This a a highlight of the Monthly Report.
If you don't wish to read the entire thing, I have made it easy for you to find the section(s) that are of interest to you.
I hope that this info helps you to understand what has been done and what is coming.
Cheers.
Monthly Report June 2017
IFCS ---
The update process of the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS) for our ships has now been converted to a batch update. Because IFCS is very isolated from the physics engine, taking in values like velocity, mass, center-of-mass, etc., and outputting one linear and one angular impulse, there’s no reason IFCS needs to be updated in lockstep with the physics thread. This change will be more efficient, but also hopefully allow a larger number of players on the servers.
Quantum Drive 2.0 --
The team has now completed the new quantum drive 2.0. We’ve removed the old code that controlled things like VFX and sound FX playback, as well as obstruction detection and alignment code, and moved the targeting of a QT point to the Target Selector on the ship, so the drive only cares about the travel point itself. This made the drive code much simpler and should make it run smoother. Aside from bugfixing, the team also added some features that attach to the quantum drive, such as automatically closing all external doors when doing a jump to prevent accidents by jumping out of a ship traveling at high fractions of the speed of light.
This updated quantum drive is now ready for design and art to start tweaking and implementing on all the ships, as well as for UI to start creating a more realistic feel for how such an event should be handled in-game and incorporate other features like the star map.
RSI Aurora --
The team also created fourteen different skins for designers to utilize as well.
Ship Stats -
Now that the ships are being converted to Item 2.0, the team has also completely reworked the ship stats page on the website to allow for up-to-the-minute stats. The design has now been finalized, the icons finished with refined meaning and everything is currently being updated on the web.
Narrative -
The team wrote approximately 2800 lines worth of generic NPCs to liven up the universe then recorded them in a VO booth down in London.
Patching -
The brand-new patching system has been incorporated into the internal CopyBuild 3 tool that was developed in Frankfurt and Austin. Now that it’s passed QA’s approval, there has been a limited rollout to the dev team to carry on flushing out any issues with it. So far, it’s looking pretty good, and the people using it are really appreciating the reduced time it now takes to grab the latest build.
MFDs -
Along with the work on the item 2.0 ship conversion, they started implementing the new pilot multi-function displays (MFD) which refines the previous UI setup and adds new information and functionality like managing your ship’s systems.
Engine Team -
They implemented an improved compression algorithm for the new pak file system to allow for more efficient data streaming due to reduced CPU overhead during decompression. This will be part of the new incremental patcher, which is designed to make patches and updates much more efficient.
Environmental Art -
The area surrounding Levski will also have more areas of interest for players to explore.
Cinematics -
Cinematics worked with UK graphics engineering to test out a working version of our brand new “Holographic projection volume entity tech.” This essentially provides a target holographic volume with content, fed from a source scene, that gets rendered into the volume and will allow us to have characters communicating via hologram to characters in a scene or have the hologlobes switch to a scripted mode and show mission briefings, all in real-time without resorting to things like pre-rendered motion graphics. This tech, minus the holographic component, will also be used to stream comms from other ships (cockpits) onto cockpit MFDs or other displays, all in real-time.
If you don't wish to read the entire thing, I have made it easy for you to find the section(s) that are of interest to you.
I hope that this info helps you to understand what has been done and what is coming.
Cheers.
Monthly Report June 2017
IFCS ---
The update process of the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS) for our ships has now been converted to a batch update. Because IFCS is very isolated from the physics engine, taking in values like velocity, mass, center-of-mass, etc., and outputting one linear and one angular impulse, there’s no reason IFCS needs to be updated in lockstep with the physics thread. This change will be more efficient, but also hopefully allow a larger number of players on the servers.
Quantum Drive 2.0 --
The team has now completed the new quantum drive 2.0. We’ve removed the old code that controlled things like VFX and sound FX playback, as well as obstruction detection and alignment code, and moved the targeting of a QT point to the Target Selector on the ship, so the drive only cares about the travel point itself. This made the drive code much simpler and should make it run smoother. Aside from bugfixing, the team also added some features that attach to the quantum drive, such as automatically closing all external doors when doing a jump to prevent accidents by jumping out of a ship traveling at high fractions of the speed of light.
This updated quantum drive is now ready for design and art to start tweaking and implementing on all the ships, as well as for UI to start creating a more realistic feel for how such an event should be handled in-game and incorporate other features like the star map.
RSI Aurora --
The team also created fourteen different skins for designers to utilize as well.
Ship Stats -
Now that the ships are being converted to Item 2.0, the team has also completely reworked the ship stats page on the website to allow for up-to-the-minute stats. The design has now been finalized, the icons finished with refined meaning and everything is currently being updated on the web.
Narrative -
The team wrote approximately 2800 lines worth of generic NPCs to liven up the universe then recorded them in a VO booth down in London.
Patching -
The brand-new patching system has been incorporated into the internal CopyBuild 3 tool that was developed in Frankfurt and Austin. Now that it’s passed QA’s approval, there has been a limited rollout to the dev team to carry on flushing out any issues with it. So far, it’s looking pretty good, and the people using it are really appreciating the reduced time it now takes to grab the latest build.
MFDs -
Along with the work on the item 2.0 ship conversion, they started implementing the new pilot multi-function displays (MFD) which refines the previous UI setup and adds new information and functionality like managing your ship’s systems.
Engine Team -
They implemented an improved compression algorithm for the new pak file system to allow for more efficient data streaming due to reduced CPU overhead during decompression. This will be part of the new incremental patcher, which is designed to make patches and updates much more efficient.
Environmental Art -
The area surrounding Levski will also have more areas of interest for players to explore.
Cinematics -
Cinematics worked with UK graphics engineering to test out a working version of our brand new “Holographic projection volume entity tech.” This essentially provides a target holographic volume with content, fed from a source scene, that gets rendered into the volume and will allow us to have characters communicating via hologram to characters in a scene or have the hologlobes switch to a scripted mode and show mission briefings, all in real-time without resorting to things like pre-rendered motion graphics. This tech, minus the holographic component, will also be used to stream comms from other ships (cockpits) onto cockpit MFDs or other displays, all in real-time.
