Star Citizen Insider – Caves 3.7 & Lawsuit Update
Welcome to Star Citizen Insider today looking at Caves from the Official Show Inside Star Citizen What Lies Beneath in addition to that we are look at new Sub Perk Helmets, Sales, an update to the Crytek vs CIG Lawsuit & a hint that we might see the RSI Mantis soon.
Let’s start with a Inside Star Citizen Summary What Lies Beneath that focused entirely on Caves:
Caves have had all of their assets & building blocks completed for the initial 3.7 launch. Though they plan to expand these out a lot more in the future. This will see the “most nessecary” elements for caves come together.
They are able to generate full procedural caves to their standards and needs now.
This uses some of the same tech as the procedural truck stops with the changes being that they use cave assets, have an entrance and are bound to some rules about where they can be placed to conform to terrain. It sounds like they actually place the enterance for the cave then generate it from that point, in fact they said the used the procedural placement tool that they use for outposts, so caves are the coming together of a lot of different other tech pieces.
The new organic shader is used to make geological assets & rocks look a lot better.
Plant roots, moss and other visual elements are used to break up the palette and texture of caves. Moss or lycan and lighting is used to help navigate players through a cave. They don’t want players to get completely lost.
Caves will be pretty dark BUT not pitch black and obviously you have a flashlight too, though currently the flash light is too powerful and washes away a lot of effects, they are looking at something to improve this for the flashlight currently.
You’ll see glow worms for lights deeper down in caves and these look amazing BUT there is also man made lighting, some caves might have been used as storage or bases or are now abandoned camps. There are opportunities for loot, to find dead npcs and interesting exploration.
They have uncharted and charted caves (and a secret variant).
Caves can be very large and quite labyrinth like, small tight spaces that you need to crawl under, areas you need to climb and massive caverns with open spaces all juxtaposed together.
Harvestables and Mineables are scattered around at appropriate spawning points in caves giving players things to discover, mine and do in caves.
They are looking at having denser more valuable minerals deeper into caves.
In the future they want massive sink holes that ships can land in as well as huge entrances that vehicles can drive into.
AI will be added to the caves when ready, in fact they have areas prepared for them already.
Caves have an appropriately atmospheric sound scape, a little bit creepy, water drips, white noise/water/wind, rocks falling. There is echo/reverb of other sounds here too.
They will be adding mission givers and npcs to the caves in the future.
There are some New Sub Perks – A series of Centurian styled helmets are the RSI sub items this month 3 different pairs of colors. For standard subs cobalt and ghost white, Imperator get those and steel / wildfire colors as well. There is also a pair that you can only purchase if you are a sub hazard and burnt orange. I can’t tell if this is a coincidence that the largest org in the game Test are likely to want to purchase this or if it was a marketing decision.
At the moment the helmet give no additional protection beyond preventing you suffocating.
I suspect that it will be heavy armor in the future though.
You can also pick up a Tumbril Cyclone with 12 months Insurance & a selection of flair items until the 16th.
Subs also have access to fly the masters of flight series of loadout variants Gladius Valiant, the Sabre Comet, the Hornet Wildfire and the Avenger Titan Renegade to fly all September.
There were a couple of interesting things in a Concierge Newsletter that came out too.
Apparently with the 890 Sale Concierge backers have almost doubled, that backers that have $1000 or more of pledges on their account… that’s a lot! At some point I hope CIG will furnish me with some of their monetization data.
The more interesting thing is that there was a concept picture sneak peek of what is supposed to be RSI headquarters or at least the area it’s in on Earth.
This has the tagline “Our eyes and ears on Earth have been dropping hints that something new is coming from RSI. As usual, the moment we have more details, you will too.”
This is expected to be the RSI Mantis… which may well be released as the next concept ship now rather than at CitizenCon that was originally expected.
The Mantis is expected to be a heavy fighter & potentially it’s going to be flight ready.
I’d actually expect this to go on sale around when the Nautilus finishes it’s concept sale.
There was a small update to the Crytek v CIG Lawsuit, there is a request for the “trial” to be continued from March 24, 2020 to June 16, 2020 basically giving 3 months more time, it appears to be a joint filing so is being requested by both sides so that they can adequately do through the discovery phase as the current schedule “does not give the parties enough time to complete fact and expert discovery, file dispositive motions, and prepare this case for trial.“
“Moreover, the remaining claims in this case require extensive computer code review that involves both non-expert and expert discovery.“
Also “Following the Settlement Conference, the parties have worked cooperatively and in good faith to narrow the issues in this case and to streamline discovery.”
IANAL but it appears that Crytek have an incredibly weak case now with as far as I am aware just complaints that Bugsmasher a CIG devshow, showed off code that they shouldn’t and that Squadron 42 / Star Citizen are still using CryEngine not licensed by Amazon, and that Squadron 42 development using the CryEngine wasn’t part of their original contract.
As Crytek sold their engine to Amazon which became Lumberyard and CIG are now using that… it doesn’t leave much room for Crytek to make a case. We will have to wait and see.