Citizencon 2017 - Star Citizen turns 5, tells alien yo mama joke

[Daemon White]

[QUOTE=Splarg!;52831208]Is there a good source that summarizes what you can do in this game at the moment and also what their goal is?[/QUOTE]

You can currently walk around a space station in person, summon a ship from a list of currently owned ships, get inside and explore ship, pilot ship and fly to one of a handful of points in the current universe (Expanded to include 3 moons and whatever's one them in 3.0).

You can enter arena combat and play some PvP either by ship (Arena Commander) or by foot / CoD-style (Star Marine).

You can accept missions in the current universe to earn aUEC (ingame alpha credits, temporary currency) which you can use to buy a select few personal equipment from the shops in the station.

There's a busted shipping hub for exploration that has an investigation mission attached to it, the Kareah security station for on foot PvP outside of Star Marine, a bunch of solar arrays for fighting NPC pirates, a data relay for accessing an item retrieval mission, a ship fixing station, and an asteroid field around the moon Yela that houses a few neat things inside it.

There's a hangar for looking at your ships and exploring in them, flying is disabled. There's a social module where you can walk around in a section of ArcCorp with other players that has a bunch of shops on it. I think you can use your earned alpha credits there too.

As for the scope of the game, picture the development work shown off in the ArcCorp planet but apply it to everything in this: [url]https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap[/url]

[elix]

[QUOTE=Splarg!;52831208]Is there a good source that summarizes what you can do in this game at the moment and also what their goal is?

The stuff in the keynote was cool but have they said how many city areas like that there are going to be and what all you can do in each of them? Will they be unique and created by hand or are there going to be a lot of them so that they need a certain degree of procedural generation?

Sorry if this is in the videos but it seems like a lot of stuff and I'm having trouble getting an idea of the scope of the game.[/QUOTE]
[URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/getting-started"]Here's what is available now,[/URL] and ordinarily [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report"]this page would display the short-term roadmap as well as the progression towards getting the next big patch out.[/URL] However, over the past two months or so, the focus on the page shifted from building out features (as those features got finished up) to the polish and bugfixing to get the patch that last 5% of the way to live, [I]and[/I] the longer-range roadmap information was removed because it's being updated and will be posted with the weekly update this coming Friday. The big 3.0 patch, which the page is about, is currently in closed testing with a group of volunteer player QA, but it's unlikely to be ready to go live before the end of the year at the current rate of things.

[URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/about-the-game/spaceflight"]The longer-term goal, beyond just patch scheduling for the next 12 months, is covered on this page.[/URL]

As for cities and the scope of things, to expand on what paindoc said, procedural tech is being hooked into the tools in order to let artists speed up the process of content generation, but the focus is on artist-driven processes. This means they'll adapt their approach to the task.

[t]https://i.imgur.com/MhKeVtW.png[/t]
So, particularly iconic zones like Area 18 above will be handmade with the various prop sets. Procedural assembly may be used here for putting together preconfigured building assets and such, but it's still made in a fairly traditional way.

[t]https://i.imgur.com/Qm5HQ6O.png[/t]
Here, we see Area 17 (circled in the background) and the suburban sprawl between Area 17 and Area 18. Area 18 is, at the moment, [I]the[/I] most important location on the planet and is entirely hand-built for the walkable areas, while Area 17 could be procedurally generated using copies of buildings from Area 18 mixed into the procgen, or it could be handmade like Area 18. The sprawl in the foreground is entirely procgen'd for speed because it's basically just scenery.

As originally planned, each planet will have at least one landing zone, but it was a big deal that Earth was going to have three (New York, Moscow, and Shanghai) and most locations were expected to have fewer and mostly one. The procedural tools change this equation to a degree, however, because they make it easier to shit out reasonably acceptable secondary populated zones with interiors, and individual tweaks to the procgen'd locations can be made by artists.

CIG hasn't made any definite commitments to just how many city areas we can expect on any given planet/moon, so all we know is that it's easier for them to spit out secondary activity hubs if they conform to certain layout plans. This [I]should[/I] mean more locations, but they'll likely be less unique and important than the primary locations.

There will also be plenty of stations in space, and there'll be missions to do all sorts of things depending on your career path. And to be clear "career path" consists of whatever you want to do and are equipped to do; there's no RPG character classes. If you get into the cockpit of a fighter, now you're a fighter pilot. If you get into the captain's chair of a large mining ship, you're a mining foreman now.

The intended scope of the game is nothing less than a living persistent universe where your goals are what you make of them. Each star system will have a different social and economic flavour with different plot hooks, threats, benefits, and mysteries, so flying and mission-running in the Stanton system (a system run by megacorps) will be quite different than mission-running in [URL="https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/spectrum-dispatch/14344-Galactic-Guide-Hades-System"]Hades, the spooky system with the fragmentary remnants of a lost alien civilization and half a planet that was cracked apart by unknown technology.[/URL]

Also, these systems are viewable in the Starmap linked in the above post.