MattScott

Hi everyone, For those that missed the streams, the Q&A or my bad posture yesterday, we decided to edit down the demo and Q&A on Little Orbit's channel. You can see the highlights here: A full transcript of the Q&A section of the video was made by @Kevkof and is posted further in this thread. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, The team is getting through tickets as fast as they can. As of today we have: 409 new tickets 553 total tickets We are 2 tickets away from responding to tickets submitted on 4/5, so we're were at 12 days to respond. We have started interviewing for more CS. Thanks, Matt

Hi there, For clarity, we didn’t invite anyone except the previously approved streamers in our program (which isn’t very large). From there we announced the streams, and then evaluated everyone who applied. I think one of the names you mentioned contacted us after we posted the list, and the other didnt contact us. This wasn’t intended to be exclusionary at all. There were very few we had to say ‘no’ to for one reason or another. Thanks, Matt

Hi Alisha, Your criticism is fair. But I think you're making massive assumptions about our content management tools. The CMS used to administrate ARMAS and those items was home grown. It is ridiculously clunky and slow based on ancient tech. Back in November we had a plan to clean everything up by importing newly formatted descriptions directly from exported game data. However that effort turned out to be a bust because some of the items on ARMAS were hand edited with flavor text in addition to the stats. We then backed up to start looking at a rewrite of the CMS (or entirely scrapping ARMAS and moving to a new store platform), but that effort quickly got put on hold when everyone was put on the Engine Upgrade. At this point there can only be a single #1 priority. Thanks, Matt

Those improvements have already been made. We are hoping the PC Beta will help us work out all the bugs first. Then we can submit to Sony for approval so we can launch the PS4 version.

