Star Citizen – Banu Defender, Canyons & 3.5.0z Mining Fixes!
Welcome to some more Star Citizen today looking at the Re-tune of the New Flight Model, New Concepts for Clothing, Planetary Feature Scaling, The Banu Defender, 3.5.0z on the PTU, Player Feedback and some other little bits, this is a summary of Inside Star Citizen: Can You Banu? & some extra info tacked on!
The Evolution of the New Flight Experience
The New Flight Model is a re-evaluation of the whole flight model both technically (for performance) and functionally back towards what they have for the vision of the game.
The Showed off the plans for new flight model in October 2018 at CitizenCon.
But got most of the feedback used to evolve the model in the Evocati 3.5 phase.
They have retuned a lot of the ships several times for the new model.
They feel they are hitting much closer to what the community want with their current revisions than they have previously, they aren’t done yet though.
There are restrictions with what they can do, as all the features that will influences flight and combat are yet to be fleshed out, physicalized components for example.
They have learnt how accerations of ships interact with the rest of the tuning for ships, they can’t tune them in isolation from other parts of ship balance.
Production Sprints
They can produce a theory, build the experiment and then test and review it. This is how they deal with many new features and makes their production schedule possible in it’s current form.
They completed concept sprint on a new clothing range for miroTech called ELD.
A colorful style for the more extroverted citizens in the area. They are also looking at animated and glowing textures for clothing like this in the future.
The have ideas for stock prices and ship commercials being shown clothes for example.
FPS Weapons – The team working on the Apocalypse Arms Animus Missile Launcher has completed their explorations, there was soom great looking potential greybox animations.
Evironment Art – Have been trying to improve the scaling of natural features on planets and moons. This will lead to unique giant canyons, craters and more at a massive scale. It’s an iteration of their current tech, pushing it to it’s limits seems like the best option to make them as efficient and capable as possible.
Vanguard Exteriors – They have been making the exterior appriopriate and inline with the rest of the design of the ship, they showed off it’s tracked and wheeled landing gear and we will see more of the rework in the near future.
Player Feedback
The have an entire reporting process dedicated to player feedback.
They take info that players give them about parts of the game and then relay that to developers so that it can be easily actioned. They monitor feedback threads, looking for common topics, comments/suggestions that players agree on. This method is a quick baseline, they also support this with in game analytics and player surveys.
This allows them to take a much more in depth look at ship and weapon balance.
They do this all the time BUT it’s especially active during PTU phases & after a major quarterly release.
Banu Defender
The Staple Primary Fighter of the Banu Race.
Quick, Nimble, Agile & Deadly.
It’s mass produced and sold to the other races in the galaxy.
The Defender is the first Banu Ship released.
The Interior is an entirely new pipeline, organics, flowing shapes.
All the materials, art and shape language had to all be done from scratch.
The future Banu Ships their, Tilesets, materials, color palette and shapes are all based on the Defender & the next Banu ship will be able to much more easily then follow that.
The fact that the materials of the ship are “Alien” allows for a lot more differences than we have had with other ships, they are still dialing it in and changing up parts.
PTU Update
There are some additional fixes being test on the PTU at the moment with a 3.5.0z combining a few pieces:
- Bounty mission markers should now consistently display.
- Items should no longer occasionally get stuck to a player’s feet.
- Fixed a crash associated with mining.
- Additional memory scaling to avoid corruption crash associated with mining.
Hopefully they will iron out a load of the known issues for a hotfix or 3.5.1 LIVE patch in the very near future BUT this seems to have fixed the issues with mining with the Prospect and common crashes with that.
If they can improve performance on near full servers AND AI jitter then I will be very happy!