Star Citizen Update – Corsair, Argo SRV, Engineering & Much Needed Fixes…
Welcome to the star citizen news, summarizing the updates and highlights of the last week in star citizen as well as what’s happening now. From the ship showdown, popular ship updates, details of one of the most important features coming next year, star kart race tracks being built out, salvage previews for Alpha 3.18, the test build of 3.17.2 potentially fixing elevators and much more.
From CI’s Star Citizen Newsletter
Get ready for the ultimate aerospace smackdown, as we kick off Ship Showdown 2952 Monday, August 15. Voice your support for your favourite ship during the event to take home exclusive prizes! Take the weekend to get a head-start on your creations, whether an original song, a Lego® build, or more — the possibilities are endless! The ships that make the most noise will move onto our Live Showdown, where the best of the best will go head-to-head for the crown.
So this is the early part of the ship showdown where they just want players to make noise about their favourite currently available ships & vehicles with pictures, posts, videos or any other type of creation. The top 16 will face off in little 1v1 single elimination popularity contests until there are 4 left… those 4 will get skins and/or some other cool bits made for them for the IAE later in the year… but they still continue to face off until there is a champion crowned.
Inside Star Citizen last week had a myriad of Ship Updates.
The Drake Corsair is really making progress through greybox and final art phases.
We saw the exterior of the ship, wings, nacelles, remote turret, landing gear, big thrusters, sensor rods and then internally quite a large crew quarters, cargo section and ramp, the ship will be able to house Ursa Rovers and similar sized vehicles.
The Argo SRV has progressed thru it’s greybox phase too using a lot of the pipeline and processes of the RAFT. The cockpit has grown a bit too. It’s looking good. AND I believe that CI are working on Ship Scale Tractor Beams to release around the same time as when they release the SRV.
The Banu Merchantman was also shown off in more glory in a better FOV than previously… as bad camera settings made the ship look like it had a duck-bill.
It looks like CI are going to be showing more off for the BMM at CitizenCon / IAE…
There was a little preview of early salvage – hull stripping. The Drake Vulture and Aegis Reclaimer will both be able to Salvage in 3.18, the Reclaimer from it’s turrets.
There are a load of metrics to see when in salvage mode and it’s very similar to mining… you can expect an evolution to salvage in a similar way to mining with CI adding more salvage components, consumables, sub components and gameplay loop beyond the initial release. We know that you are going to be able to salvage with and hand tool as well and even use that material to repair ships all in Alpha 3.18.
CI showed off some very impressive UI work with the Card System, an evolution to Building Blocks that allows CI to easily put 3d UIs around the game world for better visuals, signposting, warnings and mission waypointing potentially.
What was most exciting was CI saying they are getting in power relays and potentially the resource transfer system in game next year for ships. This is the core of physical components, engineering, damage control & multi-crew gameplay. They are placing power relays in the Hammerhead at the moment, these move power and resources between components and parts of the ship… and these relays can get damaged or break, you can reroute them or repair them, they cost power to have on so, you can choose to have some off. It;s not just the relays is the whole circuitry and connectivity of systems in the ship to.
For me this and physical components are as important as server meshing and the dynamic universe sim…
In Star Citizen Live they built a Star Kart Track. We are going to see the first of these at Orison at the Vision Center Expo Hall. And we will get to drive around greycat buggies in silly little races.
But for this live episode they made a smaller track quickly to show off as an example. All the assets here are pre-baked and modular tho they will probably make some new and custom ones for future courses. They can very quickly build out tracks and edit them. Maybe one day the Buggy will be able to do a loop de loop… they did try them previously but the buggy is too slow to make them.
It was also suggested here to make the Greycat Buggy the meme vehicle for this years ship showdown… that’s not even a ship! As long as people take it as a bit of light hearted fun then it’s all good. We all know the MSR is the king of ships.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.17.2 has a test build on the PTU that’s trying to address problems with the current cycle. Mainly that’s problems with Elevators, Siege of Orison and then a list of known issues that CI want to address. Some good progress has been made and I am expecting the improvements and fixes to hit the Live servers this week.
The best potential fix here is that elevators have not just seen some updates but also now have a failsafe that will reset an elevator if it detects them being stuck for 60 seconds.
There aren’t any dynamic events running on the Live servers currently CI had been running SoO and Jumptown over the last couple of weeks BUT you can probably expect them to be on again once these fixes go out.
We still don’t have any news of exactly when 3.18 will start evocati testing but I am expecting it later this month… don’t expect a live build for that until later October at the earliest imo…
The sneak peek from the news letter was of the volt electron pistol, CI are working on a series of volt electron weapons at the moment, for release I believe later this year.
One other thing there is a trixie scammer in my comments section of youtube pretending people have won prizes or asking them to contact them on telegram or in weird ways… you can always email me at contact@boredgamer.co.uk or go to me discord.gg/boredgamer to talk to me and i won’t use any other accounts… on youtube you can tell if it’s me because of the little tick by my name.