Hi everyone, I hope you are enjoying your respective holidays this weekend and connecting with family and friends either virtually or in real life. Several players reached out to me asking if/how we managed to fix the problems I discussed in the last update, and one even sent some ideas on how to fix the issues. After responding to them individually, I realized that I had nearly written a blog. So I thought I would share those answers here, since I didn't post an Engine Update yesterday. First, a little bit of history. When the upgrade to Unreal 3.5 was started at Reloaded Productions, they were faced with the difficult task of exporting all the geometry for the districts from Unreal 3 to Unreal 3.5. You might think this is easy, but Unreal 3 has very limited export formats. The final solution was to write a commandlet in Unreal 3 that exported meshes through the OBJ format as pieces along with some extra data. Then they wrote a commandlet in Unreal 3.5 that reconstructed all those individual files and imported everything, and when they were done, they exported a single FBX file for each mesh. This is a pretty impressive bit of code, because now we have a decent starting place for all the basic buildings (like that lighthouse entrance from last week). It's important to know that APB was the result of a different project at RTW which was focused on procedural world building. As good as that tech was, it was also somewhat messy. So a lot of manual 3D art work had to be done to clean things up. Since the RTW days everything has been done in 3DS Max. So that's what we used. When we hit issues like last week for a specific building, we often have to fix it in the original FBX and then re-import it back into Unreal. But that leads to 5 basic problems: 1) There are unwelded verts all over the place that leave stray polygons (polygon soup) detached from each other. The easy fix for this is to select all the verts in 3DS Max and then weld everything within a specific tolerance back together. But you have to find the right weld tolerance. APB is modeled in centimeters. When we welded verts within 1cm of each other, we ended up welding verts that needed to remain distinct, and some texturing got ruined. The best tolerance ended up being 0.5cm. Here is an example of what unwelded verts look like when the lightmapping tools try to bake lighting. 2) Since these FBX files were programmatically exported, they have no smoothing group data. Bad smoothing groups is another place where lighting will bake extra seams and edges that you don’t want. There are thousands of building pieces in APB and many of them have LOD variants, so we needed an approach that could be run automatically across a number of files. We tried automating "autosmooth" in 3DS Max and generated disastrous results. In the end, since the majority of buildings have squared off edges, we wrote a maxscript that was able to sample faces for 30 different vectors (angles) to rebuild the smoothing group data. From there everything else had to be hand tweaked. Here is an example of a more complex dock building after we applied autosmoothing. I have selected the faces from a specific smoothing group. You can see how some faces on the same side of that building are not highlighted. This means they aren't in the same smoothing group and can cause problems when we bake lighting. Here is the same smoothing group after using our custom script. All of the faces on the side facing the camera are in the same smoothing group. This will insure they will all be lit more uniformly together. 3) After those two issues, then we get to the uvs. In many cases, the original set of lightmap UVs can simply be repacked to use the texture space better. But if you had stray polygons to begin with, then chances are those will still be messed up in the UV channels. So in about 20-30% of cases, we had to create all new unique UVs required for lightmapping to work. Again, the automated uvmapping tools failed us because they all use a single angle to determine where to unwrap the mesh. So this had to be hand tweaked by artists mostly selecting chunks of contiguous walls where we wanted uniform lighting, then planar mapping those selections as a single set of uv faces, and then repacking the whole uv channel to fit 0,0 to 1,1 with no overlapping faces. For those who are unfamiliar with what uvs are, they are best described with a picture. UVs are a 2D coordinate system for mapping textures onto a 3D object. Each face (triangle) of an object is defined by 3 vertices in 3D x,y,z coordinates. In order to texture those faces, we have to map each vertex into 2D space with just x,y which are renamed to u and v so we don't confuse them with the 3D coordinates. Each object can have multiple uv channels. For lightmapping, we need a channel where none of the faces are overlapping. The building above looks like this: And here is an example of the lighthouse itself when we tried to use Flatten uvmapping to generate a set of unique UVs and then tried to bake lighting. Since the lighthouse tower is round, you can't apply a technique that unwraps faces based on angle. 4) Sometimes we simply needed to increase the lightmap resolution. When the districts were rebuilt in Unreal 3.5, part of that commandlet tried to guess the surface area and set the appropriate lightmap texture size. In some cases that estimate was way too small. Increasing the size fixed a lot of lighting artifacts. The problem with APB is that texture memory is already stretched pretty thin. So we have to be careful when increasing these. Fortunately we have tools in Unreal that allow us to view the entire district with lightmapping resolution grids turned on. Larger / darker will be worse with chunky shadows or visual artifacts. Smaller / lighter is better and more defined. Here is what that looks like on the same dock building. Some of the areas that appear solid colored actually have a grid so small you can't see it in this shot. 5) Lastly, for hyper detailed meshes, there is an option in Unreal to use high precision UVs. I’m guessing by default they use traditional floating point values, which lose accuracy for small numbers with a lot of decimal places. Checking this option probably switches to double precision which preserves better accuracy. In any case, this also cleared up some lighting artifacts. Hopefully some of this information will help you understand why the Engine Upgrade has taken so long - even from the point that we took over. It's also one of the reasons we decided to launch the Beta with only Asylum and Social, since those districts are farther along in being cleaned up. Thanks, Matt

The streamers this Friday will be showing off the APB 2.1 Beta. It will only include Asylum and Social for the time being. The next version of the Beta will have all districts, and then we'll launch the full APB 2.1. Console will be running the same code, so once that gets approved by Sony and Microsoft, those players will get all the new content from the last 2 years + new content as it arrives on PC.

The 2 new contacts featuring the EMP will be added when APB 2.1 launches.

It's not really possible for us to run a Beta like this on console. However, it's the same code base, so there has been progress. In the meantime, we are hoping the PC players can help us work out the bugs before we submit to Microsoft and Sony.

