This Star Citizen Dev is AMAZING – Promises Ship Updates For Next Major Patch

Welcome to some more Star Citizen with a quick summary of last week’s news and a quite meaty Dev Response talking about some improvements coming to Alpha 3.18.

Inside Star Citizen showed us some updates coming to Alpha 3.18 there is going to be a load of new Prison Gameplay allowing for missions to come in from outside sources, players will be able to hunt down each other as part of missions and there are going to be NPCs in the mining tunnels too as well as there being reasons to find stashes and bring back the items.

Security Post Kareah is getting a ton of updates too, it’s going to be an active security post teeming with turrets and guards. It will be the only place you can hackdown your crime stat too as they are removing it from Bunkers. Taking out security forces at SPK will spawn a security chief and they will have codes for accessing terminals that will allow you to operate the confiscated goods dispenser… basically a little slice of the Jumptown gameplay giving you lots of high value but illegal items. Players will get missions to deal with criminals attacking the security there. So SPK is going to be a big hot zone of PvP activity.

Star Citizen Live had a really juicy episode on ship & feature updates. I recommend you watch my dedicated video on that downbelow!

The Ship Showdown is on now with it’s first phase coming to an end on the 29th of August…

The top 16 most popular currently available ships and vehicles will face off against each other in the next phase starting on the 31st…

The Sneak Peek from the SC Newsletter was of a lovely vent… in what is probably a colonial outpost.

Right let’s look at this big old dev response… There was a thread…

I spent my Saturday evening playing my first and last derelict mission. I think I’m done now. They shared a very sped up video where the player goes thru a Derelict Mission and experiences various issues throughout, fills up an Ursa Rover with boxes, loads it into a Constellation and then the player gets clipped and backroom thru the floor… not a great experience.

However there was a big dev response to this from CIGs mintrieri Principal Ship Technical Artist, who answered a load of questions and interacted with the community on that thread A LOT. In response to the Original Poster they said:

Hi! Lead Ship Tech Art here. Thank you for posting this video.

I wasn’t aware the corners of the Connie Bay caused players to fall through the terrain. This can happen if the gravity box is a little too large. I’ll fix this for 3.18.0
Dropped cargo in Rover goes through floor. This could be the gravity volume, floor collision or desync/zone issue. I’ll check the gravity and collision. Desync is being worked on by the Engine team.
Can’t get into Rover side door at a tilt. I’ll check the collision around the entrance. Perhaps I can widen the opening a little to make it easier.
Exiting Rover seat can trap you or pops you out the top. This one is known and has been around a while. The issue is we haven’t been able to trigger the door opening when you exit the pilot/copilot seat which leads to these issues. Recent item state work has opened up some new setup options and a designer is already looking at the Rover door to see if the seat(s)/door connection can be made now.

Update for 3.18.0:

I have fixed all Constellation cargo bays so that the gravity box will no longer cause you to fall through the floor around the corners.
The Rover side entrance collision has been adjusted to make it easier to enter when Rover is tilted.
Retaliator no longer will trap the pilot on exiting the seat. Collision adjusted.
I will follow up on the other issues that were mentioned. Cheers

Why not put a button on the rover cockpit ceiling to keep it away from the seats?

It’s more that there is a delay when the door opens and so the character collision bounces around the cockpit after a seat exit. If it was one seat, we could tie that to the door anim so it opens as it exits, but since there are two seats it requires the Items to have logic that connects them. If we put a door button over your head, that would be a solution, but I’m not sure many players would think to open the door first. We’re very close to having the tech to solve these seat issues which will help the Rover, Reliant and a few other situations.

There was a follow up question “any chance you could fix the known issue with the RAFT’s elevator?”

I spent a few days looking into the Raft elevator already. What I found was that when the elevator is NOT attached to the ship it works normally. But, when the elevator is attached to the ship, it can’t be interacted with. I tore down the Raft and elevator completely, yet could not find anything that makes this particular elevator different. So, I’ve written up my findings and an engineer is looking into it now, but not sure when that will be solved.

Another Follow up question asking if there are going to be fixes to the internals and furniture on the connie?

We definitely want to fix the table but we’ll have to wait until we Gold Standard the Connies because there are several things we need to address, like component access and food station metrics.

The underside of the Connie bed is a known issue. The bottom polys are actually part of the exterior right now and so it will get culled out at certain angles. This is another Gold Standard issue we intend to address along with the table and component access.

Why do some loot boxes clip thru or disappear when placed on ships?

That’s an interesting one. When The loot box crosses into the ship’s “zone” and then fails to switch back to the planet’s zone and fell through. Boxes can disappear because the 1st person camera is still in a portal that crosses the doorway, often if you walk further inside, the box would re-appear. This is typically Engine / Physics issues. Once we put in server meshing, we’ll be circling back and fixing various issues like this.

In Some Other News…

Bar Citizen Events at Gamescom 2022

For those of you at GamesCom 2022 there are Bar Citizen events with CIG attendees at ‘brauhaus ohne namen’ on Thursday, August 25, and Friday, August 26, starting at 7pm Local German Time. The venue has a limited capacity of 100ppl so just bear that in mind!

Also on the weekend anyone at i69 – iseries in the Birmining NEC on the weekend? Because me an zinya will be there and I will be social!

Metrics for Orison Siege

It’s wrong for some players… typical but in the future you can expect CI to send you cool little stats and personal debriefs from events.

There was a thread talking about what are peoples fav ships that aren’t part of the Ship Showdown so ships that are in production or concept but aren’t flyable. I actually like the idea of that. We might run our own BoredGamer ship awards with different categories later in the year:

Best Concept Ship