Star Citizen – Ship Painting Soon Maybe?

Welcome to some Star Citizen today looking at Ship Customization, Shaders, the Future of Prisons and getting ready for fleet week BUT there is an IMPORTANT PSA I want to go through first!

I’ve seen a couple of backers reporting Phishing Scam Emails trying to get people to click on links after saying you’ve changed your RSI preferences, password or account details.

ALWAYS check an email thoroughly before clicking on any links AND really I would practice logging on to the website and checking your account settings there rather than clicking anything anyway… The internet is a dangerous place where lots of people want your data JUST BE CAREFUL AND IF YOU DO CLICK LINKS always check the link and where it goes BEFORE CLICKING! I also use uBlock as a Chrome extension and NordVPN as well as a hardware firewall on my router.

Let’s move onto a quick Summary of Inside Star Citizen Throwing Shade

CI have been building towards some Ship Customization, a lot of it is updates for their internal tools BUT they are going to be giving us updates on what we can expect from player customization in the next few days.

This will detail what we can & cannot do in the near term and longer term in regards to painting and customizing our ships! That sounds to me like we are going to have some bits we can do VERY SOON!

They talked about some new Shaders they have been building that allow for this. Shaders translate into colors and textures. Ships are pretty in Star Citizen and their shaders & materials are a big part of that.

There is a suite of new shaders the hard surface shader, where they are adding new colors, materials and features.

We are going to see wear and tear and more effects on ships and their color schemes.

Colors can shift based on angle even.

They are converting all the vehicles in game to use the hard surface shader and you’ll see more and more with each patch.

They have an asset library that allows them to merge, blend and reuse/purpose this work for whatever ship or vehicle they are working on.

Tint & Color Variants are very easy for them to do now. We actually saw this a lot in the 3.9 PTU… which may have been a bug or not intended to be shown at that stage, with lots of different colored ship skins.

There are 3 layers to this at the moment with primary, secondary and tertiary choices BUT ships have their own preset color areas. There don’t paint freehand or anything. They will create a faction like Crusader Security of 9 Tails Pirates and then save that as a tint color scheme to standardize those forces.

Prisons are getting updates in 3.9.1, 3.10 and even more in the future. The System is in it’s infancy and there is a lot more planned.

They want some prisons to be brutal with the potential of keeping you there for a while.

When prisons were added a huge number of players wanted to jump in and try them out and the escape routes got learnt quickly.

The existence of prisons changes the way players act and how they are dealt with if they get caught!

There will be missions that task you to go to prison for reasons… in the future. 3.9.1 will see bug fixes. Some crimes have been tweaked to have appropriate punishments. Also you shouldn’t get a crime stat for accidentally not stopping for security forces!.

For prisons as well as an escape route unintended path, that allowed you to skip a load of the caves. They are aware that speed runners might rip apart things like this as well.

3.10 – is going to have new ways to earn merits and things to spend them on. The Commissary Vending Machine will be updated to have an interface to purchase different items and will act as the first Vending Machines in game.

There will be Prison Jobs like repairing oxygen dispensers, first player to fix it gets a merit reward.

Beyond 3.10 they are looking at more missions to get players involved with prisons. Undercover missions for lawful players, smuggling, assassination…

There are new areas they are adding too, that are planned to be an extra step in escaping and I believe in making escapes a little more varied and dynamic.

You’ll see even more ways to earn merits too and little jobs. 

We did find out that Fleet Week & The Free Fly will be on the 22nd May to the 1st June.

It’s basically a IAE in Game Event & Big Ship Sale with some new additions showing ships that are in development too. Where you can see and try out a whole load of ships. The Free Fly will be open to all and will be the duration of the event.

And that’s it for today, if you do get any phishing emails report them to CI Customer Service!