This New Armor Is Amazing – Will 3.15 Release Today?
Welcome to the Star Citizen News, at time of recording we are keenly awaiting the release of Alpha 3.15 to LIVE which potentially could be any hour now… hopefully.
But while we wait we have a summary of the ISC looking at mining gadget and other content coming in 3.16 and beyond, CI are integrating Easy Anti-Cheat and what is holding 3.15 up in the PTU currently?
Inside Star Citizen: Sweet Gadget of Mine
Mining Gadgets are planned for Alpha 3.16 and they aim to help expand out the mining risk, reward by giving additional gameplay that help you mine if you choose to eva out and place a gadget on a mineable.
It also allows single players to mine more difficult rocks if they use these gadgets.
There are a variety of different gadgets that go through a range of risk/speed/difficulty.
This is dangerous as you are out of your ship.
But you attach the gadget to the rock and then have to select the correct resonance, basically matching the waveform. The activate it. These gadgets are destroyable and you can also choose to deactivate them too.
They are currently looking at mechanics for the StarFarer refining and getting it to be able to refine some of what the mole and prospector can mine. This will help “close” off that gameplay loop of this type of resource acquisition. This is going to be considered a gold standard for what other professions should contain and how in depth they may be.
Sprint Report
Brand Logos – The Final Pass was recently completed for the Mercenary Guild – They will be a way to legally operate as a hired gun in UEE space, providing missions and rep.
The Drake Vulture is coming online in 2022 and they are working through it’s greybox phase now.
There are various additions to the New Heads and textures to them. You’ll be able to customize your eyebrows too. They showed an Updated Miles Eckhart.
The Quronas Armor looks amazing (this is a Hurston security branded one). Nice professional and oppressive. That pipe will only appear if you are wearing the head and torso piece.
Also in this piece the player was able to run around Hurston with his weapon out… maybe the removal of greenzones as we know it are coming soon too?
There is some cool graffiti and murals that CI have been concepting. I love them even tho they are explorations of what they might have.
Continuing with the outlaw and pyro space stations, they’ve been concepting further externals for Space Stations. Some of these may even be used for different star systems.
There are some pretty cool ones there.
Confirmed 3.15.1 with the IAE
Vehicle Experience Team next week!
There was a reasonably important post from CI that I want to read:
Easy Anti-Cheat Coming in Alpha 3.15.1
“With the release Alpha 3.15.1 later this month, we’ll introduce the first phase of our Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) rollout for Star Citizen.
Easy Anti-Cheat is an anti-cheat service used by numerous popular games (many which you’ve probably played!), countering cheating and the use of unauthorized third party software in multiplayer PC games. You can find more info about Easy Anti-Cheat here: https://www.easy.ac
Preventing the use of potentially harmful software (including cheats) in our game remains one of our critical objectives for creating a fun and fair multiplayer experience for everyone to enjoy. As a result, you may encounter an error message that will either kick you from the game, or prevent the game from launching due to the detection of unauthorized changes in your game files.
We are aware that some players are using modded files to enhance their game experience, such as changes to the UI, localization/additional language support, and more. We want to give you an early heads-up that EAC will block most of these mods initially, which will result in you being unable to launch the game until the modded files are removed from your local download.
However, the passion and creativity of the Star Citizen community knows no bounds, and some of the ongoing projects out there are truly remarkable, especially on the localization front. While you may encounter these mods not working with 3.15.1, we are already exploring what a “Mod Approval Program” might look like, which could allow mods to be whitelisted after an extensive compatibility and security check from our side. We’re not quite ready to commit to this yet, but we’ve already reached out to some of the mod creators out there and are exploring options and will report back soon.
Lastly, it’s important to note that this is our first proper implementation of anti-cheat, which means there may be edge cases/issues, and the service will become more robust over time – we encourage you to share your feedback in our dedicated feedback thread, which we’ll publish when the anti-cheat goes live.”
I am quite critical of most anti-cheats as I hate them having access to my PC…, I feel they are invasive… yes we do need to be mindful of cheating and have preventions for it… EAC is probably an okish one, it should just be checking for modded files… and can have linux support… so I suppose we will have to see what this means for 3.15.1 once it’s released.
There was a Star Citizen Live Outer Space Interface where they talked about UI updates coming in over the next few patches. We should see more manufacturer based UIs for ships and they are still evolving.The Gladius will be the test ship for any UI updates. Once they have completed integrating the Operator Modes, Comms etc… they will then complete the Aegis HUD and move onto others.
We will have MFD updates and they will be persistent in the future.
You’ll have deeper targeting in the future too and they are looking at a landing radar.
They have done some work on the New Starmap it will incorporate both a radar and a larger galactic scale however it’s going to take a while, there will need to be some other tech in place before this can all go ahead BUT expect something like the Starmap from the RSI website but in game and somewhat improved.
There have been 3 new PTU patches in the last few days trying to address bugs and solve a major instability issue… RS&T… I’ll really quickly summarize the changes in those patches:
Star Citizen Alpha 3.15.0r PTU
They Made further sync fixes and optimizations for NPC locomotion that should help with AI teleporting and moving without animating. Further improvements to help on foot NPCs react to players and avoid getting stuck in areas inside underground facilities.
Major Bug Fixes
Medical Beacons should work correctly now.
You should be able to buy and sell from ships and vehicles properly.
Wind is less angry as is camera shake.
Trains should no longer open into the void.
Lots of respawning issues were solved.
And there were loads of server and client fixes and optimizations.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.15.0s PTU
They fixed issues with items disappearing and despawning.
Being stuck in downed states.
Problems with Streaming objects and account resets.
There are still many known issues… at least one of which need to be fixed ASAP. Some desync with inventory.
The most important one they fix imo is general server / client stability. There have been 30k and crash issues with the most recent PTU releases and CI are deploying hotfixes currently to solve them.This will see a LIVE build almost certainly once this issue is solved.
The latest t patch is potentially the release candidate or at least close to it, as it does seem to have helped with those issues quite a bit.