Travis Day, Dogfight Producer

Greetings Citizens!

Ah what a week it has been! This is one of my favorite points in any project as you approach a release and start to see all the pieces coming together and aligning to the cohesive vision. Our team here in Santa Monica has been diligently pushing through all of their tasks to meet our lofty goals for the release of DFM.

We’ve seen a great deal of forward progress this week and below are some of the specifics of what various groups have been up to within our studio. There is a lot that goes on each week so apologies for not capturing every detail but here is a good high level overview of the new features.

Design

The design group has been hard at work this week making sure that all our ships are dogfighting ready. This includes analyzing/balancing the mass of ships and their parts, thruster distribution and output, and their responsiveness to player input. We are approaching have the ships flying the way we want them to (pending further testing and feedback ) and behaving in the way you would expect them to given their physical attributes.

With the work that engineering has put into the signature and missile system, Design has been balancing the cross sections, heat output, and EM emissions of each ship, item, and part. This has led to some great moments in the play tests where you receive and incoming missile alert and rather than dropping chaff/flares (depending on the missile type) you can instead – with a heaping dose of skill and luck – duck into a crater on an asteroid and see the missile fly by above you having lost its firm lock.

Design is also constantly adjusting and adding inputs for the various control methods based on the feedback gathered during internal playtests and as new features come online.

Engineering

Missile fixes galore! The signature system for detecting enemy ships based on their heat, radar cross-section, and electromagnetic emissions has been overhauled to be more flexible and dynamic. This in turn has allowed us to update the behavior of both the player radar (underway in the UK) and update the way missiles behave based off which type of signature they are able to target.

The engineers have also implemented and tuned a hit impulse system so that incoming fire from enemy ships will now cause both linear momentum and angular momentum to your own ship. This is based on the kinetic energy and the effect varies based on where it actually hits on the ship relative to the center of mass for your ship.

Our chat system is also underway! One of the things that became rapidly apparent during our cross-studio playtesting was that we needed the ability to taunt one another if we weren’t in the same room. Luckily we’re close to having a functioning chat system as we close out this week so we won’t have this problem much longer!

Meanwhile our Graphics Engineer has been updating many of the post-processing and shader effects being used in the game. The holorenderer shader used on the 3D objects in the HUD has been refactored and upgraded to allow better artist control and add some additional effects to sell the holographic/projected nature of these objects. He’s also implemented an effect for g-force induced red out to rival his awesome black out effect.

Art

The Aurora and 300i have been fully updated to properly take advantage of PBR, blow apart beautifully, and LOD out in way that maximizes performance while minimizing the visual impact. Of course our Lead Vehicle Modeler, Chris Smith, with his undying sense of perfectionism couldn’t let the 300i pass without uprezzing and slightly remodeling the interior. He’s just finished up this work and all I can say is that if you thought the 300i looked amazing in the commercial just wait until you see it in the DFM.

The latest pass of visual effects for the Hornet have been integrated into the game and hooked up (remember those huge XML’s Forrest showed off?) to all the parts, items, impacts, weapons fire, ammo types, and each of their various damage states. This pass has really improved the feel and visual feedback as to what is going happening in and on your ship. During the PAX East demo we were in the process of refactoring the hierarchy of the ship models so we didn’t get to show off as much of this as we wanted to. The 300i and the Aurora are now getting the same treatment as I write this and we should have an update on those next week!

Last but not least is the ongoing work on the HUD. Many new items have been added to the HUD warning system to bring different important events like missile locks, collision warnings, and other status messages to the player’s attention. We’ve been adjusting some of the HUD elements for better readability, adding elements that need to be better visually communicated, and generally improving upon the visual language being established as we go. Some of these things include adjusting the reticles to better communicate the status of your interaction with the target object/ship. We’ve been adjusting some of the 3D objects for the radar and the HUD to improve their look and readability to the player. Our master HUD artist, Zane, has also concepted out some ideas for the HUD of the Freelancer and Avenger for folks to review.

Conclusion

Well that about wraps it up for this past week of development here in Santa Monica. Again, this isn’t every task that was completed but rather a high level look at some of the more interesting new features and updates to existing features. There was one last discovery made this week worth mentioning however… We’ve noticed from our cross-studio playtesting on the backend that Santa Monica has, without question, the best dogfighters in the company.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us on our ‘Ask a Developer’ threads!

Cheers,

CIG Santa Monica