Travis Day, Dogfight Producer

As April comes to a close it is time again for us to reflect upon, and share, the major developments of the month! There is much to discuss so let’s get straight to it!

At the beginning of this month we revealed Arena Commander (AKA – DFM) to all the backers who were able to attend our pre-PAX East event in Boston and to the world via livestream. We also had the privilege of having Arena Commander playable on the show floor of PAX East for citizens and interested passerby alike in the Logitech booth. Of course we weren’t able to show everything we wanted to that night in Boston so we put together a video showing off some of the additional features we’ve been working on that didn’t make the demo level which you can see below if you missed it.

While showing off all our team’s hard work is very gratifying, the real treat is being able to interact with everyone in the community in person. Words cannot express how humbling and inspiring it is to be able to meet with so many people who are so passionate about the universe we are creating. It is incredibly motivating for all of us who were in attendance and while it isn’t truly possible to capture those indelible feelings we were able to share at least some of that with the team upon our return.

Speaking of the team, let’s move on to what they’ve been up to! Similar to many of the other studios, we here in Santa Monica are finishing up new feature implementation as we approach our branch date and code lock and move into final polish, tweaking, and bug fixing. To this end there has been a lot of planning and communication going on amongst all the studios to synchronize our finishing of feature development and finalizing our polish and rollout strategy. This will allow us to focus on finishing and stabilizing the planned features we’ve implemented and lower the risk of introducing new issues as we prepare for the launch of Arena Commander.

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.

On the graphics engineering side Okka Kyaw has been very busy working on many improvements to the HUD’s look and feel to make sure that the curvature shader works perfectly in a multitude of resolutions and has a projected holographic feel. He’s also created the redout effect to match his stellar g-force induced blackout effect and is now working on the interstitial effects such as blackout recovery to provide a more realistic and filmic return to consciousness. Overall we believe that folks will be really happy with the graphics effects and immersive feel that his work accomplishes.

Our headcount has increased by 1, with the addition of our new Human Resources specialist. We do have some exciting new hires coming up and we look forward to updating you about them next month!

We would like to close this month by taking a moment to thank you, each and every backer, for all of their support on this project. From backing the game, to fan fiction, to late night chatroll, ‘Ask a Dev’ threads, to fan gifts, to meeting everyone at events like the Arena Commander reveal. We are all truly humbled by all that you do for us and genuinely appreciate you making it possible for us to create this universe for us to share in together.

As always, feel free to post any comments or questions in our “Ask a Dev” threads and until next time… See you in the ‘verse!