This Week In Star Citizen – New Underground Facilities – Alpha 3.18 Home Stretch

Welcome to This Week in Star Citizen we checkout CIGs schedule for Star citizen Content this week as well as where we are with Alpha 3.18, there is also a dev response on rotating ship engines!

From the This Week In Star citizen Post CIG Say:

In case you missed it, Alpha 3.18 is currently available to all backers on the PTU servers, so you can already experience Persistent Entity Streaming, Salvage, and much more. If you plan on visiting the PTU servers for the first time, you can find out more in our Knowledge Base.

We wanted to thank all of you PTU testers out there for helping us kick the tires and bang the pipes, especially over the last weekend; your participation and engagement have proved invaluable in helping us identify critical issues, such as the memory leak that was causing some pesky crashes. The vast amount of data you generated throughout this PTU cycle has enabled the team to identify and implement much-needed fixes. We want to ensure we catch any stability-related bugs before switching to the Live environment, and we’re very close. Your help is super appreciated and plays a vital role in us getting Alpha 3.18 to the live servers, especially this week as we navigate the home stretch. The more traffic we can get on the PTU this week, the better odds we have of getting this one out the door, so we hope to see you in the ‘verse alongside us!

For those interested in what’s coming beyond Alpha 3.18, you can get a sneak peek by checking out last week’s ISC that showcases the upcoming improvements and additions to mining coming in Alpha 3.19.

We also want to remind you that many Bar Citizen events are occurring every week, such as the one in Angers, France, this Saturday. On BarCitizen.sc, you can find real-life events in your area and register your own events for others to discover and attend. Remember to let us know about your meetups on Spectrum; we just might make a pitstop and crash the party!

Also, for you racing fans, qualifying rounds for System7 are happening this weekend.

This Week In Star Citizen Schedule

This Tuesday, the Narrative team brings us their monthly Galactapedia update.

Wednesday sees the release of February’s Monthly Reports, with the PU’s coming as a comm-link and Squadron 42’s via newsletter.

Thursday’s episode of Inside Star Citizen features an interior whitebox tour of the new Underground Facilities first showcased at CitizenCon 2952. They said it was 17 rooms over at least 5 floors.

This Friday, Star Citizen Live features Mike Snowdon and members of the VFX team discussing their work. Don’t miss it at 16:00 UTC. VFX are doing a lot of work on converting their library over / updating them atm so it may well be tied to that.

Star Citizen Alpha 3.18.0 PTU.8381034

It’s just bug fixes again as CI try to fix a load of the issues with the patch and get 3.18 out to live.

Fixed – 890 Boarding mission allows player to pilot the 890
Fixed – The UI on the ship customization screen didn’t update correctly
Fixed Issues with Borderless Mode
Fixed 3 Server Crashes

Weird Known Issue

Please avoid hitting the Escape key while mousing over and using the shopping kiosk search function in this build as this will cause a 100% client crash

Manchester UK Bar Citizen – April 8th 2023!

The Oast House Bar & Restaurant 2pm Local Time

Aren’t a lot of Ship Engines Supposed to Rotate for VTOL and/or Maneuvering?

Aren’t the engines on the freelancer, vulture, constellation, caterpillar, etc. supposed to rotate for VTOL and maneuvering? They look like they’re supposed to, and the MISC commercial even shows it doing so.

The Cutter, whos thrusters DO rotate. In the “A Cut Above ISC” Lars specifically states that the Cutter uses the vultures “VTOLS”, which don’t “V”.

I get that things change with time, but especially for the vulture, it feels like a ship that will definitely be spending a lot of time hovering around crash sites should have the extra boost that downward facing primary thrusters would provide.

CIGs Minterieri Responded – We are in the beginning stages of developing the blendspace tech that will allow the motion of the ships to drive rotations in the ship skeleton. While intended for the new Santokyai, organic bspace anims may come in a future release as an update, as key Tech Art and Engineering resources are limited but determined. I hope to fulfill long held goals with the Xian Scout to have it move more squid-like and the hover bikes to have articulated nacelles. Once the bspace tech is stable, we’ll roll it out to various other ships where it makes sense. I‘ve always wanted VTOLs to move like that landing scene in Prometheus: https://youtu.be/q9OLCVMm10Q

Caterpillar engines will not ever rotate though. Freelancer looked crazy so we nixed the 360 degree flips from the commercial, but since the geo would support it I would raise the possibility to re-add some motion back in with bspace, maybe, but more a Design call. Various ships that already have rotating VTOLs should then be made to vector while maneuvering such as the Idris, Reclaimer, Terrapin and Mole (and several more). The Constellation’s fan blades should probably tilt a little too, and the top Nacelle’s rotate a bit. Cheers -Matt

It is the last day to get involved in the February Giveaway for the chance to win a Crusader Spirit C1.