PU Monthly Report November-December 2024
AI (Tech):
- AI Tech spent the last two months making performance improvements to AI systems and progressing with new features.
- The StarScript design tool received numerous updates, it also has a modern UI and better functionality for debugging behaviors.
- Multiple improvements were made to the ‘tactical point system’ to provide faster results when searching for usables, cover, or points on the navigation mesh with less impact on the frame-time budget.
Animation:
- The Animation team create player-interaction animations for hacking and door panels.
- They also worked on various creature animations for the kopion, Quasi grazer, and Valakaar, and prepped for upcoming creatures.
Art (Characters):
- The Character Art team supported StarWear art debt and fixed bugs for the live releases.
- Currently working on two new armors alongside upcoming armor variants.
Art (Ships):
- The Ship Art team spent the end of 2024 putting the finishing touches on upcoming vehicles that will be revealed or released this year.
- Alongside unannounced vehicles, several upcoming vehicles progressed through the white and greybox stages, including the Consolidated Outland Pioneer, Drake Ironclad, Anvil Paladin, MISC Starlancer TAC, Argo CSV-FM, and RSI Apollo and Perseus.
Core Gameplay:
- Work was done in support of an upcoming ship, fixing quality-of life issues with personal hangar and freight elevators, and a lot of bug fixing.
Economy:
- Vehicle repair costs were rebalanced taking into account the new prices for components and commodities. For example, repairing a ship’s hull should now be a lot cheaper than replacing missing components.
Graphics, VFX Programming & Planet Tech:
- The team finalized internal support for Vulkan and rolled it out as the default renderer for developers. This includes many stability improvements alongside multi-threading improvements to increase CPU performance on multi-core machines. These improvements are in the main branch, so they will reach the PU when the next major pull of the main code branch takes place.
- R&D for global illumination, reflections, and Planet Tech v5 all progressed and will continue at full pace now that the team’s work on Alpha 4.0 is complete.
Mission Design:
- Mission Design kicked off new content planned for 2025, more of which will be shared in the coming months.
R&D:
- The R&D team continued to finalize the core system components for the first version of dynamic weather.
- Similar controls were added for lightning and the quality of lightning event locations extracted from the weather map was improved.
- Volumetric cloud shadow rendering was stabilized to further improve occasional stepping artifacts when the camera moved, especially with the sun at low angles above the horizon.
@GeneralNews
