Star Citizen

I may not have followed this closely enough, but I just learned that the top 8 (which means winners of the first round) will be available in game for free-flight in the first week of September. This will definitively affect how I will vote in the first round!

I’ll let you look at the full match up on the official page, here are some that I thought were interesting:

Today is Fury vs Arrow: I have no doubt that the Arrow will win, but I voted Fury because I want to try it in game.

Reclaimer vs Vulture: Big vs Small. The Vulture was iconic this year with the new mechanics, but the Reclaimer is bigger which is always a win in my book!

Terrapin vs Carrack: Sorry Terrapin, you don’t stand a chance!

Corsair vs Mercury: Hmm, hard choice. I love the look of the Mercury, but the Corsair is a crowd favourite!

Connie vs Cutty Black: The Connie is always underappreciated, it’s an awesome ship. I know Drake is popular, but it was never my style. I think the Cutty will win.

400i vs 600i: Bigger is better? Doing a ship showdown during the free-flight will be interesting!

Cutter vs 890 Jump: Both ends of the ship spectrum. The Cutter should win ship of the year because it’s an awesome starter, and we need new players to have fun. But considering the free flight, I’ll vote 890 just so I have a chance to free-fly it!

No ISC or SC Live this week 🙁

Monday

• Ship Showdown - Phase One ends

Tuesday

• Lore Post - Life/Labor: The Secret History of Hurston Dynamics

Wednesday

• Roadmap Update
• Roadmap Roundup
• Ship Showdown - Top 16 Announced

Thursday

• Ship Showdown - Phase Two begins
• Bar Citizen World Tour @ Gamescom - Cologne, Germany

Friday

• Jump Point - August 2023
• Bar Citizen World Tour @ Gamescom - Cologne, Germany

Saturday

• Bar Citizen World Tour @ Gamescom - Cologne, Germany
• XGR Division Pro Series 3 (https://www.twitch.tv/extremegracing)

Kind of a rocky start, but matches are going fairly quickly now!

I don't pay a ton of attention to star citizen but I keep hearing about a "stat crunch" or "normalization".

Can someone explain that to me in basic terms?

This week's sneak peak is a look at a new outpost.

If you look at the top of the screen while Elliot was playing his mission, there are some new meters that have never been shown before. He's on a much newer build than what is in PU.

Here are the top ships on the Community Hub as it stands:

Mercury Corsair Vulture 600i C8X Pisces Cutter Terrapin 890 Jump Eclipse Redeemer Arrow Gladiator Carrack 400i Mole Spirit

This isn't exactly accurate, as things have to be tallied up from all sources.

Thursday

• Inside Star Citizen catches up with the Audio team and their work on audio reverberation tech after their previous CitizenCon presentation on Claudius.

Friday

• Star Citizen Live has Elliot Maltby back on to wrap up the mission they created last week and give it a test in-game! Show begins at 8am Pacific/3pm UTC. You'll also see the weekly RSI Newsletter delivered to your inbox.

Saturday

• Starting at 2pm UTC / 7am Pacific, Knebel and the StarHead Federation in our German community will exhibit all the vehicles that keep Star Citizen's economy running - trading, mining, salvage, exploration, and more! Visit the rooftops of ArcCorp's Area17, experience air cab service, take part in guided ship tours and interactive games to earn points, and get a chance to win a Drake Vulture with lifetime insurance. You can also watch the event live on Twitch: twitch.tv/knebeltv.

• Also on Saturday: Fight or Flight tournament begins! Check out the heated 2v2 competition live on twitch.tv/ATMOesports at 8 PM UTC and see who moves on to the next round. The top four teams at the end of the series will compete at CitizenCon this year, so the stakes are high! Don’t miss it!

I still look at the SC subreddit because there's not a lot of action here on Lemmy yet (just being honest). It seems like there's a lot of upset people these days.

We've been going through a pretty big dry spell for development, so I'm sure that contributes. I just wish people weren't so dramatic about it.

Below, you'll find the new restructured waves for the PTU:

Evocati Test Flight group:

• Hand-selected players under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Very experienced volunteer testers chosen based on the long-term provision of constructive feedback, quantity and quality of bug reports, and overall activity

Wave 1:

• Top active players rated by hours in the previous two major patch cycles
• Subscribers
• Legatus Navium Concierge-level backers

Wave 2:

• Next top active players rated by hours in the previous two major patch cycles
• Praetorian Concierge-level backers

Wave 3:

• Next top active players rated by hours in the previous two major patch cycles
• Wing Commander, Space Marshal, and Grand Admiral Concierge-level backers

Wave 4:

• Next top active players rated by hours in the previous two major patch cycles
• High Admiral Concierge-level backers

Wave 5:

• All backers with an active Game Package

Not much on here except some team restructuring.

Physicalized Cargo updates were finalized and committed to 3.20

Adding new functionality to accommodate the release of the MISC Hull C. This includes both automated cargo loading at LEO stations as well as SCU containers up to 32 SCU.

