Star Citizen Alpha 3.5 to All this Weekend
Welcome to some more Star Citizen, 3.5 is about to go out to all backers, we’ve seen updates to Star Marine, Mission Content, The DNA System and AtV is going on a 3 week break, this is a summary of Around the Verse – Arrival at Alpha 3.5 | 3.4 Ep. 12
In a press release CI announced that Alpha 3.5 would be available to all backers at some point over the weekend. Though I am not sure if that’s going to be the LIVE build or just everyone having access to the PTU at this stage, the media suggests that it is the LIVE build.
In around the Verse they looked largely at 3.5 updates & improvements:
Star Marine
There has been a lot of fixes and updates to Star Marine for 3.5 that also improves general FPS gameplay across the games.
The Elimination / Deathmatch mode now has spawn logic, that checks your visibility and range to another player before spawning you, thus hopefully preventing you getting spawn camped or chain killed.
There is an additional smaller version of Demien Station, Demien Comms.
It doesn’t have the destructible glass and makes smaller games much more action packed
The Capture points have had changes too, now it’s visible who is capturing and is it worth your time running there to defend / help capture it at a glance. It now scales to the amount of people capturing / contesting it too.
Once you have started capping the point you don’t have to remain connected to the laptop, you just have to then have someone nearby to remain capping.
Kills are more rewarding, giving better kill notifications and scoring.
They have fixed the T-Poses on death now too, so you really see a dude die.
Missions & Gameplay 3.5
They are expanding out the law system over the next few releases.
We are going to see lots more content spread out over the entire Stanton System and varying types of missions.
If you are an outlaw you are going to get chased in a lot more areas by security forces.
They are making wanted levels more aggressive, so at level 1 you will start getting attacked for being a criminal. They may even interdict you.
If you get a higher rating than then advocacy might turn up, then at the top levels the navy will turn up with ships like Hammerheads.
There are going to be bounty Hunters and missions generated for that too.
Missions will have various difficulties, from introduction, to easy, medium hard.
Some missions are targeted at groups to tackle.
Some missions generate counter missions and encourage pvp, but not all of them & even the ones that do, still require a player to take up the mission, so that will create tension for players… will I have to deal with someone else? Who is that? A Random or are they after my drugs?!
They have been hooking all the different types of missions, wrecks, derelicts and outposts modular with content across the Stanton system gameplay area.
Facial Customization
The new DNA and Facial Customization feature is used to create player characters BUT also NPCs for the game.
3.5 represents an entire conversion of their previous facial animation & rigging systems.
The DNA system blends multiple faces or individual features together to create a unique, realistic face. It’s also less resource hungry than their previous system.
They use GPU skinning now too, allowing for more faces on screen at once.
The customization allows for whole different rigs being blended together. It means any character can read out any voice lines / wild lines or whatever without additional work.
Attachments also dynamically adjust to your character too, so they can have ears and eyes at different heights.
Each individual DNA Matrix is just a set of hex codes that contain all of the info for a characters face that can then be rebuilt on a client’s PC, it’s very memory efficient.
The current player facing customizer tool in 3.5 allows you to blend up 3 heads and their individual features. You can then change skin tone, eye color, hair and hair color. Hair is unified between male & females too.
They will be adding more heads, features, hair styles and facial hair in the future too.
They are going to have a 3 week video publishing hiatus after 3.5 goes live.
The first couple of weeks after a quarterly release is more focused at planning, scheduling and working out what is going to be in a patch. There isn’t as much to show typically.
They want to try improving AtV to educate and inform.
I am a little annoyed about that… as I was talking about how we needed significantly more video content ASAP and this isn’t appropriate imo, though after 3 weeks they come back strong with improvements and a load of new shows then I’d be happy.
It was confirmed that they are still having RtV during this hiatus which is at least good news.
I would ask that there is an official CI video and content feedback and suggestion section on spectrum beyond just the Subscriber’s Program Feedback & Discussion 2949 in the Subscriber section, you’ll get a lot of show ideas for that too!
More communication NOT LESS PLEASE!