Some interesting notes:

Art (Ships)

• RSI Polaris began its whitebox pass
• An as-yet-unannounced ship continued its LOD0 pass
• Crusader A1 Spirit progressed through final art
• Tumbril Storm approached the end of production
• Origin X1 entered the greybox stage

Engine

• The Core Engine team progressed with the development of StarBuild, the new in-house code-build system that will replace WAF
• Core Engine also worked alongside the Physics and Vehicle teams in support of the MISC Hull C, ensuring it works correctly and fixing bugs with the ship’s unique systems

Features (Characters & Weapons)

• July saw the Feature team experimenting with skill progression, which involves players performing specific in-game actions to make them better at similar activities. For example, building up strength will allow players to carry heavier objects with fewer penalties, while performing takedowns will open access to quicker and quieter action sets.
• For player traversal, the team began implementing a sliding mechanic. If a player tries to crouch while sprinting, they will perform a short slide before entering the crouched stance

Features (Gameplay)

• Gameplay Features continued their work on the new vehicle tractor beam
• improvements to mining for Alpha 3.20 based on community feedback, including updates to stability and predictability when mining.

Features (Mission)

• current underground facilities were replaced with RaStar to fix a variety of issues and make iterating on them easier.
• RaStar was covered in ISC and is a preliminary requirement for Outposts and other points of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSsWaTw4n8s
• Finally, code work began for reputation. Progression within reputation scopes will give players discounts on various purchases, including items, refueling, and repair.

Graphics, VFX Programming & Planet Tech

• The Feature team is working to bring the new unified water shader to the game, adding details such as puddles that splash on impact and fixing collision-detection issues on large water volumes.

Locations (Montreal)

• Montreal’s Locations team progressed with additional derelict settlements, which passed greybox before moving into the final phase
• Progress was made on underground facilities

Narrative

• the team supported the MISC Hull C by implementing the latest version of the air-traffic-control (ATC) behavior, which will allow players to request a landing spot to load and offload their cargo. This also led to resurrecting work on the overarching ATC behavior, with some potentially exciting updates that will be discussed in the near future.

Research & Development

• further updates were made to atmosphere and volumetric cloud rendering
• Based on recent research publications, cloud shadow maps can now be stochastically filtered, which considerably improves performance and render quality. The new temporal render mode will use the stochastic texture filter by default.

UI

• UI worked alongside Graphics to develop a new internal map system to help players navigate the game’s complex cities, planets, and capital ships.