This week Erris and Shiver go over the week's news in Star Citizen
Except for a few items status should be feature complete for the tier 0s on Friday
A more “persistent” interesting bug of box-hand has been resolved
Shopping is undergoing bug fixing and polish mode:
- shopkeep facial animations
- inclusion of ship weapons
- layout adjustments
Inventory has been spread out to prevent one stop shopping
The commodities kiosk though still closed, should be ironed out Soon™
Mission givers have made it to next stage testing
Mission giver bugs were mainly due to being from untested technology never being in game before
A light at the end of the tunnel can be seen regarding ship related bugs
The technology for planet rotation affected projectile trajectories but was resolved with the conversion of into and out of zone space and its sharing across other clients
Line of fire and courtesy control were major emphasis-es from an AI standpoint
Barring PTU feedback and validation with Chris' vision, IFCS and its second stage afterburner are good to go out
Criminality on landing upon the wrong landing pad has been addressed by increasing the UI size that only shows up on the correct landing pad assigned
Star Map for mobiGlas perspective is done and will rollout to ships with 3D radar with other radar conversions following later
A basic hint event system is nearing complete feature status for 3.0
The UI display in a helmet's holovisor and a ship's heads-up display have been worked upon, but final polishes continue
AtV
Gravlev vehicles
Gravlev forms part of the flight mechanics and affects most bikes on planets: it's what makes them levitate
They wanted to recreate the iconic Star Wars hoverbike but as realistically as possible using forces not fakery
Player input determines a positional goal and the motion control algorithms calculate the forces to maintain that height
Additional features:
Increased elevation when travelling fast to reduce the likelihood of hitting something
Rolling the bike based on the amount of force being used to turn so you can lean into it
Collision avoidance to automatically lift the bike over obstacles ... within limits!
It is modelled to work with upward acceleration so you skim over the surface, or skid off it you come down too fast
It has been designed to be realistic and uses imperfect information so players have to stay vigilant
They have been working hard to improve the system:
Assessing the impact of damage and fuel
Eliminating bugs in the raycast calculations
Improving the despin to work better with Gravlev
Preventing bikes getting stuck upside down because something clipped into the ground
They have been tweaking performance to reduce the amount of slide; make it a little more snappy on turning
You can now strafe up and down, and this is how you transition between hover and atmospheric flight
Misc
Starting in the coming week CIG will be starting a monthly installment of Squadron 42 newsletters. It will contain exclusive news on the single player campaign
3.0 was feature locked as of December 8th
Holiday live stream is on Thursday December 21st at 12pm PST
Sale for subscribers of a hardcover Jump Point Vol. 3 is going on sale on Wednesday, December 13th 12PM PST / 8PM UTC 4PM PST / 12AM UTC to accommodate timezones