The Simpod usable is a workstation where the player or NPCs can train. Once complete, it will available for NPC gunners to practice turret skills in a safe space.

The Cryopod usable is a cold-storage container for preserving humanoids, with vital signs displayed on external screens. The first iteration allows NPCs to check the occupant’s health on the terminal and clear frost from the pod’s window.

New additions include parameters to combo attacks to rapidly prototype faster melee animations by adjusting a scale factor. This allows them to quickly balance the speed of animations, so the pace of close-range combat can be altered to increase or decrease the challenge to the player.

Motion-warp targeting now updates throughout melee attacks so that characters can re-adjust their positioning to correctly hit their targets. The team also improved the way staggers can be triggered. Now, larger characters can have staggers triggering after sustained bullet fire to interrupt their melee attacks.

They also spent time working on Vanduul combat alongside the AI Team, blocking out animations for Vanduul breaking through closed or partially closed doorways and breaking equipment. Improvements continued on zero-g gameplay and player ground-based animations.

Variants of existing ships like the Bengal were concepted, built, and delivered, while new ships were created for the Vanduul fleet. All bridge scenes featuring Admiral Bishop and his Vanduul counterpart progressed too.

Most scenes received their ‘prop and finger contact pass’. Now, all officers are properly located in their seats, with their hands touching reactive controls and moving as required. For example, fingers grabbing a swivel display properly.

Time also went into creating reusable stunt sequences of ships battling or getting destroyed that might be viewed by the player from a corridor window or on a ship’s bridge during battle.

A key turret sequence was fleshed out, with cutaways created to distinguish waves and different challenges. This led to a lot of navsplines being drawn up and improved on.

For the renderer, significant effort was spent on improving the results of the pipeline profiler for Gen12 and legacy render paths. This was done to gain an accurate assessment of how long render and compute passes take to process on CPUs and GPUs without impacting actual frame rate too much (real-time profiling).

Significant progress was also made on the Gen12 transition: Pipeline state objects are now compiled on demand to improve loading times, massive instancing is now supported, and instance buffer management was optimized. The Scaleform render stage used for menu and in-game-world UI was optimized to reduce the average stage count from 2000 states to a maximum of 60, with the pipeline state also being created on demand. Additionally, refactoring was done to the particle code, light atlas stage, and shader parser. Content integrity was tightened by adding data asserts for invalid shaders being used in materials. Support for material texture updates (texture animation) was added too.

Improvements continued to be made to cloud and atmosphere indirect lighting based on the presence of clouds in the atmosphere. The initial part of this work was completed (LUT generation), with work picking up again once planned performance optimizations are in place. To get the latter in place, work on the reprojection and filter chain commenced to allow for temporal and spatial reuse of raymarch results. Specifically for this purpose, R&D work started on performing reprojection without motion vectors (as these can’t represent participating media properly).

Polish work was done across chapter 1, with several scenes updated with new audio, while the Graves walk-and-talk in chapter 5 progressed well. A briefing scene in chapter 8 received new mo-cap, while a complicated scene from chapter 12 was completely overhauled.

Work also started on changes to the material system to allow shaders to become more modular. This is a stepping stone towards building a new suite of shaders that provide more power and flexibility for the artists without always needing complex re-engineering by the graphics programmers.

Gen12 work continued, with more systems being converted. The team are also looking to complete a large refactor of the texture samplers to make them compatible with Gen12/Vulkan.

They also worked closely with the Ship AI team to create more realistic and challenging AI behaviors to allow for better close-quarters dogfighting combat.

Having gone through the entire ground-based areas of the game down to opening-door level, the FPS team began fleshing out the spaces with AI and new mechanics.

As the game is being refined, it’s often a single line of dialogue that needs to be adjusted rather than a whole scene. So, revised tracking documentation was worked on to better help the team monitor the status of additional dialogue requests as they come in.

“We have rewritten major parts of the DNA system used to create our in-game actors. Coupled with this, we have added support for creating and editing these head assets in Maya through a plugin that shares the same codebase and a huge amount of tooling to use it efficiently. This has allowed us to move beyond our current gene-pool limits and set our eyes on the future.”- Tech Animation

Now, all types of face rigs are viable (including animals and aliens) along with the prospect of upgrading or customizing the facial animation rigs for whatever is required in the future. This technology is also being prospectively recruited with more complex forms of deformation.

Tech Animation are nearly ready to present the head-authoring pipeline they created in tandem with the DNA system. This will give them the opportunity to create new face rigs for the DNA gene pools and tightly control the quality of assets.

Additional tooling was created throughout the quarter to include alembic cache export in the animation pipeline. It was always supported but including it this way has opened up new opportunities for the Animation and Tech teams to directly include it in their animation pipelines as an export preference. The team are planning to leverage this technology for some impressive showpieces during Squadron 42.