigprofile data. This will help them analyze what the system was doing shortly before running into a deadlock and watch dog time out and log memory usage at the time of the crash.
Deep analysis was done to resolve the disparity between tracked and system-reported memory use. Several improvements were made on both Windows and Linux to correctly track data moving forward, including low level allocator reserved pages and third-party allocations. They continued looking into the SIMD and memory layout code for zone partitions, implemented faster execution for scoped FPE enable and disable by eliminating linear search through all registered threads, and fixed several issues with ISPC integration. They also reduced the memory use of P4K system and changed the MemoryAddressRange to use CIG API instead of native OS API for memory tracking.
Work on the Gen12 renderer continued, with the team adding support for instancing and a ‘keep alive’ list so that GPUDevice objects are kept active until the end of a frame. Several refactors and optimizations were made too.
Cleanup in the shader system and renderer for thread safety continued, as did G12 brush rendering. They also started to look into DX11.1 API support (Windows 8.1 and up) for binding CBs using offsets for intermediate performance improvements until Vulkan ships. They also added support for custom texture views when using pass resources.
Volumetric fog to PassResource was ported to prevent the shader parser from stripping global symbols. Some severe Alpha 3.10 GPU memory leaks were fixed too.
For planet atmosphere unified raymarching, the team established a general atmosphere context to avoid accessing resources globally. This make it easier and safer to reuse shared code. All related shader code was refactored too. For temporal reprojection, they implemented options for: neighborhood clipping, refining color bbox using neighborhood variance, compression (based on scene luminance), and color space conversion of color data for tighter bbox to reduce errors introduce by clipping and clamping. The depth dilation code was futher developed too.
R&D into volumetric clouds continued and detailed plans for experiments and next steps were drafted. The initial set up for the volumetric cloud render environment was completed, code was restructured to allow it to be shared between planet atmosphere and volumetric cloud shaders, and the initial pass and injection of cloud raymarch results into the unified atmosphere raymarcher was implemented. The team made performance improvements to the terrain displacement mapping and optimized the shader parser to improve turnaround times when editing shader code.
Finally, Engineering implemented fast bicubic b-spline and Catmull Rom spline interpolation variants for two-to-four channel texture data, further bi-cubic spline evaluation optimizations, made a planet terrain shadow pass, and fixed time precision issue in cloud animation.
Gameplay Story
Gameplay Story continued to work thorough the key introduction of a ship early in the game, and two days of mo-cap was completed in the Derby studio.
“It was a little more challenging to work in a COVID-safe environment, but it was great to get back into the studio after such a long hiatus.” -The Gameplay Story Team
This has enabled the team to complete some long-standing tasks that could not be addressed through hand-keying alone.
Graphics
The Graphics Team predominantly focused on the Gen12 renderer last month, with time dedicated spcifically to the conversion process so that the old renderer code can be deprecated as quickly as possible. Various systems are currently being converted, including gas cloud rendering, shadow masking, and run-time environment probes. Improvements were also made to the rendering
API to allow simpler and more robust client code that’s less prone to human error. Work on the Vulkan backend made good progress too. The shaders were cleaned up to remove all unnecessary reliance on
CPU uploaded data; modern
GPU performance means it’s more important to save the
CPU work in the renderer and driver than a few tiny instructions on the
GPU.
Work on the organic shader continued too, bringing tighter integration with the planets to enable the artists to use assets in a variety of biomes and have them automatically integrate into their surroundings.
Level Design
The Social Design Team continued to work on scenes, usables, and NPC behaviors. They moved ten scenes to the ‘gold standard’ level, where everything plays out as expected in the final game. These scenes vary in complexity to give the team an accurate representation of how long it will take to complete their tasks for the rest of the game.
The Level Design Team continued to polish the ground-based levels while maintaining a strong focus on AI behaviors and multiple traversal routes.
The development of important dogfight locations continued. This involved working closely with the Flight AI and Art teams for support on use cases and space-scaping respectively.
Narrative
Throughout August, the Narrative Team continued with the review sessions detailed last month. As more locations progress in development, the team generated additional environmental storytelling documents to give intrepid players more insight into the story, history, and character of the environments.
As part of these playthroughs, they started to call out potential moments that could benefit from additional content, such as filling in potential lulls or calling out gameplay mechanics. After scripting, the hope is to record placeholder versions of the audio to block into the game and see how it plays. This approach will allow them to field-test new lines in situ and iterate on them long before official capture. They also worked alongside the Audio Team to develop the Vanduul language, which involved a deeper dive into the alien race’s culture.
QA
QA continued to support Cinematics with recordings of each level to ensure scenes are working as intended and are of the intended quality. They also created test levels for different effects to enable them to be tested more quickly and efficiently.
User Interface (UI)
Most visual teams have embedded UI artists, all of who have been working on a variety of upcoming features. For the Actor Feature Team, the artists polished the Personal Inner Though system and external inventory, both of which will be used in the PU and SQ42. They also began looking at the various fonts used throughout the game with the goal of unifying and updating them.
The UI Tech Team worked on ‘canvas-slicing’ tech, which will give other teams more freedom to add 2D UI to 3D spaces (via Building Blocks). They also began looking into refactoring the color system. The aim is to aid developers by making it easier to adjust colors across various UIs using a stylesheet rather than adjusting RGB values in each element. It will also allow vector gradients to be used in UI.
VFX
Working closely with the Design and Art teams, VFX Tech Art continued to support gas clouds, which is predominately now in the bug-fixing phase. They also continued to improve the texture sequence creation process, creating a faster, more streamlined workflow than the current one (which involves several different software packages). This is important to allow the artists to be more incremental with fluid sims (and exporting them as baked texture sequences), which will ultimately lead to higher-quality explosions, smokes, and fire effects.