Star Citizen Banu Defender, 890 Jump & Environment Updates

Welcome to some more Star Citizen with some previews of the 890 Jump, work to the Defender and early Harvesting Fruit / Farming type stuff as well as info on the Star Citizen Network Change to Server Authoritative, an early look at microTech & more info on Subsystem Targeting this is a Summary of Inside Star Citizen: 890 Reasons.

The 890 Jump is in it’s final art phase, adding the final lighting, textures and finishing it up.

There are loads of toilets, a massive bar area, service lift.

There is relaxing lighting, the communal areas are massive with lots of seating.

There’s a swimming pool, dining area, board/meeting room.

It’s a true luxury party and organization ship.

They have been working on materials for the Banu Defender, we got to see the untextured exterior and potential textures being looked at. It looks like the arms of ship might be able to move for landing / take off. The ship looks like a bug lobster with a bit of gorilla thrown in.

They have been working on Clustered Harvestables, they showed Space Fruit that looks like it appears on Hurston. It’s just some test assets, but the tech allows for the spawning of procedural groups of plants, mineables or other harvestables. They were picking Oranges or space fruit or something… it was cool.

Environments have been working on microTech’s shared resources – the hightech common elements set is what they’ve been focusing on and they showed some work in progress on a microTech transit area.

There is a hologram helmet they are making for subflair for Q3 2019.

This is part of their rework of the Subscriber System with what looks like more unique interesting flair amongst other things. There was a centurion style helmet they showed off too, both of these will be wearable.

Subsystem Targeting

They’ve been setting up subsystem targeting, each thruster has health and a collusion mesh to be able to show and dictate damage to the item.

Some ships have received light modeling work to allow for the fitting more appropriate positioning of thrusters.

Damage can transfer from one item to nearby items it seems.

Damage will be shown on the items, the main engine have more vfx for damage states.

They will have damage going through the hull of a ship and through other components to deal damage to whatever is hit.

Damaging an item will degrade it’s performance until it’s no longer functional at all.

Client to Server Actor Rework

The Client to Server Rework is the first step, they want to deal with lag better, with better prediction and server optimization. At the moment the game is full client authoritative, meaning your inputs are worked on on your PC and sent to the server, what you do is what’s happening BUT this has the server then have to correct later and has people seen jittering around.

They are changing to server authoritative, meaning that players should look good on the server, if you have a bad connection you are the one that is jittery BUT everyone else will look good bad connection or not.

The Server to Client Rework will further improve their networking taking a quarter of a second of animation/server lag into just a frame or 2.

This should be a much better experience for everyone playing.

Other News

In Regard to a when and if a 3.5.1 would be out soon CIG Community Manager Zyloh said

“Hey everyone, We absolutely still plan on releasing a 3.5.1 patch and are actively working on it. While I don’t have an ETA right now – hang in there – we’ll have more information very soon!”

In other news it appears there has been a shuffle with some people at CIG getting promoted / changing job titles. Brian Chambers for example is now Vice President of Development for CIG that is a massive boon to the company IMO, looks like he will still be working out of the Frankfurt Studio.

The Star Citizen Monthly Report is out and I’ll get a summary of that up shortly, hopefully the SQ42 Newsletter Report will follow on in a few hours.

I would like to draw attention to a video by Morphologis Star Citizen – What’s taking so long? That looks at the development timeline of star citizen, it’s very well researched and reasoned and is kind of a a response to the Forbes Article that was out the other week, I recommend you check it out and his Channel, he does great Star Citizen Content.