Star Citizen 3.17 PTU Soon
welcome to some Star citizen news, this time for the week ending the 13th March 2022.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.17 is now in it’s Evocati Phase:
CI Said – Alpha 3.17 is bringing game-changing features to the ‘verse, including the first implementation of ship-to-ship refueling and the introduction of item selling. The patch will be hitting the PTU for more testing groups soon, where you can experience the new features and help us test them before release.
I am hoping we have wider ptu in the next week or so but it will be dependant on how testing goes. I do think we can expect at least a Open PTU by the end of the month if not a Live build.
In Inside Star Citizen they showed off the Hull A which will be featuring in that patch in some detail. It won’t have all it’s bell and whistles yet as we need to cargo refactor that’s planned for 3.18 for it to start using external cargo etc… and again we aren’t sure of the steps needed for all it’s cargo gameplay to come online, so it could be even later in the year BUT it will be a fully functional cargo ship even in 3.17.
We also got to see some more of the environment updates for the patch with the new hospital on Hurston as well as clouds that are being worked on for the planet too.
We then had various elements of Pyro shown off from concepts for gates and checkpoints near POI and gas clouds that would lead to stations to a space tree to space scaping work, trash piles and markshift markets BUT my favourite were the outpost updates they showed that include gardens.
Star Citizen Live
Some effects and mechanics for things like EMP will need to be entirely re-done from a VFX point of view, they’d need to concept the new style and go through the pipeline from there.
There will be updates to tractor beam vfx.
Bombs & shockwaves will see updates in the future too this includes water interactions and I would expect props, trees, flora and vehicles to also be affected.
Things like dust cloud displacement and effects on shields are a possibility in the future.
They do want to have graphics option scaleablity so that you’ll be able to choose how pretty your gas clouds are or if you want higher framerates.
Tho they won’t allow you to disable a VFX effect that could then allow you to see thro a cloud or gain an advantage in game.
There will be lightning in some gas clouds.
Waterfalls are going to be a thing and are being worked on currently.
Repaired items and hulls on ships will look like they have been repaired and welded or patched up.
Fire is being worked on too, they are avoiding techniques like heat shimmers where possible as they are very resource intensive… that said future tech might make this much more viable.
This week’s sneak peek is of a Pyro Station… these are overrun by pirates, outlaws and vigilantes… but apparently no cleaners.
These terribly maintained and lived in stations will be scattered around the pyro system and be under the control of one of the systems factions that vi for power.
Just as a bit of a side note CI also said:
Our latest Dynamic Event, Jumptown 2.0, has come to an end… but not for long. There will be more Dynamic Events in the future, so you won’t have long to wait to get back into the action.
I am very much looking forward to new events and even things like Fleet Week that are part of the 3.17 cycle.
What do you think we might see?
Boom that’s it for your quick little news update today.