Star Citizen Monthly Report Exploration Begins!

Star Citizen has had a large update to their roadmap – Adding downstream and new feature teams to their progress tracker declaring it now to be V1.0.

A huge amount of what the work these new teams that have been added to the roadmap is as you might expect these teams work on features we already see on the roadmap… However let me give you some highlights of what’s new and being worked on over the next year (please be aware that these are not confirmed to be in the next proximate patch or anything AND things could very easily change or require more work beyond what’s listed)…

Vending Machines have work that completes at the end of April… tho it’s just the mocap for it.

Xian Facial Rigging (currently being worked on).

Gen12 Renderer T1 has work that wraps up in June, this will phase out DX11 for Vulkan and other improvements. Also there are improved options menus that are being worked on.

Work on Salvage has started and should be done before it’s 3.15 release.

Orison V1 & Crusader are making progress and look to wrap up between now & mid June.

There appears to be a big starmap, map & radar system rework potentially adding a minimap/local area map too that looks to finish work towards the end of June.

Capacitors for Weapons, Thrusters, Shields ect… are all being worked on this has you making more energy allocation based decisions on your ship that matter much more some of that is wrapping up June.

We might see the Asset Manager soon as work on it wraps up in June this will allow us to track out ships and gear, important when we have local inventory.

Creature Rigging Pipeline starts June.

Firesprite are making some updates to the AC Broken Moon and Dying Star Maps for the start of July.

They are going to be working on a roaming Illegal Goods Dealer that brokers less legal items.

They are starting work on Cybernetics Concepts as part of the Death of a Spaceman Mechanics.

Work on Jump Points allowing us to travel to new systems looks to complete work mid September and Jump Modules are being worked on too.

Current work on Ship to ship refueling completes early September. This feature allowing you to refuel other ships and get paid, the assumption there is the Starfarer will be able to fill it’s tanks at stations for this purpose.

Loot Generation to help support local inventory and deeper gameplay wraps up mid May and then they are expanding that with more types of containers and ways to break into them with plans to complete work on that September.

The Hull C… looks like it might be ready mid October.

Currently listed work for Pyro looks to complete mid December this includes initial mission setup as well.

Lots of Hospitals appear to getting work throughout the year

New Babbage & Orison which look like they are getting work finished on their first implementations now but also they are working on Area 18 & Lorville as well as some future plans for Levski (which is a different Star System).

Also their staff Doctors, patients and Nurses are also getting work now.

There was some hugely important features and gameplay being completed by the Gameplay Feature Teams that’s all wrapping up towards the end of the year it seems:

Environmental Gameplay – New activities that are focused on gameplay in the environment. Expanding interactions with objects placed around locations and new dangers in the environment, both natural and human made.

Long Distance Probing allowing players to launch quantum-traveling probes that can detect signatures at extreme ranges far beyond the reach of ship scanners. The signatures can ultimately be used to identify point-of-interest and plan quantum travel. THIS IS EXPLORATION GAMEPLAY and well science… and lots of other gameplay is connected to this… mining, salvage…

Resource Management – This system will handle resources for stations, settlements, cities, and all other locations. It will also unlock Engineering Station gameplay for ships, letting players manage power, CPU, fuel, shields, coolant, etc. this is all part of physical components but allows for much more in depth battles, damage control and balance!

Art on the Space Whale and a Space Whale Mascot Suit are being worked on.

Tech Debt is something that is given time in the Roadmap.

Cloud Imperium have said, there are some new priorities for the PU Gameplay Team

Selling – This feature deals with the ability to sell items back to the shops. Players will have the ability to sell items from their local inventory to the shop using our Building Blocks Tech. This will also support a generalized loot system that will fill lockers and enemy’s backpacks with a random assortment of items that can be looted and then taken back to shops to sell for money.

Persistent Hangars – Work that grants players the ability to have their own Persistent Hangars. This will also bring changes to the Cargo gameplay loop by allowing players to pack their grids manually.

Persistent Habs – Work that grants players the ability to have their own Persistent Habs

For useability of the Roadmap – You can now filter the Progress Tracker by team OR by deliverable (feature) as well as sort alphabetically or by time they should start work, what disciplines are assigned ect… AND there is now a search function… If a feature is also on the release view you can see it linked to there.

CI are now also planning to consistently show around 4 quarters out development wise on the release view AND plan to update the roadmap accordingly a month or 2 after a major patch has been released. This should mean we are not in a position where we just have the end of year patch on the schedule and no indicator of what’s coming after. We should see the Q1 2022 patch added at the end of May.

It’s not all good news & new stuff… Due to rescheduling and a priority check there are various features that have been temporarily removed the progress tracker at this time.

The Physics Team’s – Physical QY Movement, PhysArea Refactoring and Large Object Buoyancy for Water.

The Mission Feature Team’s – GrimHex Races, Prisons V3, Dynamic Population & Bounty Hunting V2.

The US PU Gameplay Feature Teams Mission Manager App, Org Perks & Benefits & the Notification System.

On a side note the Dev Tools Team has been split into Tools and Editor Teams both separate on the tracker.

They have confirmed that Spawn Closets have moved to a 3.13.x patch along with Ship to Station Docking, the Tumbril Nova and Hercules C2/M2.

The Roadmap Round up that CI put out every 2 weeks is likely going to be quite short/brief mostly going forward as it’s intended to highlight when something major has changes or there is a schedule change for a patch feature.

I do wish that CI would understand that a more fleshed out talk about features and development progress in the Roadmap Round up would go a long way.

However the new roadmap and it’s closer to real time updates are a great amount of information to give, even if still a little hard to read.

And that’s it for a highlight of the new roadmap and the features that CI are planning on working on this year. There is a lot of solid tangible information there.