BritizenCon 2018 Panel & Dev Summary

Welcome to some more Star Citizen I wanted to do an overview of some of the major information that was talked about from BritizenCon via the Panels, on the Stream & from Dev interviews as well as from the pub at the BarCitizen afterwards.

Object Container Streaming (OCS)
OCS is the biggest challenge and the most important thing to the game coming this year. Erin feels pretty good with being able to hit their schedule dates and the content in each patch. 3.3 will be the hardest for them most likely as it’s got OCS and they need to get in working out in the wild. Object Containers Streaming is the last big technical herdle for them then everything is about getting the content in and much easier.
I did ask Erin in the BarCitizen afterwards, what about Server Meshing and he was extremely confident about their ability to do it and said there are other methods we could use if for some reason we didn’t get what we wanted from it.
BUT without OCS there is Not much more can be put into the universe until that comes online due to reaching the limit of what the min spec client memory can do.

Mining
The F42 UK team is spearheading the mining stuff.
There 2 types of laser a mining laser to bore and hopefully cause a controlled explosion of larger rocks & break down smaller ones and an extraction laser to collect the materials.
Not every rock or asteroid is minable.
They are working on the visual target for the whole mining system at the moment.
3.2 will only have mining on planetary bodies, asteroid mining in space will be a future iteration.
The only mining laser available in 3.2 will be the prospectors boom arm.
Rocks may have different densities and concentrations of ores.
Rocks and trees and anything really can have item ports
Mineables can be biome based or more common in certain areas, the artists can distribute them through lots of metrics.
When mining you’ll have a specific UI and readouts of what you are mining.
Mining Beams/Lasers will deal damage to ships, tho it might not be the most effective weapon. Beam Weapons will be a thing in game tho.
VFX and all of the mining that we have seen in game was HEAVILY work in progress, but mining will be interactive & you’ll be able to be better at mining from learning how certain rocks and asteroids are made of or react.
The only ship you can mine with in 3.2 is the prospector
Potentially in the future other ships that are not specifically miners may be attach equipment to help with mining or mining lasers, tho they would be as good as mining ships doing it OR may lack the ability to collect the mined materials by themselves.

Squadron 42
Your choices in Sq42 ep 1 will carry over to 2, 3 & the PU.
Episode 2 & 3 are both in pre-production, designers are focused on ep 1’s production tho.
There is still a lot of tools & ai work to be done for ep 1.
It has similar steps to the PU roadmap but to a lesser degree, the AI for SQ42 doesn’t need to work for multiplayer and can be a lot more scripted if necessary.

VR 100% Confirmed (Again)
They confirmed they still will be 100% supporting VR. It’s not a priority currently tho.
They have no concerns as they believe with their engineers they will be able to pull it off to the highest level possible, but they will look at actually implementing VR after they have whittled down the more major systems and gameplay content.

aUEC & Purchases in 3.2
The plan for 3.2 is they want to have (time permitting) the ability to melt our VD purchases and for the UEC on our accounts to be the starting aUEC we have with each wipe.
Weapons & Items will be available with 3.2 to buy with aUEC.
I asked Erin to clarify if this would mean ships to purchase in 3.2 with aUEC as well, and he said they are working towards that, and would try (unfortunately it’s a firm maybe).

Waypoints / Command & Control (C&C)
C&C will give you the ability to easily order other group members, ships and the area around it.
It will take all the data from the other ships in your group, and you’ll be able to set targets and waypoints for your fleet.
But they need get a lot of the core mechanics in before doing C&C.
Lots of multi-crew and permission based stuff coming online, door locking.
In 3.2 you should be able to share waypoints with your teammates, groups and also via Service Beacons..

Other Info
VOIP & FOIP wise – You’ll be able to communicate via channels, specific people, in cockpits you’ll be able to see other people’s avatars, this will still work even if they are not using foip.
They will make changes to ships & systems if necessary. Doing light modelling work & materials updates are not entirely uncommon.
The ship pipeline is extremely developed now and they can much more easily create ships.
Employment wise they look at talent and skill over qualifications.
There are garbage, trash and scrap type biomes coming with Hurston in 3.3, in fact we should see a lot more biome diversity with Hurston, it’s moons and 3.3 additions.
CitizenCon date very soon (expect early – mid October I’d expect anywhere between the 5th & 13th looking back historically) I believe it’s going to be Austin this year.
And the venue shall be large!
They are getting the tech ready for teamplay, multi-crew and group play to take it to the next level.
Though they are currently not working on internal damage for 3.2, damaging items with small arms fire or via FPS combat is intended to be a thing.
They will be giving us more information on Modules, they are working on current priorities tho.
Exploration Gameplay will have a lot of different things under it’s gameplay, they will potentially be the more unique discoveries of a new planet or system/jumpoint BUT there is a huge amount more when it comes to exploring planets, moons & space that’s already been visited even.
We will see more ground vehicles in the future, it was implied there would be entirely civilian ones BUT we were in the pub.

Some other things thru the day.
JR fabrication has made some amazing props for Star Citizen, you can buy them from his website and he does custom orders.
SpecialEffect are amazing, they help disabled children get accessibility to games and computers via bespoke peripherals made for their needs.
HCS Voice Packs have a unified voice pack now that allows different voice actors to be allocated to different systems and positions. They are constantly supported and updated too. Probably more so if SC stop moving key bindings around.
It was a fantastic event, I do not envy having to organize that, great job from everyone there! Here is the full stream from the day too.