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Beam Weapons & Building in Space – Con42 Dev Panel

Welcome to some more Star Citizen, there was a Star Citizen Dev Panel at Con42 a German SC Community Convention (on the 22nd of Sept), there was some very good information about Game Features and Design. This video is a summary of that info.

Life Support – The Room and Atmosphere system will be able to have data on every room and the composition of its air. Ships will have oxygen issues if they are carrying too many people, beyond their life support system limit, meaning a Cutlass can’t carry 50 people, without running out of oxygen quickly UNLESS each of the passengers are using their own oxygen supply from a suit.

The in Game Vending Machines should eventually be functional, they have the animations for that already.

Org Features – They are still building out Organization functions. They will provide tools to allow them to manage funds, things like collecting funds into a central account or paying dividends to members. They are also looking into having multiple leaders, democratic and other setups for Orgs.

Caves & Building – They are able to add caves and rivers by hand to planets & moons BUT they are not naturally procedurally generated currently. They are working on underground structures at the moment and once caves are added they could potentially have structures as part of a cave system & maybe players could building something inside cave.\
They are currently looking at players building structures in space too.

Engine Choice – The Lumberyard Engine allows for the scale and graphics quality of what they want for Star Citizen & SQ42. They’ve had to evolve some of the tools to make them more appropriate for their needs tho. They still need to improve a lot of these tools further. Any Engine they would of used would of been a foundation to build on, Lumberyard seems to be the best foundation available and the Amazon Team is trying to invest and evolve the engine & it’s backend as far as possible. The AWS and network infrastructure that Star Citizen can leverage from this is fantastic too.

Fuel is a commodity and will be tradable. We will be able to mine fuel from gas & gas planets, this is currently in the design & prototype stage.

The Crossbow will be added to the game at some point BUT it isn’t soon.

Water – They are prototyping water interaction with large bodies of water. Many other tasks have a higher priority at the moment so it’s currently on the backlog. 1st iterations of water will have very limited interaction. In the future tho they do want some ships to be able to float, players to swim & under water content with diving, exploring, cave & more.

We will see more on FOIP and Faceware’s Camera very soon.

Animals will be in game.

They talked about cargo containers for animals and prisoners allowing them to be kept alive in space/cargo/a non standard environment. This may be an interesting smuggling career BUT Lifeforms as cargo is now sort of confirmed.

Hangars in game will be able to display items & ships, but they will have a physical size and amount they can show. Some hangars may have more storage than actual space they can display items. There haven’t nailed down exactly what systems will be in place for things like Org Hangars.

Raytracing – They are working on Future proofing Star Citizen & SQ42 by various means technology wise. If ray-tracing or any other future technologies would add huge benefits OR is sensible to integrate then they will HOWEVER they have yet to see the real gains or reasons for them in using something like Raytracing.

Planetary Tech has seen a lot of updates and improvements in the last few months, with more detail, better & more textures, more eco systems and transitions and blending between areas, water, biomes has all significantly improved.

There was a bit more information on the SC Joystick, they are interested in finding a partner. They still want SC branded HOTAS & peripherals BUT it has to be of an high standard. They have had opportunities & offers to partner up with other companies on it BUT nothing has been appropriate for them yet.

Weapon Refactor – The whole weapon system has had a major update as part of the Weapon Refactor. This will affect all weapons & general balance & allows them to do Beam Weapons in the future now too.

There will be Beam Weapons in the game, these will be just like a standard weapon.
The first implementation of the beam technology is the mining beam on the prospector.
The Collection Beam on the Prospector may have some tractor functionality in the future, they are a bit worried that it could cause some issues tho.
They are working on proper tractor beams in game as well, that will be very useful.

3.3 will have have 2 builds one with OCS and one without during it’s Evocati (and maybe it’s wider PTU phases) This only adds a small amount of additional overhead and the benefits outweigh any burden.

Parachutes/Jetpacks – There will be some form of way to survive ejecting while in atmosphere but also ways to allow players to get from spaceship to ground with some form of items or attachments. They have yet to confirm EXACTLY what tho.