April saw Star Citizen teams from around the world finishing off their tasks for Alpha 3.5 and moving in earnest to the next patch coming in a few months’ time. Several teams have even started looking further into the future, making progress on the locations, ships, and characters for Alpha 3.7 and beyond.
AI Throughout April, the AI Team made a ton of improvements for the release of Alpha 3.5. This included optimizing the AI EventDispatcher to register entities to specific events, which brought down CPU usage from around 12 milliseconds to 600 microseconds. They also optimized the navigation mesh loading time during server-level initialization and deferred behavior-specific queries to the zone system to take advantage of multi-threading and use less CPU time during subsumption updates. A project to optimize usables began that will eventually allow the team to cache animation and navigation data for interactive objects and improve runtime usage. This will be most useful in densely-populated areas like landing zones and space stations. The team are also looking to improve the compilation times for subsumption task nodes and extend the Tactical Point System (TPS) to allow the time-sliced evaluation of game-code-defined functionalities. Away from optimization, human combat AI was refactored to allow a more modular approach to the definition of tactics and behavior. The aim of this is to give the designers an efficient template that they can expand on and customize as they like.
Animation Animation is working on a new mission giver, Eddie Parr, a bartender who gives out missions. So, to match the gold standard of our mission givers, we are adjusting the bartender experience to make the experience as engaging and realistic as possible. They’re also refining NPC bar patron animations to help populate the locations that Eddie will be bartending. Part of this work moves the team forward on their ‘recycled body animation tech’ (RBT), which will help them expand the ever-growing universe while keeping the animation footprint down without sacrificing quality.
Art (Environment) The Landing Zone Team began early whitebox exploration of Crusader’s landing zone, Orison. Basic architectural forms and structures are being developed and even at this early stage, the mood and atmosphere is unique and interesting. The team are also working alongside Level Design to find the right balance between expansive on-foot areas and keeping essential points of interest within sensible traversal times of each other. The Modular Team finished whiteboxing new sets of assets for more diverse space station exterior shapes. Prefabs, rules, and filters that enable the procedural tool to do its thing are being established too, with promising early results. All of this will lead to a much more interesting and diverse set of station exteriors to fly around and land at very soon. The Environment Team also focused on the ‘hi-tech’ common elements found throughout New Babbage. The new hangar, hab, transit, garage, and security elements are currently being finished up and readied for their debut in Alpha 3.8. On the organics side, they completed another push on procedural caves and continued to update the PU’s existing planets, including investigating canyons (the first results of which are looking very promising). WE’LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH…