1 month ago [2022-06-02 01:16:05]
**Star Citizen Monthly Report - May 2022**
**AI (Content)**
- Focused on improving the visuals of general AI locomotion.
- Began using dynamic conversations tech recently delivered by AI Tech, allowing spontaneous AI conversations.
**AI (Tech/Vehicle Features)**
- Several improvements to quantum travel and quantum boost, ships can accelerate while spooling before the actual jump.
- Occlusion calculation was restored to stop NPCs from ignoring hidden enemies while shooting.
- Improved the friendly-fire validation and can now assign different factions different behaviors.
- Developers can now control and set up specific AI scenarios across various ships. Maneuvers are currently being ported to this tech.
**Art (Ships)**
- Improved the damage maps on all ships in preparation for the salvage mechanic.
- An *unannounced* ground vehicle progressed into final art and design. (Not MULE)
- A *new ship* entered the early greybox stage.
- *Banu Merchantman* continued to move through greybox.
- *Argo SRV* began production and is nearing whitebox-complete.
- *Drake Corsair* exterior is in greybox.
**Engine**
- Worked on additional rope simulations to interact with pulleys
- Fog volumes, environmental texture rendering, and reflection optimizations were ported Gen12
- Cloud rendering porting has begun
- Planetary terrain and shadow rendering were improved
- Various improvements were made to the performance profiling system, including CPU spike tracking.
- CPU performance scaling was disabled on high priority threads, to improve speed
- The background job manager is now fully asynchronous
- SOCS improvements were made
**Features (Characters & Weapons) **
- Improved visual effects using scanning pings on foot and how it highlights contacts, interactables and POI.
- Increased information gathered from objects, displaying object states, player/npc inventory contents, causes of death, etc.
- For salvaging, created a model for serializing damage maps.
**Features (Vehicles)**
- Progress made on QT boost, supporting POI and allowing pilots to fly towards highlighted destinations.
- Setup and balance of the new ground-vehicle physics is progressing well. Baseline handling is now complete.
**Graphics & VFX Programming**
- Work on damage maps continued last month, with the team focusing on debris.
- Further Gen12 / Vulkan improvements have been made.
- Number of bugs were fixed in the RTT system.
**Lighting **
- Continuing to support the Siege of Orison mission.
- Provide an interesting and unique atmosphere at night and day while also ensuring good player visibility.
- The space being a fully man-made exterior location means a lot of light entities and shadows must be rendered.
**Locations (Montreal)**
- Spent the month working on the Reclaimer space missions and derelict Reclaimer settlement.
- Next stage is to take the proof of concept and see how much more depth can be added.
- 600i and Mercury derelict settlements progressing on Daymar.
- Rework of Lorville's cityscape is ongoing.
- Landing zone building interiors has entered the concept phase.
**Tools (Montreal)**
- Integration of the Mighty Bridge into the editor was completed.
- Vegetation Scattering v1 also completed, allows teams to deploy vegetation without collisions, brushes, and entities on planetary surfaces and objects.
- Procedural location creation tool is also progressing well.
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