Latest CI email is great:
Blonde hair making progress lol.
The Character Team continued to work on hair, with blonde hair making progress. They also revisited the ‘bun’ style, which appears a large number of female characters. The rest of the team’s SQ42 focus was on refining the Vanduul.
More like higher fidelity bugs.
“Our Vanduul base body needed to be tweaked and reskinned so that we could achieve higher fidelity animations. We’re wrapping the pass up this week and making an update pass on all Vanduul armors.” -The Character Team
Sure I believe all of this:
Last month, Engineering worked on the ISPC compiler for WAF:
“Think HLSL for CPUs to write CPU target agnostic vectorized SSE functions that can be invoked from C/C++. This allows us to have bespoke, run-time invoked code paths for different CPU architectures to get the best possible performance for computation of heavy code.” -The Engineering Team
They also began experimenting with a new code-build system to improve quality-of-life for developers. This will feature implemented Python script to fold similar threads when inspecting GDB crash dumps and add a VC 2019 compiler transition to QA test requests.
Optimizations were made to the physics grid, physics instances, and local OBB algorithms. For planet entities, work was done to prevent cell generation under terrain, while the generation of POD entities on terrain patches was improved by moving complex constructors out of tight loops. They removed various methods from the physical entity interface to avoid virtual-function overhead, made box-pruning optimizations, and promoted moment-related variables to double precision so that the solver is more numerically stable in terms of large masses.
Body-dragging was further polished and work continued on physical damage, this time focusing on deformations. Engineering continued tuning the integrity reduction formula based on the surface types of colliding parts, while ship-to-ship collision detection was tweaked to benefit stability and performance. Ragdoll experiments were also conducted and a quick prototype for cross-section data structure was completed.
Regarding the entity component update-scheduler, the Engineering Team worked on flattening or even removing recursive processing, made improvements to component processing inside an aggregate, and started implementing support for multiple component policies per-update-pass.
Numerous tasks were also completed for the Gen12 Renderer. For planetary atmospheres, they completed the guided filter to de-noise and up-sample lower resolution raymarching results for inscatter and transmittance. Work also began on re-projecting raymarching results to further reduce cost per-frame.
