Star Citizen 3.6 – PTU Waves & Inside SC Summary
Welcome to some more Star Citizen Alpha 3.6 is currently out to evocati on the PTU but this could go to 1st wave PTU during the weekend potentially so we are focusing on news looking at 3.6 Features. The Bering S38 Pistol, Lumin 5 SMG, MaxOx Neutron Repeaters, Transit Updates, Persistent Ship Damage & Debris, the Merlin P-52 Rework & Archimedes P-72 Snubcraft, how the PTU works as well as a new ship package for concierge. This is a break down of the latest Inside Star Citizen & the Concierge Newsletter.
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Inside Star Citizen: The PTU and You
The Bering S38 is the new ballistic pistol in 3.6
It’s a middle ground between the Coda Revolver High Damage and Lower Damage L86, standard pistol.
It’s accurate from the hip and very accurate mid range ADS.
Medium Damage, Medium Rate of Fire & looks to have a mag size of 15.
The Lumin 5 SMG is a burst fire laser weapon also in 3.6
It’s a shorter version of the typical K&W style.
It fires in long bursts of 5 rounds. Though you can hold the trigger to continue firing successive bursts.
It has 45 round magazines.
The gun is pretty accurate short range BUT does kick up a lot and this will affect mid – long range use. It benefits from controlled bursts and weapon control.
They are adding trains & public transit on looping tracks / paths so that they are still physicallized but you don’t have to constantly wait to get a train, you’ll see them much more often. Devs can set the interval that they want trains to arrive at stations and then the system will put the correct amount of trains or buses in that route.
Ship damage & it’s visuals are now persistent even to debris and sections of destroyed ships. You can write your name in the hull of a ship or debris with weapons fire.
This debris should persist for a long time as well.
The New Max OX NN Neutron Repeater was shown off with it’s first pass VFX.
The weapon’s rear lighting changes color directly based on it’s heat level.
They have been working on tinted impact effects.
Particles will inherit the color or tint of the surface they are produced from.
It’s early stages and the moment, the blocks are to just show where the effect is supposed to be generated and the color it inherits.
This will really add to immersion and a good looking moon or planet, whether you are on foot, ship or vehicle.
They have decoupled lights to allow for better looking lighting pretty much everywhere.
They Merlin rework and Archimedes are both in 3.6.
The Merlin has had materials, animations, wear, cockpit (as well as it’s lighting) and landing gear updates. They have the HUD showing better too.
The Archimedes has racing thrusters and clean luxury paint job an additional intake to help with cooling. It has warmer lighting as well as winglets on it’s wings to help with maneuverability.
In the Newsletter – Concierge the only thing relevant of note was an addition of a Concierge
Scoundrel Pack for $695. Which contains a Caterpillar, Mercury Star Runner, Cutlass Black, Anvil Hawk, Dragonfly and Ranger CV as well as a SC & Squadron Gamepackage, LTI & the Industrial Hangar.
Concierge are the subset of backers that have spent $1000 or more on their account & get some perks in this context they have access to some (expensive) ship packages ranging from the Drake Loot and Scoot Deluxe Package for $155 to the mighty Legatus Pack for $27k.
There was a bit of a re-iteration of exactly what the PTU and phases for Star Citizen tests are:
The PTU is the Public Test Universe where volunteer players test the latest builds of Star Citizen before they go live to help fix bugs, major issues, some balance & help rapidly evolve a mechanic’s implementation.
They can iterate & experiement with a much more focused test group than the live server would allow.
There are several waves, Evocati get it first and are invited by CIG to help test the rawest of patches, they are basically a middle ground between QA staff and voulnteers and are NDA’d. Then it’s goes out to more waves of players based on activity in PTUs and issue council reports (the system where players report and prioritize bugs). They do also give concierge and RSI subs the perk of being in the 1st wave of testers after evocati.
They collect survey info and feedback from player experiences and issues during the PTU and that data gets written up and put into the development pipeline for fixing, improving, added to the back log or immediately actioned.
Typically when the most aggressive bugs are squashed they the open the PTU to wave 1, more to test server load and player concurrency more than anything else.
That then expands to wave 2 & eventually everyone else.
They continue to action feedback through the PTU and LIVE builds.
They recently added an additional 1500 backers to evocati. They are still adding more members again it’s based on activity playing the PTUs and general engagement with the issue council.
In some other news Asetek who make some amazing PC Cooling Solutions reached out to me and are sending us some custom BoredGamer coolers and I believe some stuff for some giveaways in the near future for my subscribers. More on that soon, I am also in the process of planning some Star Citizen Focused PC builds.