Could We See The Banu Merchantman This Year?
Star Citizen have given us a load of ship updates from the Banu Merchantman to the Corsair, the Vulture and Hull-C let’s jump in and take a look at these mighty ships.
The Corsair is moving into it’s greybox phase. This is Drakes answer to something inbetween a Connie Aquilia and Carrack… for some serious but no frills exploration. They are making sure that they are happy with the metrics and blockout of all the interior and exterior of the ship.
There is a hangar bay at the rear of the ship, this lead to the main component room, then onto the habitation area, that has a toilet and dining area, going towards the front of the ship there is then a general access section that leads to the cockpit. The cockpit is planned to be built out first to then act as a style guide for the rest of the ship.
The ship is very hype and going to be a multi-crew dream as well.
The Drake Vulture Light Salvager is further along in the pipeline and is planned for release in 3.18. It’s pushing through it’s final art phase with work on Levels of Detail being a focus and the wear and tear shader. They will move onto VFX and lighting passes once this task is complete. It’s coming with it’s Ship Salvage mechanics and will be able to Hull-Strip.
Banu Merchantman Explorations continue – they are testing out the look and feel of internal rooms for the medical centre, which looks to have at least 2 mid-high tier beds at the moment.
There is a security room with a huge amount of space and a massive wash room. They have been talking about having these have facilities for the Banu & Xi’an too (why no Tevarin Love eh?)
They are experimenting with the landing gear and rigging for it too… the gear is massive and looks like a backwards animal leg. The Merchantman is making quite a lot of progress pretty quickly now that it’s in active development BUT I am expecting the greybox and final art phases to take quite a while.
I am looking forward to being able to make some money by trading on the outskirts of systems and having Players and NPCs use the shops onboard. We know that the ship has massive alien turrets, the Defender will be able to dock with it… you want a mobile market then it’s your ship.
The Scorpius Heavy Figher has had one of it’s wings completed to the final art phase. They will then duplicate / mirror it for the other 3 wings. The entry and exit points saw work too as did color tints. We can expect to see the ship and it’s very mobile turret in Alpha 3.17.
CI then showed off the Hull-C in more detail. Looking through it’s rather large interior.
All the tech needed for the Hull-C has now been completed and the ship has been updated somewhat since it first entered the pipeline. The ship is pretty massive.
They have also at the same time been working on a ship tractor beam and remote camera UI for it… sounds like we are getting larger tractor beams for out ships reasonably soon!
The Hull-A is coming in Alpha 3.17 but they will keep checking back with the Hull-C. I am still expecting it later this year probably with 3.19 in Q3.
Also from ISC there was an Origin Story of a Star Citizen community member that joined the CIG team.
Will Price is a gameplay capture artist.
He was responsible for Raft-tron and a cave full of picos (which no one has found yet apparently). Also he did the Dr Strange Love styled missile ride too.
He was a freelance cinematography and loved to work on Music Videos.
He originally was a backer who pledged in 2016.
His ability to help build scenes for trailers, ship ads and marketing is pretty awesome.
One of his main roles is to film the b-roll for things like Inside Star Citizen but also patch trailers. He will typically get this in Dev / Pre-Evocati Branches of the game… which can be pretty unstable. He does get to play with new features and areas before anyone else.
I’ve realized he does a very similar job at least in part to zin.
John Crewe Vehicle Director at CI put out a Tweet
So @discolando wanted to play a game, so I’ll play a game. One lives, two die.
- Battle Trolley
- Orison Shuttle Ship
- Cutlass Black Toilet
The Orison Shuttle Ship (the one that is used for player transit around the zone) is currently winning that more comedy poll… however I do want a toilet in the
The Freefly is ending but we still have ninetails lockdown and the jumptown 2.0 events until march 4/6th respectively. There have been some tweaks with payouts as CI test some things.
We move into March next week and we should see a Roadmap Update… which have me a little more anxious, since a few weeks ago. But we should also be seeing a Monthly report pretty soon and I think this will help put a lot of the Roadmap in a bit more context.
At 5pm UTC Friday 25th Feb there is a EU PU Gameplay Feature Star Citizen Live on the SC Twitch Channel that I think is going to be pretty informative… I’ll get a summary of that up on the weekend.