Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games have announced the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.1 to its eager fan base. Star Citizen is an epic first-person experience where players fly highly detailed space ships, battle on foot through massive environments, explore life-sized planets and moons, and discover boundless adventure in an ever-changing and expanding galaxy.
New features in the 3.1 update include the much-anticipated character customizer, allowing players to add a distinctive look to their in-game avatars by personalizing their physical appearance, as well as the Service Beacon feature, providing players the ability to send out distress calls which other players can detect and respond to.
Additionally the development team polished many of the exciting features that launched with the 3.0 patch in December. Updates to the planetary technology, IFCS (flight control), AI, the Personal Manager tool on each player’s mobiGlas, ship weapons, ship damage physics and overall performance optimization, all work in concert to improve the overall Star Citizen gameplay experience.
Five new ships and vehicles see their flyable/drivable debut in Alpha 3.1, including Aegis’ heavy salvage ship, the Reclaimer, the Anvil Terrapin-Class exploration vessel, MISC’s dedicated long-distance racer, the Razor, the Nox Kue, a flashy variant of Aopoa’s popular open canopy speedster, and the Tumbril Cyclone, a capable all-terrain ground vehicle.
CEO and Creative Director Chris Roberts said:
“This is the first step in fulfilling the pledge we made to our community last December to target quarterly updates to Star Citizen. These are important updates and our fans should see some significant improvements to Star Citizen’s overall experience.
Star Citizen is an ambitious game. We are working tirelessly to build a fully immersive experience where players will be able to have the adventures of a lifetime. One universe that can be a home for all gamers and one that will continue to grow and evolve. We are proud that so many gamers have joined with us to make Star Citizen the success that it is today.”
Enjoy!
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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Is the consensus still that Star Citizen is a big con that’ll never be feature complete or see a version 1.0 release?
Yea i’m doubting a “SC gone GOLD” statement. But one can always wish. I hope it ends up breaking new grounds.
Nah, those people are pretty much the flat earthers of the gaming community. Massive games take time, and this might very well be the most ambitious project in gaming history.
GTA5 is bigger and took only 4-5 years. Star Citizen already more than 5 years old with no clear release date in sight. Sure, not a scam /s
GTA V is bigger than SC? Are you kidding?
proof that it’s more advanced? Because it’s bigger therefore ot’s better?
Tech means nothing if game itself is boring. Why do you think there so few space sims? Because it’s difficult to make an exiting game out of flying on space junk through millions of kilometers of nothing, of Space. That is exactly the came where “bigger is better” aproach don’t work at all.
if GTA5 had few millions km between bildings – sure, it would be gigantic by your standards
Comparing GTA 5 with SC, it must be an April fools joke or you’re a fool.
It is way more advanced. First, it uses so called “physics grids”, a tech that allows independent physics of objects regardless of motion and state of player character – you can have FPS combat in a ship moving trough another capital ship, moving trough space, all seamless in real time and you can exit one to get to the other at will. GTA5 has basic physics shared by all objects in the game.
Ships in SC are true simulated vehicles with physics based thrusters reacting to player input, a large number of components (generators, engines, weapons, each a unique item interconnected with other items and the ship trough a complicated network of states), some of them are 1000 m long and contain an area larger than most single levels in FPS single player games. You never “become” the ship while you are driving it, you are still your character just with additional input for the ship. GTA5 doesn’t have any single object even remotely as complex and big and they “cheat” when you enter a vehicle – you become it.
SCs graphics functions in a different order of magnitude and in 64 bit precision, which allows a lot more details without ANY render distance cap – you can see distant planets in the sky and can get to any of them that you see. GTA 5 has a render distance cap of less than 1 km.
That’s the usual stuff that layman think about when someone says “game tech”. But if you want to go technical, we can talk about serialized variables and their usage in netcode (reducing server-client update resource draining to a fraction of normal value, without effecting gameplay, allowing updates of just small code variables and not whole components or objects), object container streaming (essentially a need-to-know based system of pre-loading and rendering game logic, objects and everything else, where the relevant information for the player is isolated on the server and streamed directly when required, allowing thousands of players in hundreds of ships at the same place in the same server), Subsumtion AI (a global AI network that governs everything from a simulation of interstellar economy down to NPC behavior patterns, schedule and affiliations), Item 2.0 system (every single object in the game, from a pickable rock and a coffee mug, to capital ships and entire planets are unique objects with a complex set of rules and can interact with one another in logical ways; in essence, if you have a light in a room, you can flip a switch on and off and it will interact with the light like in any game, but it will also react to a destroyed generator, a repaired generator, heavy power consumption, faulty connection with the generator, physical damage from being hit or shot etc., all without the need to manually program every single interaction – if you place a light inside a room in the game world, it has all those connectivity options), procedural generation of game objects with random variables that still allows modification with game creation tools (this is not No Mans Sky, where the computer built the game, procedural generation in SC is just a speed-up tool for artist based content creation because it would be mathematically impossible to do it all by hand). GTA 5 can only dream of all this tech because CIG literally invented it while making Star Citizen.
