Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries announced that the alpha 2.6 update for Star Citizen has been released, featuring new ships to fly such as the the Origin 85X, Drake Caterpillar, Drake Herald and Aegis Vanguard Hoplite. They have a selection of new ship weapons available for pilots to use as well, including more than 25 new missile and laser weapons.
Over on the official Roberts Space Industries site they showcased all of the new content in alpha 2.6, including posting up a half-minute video featuring the weapons that you can check out below.
They’ve made many modifications to the vehicle and on-foot third-person camera, fixing many of the ‘under the hood” mechanics to make it more cinematic and user friendly, this includes three new camera modes for third-person view: chase camera, vehicle orbit and passenger orbit.
With the inclusion of the Star Marine module they’ve also introduced the new health system that sees players bleeding out. Bleeding is a stackable state, so the more you bleed out from different body parts, the more likely you are ot bite the dust. Each body part can also enter a damaged or bleeding state, so it’s possible to leg-shoot someone until you do the equivalent of severing an artery and have them bleed out to death.
You can stop bleeding by using the Medipen to fix the injured limb.
The new scoring and leaderboard system was also implement with Star Marine, along with two different game modes and two maps.
Arena Commander was also updated with the new Pirate Swarm game mode, along with new promotions done through a UEE Navy Arena Commander leaderboard.
Blues also pointed out that CIG has switched over to Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine, which is based on the CryEngine technology.
However, the switch came in favor of Amazon’s AWS cloud services for multiplayer networking. The Lumberyard is designed for large scale shards supporting massive multiplayer environments with better optimization and streamlined seeding over the CryEngine.
The CryEngine, Unreal Engine and Unity aren’t very convenient for massive, open-world, procedurally designed MMOs. They’re better suited for high-end, small, instanced area environments. However, RSI and CIG wanted to go for super high-fidelity rendering and the CryEngine was perfect for that sort of stuff early on in development, so that’s why they went with the CryEngine. However, the engine scales horribly for MMOs, which is why they’ve eventually switched to the Amazon’s AWS and Lumberyard.
In their production schedule they note that gamers can expect new mercenary missions and quests, repair functions for the ships and new salvage features in version 3.2, due next year. They also have plans on adding six new ships. 3.3 will go even further by adding farming, rescue missions, professions and new solar system locations.
