Star Citizen – New Starmap, City Interiors & Resource Updates – Todd Papy Dev Response

There has been variety of development updates for Star Citizen over the last day. We have Todd Papy answering questions on the new starmap, city interiors and resource management, Turbulent show off their “mighty bridge” & the Galatapedia blitz’s through multiple Star Systems.

Todd Pappy was asked 3 gameplay and development questions by Sandi Roberts onTwitter. Let’s go over a summary of them:

When Are We Getting a New In Game Starmap / Map?

A New Starmap is getting worked on for Squadron 42 first, this includes FPS Radar and local map. This will then be transitioned to the PU.

We know that Turbulent are working on this and it’s much more indepth than just a starmap rework… it’s a full sort of minimap and all that jazz it seems. CI had originally said they wanted to be able to go down from space in the map to ground to inside structures… let’s see if that is still the case.

Are City Interiors Going to be Built with Procedural Tech?

They are working on procedural tool, that partial build out some of these areas with rooms and shops. They use this for Space Stations already, They are in pre-production with underground bunkers using this tech. They haven’t yet started with interiors of city buildings which may include apartments, office space, industrial areas, that will be done by the Turbulent team.

What are you looking forward to in #StarCitizen?

Resource management will give players much more control over items in their ships. And how that functions. But this will also bring environments to life as well, not just ships.

You’ll be able to sabotage / repair and Todd thinks this is a game changer of a feature.

On Twitter Again we had… Turbulents Mighty Bridge

From the Montreal Tools Team at Turbulent’s Game Studio comes The Mighty Bridge, a tool that can connect the game editor to any other software! 

Well it appears that Mighty Bridge allows CI to basically build and test any of their assets or modular structures in the in game environment in a couple of clicks and connect to other software as needed.

Which should speed up the whole environment and structure building process.

This can make space stations, caves, outposts, cities, landing zones and their dressing / prop deployment incredibly quick. I am interested to know if it can be used at planetary and biome scale yet.

It’s just part of the work that Turbulent and that Montreal Based studio are doing.

What is awesome about all this is it may herald CI being a bit more interactive on different media sources. The idea of Sandi and some of devs posting up quick questions and responses, Turbulent and other studios showing off little sneak peeks of development work… has me pretty excited… I always want more when it comes to dev info… and this is certainly more.

Galatapedia Update this time is described by the narrative team as:

a planetary system blitz, with overviews of the Ferron, Cano, Chronos, and Castra systems.

We also dig into the history of the Imperial Arts Foundation and visit Kesseli and Carteyna City.

Star Citizen continues to build out it’s lore and universe and these star systems will be in game at some point and it does indicate a bit of a focus on star systems in general at least to some degree.

Alpha 3.17 should be coming to first WAVE PTU at any moment… maybe… if they are happy with the build… you can expect it to turn up over the next couple of days most likely.

Beyond that there are a couple of things to look forward to later this week.

Later today we do have a Roadmap Update giving us the latest on Alpha 3.17 and 3.18 as well as the progress tracker.

Thursday there is an Inside Star Citizen with something very MISCy about it as well as seeing a Patch Watch that will highlight various more minor or backend parts of Alpha 3.17.

Once 3.17 goes to a LIVE build probably mid April at the current pace we should see a ship sale that will have any new ships like the Hull A, the Scorpius (if it makes the live build) anything that’s had major updates like the Starfarer and Gemini and maybe a few more ships / vehicles besides.

Is it possible we will see something new and straight to flyable / driveable… yes that’s possible. However Fleet Week in May is normally a good place for new ships and vehicles to be sold and 3.17 is already pretty feature laden as is…