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May 3rd 2019
Attention Recruits,
What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
From alien concepts to player control over cutscenes, momentum remains strong. Naturally, there’s a litany of restricted intelligence awaiting review for potential declassification, so keep an eye on these updates for access when release is permitted.
The information contained in this communication is extremely sensitive and it is of paramount importance that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Purge all records after reading.
UEE Naval High Command
They also teamed up with AI to start connecting character animations to specific usable dimensions for more realism when picking up and inspecting items. Although currently in development for SQ42, these developments will eventually make their way to the Persistent Universe.
Finally for Animation, they worked on the combat AI system to give enemies several new weapon options to choose from when encountering the player and hostile NPCs.Deep space has been getting an art overhaul too, with three key locations (called ‘mini-systems’ internally) now in place and ready for polish. These systems form three separate parts of the overall Squadron 42 map and each has its own unique flavor.
A capital ship is being brought up to scratch by the same team who worked on the Idris. They’re also designing a social hub, a foundry for a major space station, a visual target for an asteroid base, and a number of other tasks that can’t be divulged just yet. All of this is alongside working closely with the design, UI, and cinematic teams to ensure they each have what they need to move forward.
They also completed rendering support for CPU-accessible textures for RTT video comms calls and optimized shaders to avoided unnecessary resource creation (e.g in GPU skinning). The Initial ImGUI integration was completed and will be used to unify and improve the in-game profiling tools. System and module integration were added to avoid an unorganized collection of tools and a text/tag searchable configuration system for registered tools (similar to Visual Code) was implemented. To better improve load times, the team created a new load time profiler to track file access (times accessed, data transfer, etc.), amended the IO scheduler for SSDs and HDDs to give faster load times and response, and vastly improved file access in the shader system to speed up initialization at start-up.
In addition to the compile-time analysis tool developed last month, they finalized an add-in tool to generate optimal uber file sets and, as a result, reshuffled game uber files for even better compile times. Work also began on a physics debugger that will allow the team to record issues, play them back, freeze time, etc. to help understand and speed up fixing complex physics issues.
The team experimented with a new over-the-shoulder camera for cinematics and started looking into how to track the player’s mission performance and what variables need to be exposed to the designers.
The AI Team adjusted the way story scenes are set up and how NPCs enter and exit to make sure they’re positioned correctly. AI ‘push/pull’ behavior has been improved too, so NPCs flying with the player can’t get too far ahead or fall behind.
Updates to performance capture and in-cockpit scenes are currently being swapped from the narrative placeholders to more polished final representations that support branching conversations, reputation, and player actions.
AI focus was mostly on the social side, with the team building behaviors and schedules for ship crews, which is now possible thanks to the usables pipeline delivering final templates for integration.
They also worked on creating a cinematics ship zoo test map. Different ship issues will sometimes occur in-game rather than in Trackview, so having them pre-set up makes reproducing (and fixing) bugs much quicker and easier.
They’re currently providing dedicated support to the Cinematics Team, investigating any issues they may encounter that hinder their workflow.
The team also worked on multiple prop rigs for cinematic and gameplay-story animations and began work on the first version of a remote exporter for animations. In its final version, this will speed up the team’s workflow, especially for cinematic animation, because the animator can outsource the export to another machine and continue working.
They also worked on various cinematics using vector fields to make particles move in a more realistic and interesting way around certain ships. For example, particles flowing around a ship’s hull.