Hi everyone, There isn't an Engine Update this week. Instead we are announcing the first Live stream of the Beta on Friday, April 17, 2020 at 11am PST. You can get more details here: Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, 6 months ago I decided that the community had been kept in the dark too long about the Engine Upgrade. In development all kinds of things can and do happen, and even the best teams run into issues and blockers. So to help pull back the curtain, I started posting a dev diary of sorts focusing on our weekly progress. If you haven't been following it, you can check it out here: This week there is no update - at least not on the engine itself. Instead we are going to try something different with the community. On Friday, April 17, 2020 at 11am PST we have invited a number of APB streamers to show off the new Beta live. Over the coming week, we'll be posting a list of Twitch channels that will be participating so you can support your favorite. Each streamer will start with some quick benchmarks on their system from APB 1.20 (Live). Then they will load up the Beta and do another quick series of benchmarks before jumping into a couple Fight Club matches on Asylum with our dev team. Everyone will have codes and goodies to give away, and they will be gathering your questions and comments to give me for later. After about an hour all of the feeds will hand everyone off to the Little Orbit Twitch channel (https://www.twitch.tv/littleorbit), where I'll do my best to answer your questions and talk a bit more in-depth about the upgrade and the upcoming timeline. EDIT: Below are the names of the streamers that will be showing off the Beta on Friday. This was a bit difficult to manage, because many of these are controversial figures in the community, but I didn't want to get into the politics of approving or denying streamers. The idea behind this is to allow the community to take a good look at the game with your favorite streamer. You can choose to watch any of these, so let's not flame this thread with criticism. This is a big milestone for the game. Let's enjoy it! Here is the list: WitchQueen https://twitch.tv/witchqueen Frosi https://twitch.tv/frosi Lie https://twitch.tv/liee Rich https://twitch.tv/cuve RuschGaming http://twitch.tv/ruschgaming Kempington https://twitch.tv/kempington Flaws https://twitch.tv/Flvws Gordo https://twitch.tv/gordoismyname CombatMedic02 https://twitch.tv/0utbreakgaming Exo https://twitch.tv/exoticzlol Zeal https://twitch.tv/zeal PoundOfFlesh https://twitch.tv/thepoundofflesh Shini https://twitch.tv/shini Jam https://twitch.tv/amsterjam Ntec https://twitch.tv/ntec Sadira https://www.twitch.tv/sadira SKay will be joining Matt Scott on twitch.tv/littleorbit for a Q&A at 12pm PDT / 7pm UTC. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Still trying to keep the response time low, but there has been a massive surge of new tickets. The team is working hard to keep pace. As of today we have: 318 new tickets 490 total tickets We are responding to tickets submitted on 4/2, so we're were at 8 days to respond. EDIT: Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words... Here is a report showing how many new tickets we have been getting since the beginning of 2020 through last week. We went from ~200 new tickets per day in late February up to nearly 400 tickets on a single day last week. In order to stay current with tickets right now, we have to close ~1500 tickets per week. Here is a report showing our average response time since January 2019. At the beginning of 2019 it was taking between 30-36 days to response on average. For the most recent 12 weeks we have been responding between 6.8 days and 4.9 days. Thanks, Matt

Servers were back online at the time of my original post.

Hi everyone, This is just an informational post to let you guys know that the Citadel servers got hit extremely hard this morning. Our normal DDoS protections weren’t enough, and those districts were affected intermittently for about an hour. If you had connectivity or latency issues, that wasn’t your provider. It was on our end. It’s been quite a while since we have had an attack get through. The network team has made corrections to block this form attack moving forward. Apologies, Matt

