Purge all records after reading. - ie forget we said this and dont hold us to it later one and forget we said it was triple A game ready for release 6 years ago in 2015
Last month, the Audio Team continued to support work on chapter 4a - Theres 4 Chapters now? Before Chapter 1 is released? Better get that QA tester back to play all the missions through coz now they just making him look like a bare faced liar in public, not good.
“For the longest time, the captain of said Xian vessel was realized as a crude stand-in blockout. We had put a Halloween-mask-style sculpt export of a Xian on top of a human body for our cutaway scene, so seeing this guy finally appear in our scene as a realized, almost-final creature was a refreshing sight for the eyes!”
They found some bottlenecks in a couple of the systems which, when optimized, will have a significant benefit and could help performance in general./
Work also began on formation flying, which features an indicator highlighting where the player should go and gives the option to continue flying manually or automatically stay in formation.
A bug affecting wrist wobble that plagued the team for years was fixed - strange they never mentioned it in those years?,
Particle lighting is a new model
In several instances, the Narrative Team began working with Audio and Design to record and implement placeholder versions of this dialogue with various team members serving as temporary voice actors.
- But it was an AAA game already in 2014 ready for release 2015?
Extra lockers were added to the main bathroom in the Idris, so several scenes were updated to match the new layout - featurecreep
Additional “wait function” animations for different characters were created too - featurecreep
and a complicated scene that uses a flexible cable was also updated.- Joy to the world this sounds awesome, a cinematic involving a cable
On the plus side they are finally learning to prioritise and that performance and gameplay comes first and fidelity and Mo-Cap etc comes second or last of all based on what you can actually do and what memory or bandwidth is left:
the NavigationLink component was simplified
In March, Engineering added physics support for multiple solar systems
To ease debugging (which can be difficult without a visual representation of what’s going on in the physical world), a simple debug raytracing framework was added...This has been hugely useful already and allowed the team to fix various bugs quickly.
Python scripts were written to run performance tests and write corresponding reports
threading logic was refactored to further improve performance and the job system now utilizes specific APIs introduced with Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 (Windows 7 still works but won’t benefit)
Now, the memory reserve for RTT is linked to screen resolution, because higher-resolution outputs require higher-resolution intermediate textures. If the fixed budget is exceeded, they now dynamically down-res the RTTs until they fit, which ensures stability in extreme scenarios.
The team can also make additional revisions much faster with the placeholder assets than if they had been recorded with actual voiceover talent.
So progress in some regards...until it gets 'unapproved' or 'refactored' anyway. But if they carry on like this with actual debugging and decreasing visuals depending on performance....then a Triple A game is just a decade way surely?
