Star Citizen Monthly Report – Pyro Planetary Progress
Star Citizen with a Monthly Report for Star Citizen’s Persistent Universe what’s was worked on during June, what’s being worked on now in July. This is a Summary of The STAR CITIZEN MONTHLY REPORT: JUNE 2020.
Environments have moved into full production of Pyro Three and Four now and we have seen work that they have been doing on Pyro 1 & 2 over the last few weeks as well. They’re currently producing the required assets, with a lot of new content reaching completion. They’re currently undertaking R&D on touch-bending for vegetation, which will ensure bushes and small vegetation are pushed away & bend more realistically when the player walks through them.
Work on Crusader & Orison continues too, with further development on shaders underway.
Level Design worked on some new, as-yet-unannounced content and fixed as many bugs as possible for Alpha 3.10. They also closed out tasks on key locations such as Levski and New Babbage and made further progress with Orison.
They finalized GRIMHEXs new utilitarian hangars along with polishing and optimizing the asteroid’s exterior. New Babbage’s Hi-Tech hangars also had their lighting pass completed.
Alongside these new locations, bugs were fixed in older locations (such as surface outposts) and the rework of Lorville’s day and night states was completed. Players will now experience a different mood at L19 when the sun goes down.
They continued to work on the Factory Line New Shop with it’s final lighting pass, it’s props and the Muse Simpod. The Props Team said:
“This turned into a longer-than-expected task. There’s a lot of crossover with Animation, so we’re building the asset with that in mind from the start.”
They have added new mobiGlas variants to in-game shops. Because the mobiGlas is one of the oldest game assets, it’s built on older tech. The Character Team said:
“Setup for this item is tricky and being able to swap out a mobiGlas without unequipping one permanently was a huge technical challenge that shops had to deal with, even as we started bringing new colors online. This is now in QA and so far, minus a few string bugs, appears promising.”
They have begun modeling work on the ‘Pyro Crab’ a terrifying Apex Predator that we may see on one of Pyro’s Planets in the future.
Narrative created documents outlining the general feel of some upcoming locations alongside potential flora, fauna, and NPCs.
VFX
VFX Work also continued on prototyping the fire propagation feature AND ongoing gas cloud work.
One of the VFX Team’s bigger tasks for Alpha 3.10 was the new signed-distance-field-driven atmospheric entry effects. To compensate for the fact that entry effects are physical-based and most ships never reach high enough speeds to generate them, they made slight changes to the code. The VFX Team said:
“This is progressing well and we are looking forward to seeing beauty shots and videos from the community as they fly towards planets and moons!”
Features (Vehicles)
There was a lot of work getting the new flight model and combat updates ready for 3.10. Further development of the flight model will continue as well.
The development of features coming further down the line continued, including docking and improvements to missiles.
They also squashed bugs with thruster balance and other aspects of IFCS.
Art (Ships)
Worked continues on the Crusader Hercules Starlifter with the Vehicle Team saying:
“One of the last areas to go in was the impressive front cargo door/ramp that gives it full roll-on, roll-off capability for your ground vehicles.”
Other areas completed are the rec room and kitchen/dining area. The exterior is in the final art phase and currently receiving a material pass and UV mapping.
The Star Runner is making good progress too with the turret seat, turret interior, rec room, scanning room, cockpit, foyer, and habs all seeing work. It’s now in the final art phase, with feedback being implemented to give it more of a ‘smuggler’s ship’ personality.
The Aopoa Khartu-al was also reviewed, which led to its weapons and shields being buffed. This update will be live in Alpha 3.10.
There are 2 Unannounced Ships and the Origin 100 series that have made great progress too.
Quick Spoiler 2 second leak – I suspect one of those is the RSI Odin Gunboat.
Features (Gameplay)
They have continued work on the player trading app, which is now in the art phase. The basic functionality should be in 3.10
They also put significant time into the upcoming Alpha 3.10 patch and the ability to purchase ship paint from in-game shops.
Art (Weapons)
The new Lightning Bolt Co. weapons (Pistol & Sniper Rifle) are completed.
Work continued on the Behring BR-2 Shotgun,
A new weapon entered development that the team is excited to unveil at the end of Q3.
There were some UI updates to weapons too.