Hi everyone, This was another productive week. We fixed the blown out ColorLUT issue that I posted pictures of last week. We are knee deep in fixing an in-game browser issue that causes a crash when opening up ARMAS. We are also working through more collision and game-play issues in Asylum. And lastly, that's right, we are working on lighting issues in the districts. I know this is something that has been taking forever, and several players suggested that we release the Beta with unfinished lighting. However, just to show you some of what we are fixing, I pulled some images that went back and forth between the team this week. Building lighting in Unreal is actually 2 different processes: (1) Baking lightmaps and (2) building indirect lighting 1. Baking lightmaps This is an ancient technique for generating fast lighting that doesn't require very powerful graphics cards. The primary downside to lightmaps is resolution. Lighting is baked to a texture and then wrapped around objects just like normal textures, but if your lightmap is too small, then you'll end up with very jagged results. Conversely, if your lightmaps are too big, then you'll eat up a lot of texture space. Also, you can only build lightmaps for objects that are static - meaning they don't move. So it's not a technique you can apply to everything in the scene. Ultimately, even though this technique is very old, lightmapping works well if you blend it with several other techniques. In our case, we don't build lightmaps, we build shadow maps. This enables us to change their color and how much they influence the scene at different times of day. We can only build shadowmaps for static objects that don't move, and those objects require a separate UV channel to map that generated texture into. Buildings are the best example of objects that we bake lighting for. However, Unreal is very finicky about the UVs it maps into. For those that don't know, UVs are a 2D position on a texture that is assigned to each vertex in a mesh. This defines how textures map onto the mesh. Lightmaps require "unique" UVs. That means each vertex maps to a unique spot in the texture, which makes sense because the lighting generated into the lightmap would be unique for each part of the building. If any of those UVs are slightly overlapping or touching the edge of the texture, then Unreal errors and aborts lighting that object. We run lighting with error color coding turned on to see which objects have issues. This looks something like: The orange area indicates that part of the lighthouse entrance doesn't have correct UVs. This specific case likely wouldn't be a big deal for Beta. However, this next case is, because every ceiling in this part of the district has no lighting and looks terrible. As you imagine some districts have thousands of individual meshes that require lightmap UVs, so we have been going through by hand to fix all the areas that aren't building correctly. Corrected lighting ends up looking like this: 2. Building indirect lighting This is a new system that was introduced in Unreal 3.5. I'm sure Reloaded felt this would be the biggest visual upgrade for players, and they aren't wrong. However, the new lighting engine in Unreal 3.5 also costs quite a bit more to render, so all of our initial performance tests were terrible. We have spent a lot of time optimizing so that players will get the benefits of better lighting, but not take a huge performance hit. Indirect lighting is built into a 3D grid and it samples the various lights in the scene at that location, so that when a moving or dynamic object is in that area, it is quick to apply the lights. This next image shows off some of the better lighting which is a combination of overhead dynamic lights, dynamic shadows, baked shadowmaps, ambient occlusion, and built indirect lighting on the player). It also shows off one of the big flaws in how indirect lighting is built. The indirect lighting in this shot is the orange light casting on the player. The flaw in the shot is that there is no obvious source of that lighting. In fact, that orange light is coming from just inside that building. This only happens if they get too close to the wall because the 3D grid is 4ft x 4ft, which doesn't have the resolution to sample lighting from both inside and outside the building. To fix this, it requires us to build lighting volumes that "trap" the light inside the volume by inserting extra cells in the 3D grid for indirect lighting to emulate where walls would prevent light from leaking outside. The art team has been building lighting volumes for these cases. Lastly, we had a couple players mention that we needed to turn on ambient occlusion. It's there, it just has problems. Here is what ambient occlusion looks like right now in Asylum. It's very faint, and it's being calculated on a very dark frame buffer in the pipeline. That's also being looked at. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, I missed posting this yesterday. With the significant rise in population, we are continuing to see lots of new tickets. As of today we have: 229 new tickets 364 total tickets We are responding to tickets submitted on 3/27, so we're were at 7 days to respond yesterday. Thanks, Matt

Hi all, Let me step in here to provide some clarity. First, I want to say that I respect the OP’s opinion. I’m going to disagree in my answer, but I can appreciate the dialog this has raised on this thread. Next, I think it is important to remember that the game itself is rated M and has pre-existing references to prostitution and the term itself. I’m not going to start diluting RTW’s vision for a gritty world with mature themes. As has already been pointed out, the term refers to a male or female, and more importantly the title was meant to be more of a joke than anything since it refers to candy on Easter rather than prostitution. This is a case where I do think the OP is taking this a bit too seriously. Having said that, if you don’t approve of the term, you have agency on whether to apply the title to yourself or not. Lastly, the forums are PG-13, and have always had different rules than the game. Previous management felt the need to blacklist the term here, which I’ll respect for the time being. Thanks, Matt

