Star Citizen Alpha 3.6 | Ship Rentals, 890 Jump & Banu Defender Delayed
Hello & Welcome to some more Star Citizen, we learnt that some features from 3.6 Alpha are slipping to 3.7 or a 3.6.x patch as well as how other features will work in the upcoming 3.6 Alpha. Chris Roberts and some key members of CIG talked in an informative fashion about that Alpha.
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The Law System is a foundation for future criminal and law gameplay BUT 3.6 is the first iteration of this and will continue iterating for the next few quarters.
The will be a greater range of “defined” laws, they have 19 laws planned from murder, to possition of stolen goods. You will be unable to sell stolen goods to normal vendors, you’ll have to go to salvage yards or sell them to fences.
They are working out exactly where these areas to offload these goods are at the moment, they are considering 1 – 2 areas per planetary area, so they won’t be overly common, there might be emergent gameplay in these areas. Also Law Enforcers will have an idea of criminal trade routes.
Prices items sell for will be a fraction of anything you could get for legitimately acquired goods.
If you are discovered with goods you’ll have a choice to lose the goods and pay a fine OR Fight OR Run. Security may bring in reinforcements, interdiction and this could go South very quickly.
They want to add prisons in the next couple of quarters or so, once they have arrested a player they put them in one of those areas.
Different crimes will have different punishments and responses.
There will be jurisdictions that define the area that force security will come after you and what constitutes a crime within that area.
Ships -The Merlin is being updated to the new standard, The P72 Archimedes is a Luxury Variant of that.
The Vanguard got a larger rework than was originally intended with only 10% of the original interior and 20% of the exterior, they brought it back to the original vision / concept of the ship.
There are various ships and vehicles in the pipeline that are not listed some of which might appear in the game as straight to playable in a patch as a surprise & are moving towards trying to get more ships straight to playable.
Their vehicle team is a decent size but they are recruiting more people to help in the production of ships.
FOIP & VOIP Improvements in 3.6 will allow you to hail other ships and chat to them on comms and Screens. You’ll have seperate channels to talk to squad mates. They have fixed a load of bugs and hope to see VOIP & FOIP widely used in 3.6.
You’ll be able to communicate with players that you have requested or responded to a Service beacon of.
Further to that general multicrew and group gameplay is being improved but this won’t make 3.6
They have brought back acceleration control for the flight model giving you precision to the % scale of thurst you can use so you can adjust it for my fiddly maneuver and have softer landings. There is the new VTOL / Hover mode as well.
Shield replacement tech will now allow for different shield generators to be used on ships that can use more than one & rather than just adding their stats together they will now have notable behaviors. This I believe is in addition to the signed distance fields of Shields hugging the ship.
The Banu Defender is moving to Alpha 3.7, they attempted to apply their current pipeline to it and this just didn’t work as intended as it’s very different from other ships they have made.
Some things are held back as they aren’t ready, some things released as they need to iterate or need feedback on, the Banu Defender just isn’t ready yet. They kept hitting roadblocks.
The 890 Jump is also unfortunately slipping too, it just needs a bit more time as well it’s around 199m long. It sounds like it might be for a 3.6.x patch though rather than for 3.7.
In fact I just read from Zyloh -:
“To be clear, the 890 Jump is not moving to 3.7. It will come in a 3.6.X patch.”
Zyloh went on to say -:
“Our goal is to have ship rentals in a 3.6.X patch. However, in today’s Roadmap update you will see a new card added for the 3.6 release titled Ship Purchasing Kiosk.
Currently in game, you can visit a showroom at Lorville or Area18 and purchase a handful of ships that are on display, which is great, but doesn’t offer a whole lot of choices – this new Kiosk functionality provides designated kiosks that offer the ability to purchase a wide variety of vehicles/ships. The inventory available will differ based on location, but covers a majority of flyable ships.”
They added Ship Loadout Persistence to 3.5.1 as it was so requested, however the future of the mechanic will look at the value of the ship and they will have insurance costs, insurance might cover ships upto a certain value & there may be deductables to pay or longer times to wait alternatively you can pay for better insurance to gaurantee that the full loadout is covered if you reclaim.
Cargo insurance will also be a thing, you’ll be able to choose to cover your load at an extra fee.
They are working on SSOCS, SM & True Persistence.
Server Side OCS and True or Full Persistence are needed to come together. The server needs to know the state of items it puts in standby.
Around about this point in time they say they can stop resetting the databases with every major patch (this does not 100% stop resets they may need to do in the future tho in my opinion) In the mean time Rentals will allow you to try out ships in game!
Server meshing both static and the end game dynamic server meshing requires SSOC and True Persistence. It’s a big task though.
Currently the larger they make a Star System the less density of players there are due to server caps, with SM they should be able to open up to potentially 1000s to start with.