So, you see – that’s why it takes so long. When all of the tech finally comes together (it all works and is in various stages of integration), it could very well revolutionize game creation and game experience as we know it. It still might fail, but it is very unlikely because some industry giants (Intel, Amazon etc., all of them partners of CIG) have an interest in it succeeding, not to mention millions of fans who are tired of half finished marketing stunts that the call “games” today.
I’m not – if the tech works, that exactly what it will enable, no inbetween. So the only remaining question is will they complete the object container tech and when.
Are you just pure stupid? CIG started in 2012, they didn’t have the employees, studios and the money back then. R* have been making GTA games for the last 15 years that have got bigger and bigger, even they had to open new studios up. People like you just know nothing.
ROFL, the flat earthers of the game community? Please, that comparison distinctly belongs to the fan boys of this project. Forget Star Citizen for a minute, we haven’t even heard a whisper of the years overdue Squadron 42 that’s supposed to release first aside from a few minutes of footage. Flat Earthers are suckers that believe whatever some snake oil salesmen tells them to. That’s the definition of the Star Citizen fan base. A company that has never sold a product is going to create the most ambitious game ever made with all the promised features based on what it’s raised selling ships for a game that doesn’t yet exist, yeah okay. Remember this is a company with millions in monthly expenses and no income aside from fund raising that has tapered off slowly. As they will need more money, they will have less. I’m sure something will eventually release simply because they will need the income, but I doubt it will be the game promised. I hope I’m wrong because this is the game I’ve wanted to play since I was 4, but this would be a monumental task for a AAA publisher with billions to burn, I just don’t see how the math works.
The alpha is already shaping up to be the game promised, you’d have a point if there was no game to test at all, backers have something to play and test, all the tech is coming online or is online now, the development process is accelerating now the tech and piplines are in place.
CIG is a new company full of people who have made games or been part of making games or the engine powering them, please go learn something.
They are literally making things up in their head because they know nothing about SC, they know nothing about developing games, they know nothing about the timeline and why SC is taking so long, they know nothing about budgets, nothing about how a business is run, nothing about marketing, basically just gamers that think they know something.
Didn’t you know that playing games and browsing reddit makes you an expert on game development?
most likely it will be released in 3-4 years, but will be massive flop. You can count succesful games that finally got out from development hell on one hand and still have fingers left.
Considering the scope of work, what development hell have they been seeing?
I don’t know if con is the right word, but I doubt we will ever see a true, feature complete release. Remember that this started out as just a modern version of the Wing Commander series that was supposed to be a single player campaign similar to those games called Squadron 42, and that game still isn’t in our hands many years after the promised release date. That isn’t a complicated type of game for the money and number of people working on it and all we’ve seen of that is a little cut scene footage. That should have been done first and then been used to build the good will and revenue for the more ambitious Star Citizen. We will probably get something released, but like No Man’s Sky it will be a fraction of what we were told. Of course the massive fund raising Star Citizen has been able to achieve cannot be sustained indefinitely and a multi-studio game company of this size costs a fortune monthly with no actual product income, so we may see nothing come of this in the end. It might not be a con, but it might be something that a first time game studio can’t possibly deliver.
Which is just space and procedurally generated geometry, not content. No Man’s Sky is big as well if that’s the measuring stick we are going to use. That simulated a universe and has less content than most mobile games.
So,the very universe, we will be traveling through in a SPACE game that will also have NPC’s, and Players flying around, is not content.
Okay then.
Star Citizen got updated ? Hahaaaa 😀 nice april 1 joke 😀
millions of kilometers of nothing is still nothing. Procedural generation never beats handcrafted content.
Remember you’re talking to people that are not interested in the game and don’t follow it, that’s why they’re saying the false and inaccurate things they’re saying.
I was in awe the first time I saw that, never seen anything like it.
Very impressive vertical slice of Sq42 and what’s even better is that there is nothing much in there that isn’t in 3.1 now in terms of tech, so the people that might say it’s fake have no argument, you can do all that right now
Well, why did you come here in the first place?
to find people that click on a SC article just to sh*t on it, was not disappointed.