For anyone experiencing high latency, please go in-game and run /latencytest Then open a ticket at http://support.gamersfirst.com and attach the .CSV file from the APBGame/Logs directory. Right now we are seeing 1 of 3 scenarios: 1) We had an issue in the last patch that was spamming the network which got rolled back. We fixed the issue, so that code is active again since the Easter patch (players are helping diagnose with latency tests) 2) Some home network providers are overloaded due to all the people working from home 3) Our servers have been hit relentlessly with DDoS - for the most part this has had zero effect on players, but occasionally a large spike results in momentary lag Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, This week was a mixture of success and frustration. We made a lot of progress knocking out bugs, and the only thing blocking the release of the Beta are some inconsistent crashes with RTX and higher end cards. At this point, we're starting to get more specific issues reported. These are things like "The stairs in this part of Asylum cause a jitter as I go up them" or "This object needs to allow shots through it." I'm not sure how much longer I will hold the Beta while we fix some of these smaller issues, but until the last of the major crash bugs is fixed, I have no choice but to hold this back. Lighting is getting very very close, but this continues to be one of the more frustrating areas. The main issue right now is color balance using Color Look Up Tables (Color LUTs). These are images that modify how specific color ranges are displayed. Here is an example of what a ColorLUT image looks like. We use this one for color grading Financial at noon. Here are some references from Live (if you look closely you'll notice some flawed lighting with foliage). All of these shots accomplish giving the game a moody look and feel while also keeping the character lit enough to see where he is. Midnight Noon 5pm Here are some shots from APB 2.1 as it stands right now. All of these shots have much better lighting consistency (ie. foliage doesn't glow). However the scenes don't have the same punchy color as Live, and the character is far too muddy while standing in shadow. This gives the overall scene a very flat feel. Midnight Noon 5pm This is all very correctable with ColorLUTs, because we punch up the contrast on specific colors. Except.. that system isn't doing what it is supposed to do. Here are some pretty awful examples of what we see right now when the team tries to enable some pretty basic ColorLUTs. This system works fine right now on console, so somewhere along the way it broke. Noon 5pm Thanks, Matt

Hi Ketog, You raise some good points, and I think the answers are a lot more simple than you might expect. When we took over APB, we only had Reloaded as an example of how to run things. So largely we started by following their previous policies with some smaller changes. I also took a very conservative approach, because aspects of the community were very scary (ie. calling bomb threats to Tigg's home). For the safety of my staff, I chose to expose my identity up front, but that allowed everyone else at LO to remain somewhat anonymous till we got a better feel for things. Beyond that, we stepped into a very difficult spot. Towards the last couple years, Reloaded promised a lot of things and never delivered. Initially, we tried being more transparent with dates and things coming up, but most players responded either neutrally or negatively because those dates are often challenging to hit. This is really the only comment that confused me. I post every week about the Engine Upgrade - good, bad or ugly. I also post Customer Support stats every week. Those are areas where we are already giving 100% transparency. For the most part, I see those efforts as successful, so I am looking for more opportunities to continue doing that. Lixil lasted more than a year, and while she wasn't perfect, I think it's tough for a CM to "compete" with me. I try to get on the forums, twitter, Facebook, and discord as much as possible to stay aware of what is happening. I also try to respond when I can. We made some changes with SakeBee, so that he would have a clearer space to manage without me constantly jumping in. He's still new, but we are working on ways he can hang out with the community and get to know you guys better. I'm not going to defend RIOT. It had its benefits for my team, but we did it mostly because it was "low hanging fruit" that Reloaded had mostly finished. There were some hard lessons learned there. There are going to be a lot of opportunities for this coming up. But right now, we have to focus on the Engine Upgrade. It's blocking everything else, and a lot of the tasks for the Engine Upgrade are more "mechanical" to just getting it working like Live. However, the upcoming Beta will very much be work in progress. It will be a chance for the community to jump in and give us feedback, so we can make corrections. Thanks, Matt

Yes. Vehicles will work in Asylum.

