Foundry 42 UK



Engineering

One of the main tasks of the company has been Subsumption and all of the systems which are tied into it, as it’s a core aspect of how we will create content and game play, specifically missions. This new mission system is designed to do away with the heavily-scripted Flow Graph and make it much more straightforward to implement the game play. For example, you can say that a particular area is going to be patrolled by a given group of ships and pilots and the Subsumption will do the rest: spawning them in when players arrive in the area and despawning them once everybody has left. Ultimately it will also allow the dynamic creation of missions in the PU, something we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. This mission system is something that sits very closely to Subsumption and they both work very closely with each other.

Another area Subsumption will be driving is the AI and we’re helping move all the old behavior tree code over to use it. It’s never easy moving a system over and it does tend to mean you take a step backwards in functionality before you can start to move forwards but we’re now starting to get back to the position where we were and we can really see the progress it’s making.

Art

Lots of things to report, but you guys know that already. The biggest thing for me, even though it is starting off small, is that we are re-evaluating how we go about imagining the ship weapons. Historically we have been reactive in creating weapons (responding to requests from Design), so I’ve put a small hold on production until we, the concept team, can devise a more modular formulaic route so that we can quickly and easily create families of weapons. It’s basic stuff really, but you need time and headspace to be able to think things through for a longer term vision and we are now at that point thankfully. We wanted to put a system in place so the ship weapon artists can improve production and get more weapons out to the fans.

What else? Klaus and Werner ATT4 and Sniper are being given some extra love, working up the family and making them consistent and usable for Squadron 42, early work has taken place on Kastak Arms on the shotgun and again laying the groundwork for consistent styling.

Ships, well I’ve been working with Justin and we’ve taken care of some Caterpillar things, like color schemes and branding, also updating the F8 concept (it’s been 2 years since the first iteration) and managed to get a magazine cover knocked out too.

VFX

This month the VFX team have done a flight-ready VFX pass on the ARGO – thrusters, damage etc. Work also continued on the Grim HEX environment effects, taking full advantage of the new tiled lighting model. Work also continued on weapon impact effects improvements.

Aside from this, Mike visited Caleb in sunny Frankfurt – along with some of the UK environment and props team, to discuss VFX support for procedural planets. As you can imagine, there was LOTS to talk about – clouds, weather, water, atmospheric entry/exit to name but a few things we will need to support. Working out a long term plan for something as complex as a procedural planet is crucial; there is no sense in just throwing a load of effects in before we have worked out the systems with which to generate them.

Finally, our new VFX artist Michal jumped straight into ship effects, tidying up some of the existing thrusters (necessary with the move to optics flares and bloom in 2.5.0) and created some lovely new boost effects.

Environment Art

As ever, the team is focused on taking sections of their Squadron 42 levels and using them as visual targets for modelling, shading, lighting, dressing etc. We are also polishing what we are going to be showing at Gamescom this year, we’re excited for everyone to see what we’ve been working on. A small hit team of artists have just returned from spending two weeks in the Frankfurt studio where they focused on using the procedural tech and working with the engineers to push the feature along. Internally we’re all super excited for this, and it’s going to be big for creating environments for SC.

Animation

The animation team has been hard at work tackling a variety of issues, ranging from weapon reloading animations for all positions, fixing broken animations caused in the batch process, and iterating on the new character skinning and base pose. All their hard work has created a 1:1 match between Maya and the Engine.

Vehicle Art

This month, we knocked out the captain’s quarters and started mirroring areas to the other side of the ship (such as stairways, corridors, hallways) on the Idris. This next month we are aiming to have all the interior rooms on the Idris complete to final art with collision to allow for a full play through. We have been doing a lot of clean up on the Javelin: finishing off junction rooms and started moving over standardized areas we first created on the Idris (such as the captain’s quarters) and making it work for the Javelin, one of the benefits from building up our AEGIS building set.

The Bengal team have made great process too, we are wrapping up the final art of the exterior hull, completed the Gatling gun, AA turrets, exterior bridge. On the interior we are wrapping up some final touches on the main Hangar to ensure our shaders work well with our latest lighting pass and light linking tech. Interior bridge is also close to coming to completion, something we are very excited to show more of. The team has also started on both the ready room and bunk rooms.

Design

The Squadron 42 design pit have been hammering away at the levels and things are really coming together. Sometimes you think you know a level, you get used to seeing the same Grey-box and then we’ll get an art update and it’s a game changer. You can really soak up the scale and details, and gives you that extra push in morale. It’s one of the real joys of this job when a designer with a beaming smile calls you over with a “hey, check this out…”

Implementation of all the recorded performance capture dialogue is well under way now which is replacing any temporary designer dialogue and text-to-speech which must be a huge relief for the script writers Dave and Will. It makes you appreciate the actor’s craft in hearing Mark Hamill and co. deliver their lines in the game, it makes such a difference.

The Character team have really been delivering the goods recently, making some good inroads into the required costumes list so we’re getting to a point now in which we can start populating the levels with final characters in their correct costumes.

Props

The team has been fairly divided this month, all focusing on different areas of the game. Two of our guys have been working closely with the environment team to push the procedural planet tech, start devising workflows and nailing down the pipeline.

We have also refined the hanging clothing workflow which is a combined effort from the character team (who create the base items) and the props team (who transform them into hanging versions and eventually folded clothing). It may seem like a small fish, but it helps add realism and immersion to the shopping experience.

We continue to work on the ship items. We now have just over 100 ship items complete, so plenty of customization options will be available when the feature launches. Next, we’ll be looking into the ship interiors and how the sub items integrate into them.

The newer members of the props team have all settled in great and with the new plethora of concepts coming everything is moving forward well.

Graphics

The graphics team has been split between new features for our expanded universe and low-level improvements to our shading model.

For the expanded universe, we’ve finally made the sun into an actual object that you can fly around. Previously in CryEngine, the Sun was always 10km away in an artist specified direction no matter where you were in the universe, but now it’s a hot glowing sphere that casts light and shadows in all directions as you would expect, and has a physically accurate reflection which grows as you get closer. We’ve also began work on our asteroid tech to place asteroid fields and planetary rings consisting of millions of asteroids with minimal artist setup.

On the shading side we’ve improved our specular reflection model based on recent research in the field, and this should give us brighter and more accurate reflections from lights as well as being cheaper (which was actually one of our main motivations for the change). We’ve also improved the physical accuracy of how rough or glossy materials look when you zoom in/out from them.

Our final improvement this month is that we’ve completed our changes to the exposure control system. We can now let the art team finely tune how bright or dark they want the scene to appear, allowing them to use a much higher dynamic range of lighting. We’ve also implemented a realistic adaption algorithm that individually adjust according to your pupil dilation and photo pigment adaption.

Audio

Sam Hall fixed up some audio functionality in the editor, provided a host of new hooks for the dynamic music system and has been working on bug fix support for the 2.5 release.

Graham Phillipson has also been bug-fixing specifically: working on what we’re calling ‘interiority’ (so that we can change sounds depending on the player’s perspective/relationship to inside/outside sound sources more efficiently), RTPC normalization for consistent reverb levels across environments, further VOIP code tidy-up, adding pitch control to AudioAreaAmbiences and adjusting to his role in leading up the audio programming team.

Darren Lambourne has been hammering away at the Dragonfly and generally polishing up and improving ship audio, with the Idris taking up a fair chunk of time too. While Stefan Rutherford has been continuing work on the GrimHex map, providing support for new systems (elevators, doors etc.) and continuing revising and improving upon the FPS module audio.

Ross Tregenza has been coordinating with composers Pedro Camacho and Geoff Zanelli to get music into the game for both the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42. There’s a been a huge amount of work on the music logic system with some great new code aspects added by Sam Hall. He’s been iterating and tweaking the system and assembling the content in Wwise and finessing it all into one big seamless system.

Simon Price has been continuing his work on the dialogue pipeline, as well as providing support for bug-fixing too. Meanwhile, Bob Rissolo and Phil Smallwood were both out on patrol duties at the Squadron 42 shoot in Ealing and are dealing with the subsequent editorial work currently.

Matteo Cerquone has been working on some Squadron 42 maps, adding states and similar game-syncs; worked on UI “purchase Items” sounds; tested new ship engineRTPCs and assisted with some new parameters for improved ship audio feedback. Matteo’s also been working with Luke Hatton to prototype the new UI ship sound design language to have consistency over the different manufacturers, and divide the UI information into different pools of sounds.

Ewan Brown has made improvements to the spaceship flight audio feedback system. This translates more of the ship’s physics into usable audio parameters. Now speed and acceleration, in both linear and angular axes, are being fed into the audio engine. He’s also been working on new audio controls for atmospheric wind and turbulence and systems to improve dialogue lip sync for upcoming cinematic scenes.

Meanwhile, Jason Cobb has been setting up mix states for GrimHex, building pipeline support and refined the ATL generation script. That’s in addition to general bug testing and smashing.

QA

The Foundry 42 QA team worked very hard with the Dev team again and of course, the community, to get 2.4.0 out to you guys and it was really rewarding. The response we got was amazing, but we didn’t stop there. After pushing it out, we gathered up all your feedback and bug reports and went straight in to get 2.4.1 out for you. After 2.4.1, some of the team cycled right into 2.5.0, while the rest started working on some lovely things to show at Gamescom.

This month was also good for seeing our team grow, with three new starters each starting a week apart, Ian Goodey, Stephen Austin & Idreece Hadi, they have fit well into the team and already have started focusing on specific aspects of testing, with Ian looking at Squadron 42 and FPS, Stephen working heavily on the Gamescom stuff and Idreece taking a technical testing approach.