Drake Corsair & Vulture Salvage Teasers

Welcome to some more Star Citizen… we have had a load of feature information thrown at us looking at various bits that are expected in 3.18 and beyond or at the very least are getting worked on in Q2.

AI Ship Landings are being worked on. Safe spline generation is used to have ships appropriately approach a landing area smoothly, it uses sign distance fields to make sure it doesn’t hit any objects. This will be used in the not too distant future to add NPC reinforcements to a variety of locations as well as allowing for new mission types.

We will start to see NPC ships coming and going from POI and landing zones too.

FPS NPCs are going to have randomized movement speeds to help add some interest and variance.

Collision avoidance tech is now able to avoid interrupting other conversations and if it detects them it will try and move around.

They are adding more behaviors with NPCs able to now eat big bennys noodles.

The Frontier Clothing line is building out various concepts for utility and wilderness survival styles. Including some outfits for more extreme conditions. They are also exploring some more unique ideas for minor NPCs in the verse too.

New Cave archetypes & entrances are getting worked on. They showed an early greybox of a sand cave.

For rivers and water they are building out a library of underwater flora.

The Drake Corsair is currently being taken to gold standard, so when it releases it’s going to be pretty sweet.

The Mess hall has been tweaked for better player traversal, the entrance lift comes up from a sealed closet off to the side of the mess hall, helping prevent traffic jams.

The cockpit dashboards were shown off… there are a lot of buttons and switches.

There are changes coming to ground vehicle physics. They are currently in testing and iteration phases. The new system is called physical movement (ON THE RIGHT) internally and is exactly that, a more physical movement driven system.

We should see less magic gliding and a more realistic system with a bit more weight to it. Speed, momentum and grip are all going to be important too. Falling and rolling will be a thing too. I suspect we will need gravity tools to right beached vehicles in the future.

We got a treat with the Drake Vulture and showing off it’s salvage (hull-stripping) beams.

They will strip the outer hull of a ship and turn that into valuable salvage. We know that this can then be used in the FPS salvage tool to repair a ships hull too and I believe there is a dispenser on the Vulture that allows you to fill up canisters. We are expecting Salvage to come in Alpha 3.18 and we also know that CI have been working on Hull-Stripping for the Reclaimer too… tho it’s not confirmed when that will be functional.