Star Citizen has been ridiculed by a lot of gamers for its lengthy development cycle. However, we can all agree that the tech powering it is incredible. And, in order to showcase the key tech features of the StarEngine, Cloud Imperium released a new tech demo video at CitizenCon 2953.
In Star Citizen, the devs are using a 64-bit engine that lets you smoothly go from space to the ground without any loading screens. This means you won’t have those annoying loading screens like in Starfield. Cloud Imperium even said that you can explore all the planets without any loading screens or limits.
Star Citizen will feature physically-based atmospheres with multiple light scattering. The game will also have planet surface generation on the client and server at different levels of detail.
StarEngine in Star Citizen will be really good at streaming, which means the game can have huge outside and inside areas. And these places can be filled with lots of characters and players.
Cloud Imperium also said that in Star Citizen, there will be real-time transit systems in the city districts. And yes, they’re poking fun at Cyberpunk 2077 with this feature.
Now unlike the new games using Unreal Engine 5, Star Citizen appears to have noticeable pop-ins. From the looks of it, Cloud Imperium has not found a solution that is remotely close to UE5’s Nanite.
I should also note that the lighting in Star Citizen seems a bit dated. If you compare it to the newest triple-A games, you can easily see where it falls short. Sure, it has sunlight beams and fog effects, but sometimes it can look a bit dull (a problem that older games with real-time day and night cycles also had). Cloud Imperium claimed that it will be using RTGI (ray-traced global illumination). However, there is nothing in the following video (regarding the lighting) that stood out. For instance, in the “caves section”, you can easily spot the unnatural rasterized “light/flat” issue that also plagued a lot of games that have not used Ray Tracing.
Considering how big Star Citizen is, though, it looks fantastic. The game will even have a real-time large-scale asteroid generation and rendering system. Players can also look forward to some stunning volumetric clouds. From what I could see, these clouds look similar to those we saw in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Enjoy the video and stay tuned for more!
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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