Star Citizen June 2020 Roundup
Welcome to a Star Citizen June 2020 Roundup looking at a summary & highlights of what happened during the month.
June looks to have been an extremely good month raising around $8 million in crowdfunding. This is in part due to hype being carried over from the end of Fleet Week (as the last couple of days of the Drake DefenseCon were at the start of June) and impending new Major patch release with 3.10 as well as Alien Week which saw a selection of alien ships go on sale including the Banu Merchantman which is highly popular.
Star Citizen hit $300 million on it’s funding tracker on the website BUT as I mentioned in a video their total funding is much more likely to be around $425 million with private investment, subscribers and more that’s not shown on that tracker. It’s a huge amount of money.
Alien week also saw a various festivities, community competitions, lore posts and a Message from the “Banu” that the community went to translating and was pretty accurate with when the message was revealed, it was just a Happy First Contact Day message and advice on how to sell things to humans as part of alien week BUT I feel it may of been a test for potential future reveals and maybe even in game uses of Alien Languages.
Subscribers saw access to the Carrack and got some Skinned Multi-Tools as flare rewards.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.10 went to Evocati BUT has yet to progress to 1st Wave PTU. There was a big focus on showcasing and discussion of 3.10s features thru June tho.
The Trading App that’s coming with 3.10 was one of the most exciting things to be shown off this month. Allowing you to send aUEC OR merits to other players even if they are offline.
We saw lots on the Lightning bolt co electron weapons with the sniper and pistol. They use a new damage type that can deal a bit of an AOE and pulses when you hit a target that’s been recently hit with one already.
We saw some Body Dragging & AI Improvements, there was a Surprize Gladius External Weapons Rack it looks like the Gladius will also be first in line for some Future UI Updates that they are currently working on.
Landings at Lorville and Area 18 now have landing corridors to guide you.
I’d say the Lion Share of information shared from CI this month about Star Citizen has been about changes to the Flight & Combat Model:
Atmospheric Flight has seen major changes with Aerodynamics and Thruster Efficiency seeing ships heavier in atmosphere and fly a bit more realistically a bit more like plane.
Lighter craft will get blown around in the wind and storms.
Jerk was added to make thrusters not instantly react as well so ships in space and atmo will feel more weighty too.
For Combat going about SCM speed will see gimbals slower and targeting & missile locks take longer.
They have worked on improvements for ESP, PiPs and aiming for Fixed Weapons nudging projectiles slightly towards a target you are aiming at.
Turrets are more stable and should be easier to hit with these improvements as well.
Targeting someone will tell them they are being targeted and you can pin and cycle targets and these targets are shared with others on your ship.
We’ve seen updates to POI and derelitics which will be populating the world much better in 3.10 as well.
There were some location updates for 3.10 shown off as well this has seen GrimHex having a much more in depth landing zone, more updates to new babbage with new hangars and shops with the factory line, lots of new items to buy etc…
Beyond 3.10 tho we have seen various work on Pyro 1 & 2 throughout the month with it looking like the background of Pyro 2 getting changed somewhat to support something more interesting and less of an empty husk.
We have even seen work on some giant apex predators that will be coming at some point, the Pyro Crabs which are massive cthulhu-esque creatures as well as a creature that will be appearing on new babbage which is more of a yeti. The first large animal we are likely to see in game tho is the Space Cow.
We also saw a lot of work ongoing with Crusader, it’s landing zone orison.
And both cargo and refinery decks have been shown off in there white/greybox phases as they build out these important facilities and associated gameplay for space stations allowing you to refine ore and have an area for mining gameplay as well as a place for all things cargo related.
June saw further testing of Theatres of War with another testing weekend and also an AMA. While Theatres is not yet ready for a wider test group we will see some more testing after 3.10 has gone live. There has been a lot of optimization and feedback based updates done to the gamemode apparently, with some of the major issues being client performance & balance potentially being addressed.
We saw Vanduul Ship Updates that will be coming from SQ42 to the PU at somepoint.
The Scythe has been balanced out visually and looks magnitudes better imo and the Glaive rather than being a symmetrical scythe is very much it’s own ship now. The Vanduul Ships have different cockpits from the replica/captured versions that will be in players hands when updated.
CI re-affirmed their plans for PvP gameplay which is that some star systems will be more secure than others and PvP will be unlikely and very hard to do in some areas BUT there is going to still be some potential for it.
There are security forces and laws to prevent RDM and griefing.
Other areas like Pyro are much more dangerous and like the wild west with no laws or security protections for players.
Players that focus more on PvP will have more missions focused towards that as they build more “rep” in those areas.
We saw a dev post with a huge list of updates that the Star Engine has over the Lumberyard that have been built by CIG over the years for their games.
And we know that CI have continued to work on their Gen12 renderer solution and vulkan integration.
They have been getting backend services and redundancies in place during June for 3.10 and future patches so that we don’t have the same sort of accessibility issues that 3.9s branch had with login servers going down and constant degraded performance of the servers/backend.
The iCache has been making progress. We should here more about this more very soon.
There has been a lot shown off an touted about updates coming to UI, with the new building blocks system CI have been able to deal with a long term bottleneck and are able to do a lot more in forms of gameplay, accessibility to systems and UI interactions for various things including making the ship experience better.
A Gridbased inventory System is being worked on as a step towards physical inventory.
OTHER BITS
We know they are prototyping fires on ships and stations, we have seen some early tests that make use of props and the environment to fuel them.
We have seen SDF tech used to create more visually appealing atmospheric entries.
They told us the 100 series of Luxury Origin Starter ships the 100i, 125a and 135c are planned for 3.11.
Work continues on both the Mercury Star Runner and Hercules Star Lifter both ships are currently expected this year.
It wasn’t all progress tho… there were also some delays and bits we are waiting on xD
We did see elevator panel UI updates, Law System v2: Surrender & the Mission Giver Eddie Parr slip from 3.10 with the former 2 being pushed to 3.11 and Eddie yet to be confirmed.
Most disappointingly this month Docking Slipped from 3.11 and we don’t have a confirmation yet of when the feature will be added, this combined ship to ship and ship to station docking.
CI did als say they were working on ship/vehicle in ship spawning, that feature has yet to appear on the Roadmap as well.
We are still waiting on a Squadron 42 Update Video from CI, that they said will be released as soon as it’s ready. Though not totally a blackout as we have the monthly reports for Squadron, the Roadmap updates have been discontinued and we are waiting on CI’s new way of conveying more Squadron Development update info to us still.
I’ll put Leaks that I can talk about at the end of videos so people can just avoid them here if they want. We heard about a GreyCat ROC Mining Buggy which may be released with 3.10 LIVE, also SCLeaks also talked about a potential RSI Odin Gunboat in the future too.
And that’s it for a quick rundown of June 2020.