AI in a complete muddle as always 
“One particular bug threatened to become our new ‘standing on chairs’ issue (a bug that has a lot of individual causes so can keep cropping up in different situations). So, like with that issue, we adopted a belt-and-braces approach that should eliminate it, even if new causes crop up in the future.” AI Features
For example, work on planetary navigation was completed, with the team now able to generate navigation mesh over entire planets. To achieve this, the devs used the same concepts the Physics and Planetary Tech teams used for representing planet terrain patches. Compared to the previous implementation, where planet navigation tiles were represented as a cube/parallelepiped (as used in traditional navigation volumes),
the new method uses a volume with a skewed square/rhombus base. While this brings new challenges, such as how two neighboring triangular navigation tiles will connect, it allows navigation mesh to be generated everywhere and on all types of planets and moons.
For boids, the team continued to implement new rules and
finalized synchronization between the server and clients. They also worked on additional iterations with Design and polished the feature for release.
Elsewhere, improvements were made to the
navigation-links system to reduce the computation cost over a frame by better utilizing the new Navigation Anchors concept. Subsumption loading logic improvements were also submitted that will more clearly show possible problems with the data so the designers can fix them sooner.
[plus more tool improvement attempts...]
Core Gameplay various:
the Gameplay Features team successfully passed the go/no-go gates for procedural recoil, new scopes, dynamic crosshairs, and reload improvements.[But the other 3.23 gameplay didn't presumably]
Progress was also made on ammo repooling, including network optimization and bug fixing.
Work continued on
preproduction for base building, with Gameplay Features working closely with Art and Design to refine requirements and define metrics.
A temporary solution for ship-hull penetration was added until Maelstrom is ready to support physical ship armor. [yay tech debt
]
“The system is subject to change as development and testing progresses, but currently all projectiles can deplete armor health. However, only ballistic weapons can penetrate the hull and damage internal components.” Gameplay Features
For life support, the team optimized
the dynamic room atmosphere system and made it network compatible. Various improvements and refactors were also made to the room system, and various debug tools were greatly improved to allow the team to test the system before the player-facing UI is complete.
For radar and scanning, the team updated radar zone queries to use new zone query
time splice tech to improve performance.
Support was also provided for the item-port editor tool with a
refactor of default item loadouts, including defining them directly in the item-port parameters within the item-port container in DataCore.
The instanced hangars / cargo elevators are very WIP, and built on the transit tech. Which needs a refactor :
For transit, the team’s primary focus in March was supporting cargo elevators and instanced hangars. Alongside general refactoring, this required adding hangar destination exporting,
communication between the transit and instance managers for available hangars, the ability to dynamically add destinations to transit carriages, requests for the creation of hangars, and support for capturing peripherals in dynamically added hangars.
Once complete, the team moved on to planning and architecting a refactor of the whole transit system to prepare it for the future.
Vulkan is beta. Most developed thing in the game
The Vulkan team worked through several performance issues as they moved closer to matching D3D performance.
“This precedes the enabling of multi-threading for the next release to hopefully smash D3D performance levels on the CPU (GPU performance should remain similar). However, some performance issues currently remain. So, depending on the location/context, players may see worse performance, hence the BETA label on Vulkan. But the aim is for us to get widespread testing in Alpha 3.23 so that we can enable Vulkan by default in the following release.” Graphics, VFX & Programming Team
Planet Tech V5 is... pre-pre-alpha...
The Planet Tech team
started work on Planet Tech v5, with initial focus on the groundwork required to set up spatial partitioning [is this to replace current tiling?].
They’re currently deciding how this will work with Server Meshing and server-crash recovery. The devs also introduced the concept of ‘default planets’ for the internal editor so that it’s trivial for anyone to create and use a planet for testing.
Missions: Don't worry, an intern will fix them later:
Following a recent hire, some older mission modules were refactored. As such, the Destroy Illegal Satellites mission received a small facelift.
Let's end on a bet...
They also closed out the upcoming distribution centers,
adding content and quality to give players the best possible experience on launch.
