"Whilst Production, Operations, and Network Engineering have been planning and executing the above strategy, our visual effects team has been finishing its final passes on effects and hooking them up to all the parts and states of the Aurora, 300i, Scythe, and Hornet and all of their possible item combinations. Our planning on this from Forrest and Casey has panned out quite well. In creating the effects for the Hornet and the Scythe along with all their weapons and items we’ve established a good starting point for an effects library for both UEE and Vanduul craft. Obviously these libraries will grow and change over time but it has us well positioned to rapidly iterate and hook up new ships and items in the future.
Speaking of ships breaking apart… This month has seen the completion of hooking up all of the damage pieces, LODs, particle effect nodes, etc. for the Scythe, 300i, Aurora, and Hornet. Not only do they all now explode, break, and LOD properly but we’ve also got them all flying properly this month. They’ve all been converted to PBR and as mentioned in a previous post the 300i has also undergone a major uprez and detail pass as it was being converted to PBR. All of the ships (which already looked great) are now looking absolutely fantastic. This is another case where our early work both in the way we approached it and focusing on the Hornet first has paid of dividends. By spending the time to R&D ship mechanics with the Hornet and locking down the process and documentation it has allowed us to blaze through the Scythe, Aurora, and 300i much more quickly and each ship has progressed more quickly than the last as we improve our technique, which is great to see.
On the engineering front the team has been focusing on finishing off some changes to the pipe system (framework which manages per ship and per part CPU, power, cooling, and fuel) to allow players to manipulate settings dynamically on a per item basis or on a global level for the ship which will affect all attached parts. This was a stretch goal for us going into the first release so we’re pleased that we’ve been able to fit this in as it will improve the dynamism of ships greatly and we think player’s will really enjoy it.
The pipe system wasn’t the only one to get a bit of an upgrade. Radar/detection system too has undergone an overhaul to expand its functionality both to improve its current features and to create the foundation for future features that designers can play with. It has also undergone an optimization both in parallel to this which has greatly increased its performance per frame. To expand upon the improvements to the radar system, it has been moved into a centralized system hosted by the vehicle that can be shared by multiple items and only get called once. That doesn’t sound very sexy but what it allows is for much more realistic simulation of missiles for example. Where you can feed your ships primary radar data to the missile for acquiring lock and then later switch to the missiles radar only once it has left the ship. It also paves the way for slaving radar from one ship to another or things like centralized command and control which is a feature we know a lot of our community is looking forward to. Lastly, we’ve adjusted the way the signal to noise ratio system works and expanded its functionality quite a bit to allow designers to play with different types of chaff, armor, nebulas, flares, etc. and have them impact the radar/detection system in entirely new ways."
