The next step is to work alongside the Design Team to implement them into the level, finish the cryopod interactions, and make use of the First Reactions system to allow transitions from systemic behaviors to the combat activity.

AI-wise, the team began closing out character wildlines and improved seating poses in the mess hall to make it look like a real cafeteria. The male ‘hurt’ locomotion set was completed, with the team moving onto the female set. They’re currently editing juking assets for combat, assets for perception reactions from useables, and Vanduul combat locomotion.

A motion-capture (mo-cap) shoot was conducted to gather content needed for the work mentioned above. The team is currently working through the results before handing them to the animators. The Facial Team continued with the character improvements mentioned in previous reports.

Trejo’s outfit and helmet are in the final stages of modeling and will be ready for the tech artists to skin soon. Once complete, they’ll will focus on chapter 1, which includes major characters like Bishop, Wade, MacLaren, and Mason.

The interior of the Bengal is approaching completion. The team closed out several small iterations in support of the Cinematics and Gameplay Story team’s scene work and made the main Hangar feel more alive, lived in, and like there’s a process to launching ships.

Archon received further interior and exterior work, while chapters 15 and 19 made great progress.

Another major focus was on a cutaway that introduces players to a remote mining outpost. As art is still in progress, the team built a previs blockout to inform how the scene will play out and how it should look and feel. This encounter features the player and Old Man flying their Gladiuses towards an outpost located on a remote asteroid in the Odin system.

A lot of animation polish was also completed last month as scenes progressed from implementation to the production pass. One key scene received an arms, hands, and fingers contact pass to adds significant impact to the characters’ interaction.

All tiers of physics geometry instancing were completed. As a result, the cloning and sharing of brush physics was enabled, leading to physics now using only 50% of the memory it previously had on the client and server. This was made possible by sharing all common geometry-related data (such as geometry transforms, sub-mtls, and surface types) across all clones of the same static instance. For example, a set of static objects using the same geometry. With the pending release of Orison in the PU, the tracking of terrain is skipped for gas giants. AVX instructions are now utilized to block set entries in spatial grids and ray-box intersections in spatial grids have been optimized.

Networking-related data was moved between internal structures for more efficient access and synchronization, while the structure size of physical entities and alignment was optimized to ensure hot members are always on the same cache line. Page sizes for event factories were tuned, resulting in a net gain of 100 MB in system memory. Additionally, the physics queue for the biome builder was reduced, several areas of thread contention were reduced, and a race condition in the optimized priority queue was fixed. Lastly, the precision of quantized bounding volume hierarchy trees was improved.

For the renderer, the team continued working on the transition to Gen12. A Gen12-exclusive mode for forward-rendered deferred pipelines was added, numerous rendering issues were fixed, and editor support was improved. Support for instance constant buffers with reflection data was added and vertex input caching was extended. In terms of visual features, support for detail cavity and gloss blending was added too.

With regards to volumetric clouds, the rendering of secondary views (runtime cubemaps, RTTs, etc.) including clouds was addressed. For empty space skipping, which is still in the very early experimental stages, computation of the narrow band SDF for cloud coverage has been revised along with the generation of associated MIP maps in a signed format. An initial set of quality options was exposed to the game menu (combined as a single quality option). These quality settings will see further refinement and extensions as the system matures in releases post Alpha 3.14. A driver issue on the 10xx GTX line of video cards affecting the computation of scattering queries was investigated and a workaround implemented. The team are still in the process of clarifying whether this issue is a driver bug and, if that’s the case, hope that it can be fixed properly.

The Core Engine Team finalized the switch to Clang 11, which is used to compile the game server. Clang-related code vectorization and math optimizations were enabled and a code generation bug was identified, worked around, and reported. The memory tracker was improved to detect deallocation of memory that’s not allocated (double free, without the use of page heap). Also, it can now filter allocation stacks by specified engine modules and the engine’s memory statistics update has been optimized. Preliminary support for a new profiler frontend was added alongside various improvements and optimizations on relevant engine components to utilize the profiler to its full capabilities. The component update scheduler received support for multiple passes and event handlers were separated from component updates. Vis areas now use more fine-grained locking for updates to reduce contention and the queuing of animation vis area updates is now lockless, as is event queuing.

The team began designing a new system for development skip points, which allows a developer to start the game at any point through any mission. This will behave in a similar manner to the save game checkpoints, simplifying the whole setup and flow.

“This proved to be quite complicated but we were able to work with Design to break down what was required and deliver placeholder animations so they could set the scene up. We are now eagerly awaiting the delivery of some new mo-cap that will allow us to bring this scene up to a really high standard.” -The Gameplay Story Team

The team also tested and documented new tech that should get trams and elevators working correctly in-game, which will allow them to play chapter 5 from start to finish.

They also updated various scenes in the mess hall and supporting Design with their work on chapters 12, 13, and 14. Planning for Q3 began and a two-day mo-cap session was booked for the first week of July. This will allow the team to record everything they need for the additional chapter 1 scenes and to add additional lines to many of the random-to-NPC conversations mentioned in previous reports.

For Orison, improvements were made to the performance of real-time environment probes and bugs were squashed ahead of release. Improvements to the LOD Merger to support tint-palettes and wear were also completed to allow huge draw-call savings for distant renderings of the city.

The team also made improvements to the UI compositing and post-effect pipeline to achieve the specific look the team want, such as drop shadows, glow, brightness adaptation, and color correction while minimizing performance impact.

The VFX Programming Team added support for querying cloud density from planets and used this to trigger a variety of effects. Several particle-streaming issues were addressed and the final bugs with the new lighting system were resolved. The fire feature progressed well too.

Both the Graphics and VFX Programming teams also made great progress on the Gen12 renderer and Vulkan backends, with the vast majority of post effects now running Gen12 by default. This doesn’t result in major CPU performance savings as the post effects were already cheap on the CPU side, though major benefits will be seen in scene rendering.

The Level Design Team pushed hard to make the most of increased support from the various feature teams, making their first FPS space as polished as possible. There were a number of technical challenges to overcome and there’s still more to do this quarter.

As always, the Social Design Team implemented scenes for the various chapters for review and signoff, which now encompasses all FPS crossover scenes that could switch into combat at any time.

They also worked with Design and Gameplay Story to prepare for the upcoming mo-cap shoot in July, where they’ll capture some of the lines mentioned in last month’s report.

Narrative also supported a Production initiative to assess the descriptions in the Character Pipeline so that all teams and disciplines have the same expectations for delivery. For example, whether a character is expected to have a bespoke face or whether they can be modeled using the DNA system.

R&D into streamlining the ‘facial-scan’ and ‘scan-creation’ pipelines was completed, with the outcome saving the art teams significant man-hours over the coming years. This also formed the cornerstone in Tech Animation’s own facial rig building process and will ultimately expedite the entire facial pipeline.

One main aim of the quarter was to upgrade the head asset and facial animation system codebase, which is currently well underway. The team also managed to overhaul the weapons pipeline with a facelift and new toolsets to assist with technical elements.

Tech Animation were supported by Tech Art in upgrading their export processes. Once complete, they moved onto the skeletal optimization process that will improve character hitboxes when completed.

Work also continued on improving the underlying tech of the Starmap, and they began investigating how the final version of the mobiGlas UI will look and move.

The artists also continued adding screens to SQ42’s levels and began work on environmental branding to help build the backstory and ambiance for one of the locations.