Hi all, We had a lot of new tickets this week from more players returning.. up about 25% per day. The team did a stellar job trying to answer as quickly as possible. As of today we have: 198 new tickets 322 total tickets We are responding to the last 6 tickets submitted on 3/20, so we're at 7 days to respond. Thanks, Matt

I'm looking into South America and Asia servers as well. We have a pretty specific architecture that needs to be supported, so it takes time to identify data centers we can operate out of. It's coming. Some of the crossplay work was paused to get the Engine Upgrade out the door. But getting in support for regions was a big first step.

Hi everyone, This week was a total surprise for me. On Monday, the entire US watched as our government slowly tightened up social rules to help suppress the spread of COVID-19. At Little Orbit, we took the plunge and moved everyone to working remote, and I had to hope things would all work out. And thanks to all of you, we've seen a spectacular rise in population. Keep reading below the graphs to get an update on a new data center location for APB, my Engine Upgrade has big news, and a nod to our folks in Customer Support who have worked hard to get our response times down. First, the population increase. This is our PC traffic from two weeks ago on Saturday the 7th. It shows a total peak concurrency of ~900 PC players. While this is a good measure of Citadel (which is in yellow at 700 peak players). Jericho's peak comes later in the day beyond this graph at around 8pm. This is our PC traffic from today on Saturday the 21st. It shows a total peak concurrency of ~1500 players. That's a net gain of 600 players or 66% growth. I'm extremely grateful that players have chosen to spend their free time on APB during this world wide situation. We had a couple issues with district disconnections, and a client-side issue with this week's patch that causes a hitch every so often which we will correct on Wednesday. But overall I feel like the new server architecture and anti-DDoS got a chance to shine. If this continues, we will be out of server space in the next 2 weeks. With that in mind, we have started the process to open more servers in Warsaw, Poland so our Eastern Europe and Russian players can get better latency. Next, if you haven't been following my weekly updates on the Engine Upgrade, you should check out this week. We are making our preparations for Beta. One player in our community was able to get a copy, and I am now sharing details about the rollout plan. And finally, for those who don't look at my Customer Support updates I also made an exciting post there this week. Despite moving our entire team off site, we are now at only a 4 day initial response time for tickets. We will continue to work hard to bring that down as new and old players join APB, but that is our lowest ever. Thanks, Matt

Hi everyone, We had a great week with the Engine Upgrade with one notable problem that I'm going to talk about first. Due to juggling things around, we inadvertently exposed the new Beta client, and one adventurous player got a copy and was able to get in. I'm not going to block the screenshots on the forum, and he later contacted me to reveal how he did it, so we have fixed the issue. Many players sometimes assume we aren't working on this or that the Engine Upgrade will come out in 2025. And while I want to discourage other players from digging through our systems to find stuff like this, I have chosen to leave this post up simply to show that what we're doing is real. Now that the Beta client has leaked, there are a couple things that I should cover: We are only working on lighting and 8 remaining bugs at this point unless anything new comes up (which has tended to happen on this game a lot) The Beta is going to be limited to only Social and Asylum districts. APB is a massive game, and rather than continuing to grind through every possible problem in the hopes of some perfect launch, I have chosen to focus the team on a couple districts so we could polish those and let players in to test sooner. I'm very happy with the system performance in Asylum. During this week's tests, I heard a lot of positive feedback on how that district felt to play. The plan had been to release the Beta client 1 week ahead of when servers will be opened to give the players a chance to download it. Then we were going to do an initial test for a single weekend, where we open up the servers for a limited time. There has been very little testing done with a lot of players on the same district, so we want to see how the APB 2.1 servers handle everything. However, with our recent influx of players, we don't have the server capacity to host a lot of beta testers. I'm already working on a solution. As soon as we can host more than 500 players on this environment, then I'll get the gears turning. Thanks, Matt