Star Citizen – Resource System, Gen12, Underground Facility & Ship Updates
Welcome to some more Star Citizen News with a schedule of what’s coming up this week, also a deeper dive into what Star Citizen’s EUPU & Arena Commander Feature Teams are working on with improvements coming to Star Citizen.
From This Week in Star Citizen:
Tuesday 25th October, the Narrative Team brings us their monthly Galactapedia Update.
Tuesday also kicks off our Dynamic Event Week with both Jumptown and Nine Tails lockdown available to take on in the Stanton system!
Keep an eye out for Priority missions in your contracts manager!
Wednesday has the latest Roadmap Roundup, this should give us better details of what exactly is planned for the 3.17.4 patch we are getting for the 2952 IAE.
Thursday, Inside Star Citizen returns with a look at the Underground Facilities shown at CitizenCon 2022 as they enter their production phase, which is awesome to hear. Also CIG will be showing us the latest updates on the Gen12 renderer, which sounds like it’s getting a lot of implementation in Alpha 3.18.
Friday, we’ve got Star Citizen Live with the Mission Feature Team and a follow-up discussion to their Investigations presentation at CitizenCon, so this is the deeper investigation missions that will be in game. CIG have also said there will be some additional guests after that in the 2nd part of the show… you can watch live on the SC Twitch starting 3pm UTC.
The latest Jump Point issue also goes out to subscribers.
CIG have also said – we’d love to feature your commercials on Star Citizen Live! Post a 30-second, in-lore commercial for your org, a ship, or even Smoltz to the Community Hub for a chance to be highlighted. Let me give you a quick example of what they want.
KEL-TO AD
In the 2nd half of Star Citizen Live: Taking Flight we got to talk to the EUPU Team and see a bit in the Life of a Programmer we had 3 Devs:
Jacob – Loot Generation, Salvage, Room System, Harvestables (2 years)
Yaro – Laser Mines, Mining Gadgets, Resource Systems (Gravity, Life Support)
Gayamo – Mining, Resource Systems, Harvestables & Gadgets
They turn designers ideas into something that works in engine like making tools that allow level designers to make and place all the rest of the content.
They might do a little bit of everything, like UI and design work to get a feature into a testable state. They will also reality check ideas that won’t work BUT the balance between design and code is pretty well maintained.
Sometimes they have to make concessions, sometimes they rewrite code, other times ask the designers to re-design a system.
Some of their work is cleaning up things that have broken in the code with new patches.
PES has caused some waves as gameplay teams need to rethink, tweak and clean up code for the new systems. The are reevaluating all their systems to make sure they keep up with the latest tech.
The Resource System they are building uses the same underlying logic as the Refactored Cargo System.
The Resource System is not just the circuitry of the ship but also is things like gravity generators, life support, fire, damage control, engineering and physical components.
Recently they had a bug with the Room System and Inventory, dragging a helmet out of your inventory or put it on your head would confuse the system as technically the helmet itself is a room.
Another old bug would have a ship flashlight or small items detach from ships and then bump into your ship causing damage… eventually causing your ship to explode.
They are working on Salvage and Hull Scrapping – They are in the finishing touches and bug fixing phase.
They had been looking at a vending machine repair prototype, that had a lot of interactivity for fixing it. They had built this originally to see what they could do with their current tech at the time.
People are moving into the New UK Office, some of which have only ever worked remotely for CIG before as they were hired during the pandemic. So they are getting to meet everyone but it’s a great environment to work, share ideas and collaborate.
There is a Thread on Spectrum [3.17.2 Live Feedback] Arena Commander and Star Marine that is collecting a load of player feedback on those modes… a lot of this also helps out the PU and TheDJButin put up some replies addressing some of the bugs, tweaks & new features the Arena Commnader Feature Team are working on:
HUD Visibility Issues: This is brought up quite often internally and while I personally don’t play a part in the art/design of the map I heavily lean on the side that we should not be changing maps/environments to suit the UI, the UI should be improved to suit the many environments it can find itself in; such is the purpose of AC, to push these kinds of issues. Part of Dying Star’s “gameplay” is flying off towards the star or thick fog using the environment to your advantage but I agree and it’s very clear from feedback that the map is suffering a bit too much from visibility issues. I’ve tasked up Design to do a review of the map, to ensure we’re happy with it and if we can tone it down. We’re unlikely to do more than that as again I’d rather push on improvements to the UI as even as you mentioned this is not a problem specific to AC, the PU suffers from it.
Tossing around of ship by invisible forces: We and the vehicle team are aware of this. I’ll chase it up! ^^
Broken Moon Asteroid Collision Issues: Thanks for calling this out, our QA also encountered this this week, we’ll look into it!
Regarding the invisible collisions in Broken Moon: We’re currently investigating, current theory is it’s caused by desync from FreeFlight servers that have been up for awhile.
Leaderboard/Score Exploiting: Hot topic internally! And yes we agree. I’m going to be looking into ways to improve this later this year.
Private Lobbies: I am still actively working on this. I can only apologise for it taking so long as outside of forming the new team I have to refactor quite a few core systems and also rely on assist from the networking teams who have been swamped with Persistent Entity Streaming/Server Meshing. They won’t be returning for 3.18 but I’m hopeful for soon after; we’ll communicate it out when it’s closer to being complete so folks can organize tournaments/org battles.
AC Squads limited to 4: This has been resolved in my feature stream and will release same time as private lobbies.
Love the feedback, keep it coming! We’ve got a really passionate team within ACFT and we’re pushing hard to improve life across AC/SM! Every bit of feedback is greatly appreciated.
He went onto say in some other replies:
Loadout Manager
We’re totally in agreement with how frustrating this UI is, unfortunately it’s Flash and a complete waste of time to work on, instead we’ll explore converting it to building blocks sometime in the future. It’s high on our list of things to tackle, especially that loadouts are for each team & mode, should just be able to select from X number of Custom Loadouts for any mode.
Private Lobbies
I’ve replied elsewhere in this thread about this in more detail but in short it’s being actively worked on and is our highest priority item, it’s just as it involves collaboration with services/networking they are obviously busy with PESnSM so not certain on when it’ll be ready for live.
Last Stand Name
I’ve wanted to change it’s name for awhile, it’ll be getting renamed to Control soon(tm)
Reporting Players / Scoreboard Interactions
I looked into how we’d add this last week and got it scheduled for sometime early next year. This’ll include being able to add friends/invite to party.
Will We Be Able To Join AC / SM as an Org?
For team based modes yes, the max squad size will change per game mode so you can fill an entire team with your squad – I’ll also be resolving the issues with team auto-balancing separating squads for when this releases.
Scoring in AC / SM will be based on % of damage dealt to the target that was killed.
We’ll be adding Countermeasures to pickups.
For 3.18 we’ve reduced the smoke and ash particles both in size and frequency, greatly reduced the brightness/glare around the level and other visibility improvements. We’ve had a few internal playtests and requested feedback from other teams, so far it has been very positive. We’ll be looking out for feedback on it come Evo/PTU.