Star Citizen TLDR The Idris Cometh 3.12
Welcome to some more Star Citizen TLDR we have a lot of updates for 3.12 Features, Capital Ships Turning Up, Chris Roberts talked about PermaDeath and Loss in Star Citizen with updates to Death of a Spaceman and we quickly summarize the news from the last week of October 2020.
There are various new Features for Alpha 3.12 that have been added to the Roadmap, mostly related to the improvement of Stanton’s security. With the release of Alpha 3.12, a Navy Idris will now be the final line of defense at Space Stations. Should criminals with a high enough combined CrimeStat enter the Armistice Zone, a Navy Idris will be called to deal with them. There are a various associated features:
- Capital Ship Combat Behavior Improvements, focused on maneuvering, targeting, and weapon. This involves ensuring that the Ship has full awareness of its loadout, available turrets, and the size/number of combatants it is facing. The Pilot will react and position the ship accordingly to a given combat scenario.
- Capital Ships, Turrets, and Torpedoes VFX/SFX Improvements to destruction deathmasks, turret firing, missile trails and torpedo visual and sound effects, to enhance the look and feel of combat against and destruction of capital ships.
- AI Fire Mode Usage and Targeting Priorities that allows ship AI to charge weapons and use several fire modes and rates of fire effectively against the most appropriate target based on the weapon and turret they are using.
- AI Intercepting Torpedoes making the torpedo gameplay more challenging and realistic, and scoring hits more rewarding. Shooting down incoming torpedoes will help defend capital and gunships from bombers.
- AI Accuracy Convergence allowing for more believable accuracy that rewards players for taking evasive action.
- Counter Measures v1.1, will have the amount of deployed countermeasures playing more of an important role in the chance of spoofing missiles. Single countermeasures will be less effective, but players will have the ability to choose how many should be fired with each burst. Different missiles will have varying degrees of countermeasure resilience.
- Torpedo Attack, Counter-Balance, and Behavior with a rebalance of Size 9 Torpedoes. They are now much deadlier, with only a few direct hits required to bring down larger ships. This extra damage comes at the cost of speed, however, affording the opportunity for ships to counter-attack by destroying them.
Also now in 3.12 there is also the Mining UI Refactor, this was shown in the Inside Star Citizen Episode LAST Week (22nd October). This update adds a brand-new user interface for all mining-capable vehicles, which will provide the player with a clearer overview of what they are currently experiencing, including: Mining Consumables – What you have equipped, their current state, and their duration. Cargo – Your cargo pods now show their contents and update in real-time as you extract materials from mineable deposits. Volatile Cargo – The health and estimated time that the cargo will last in your cargo pods before collapsing, and volatile cargo itself is highlighted in the UI so that you can’t miss it when you collect it. Flight UI – The current flight and gimble settings your ship has active are visible at all times. This new interface is built entirely using the new BuildingBlocks system which will allow for quicker development, iteration, and testing of new features for the Mining System.
Law System v2: Surrender has been removed from 3.12… tho it’s not a huge loss at this stage, I suspect it will return in 2021 with some of the other bounty hunter and security updates that will be coming up.
Chris Roberts talked about mortality and medical gameplay in Calling All Devs – Death of a Spaceman, I’ll do a quick summary here BUT a much deeper dive with more context very soon.
The Death of a Spaceman gameplay has evolved a little since SC’s original concept BUT it’s a core pillar of the game, risk, reward and death.
They want the economy and value of ships & items to help be driven with their possible loss.
When you DIE DIE you’ll make a new character and you’ll get the assets of the previous one BUT there will be death taxes and these will be high enough that players WILL WANT to avoid them.
They are expanding out what happens when you take fatal damage.
Downed Characters can get field medic’d or otherwise revived where they fell. You’ll be able to use things like the medigun they’ve been working on to get a character back up.
If you don’t get picked up or take a lot more damage you’ll spawn back at a hospital, clinic or appropriate medical facility you are basically a clone and can go back to where you died and see your body. This is very similar to EvE Online where they are clones… HOWEVER your DNA gets less “stable” the more you are cloned.
If this happens a lot then you won’t be able to be cloned and you’ll have to make a new character.
They are going to be expanding out the Player Status System and Medical Gameplay you’ll see drugs like stims and for different effects, medipens are going to be a quick temp health boost to get you back on your feet rather than a proper heal, you’ll see more gameplay associated with the environment and status effecting your character.
You’ll be able to receive wounds that can get worse, light damage to a leg could become a broken bone and then a destroyed limb if you don’t treat it or take more damage.
Treatment for injuries will tie directly into the amount of damage you have taken.
Medical Care and Rescue are very much going to be their own gameplay loop.
We will start to see more of this medical gameplay coming in 2021, they are working on medical facilties & drugs currently.
These gameplay elements will continue to evolve and grow as they develop them and as CI get feedback. I actually quite like the idea of clones but then I used to play a lot of EvE online… in Star Citizen I’d like it if you didn’t have to make a new character if you didn’t want to MAYBE you could pay a lot of money for a new stable clone prime or something but you keep your “original” character… I now also see that you might have characters that have clearly been very injured a lot before BUT haven’t died at all… but they’d have a load of battle scars… that’s kind of cool!
Newsletter FINAL HOURS: Show us your scary best!
It’s Halloween & the Last chance to get the October Star Citizen Masks
This is the last chance to get into the MSR October Giveaway (tho we have another one for November). Also the MSR is in Polishing and should be in the Star Citizen Alpha 3.11 branch shortly (between now and the IAE).
The IAE is starting 20th November and running through December 2nd
The Sneak Peek is of the Refinery Deck coming with Alpha 3.12.
The Subscriber Jump Point Magazine looked at the Improvements to Law System & Space Station Defenses that came in 3.11, the Origin 100 series and the Eclipse BUT also teased the Next RSI Subscriber Flair appears to be Nerf Guns VERY COOL or at least silly.
Inside Star Citizen Ship UI that are getting overhauled with a huge amount of info now sensibly placed at a glance as well as looking very cool and the addition of an emissions gage and compass. They are working on the Aegis HUDs and MFDs atm.
Ship PipeSystem – Resource Management System as it’s now known, it’s still a long way out BUT it will have fuel being converted to power then that power feeding into systems, relays will sit between components providing more connections and systems to be connected around a ship with more redundancy or pathways. Though you might not want them all on at the same time as they also have a power and therefore fuel cost.
Battery components will store power and will be used if the system can’t get enough power from other sources.