Testing Focus

Today's PTU build beings the focus of feature testing in the PU. With this build we will only have the PU enabled (no AC) and the Hull-C and cargo rework is not fully available for feedback although most of the cargo updates will function on other ships.

Seraphim Station

Mining Stability Changes

UGF RASTAR Drop (Bug checking)

Ever wish you had a nice place to keep all your medical supplies in Star Citizen? Lewis from the Interactables Team creates a medicinal case while showcasing their process for building functional containers.

This was reported over on [reddit[(https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/15hctp4/correcting_a_wrong_ready_for_anything_kit_now/). The OP doesn't know why it was gifted. It was on a new account that used a referral code.

The Ready For Anything kit also seems to have been removed from the store. There are still a couple armor kits, but at least they aren't promoting them to new players.

I'd like to think CIG has learned from this, but it's probably just damage control.

Today on Inside Star Citizen, we’ll show how we get our game on by playing with the Rastar tool to build an Underground Facility on Daymar.

Watch it now

Some interesting notes:

Art (Ships)

• RSI Polaris began its whitebox pass
• An as-yet-unannounced ship continued its LOD0 pass
• Crusader A1 Spirit progressed through final art
• Tumbril Storm approached the end of production
• Origin X1 entered the greybox stage

Engine

• The Core Engine team progressed with the development of StarBuild, the new in-house code-build system that will replace WAF
• Core Engine also worked alongside the Physics and Vehicle teams in support of the MISC Hull C, ensuring it works correctly and fixing bugs with the ship’s unique systems

Features (Characters & Weapons)

• July saw the Feature team experimenting with skill progression, which involves players performing specific in-game actions to make them better at similar activities. For example, building up strength will allow players to carry heavier objects with fewer penalties, while performing takedowns will open access to quicker and quieter action sets.
• For player traversal, the team began implementing a sliding mechanic. If a player tries to crouch while sprinting, they will perform a short slide before entering the crouched stance

Features (Gameplay)

• Gameplay Features continued their work on the new vehicle tractor beam
• improvements to mining for Alpha 3.20 based on community feedback, including updates to stability and predictability when mining.

Features (Mission)

• current underground facilities were replaced with RaStar to fix a variety of issues and make iterating on them easier.
• RaStar was covered in ISC and is a preliminary requirement for Outposts and other points of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSsWaTw4n8s
• Finally, code work began for reputation. Progression within reputation scopes will give players discounts on various purchases, including items, refueling, and repair.

Graphics, VFX Programming & Planet Tech

• The Feature team is working to bring the new unified water shader to the game, adding details such as puddles that splash on impact and fixing collision-detection issues on large water volumes.

Locations (Montreal)

• Montreal’s Locations team progressed with additional derelict settlements, which passed greybox before moving into the final phase
• Progress was made on underground facilities

Narrative

• the team supported the MISC Hull C by implementing the latest version of the air-traffic-control (ATC) behavior, which will allow players to request a landing spot to load and offload their cargo. This also led to resurrecting work on the overarching ATC behavior, with some potentially exciting updates that will be discussed in the near future.

Research & Development

• further updates were made to atmosphere and volumetric cloud rendering
• Based on recent research publications, cloud shadow maps can now be stochastically filtered, which considerably improves performance and render quality. The new temporal render mode will use the stochastic texture filter by default.

UI

• UI worked alongside Graphics to develop a new internal map system to help players navigate the game’s complex cities, planets, and capital ships.

Time for the reigning champ to win again!

Do any of the newly released ships have a chance to upset things this year?

Right now we have T1 or T0 for the following:

• Bounty Hunting
• Mercenaries
• Piracy
• Trading
• Mining
• Salvage
• Racing
• Medical/Rescue
• Refueling
• Repair

We're still missing mechanics for:

• Exploration
• Smuggling
• Data Courier
• Passenger Transportation

Am I missing anything else? It's kind of crazy to think we have at least T0 of so many game mechanics now. What are you most looking forward too? This can be either unimplemented or gold standard or any mechanic.

This was posted on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/15bs2nq/starcitizen_ship_sice_comparison_july_2023/

Did I hear someone say that this video is showing off prototypes?

Copying this over from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/15455pd/star_citizen_roadmap_advanced_release_view_update/

Credit to odysseus1992 and Snakem

Pretty exciting to see this happening at an official event! Star Citizen has a ton of potential in this space and things like the experimental AC modes will really help with this type of event.

Sign ups are here: https://www.fightorflight.gg/sign-up

I've noticed a lot of complaints from the other communities (reddit & spectrum) about the new armor/weapon packages that CIG is selling.

Persono, I feel like CIGs market has always been predatory and this is nothing new. It just seems like it's the flavor of the week to bitch about and I really hope attitudes do spread to Lemmy when this platform inevitably takes over.

Evocati testing for 3.20 has started \o/