LA Studio Progress & Planetary Tech Updates

Star Citizen’s Latest AtV “The Sound of Science” gave us a Star Citizen & LA Studio Update, so let’s delve right in with a summary:

Characters
Character Customizer is being Introduced with 3.1 & the live version will have more functionality than the current PTU one with more options for some of the customizations, thumbnails will also show the previews of your character choices, the feature is currently being polished.
They have been making sure helmet lighting is working how they want it to.
They’ve been working on male and female senators and the finishing touches are being put to the Legacy Armors (older armories with in the SC history).

Planetary Tech
There have been lots of Visual improvements to the three moons Yela, Daymar  & Celin with Color Balancing, Object Distribution, new defuse height and global maps
They are working on some further detailed polish, improved procedural distribution for planetside features, and some dynamic weather effects.
Environment art have been working on improvements to Delamar, specifically the transitions between close, medium, and far view points and the scattering of assets.
General Space views of Yela have been much improved.
They have been R&Ding new tech called Speed Tree which will we will see more on in the coming months.
Player hangar revamp is underway to bring them in line with current modular assets making them usable in the persistent universe, They are currently in grey box there is no scheduled completion dates yet.
Prototypes of Hurston and its moons is currently ongoing. The have began the whitebox blockout of Ariel one of the moons already, it has some unique geography.

3.1 Gameplay-wise
They have been working on  [distress] service beacons.
It currently functions similar to a mission beacon with QT markers appearing when a service has been accepted. It’s the initial iteration, but you can track, untrack, or cancel a beacon & the notification range will be tunable.
The Personal Management App is getting more polish which includes work on the Star Marine Loadout customizer  – Based on the mode some Items earned in the PU will carry over to Star Marine.
They are polish the 3.1 ships and working on various ship and FPS weapons as well as VFX to improve current ones.
45 out of the 46 tasks have been completed to meet their performance goals for 3.1. However more work will be going into this based on PTU Feedback.