Characters can be knockbacked, staggered, and there are hit reactions from grenades and other thrown objects.
User Interface (UI)
UI have been building out new vehicle targeting and turret improvements & new uis for various things throughout the game.
Work continued on a new mobiGlas app and the future of the Starmap and radar were iterated on. Screens were also created for the Factory Line store and concept art was created for new versions of scanning and vehicle UI.
They worked on making UIs more visible on contrasted backgrounds.
AI (Social)
There was a focus on improvements to various systems connected with AI getting everything more refined and robust. Pathing and movement of AI saw improvements. They have begun overhauling the existing mission giver experience.
The first iteration of the shop vendor behavior is also nearing completion. They also now have the addition of patrons that can order a drink, bring it to a table, and then return it to the counter.
Social AI has focused on the first pass of two new scenarios: bridge crew behaviors and capital ship hangar crews.
The bridge crew behavior allows NPCs# to handle the required work of a capital ship. Designers can specify in the NPC schedules which type of role they have (similar to how a player will assign a hired NPC), which will help the ‘generic’ behavior select the right seats and routines they have to perform. The captain will also roam the bridge and supervise other members of the crew.
The hangar crew behavior represents a set of behaviors for all NPCs that work in a hangar, including overseer, fueler, ordnance, mechanic, grunt, and air-traffic controller. In this instance, the ship is an example of a compound usable – a usable that can contain the functionality of other single usables.
AI (Combat)
Character Combat worked on realistic firing, including improving triggering and reloading. They made all requests event-based with outcomes recorded. This gives the AI consistent knowledge of the results of requested actions, allowing them to create behaviors that can handle different scenarios correctly. If an NPC is pushing towards an enemy, they may want them to automatically reload their weapon. However, if no ammunition is available, the behavior will be notified and a new reaction activated. This can happen to NPCs less skilled in evaluating their ability to manage ammunition, while those better skilled can choose not to use that tactic unless enough ammunition is available.
They also began leveraging the usable system functionalities of the bartender in combat scenarios. In the social environment, they created the concept of usables that can produce and accept items – Character Combat Team Said:
“An ammo box is nothing else than an item provider. The item itself could produce magazines or it might have magazines attached, similar to how a beer fridge can contain beer bottles, but a mixing station can create the drinks from specific source items. This allows NPCs to search for places in the world that can provide them with magazines of a specific type, relocate to those objects, and refill their loadout. This gives opportunity for the player and forces NPCs to evaluate the environment to decide if and when it’s appropriate to use those refill spots.”
AI (Ships)
Ship AI created a single-player version of the Player Group Manager, used to manage player parties and group quantum travel. The system relies on a backend service that only exists in a multiplayer context, so to support quantum-travel-linking in SQ42 between the player and NPC characters, a standalone version was created.
When complete, players in the PU will be able to use quantum-travel-linking within a group containing both real players and NPCs.
This also has the functionality to support future missions.
They have improved AI target selection for ‘pilot combat’. They also iterated on the sphere strafe movement block by adding speed controls and the ability to lock orbiting ships to a single axis within an acceptable range.
Engineering & Renderer
Numerous tasks were completed for the Gen12 Renderer & Vulkan Integration
They have improved CPU efficiency & Performance, reducing function calls to DirectX by over 30%. They also began experimenting with a new code-build system to improve quality-of-life for developers.
Optimizations were made to the physics grid, physics instances & planet entities.
Body-dragging was further polished, and work continued on physical damage, focusing on deformations.
Ship-to-ship collision detection was tweaked to benefit stability and performance.
They changed how the culling system works for ships to allow them to be visible from much greater distances to aid gameplay. To help mitigate performance impact from the increased viewing distance.
The Graphics Team Said – “With some of the fundamentals now falling into place, we hope to ramp up the efforts to convert existing features over to the Gen12 renderer with an aim to enable an early version in the next few months.”
Backend Services have worked on better health monitoring of all services.
Some low-level networking code was updated, fixing a few potential connection issues.
Work was completed on high-performance dedicated pathways for some of the services to greatly improve network performance and login accessibility. The loadout and persistent variable services were also updated to support a distributed model for better performance and increased up-time reliability.
Time was also spent completing tasks for server mesh implementation.
And that’s it for this month, we will check out the Squadron 42 update real soon tho.