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September 10th 2019
Attention Recruits,
What you are about to read is the latest information on the continuing development of Squadron 42 (SCI des: SQ42).
Operatives around the world collected the intel needed to provide you with this progress report. Intelligence suggests we’ve uncovered intel on operations concerning cinematic techniques, the creation of derelict ships, and a new Vulkan-friendly pipeline.
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
Ship AI worked on behavior and technical improvements. So of these allow the designers to access more behavior parameters, such as the option to look at a target while flying to a specific offset or to the beginning of a Track View scene. They implemented the first version of the Defend Target behavior that makes great use of the new target selection functionalities – the designers can now customize weights and threat scores to enable the AI to select the most appropriate target. This selection is influenced by several factors, such as the enemy ship’s threat score, the number of enemies targeting a specific entity, or damage inflicted. This provides a more realistic fight experience and allows players to witness more meaningful decisions during firefights.
Further progress was made towards the new ship 3D pathfinding implementation. This new approach has two basic control modes: position and velocity. Positional control means that a spaceship wants to reach a specific location, so a path will be generated incrementally as it moves in space. Velocity control means that a spaceship is going to maneuver related to a specific target or location. Both approaches make use of the physical data stored in the signed distance fields (SDF).
The exterior of the comms array was tweaked slightly and work continued on the geometry and shaders. The station is about to receive a lighting pass and has been handed to the Space Scaping Team for placing.
The development of derelict ships began, with a few interesting variations created, including rotting, frozen, and attacked – all of which are being hand-sculpted to give maximum visual and emotional impact.
The female character model is also smaller than the male version, both in terms of body size and camera framing. So, further adjustments to the character motions were made, such as adjusting the hands and back to fit in chairs properly. To solve the framing issue, a camera tag was created to reduce the “tripod” height by 10cm in scenes that show the female player close up.
Rendering wise, the first draft of the new graphics pipeline was submitted. The goal is to gradually transition to a Vulkan/DX12-friendly pipeline and the implement the Vulkan backend. The first pass includes initial interfaces and implementation, tone mapping, and the first Vulkan code added to renderer. For planet rendering, they moved from the explicit table-based evaluation of atmosphere inscatter to an incremental raymarch stepping process. This now allows additional evaluation of ground fog density samples (and clouds at a later stage) and incorporates them into the scatter equations.
Testing for the newest AI collision avoidance changes is also underway. While AI testing in DE is primarily done for the Persistent Universe, any new AI issues are cross-checked with the SQ42 test team in the UK as there’s often overlap.