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Carrack, 890 & ArcCorp 3.5 Updates

Welcome to some more Star Citizen with updates on the 890 Jump, the Carrack, ArcCorp and Thruster VFX. This is also a summary of Around the Verse – Carrack News, ArcCorp Views, it was a fantastic episode!

Thrusters
Thruster VFX are being updated for 3.5 and the new flight model.

The New IFCS system will have individual damage to trusters & they wanted a visual representation of this to see how damaged your Ship is and any targets or friendlies at a glance.

They are experimenting with exactly what they want currently and making lots of variants/iterations on different looks. They are using fire, smoke, erratic trails to see what looks good. Optimizing and tweaking will come later.

There will be sparks, dust, plasma, all with the goal of making any damage or wear OBVIOUS with those VFX. Destroyed components should be obvious too maybe with large raging fires or plumbs of smoke. They connect the damage directly with data forge so the VFX you are seeing will be directly related to the damage received, ranging from barely taking any damage to being entirely destroyed.

890 Jump
The 890 is in it’s GreyBox phase, building out the geometry which will lead into final art, and they showed off all of the updates and progress to the ship in AtV.

They are determining the placement of turrets still.

Window sizes and shapes may change as they were working out what works.

Thruster Orientation is going through iteration too.

Interior wise they showed a mixture of white box and grey box but it’s clean open spacious and minimalist.

They showed the Atrium, which has trees, the master suite with interesting stairs, the medical bay, the bath rooms.

I said minimalist earlier BUT they stated they do want to address the feeling of sparseness that the 600i had.

Carrack
The Carrack is also in mid greybox, they showed off the drone bay, but no drones in there, just the control seat and the ceiling hooks for them.

The mess hall has a table and room for 6 chairs currently (which is the crew size of the ship)

The Bridge was also shown, still with the 3 hanging seats. Above that is a holomap table. There is progress on the retractable cockpit shielding too.

Exterior wise the ship has retractable antenna. They’ve made changed to the profile of the ship and it’s landing gear, bringing it lower to the ground when it lands.

3.5
There is progress on the Coda Pistol & S71 assault rifle.
They’ve been tweaking the concept of the Tarantula weapons for ships too.

ArcCorp
ArcCorp is entirely covered in city & man made structures.

The have done a lot of work on the industrial and suburb areas.

They are creating a large range of buildings and assets for these areas and then using the procedural gen to scatter them around.

They are working on how the transitions between areas will look, from one type of district to another.

The suburbs and lower suburbs are the areas immediately around the landing zone area 18.

The lower suburbs will have buildings no taller than 350 – 400m.

They found as they were experimenting with no fly zones around this height and flying around the buildings that they could get a good mixture of LODs and immersion, the buildings also integrate well with the ground textures giving depth too.

The downtown area has much taller buildings. The city tiles are bespoke and not procedurally scattered around the planet.

They’ve tested with doing it entirely procedurally and and mix of hand placed and decieded that they want to have the area around area 18 to be more hand placed.

They are still likely to use these more unique assets and large buildings around the planet too, these may help mark other landing zones or places of interest, expect area 18s proximate area to be really high quality.

They want the buildings in the downtown area to by upto a km tall, they are actually above the no fly zone, so we will be able to fly around them.

The no fly zone is quite low here, partly to try the new flight model in atmosphere and they even talk about some that they are testing, if you pass into a no fly zone they may have the system take control of your ship and fly you back up or prevent you going lower. Not immediately blowing up when entering a no fly zone will be a thing or at least its on their list.

This also means with current thinking you’ll be able to land on these buildings, there could be missions based on this and answers the question will we be able to land at least some other locations on ArcCorp… BUT we don’t know for what reasons or functionality other areas will have beyond area 18.