Star Citizen Prowler & Vulkan Updates

Welcome to some more Star Citizen Insider looking at the Esperia Prowler coming in Alpha 3.8, How Star Citizen Tools Help Build the Game & New Glasses and Facewear RSI Subscriber Updates.

The Prowler is the first ship we will have in game that is based on the Tevarin.

It will help define any further Tevarin Ships, Arcitechure and Style going forward too.

The Prowler is a stealthy Space APC that allows the ship to have it’s doors open and not depressirue by using special air shields, this means the ship can rapidly deploy troops in EVA or in a depressurised environment.

Even tho the ship has this airshield tech, it still has the ability to close and seal it’s doors.

The Pilot and co-pilot are separated into 2 cabins one above the other.

The room leading from the upper cockpit is used for components, so you will have very easy access to them, they plan to hide the components behind and sliding wall it sounds like.

The cockpits are a sealed compartment separate to this room tho.

They want the different alien ships to have different styles and in game looks to their inputs, for the Tevarin they have a large railed joystick/controller that controls most of the ships operations.

They plan to have animations when you move this to give you more of a feeling that it’s very much an alien control device. Turn and the entire stack will rotate and you’ll have this cascading set of animations.

The Interior of the prowler looks like it’s been inspired by a 3d printer and getting lightweight effective support and the lowest possible use of materials.

They have lots of upside down triangular and tree shapes.

The room leading from the lower cockpit leads to a troop and armory area.

There is a sealed door with ladder leading to the exterior.

The Troop section has a lot of room for equipment and weapons as well as 4 passengers.

Going toward the rear of the ship and connected to the little armory there is a large jump room where most of it’s troops can be seated (I believe 12) and they have air shielded exit doors and rear ramp, again these exits should be able to fully seal too. I believe the plan is still for the Prowler to carry 16 passengers plus the 2 pilots.

After they have finished building the rear of the ship they will marry the exterior work together, make a set of materials unique for the Tevarin and then apply that to the ship.

It can be a long process and there is still much to do, lighting also need to be nailed down. I would also expect to see a unique Quantum Travel Effect at some point too as each of the aliens is supposed to have one.

Tools – Martin Senior Lead Tools Programmer talked about the Tools of Star Citizen… I have drunk heavily with this man on occasion up in Manchester and he is brother of Derek Senior who is the Programming Director there.

The tools they develop for Star Citizen are primarily used by devs to help build out and support work for the game.

They support and help build tools for the editor the in engine side building out gameplay area and such. There are general tools too for managing workflow and business process, crash reporters or copy build the system they use to grab the latest game builds from their main server.

Data Forge – Everything you see in game has a large amount of data attached to it, data forge has master and variable records to allow for object and asset data to be change and edited easily.

They are hoping to release a new tool this quarter StarWords, it’s there to help manage all the text in game. It is replacing their web based 3rd party previous solution.

It will provide a much richer UI and is obviously very useful as they move towards dynamic missions. It also acts as a very useful database of previous missions, descriptions and can be easily updated with new data, they will be linking it to the editor tools so they can see changes at real time too.

Automated testing is also part of what Tools handle – They produce 20 builds every day, these go through a suite of automated tests to check stability. This is particular important for the Vulkan work they are CURRENTLY doing as it’s a big change for the graphics and renderer.

They also use a pixel heat map to see differences when testing this to see if there are any visual issues, they have various testing levels too, so they can quickly see changes that make when integrating vulkan and optimizing the game there can be some manual labour BUT they run all of this through an automated set of tests which saves a lot of time and then can compare the changes.

As these builds and changes are incrementally done, they also have all of the previous historical changes and data here too.

For RSI Subscribers – The Anvil Terrapin is available to fly for free for the month of November.

Flair this month is various sets of cosmetic eyewear / glasses.

Centurion Subs get the Urban Collection of 3 pairs of glasses.

Imperators get that plus the Adventurer Collection of another 3 pairs of different glasses.

Subbing by the 18th of Nov will net you the appropriate rewards, though they are also going to be added to the sub store, so you can purchase these or any of the other sub flair at anytime WHEN YOU ARE A SUB.