Realistic Star Citizen Update – June 2nd, 2018
Update for the week ending Sunday June 3rd.
Calling All Devs
-Overhead FPS nametags got broken by planetary tech and are sitting behind shopping kiosks and ship HUDs in the priority backlogs.
-Rules for getting to see nametags (outside of allies) and NPC nametags are still undecided.
-CIG is still working UI visibility issues, discussions and development of new tech is being looked into for the radar globe.
AKA: CIG didn’t really prototype out the sensor UI functionality before getting over five years into development and baking it into all the ships cockpit models.
-Ship modularity (being able swap internal bays) is on the backburner. Apparently there has been a fair disconnect between ship design, marketing, and the programmers on some ships so those ships will be somewhat interesting to provide already sold modules and functions on.
-Ship modularity will also has to deal with complexities of hooking up modules to ships power and controls.
Personally I thought Item System 2.0 that has been in development for nearly two years was supposed to deal with this kind of hookup but apparently that will be Item System 3.0… /s
-The ability to get out of your seat during quantum travel is… on the backburner as well. CIG is working on some other stuff around quantum travel that will improve the game quality but no real details dropped.
-Some ships come looking beat up due to “realism” by the art team. Some ships will come with dents in the hull and wires on the floor fresh from the factory due to art “realism” reasons apparently.
Around the Verse
-A new FPS weapon recoil system is being worked on. Looks promising.
-Ship AI is seeing work, AI can now take off from an Idris deck (thought they were working on that years ago), and fighter/gunship behaviours.
-Work on trained/untrained AI FPS behaviours and animations. Basically the untrained guys do the FPS trope of coming out from behind cover so you can shoot them.
-Scanning mechanics are nearing release(?). Plans are for them to required to obtain ship owner, faction, fitting and other information.
-Same basic principle for mining.
-Long section on the Eclipse stealth bomber, lots of talk but nothing really useful to glean about gameplay.
Reverse the Verse
-There’s currently no sensor jamming mechanics, sometime in the future.
-Stealth looks like it will be a mechanic that prevents you from emitting a signature that is then scanable at longer ranges.
-The closer you get to a ship they higher the chance of detection.
-Active/ping scan just ups those chances.
-Some ships will only be able to scan forward of themselves, some will be able to aim scans.
-At some point it will be possible to share ship scan data.
-These mechanics extend downwards to FPS play.
Production Schedule
-3.2- Due for release at the end of the month.
Some progress on a few systems but the only gameplay systems at or past the 75% mark are FPS AI, Flight AI, and turrets.
Mining is getting towards 70% so it may make 3.2 still.
Major tech like network bind culling, group warp, power allocation, and other major systems are all sitting at just over 50%.
Performance optimization is sitting down at under 25% progress so 3.2 is probably going to retain those now classic frame rate levels Star Citizen has become known for.
Item kiosks, group/party systems, and quantum travel actually slid backwards a small amount this week as new tasks were added to their lists.
-3.3-
Some gains in FPS weapons use AI.
Code cleanup/conversion is at about 80% so that’s good.
Background spawning of objects (to help with stalls and pauses during gameplay) moved backwards by 7% but still remains at a healthy 70% done.
Nothing else to really report here as no other movement.
-3.4 & 3.5-
Nothing to report.
I did apparently miss that CIG has cut the Banu Merchanman from production for this year at some point
TL;DR
The good.
Mining looks fairly cool, y’know for a mining system that involved the tried and true scan the rock, shoot the rock, suck up bits gameplay.
The bad.
A lot of core tech stuff is sitting at a fairly undeveloped state currently so CIG is either going to do what they did with 3.1 and throw it all together at the last minute hoping for the best then patching it for months, or things are getting delayed.
Either way CIG is looking fairly strained even providing the reduced 3.2 scope so we’ll have to see if they’ve been spending resources getting ahead on 3.3 or if they push most of it further down the line to 3.4.