Star Citizen – Pyro Preview Update & Creature Pipeline
Welcome to some more Star Citizen with various news… a Pyro Preview Update, CIG expanding out their Creature Team, a correction to ships coming out this year, a gamemode schedule for november, clarifications on precision targeting mode and a subscriber update.
Alpha 3.21.1 is in Wave 1 PTU.
The Pyro Playground is on the Preview Channel and there has been an update to that with CIG saying:
Hi everyone,
We’re absolutely thrilled by the positive reception from those embarking on their first journey to Pyro. It’s not only immensely gratifying, but it’s sparked a contagious excitement across all of our studios who are tuned in! We’ve kept a watchful eye on your experiences so far, both through our backend data, and your collective feedback.
It’s important to note that what you’ve experienced so far is just a glimpse of the vast System and the myriad of experiences Pyro has in store for you. We can’t wait for you to fully immerse yourselves in everything that the lawless wastelands of Pyro has to offer. In the meantime, your continued support and participation is greatly appreciated!
As shared in our initial messaging, we want to emphasise that the availability of the Preview Channel will fluctuate based on testing and analysis needs, both for this test and future tests to come. Such is the inherent nature of the Preview Channel! Depending on how things progress, further tweaks to the schedule may happen, especially as we prepare for potential major technology tests. With all of the above in mind, you’ll find an update to our schedule below.
Last but not least, we want to remind you that we plan to host more playtests on the Preview Channel later this year, including access to Pyro. We will provide further details about these yet-to-be-announced playtests as we lock them in.
Thanks again, and we’ll see you in-game!
This update has seen the active Schedule dates being shrunk. It’s now only showing until the 10th of November (previously 14th). We still have regular 8 hour sessions and different starting times for different time zones.
This isn’t a bad thing tho, this likely means that CIG has gone we are getting a load of useful data and can get a load more fixes in for the next time they try it.
Which may well be in November again or at least later this year.
I am expecting to see some additional people added to the Preview Build for some stress testing in the coming days.
Owning The Creature Pipeline
We have seen the Space Cow and StarWhal in the recent engine demo BUT there are tons more animals and space creatures CIG have planned. I thought it was interesting to talk about a CIG tweet and a job posting on the CIG website:
A CIG dev posted a Tweet:
They link to the Job Listing – https://cloudimperiumgames.com/jobs/uk/senior-ai-designer
I want to read out some of the parts of that as obviously it’s relevant to the next couple of years of CIGs Development plans (imo).
The AI Design team is responsible for ensuring the world of Star Citizen is full of life, from the tiniest of creatures to apex predators; from the human population in outposts, cities and space stations to the strange aliens on distant worlds. They are responsible for creating the AI behaviours for all of those and the interactable entities that these NPCs and creatures use in the world. Their aim is to achieve a level of detail never before seen in a video game by populating the myriad of locations with believable life forms based on each location’s theme, lore, and environmental conditions.
What does an AI Designer at CIG do?
- Create believable social and combat AI behaviours for both FPS and Ship gameplay.
- Work with Programmers to ensure the technology is built to support the complexity needed by the behaviours
- Work with Animators to create realistic and engaging behaviours for humans, aliens, creatures.
- Work with Level & Content Designers to ensure the world of Star Citizen is bustling with life using the behaviours you built.
Zin is angry about the naming of the Spirit
C1 Spirit or Spirit C1
CIG say the former… zin and I say it should be and is better as the latter…
Talking about Ships…
In the Talking Ship CitizenCon Presentation JC talked about 12 ships coming by the end of this year… it appears that he meant 12 ships that were released thoughout 2023.
So there are not 12 more to come by end of year.
Quick update, we had an issue crop up with the Progress Tracker import that’s resulting in some missing data, so there may be a few inaccuracies on Progress Tracker for the time being. Our devs are working on a solution but may not have one this evening. Apologies for any confusion, we’ll have this sorted as soon as possible.
There might be some additions to this in the coming weeks too.
Precision Targeting Mode – A question about balancing combat
As we saw in the very nice CitCon-Panel, the Precision Targeting Mode will change combat gameplay opportunities.
I had some discussion with a friend about how the balancing should be or if its probably too arcade or not.
When physicalized damage will come in, will it be still that easy to destroy Hammerheads or other ships turrets?
CIG Responded
For the purpose of the demo we made the turrets of the Hammerhead very weak so they blow up after a couple of direct hits. You can expect the Hammerhead turrets be a bit stronger than what we’ve shown in the demo but you need to keep in mind that it is a dedicated anti-fighter platform. If you go against it alone in a single fighter you will not survive long … 24 S4 guns will hurt …
CIG appear to be making some updates to their voluntary Subscriber Program:
In a recent email that appears to have gone out to subs it said:
