Cloud Imperium held CitizenCon 2019 yesterday and revealed some new interesting details about Star Citizen. In addition, the team showcased some new gameplay videos from the game, and announced that a Free Fly period will begin later today. This Free Fly will last until December 5th, and players will have a chance to fly every single ship in Star Citizen, with more than 100 options to choose from.
Cloud Imperium showcased Star Citizen’s newest planet, microTech, in its latest gameplay video. microTech is an icy world covered in snow, mountains and vegetation. Furthermore, microTech will be playable in 3.8, coming in December, with New Babbage coming in 2020.
The CitizenCon 2019 demo took players through an upcoming mission to Star Citizen, where they stealthed around AI enemies with new non lethal takedowns (coming in 3.8) on their way to fulfill their “corporate espionage,” mission but were eventually detected.
The demo also showed the game’s new Dynamic Weather System. This tech system procedurally generates weather effects across all planetary bodies in Star Citizen. Therefore, players can expect massive rain storms, huge blizzards, gusting winds and more from it. Far from simply looking pretty, the weather effects in Star Citizen will challenge players, affect atmospheric flight and include on-foot dangers for those brave enough to enter the storm.
Cloud Imperium has also announced the following new features that are coming to Star Citizen:
- Theatres of War: This new game mode combines the ship combat of Arena Commander and the on-foot gunplay of Star Marine. Playable today byCitizenCon attendees and planned for a 2020 launch, Theaters of War is designed for 40 players divided into two teams who battle it out for territory control across three rounds. Across the rounds, players will control multi-crew ships and on-foot combat as they train their way towards Persistent Universe combat supremacy. Theatres of War is deeply rooted in Star Citizen lore, as players will reenact famous battles from throughout the history of the Persistent Universe. Here’s a short video introducing the mode – the panel will be available on Youtube shortly.
- Server-Side Object Container Streaming (SOCS) – This foundational tech will see its first implementation in the upcoming 3.8 patch this December and should include significant performance gains for all Star Citizen players. SOCS technology slices the Star Citizen Universe into various “Object Containers” which automatically scale in size based on player location and gameplay. For example, if there were numerous players in one area, the tech will recognize this and place them into their own “Object Container,” which shrinks their need for computing power to simulate the rest of the universe. SOCS is a new backbone of the upcoming “Server Meshing,” which will allow for a dramatic increase in player count, with thousands of players sharing the same world.
- Platform Persistence – debuting in 3.8, platform persistence is the first iteration of persistence in Star Citizen. In layman’s terms, it means fewer wipes of player progress, and the ability to play Star Citizen to accumulate currency, goods, ships and items in progression.
- Quantum – this new tech system is the backbone of our simulation that we run on the back-end that allows us to get all the information we need to customize the players experience and the universe of Star Citizen across millions of simulated entities, without having to burn enormous amounts of computing power. This panel will be available on Youtube later this week.
- New Procedural Planet Tech – the next iteration of our procedural generation technology, this planet tech includes multiple new systems that will increase both the diversity of our planetary environments as well as speed up our development process, as it allows for less individual attention from our art team to create Star Citizen’s stunning locations. The new tech will be applied to all Star Citizen bodies in Alpha 3.8, and be used for all future development. For an idea of just how much of an upgrade this tool gives to development, it took the team 2 months to re-do every planet and moon in Star Citizen, a task that previously took 2 YEARS.
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John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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