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What was that milestone that just shipped in 3.17 [for Gen 12]?

TL;DRThe first Gen 12 milestone in 3.17 moved the static brushes and objects on planets through the new renderer, with characters, ships and dynamic objects next and transparent objects still a large task.

Silvan HauEngine Programmer

So Gen 12, you can kind of split it up in two parts: all the scene rendering, like all the objects you see on screen, and then all the other rendering stuff like post-processing and compute passes and pretty much everything else. And the scene rendering was especially difficult to do, because we have hundreds of shaders and thousands of shader permutations and thousands of materials, and we need to make sure that everything works exactly as the legacy renderer. And we had a lot of issues and edge cases which you don't see during development. So just once you submit your code and it crashes somewhere, and then you take a look and see, oh shit. Okay, that's what happens. I forgot this. I forgot to add this. So I'm going to add this edge case. And so the first milestone was getting part of the scene rendering done. And for 3.17, that was the brushes. The brushes is what we call all the non-interactive static objects you see in game. And they're going through Gen 12 already. And the next step would be characters, ships, dynamic objects, and the planets didn't make it in 3.17 as well, though the objects on the planet, they made it in 3.17 as well with Gen 12, so happy about that. So once we have that, Gen 12 is almost complete. We still need to do all the transparent objects, which is still a huge task to tackle. But we started on that, and I'm very optimistic.

Star Citizen Live›Engine & Graphics Q&A·
Published on this date.6 May 2022