The newest episode of Star Citizen’s Around The Verse is rather short. However it does cover a lot of the development taking place on the Squadron 42 side of Star Citizen. The video clocks in at 11 minutes and covers some of the animation, cinematics, and gameplay featured in Squadron 42.
You can check out the full episode below, which gives you a few glimpses of the single-player campaign content along with some of the updates you can expect to see go live in alpha 3.2.0 and beyond.
The video covers some of the enhancements being made to some of the movement mechanics, such as vaulting and animations for deceleration and acceleration as players start, stop, vault, jump, or come to an abrupt halt.
The procedural inverse kinematics technology has been updated, so that character interaction with world objects and examination inspection looks refined and polished. This isn’t just for aesthetics, though, this ties into the game’s inspection feature where you can pick up and examine all the objects scattered around the game world, and you can also use the inspection mechanic for weapons and accessories. I imagine this may tie into certain gameplay features at some point in the future where a quest might require you to look at a certain object for a certain clue or whatnot.
Soft-body deformation is being added to Star Citizen as well, specifically for the cinematic sequences in Squadron 42.The soft-body deformation is being applied to the walls and certain structures.
Unfortunately it doesn’t sound like the soft-body deformation deconstruction will be applied to the persistent universe, but will only appear during the single-player portion of Squadron 42. As per the developers, soft-body deformation is a very taxing effect and few games use it due to how resource-heavy the effect is, even though it truly adds a lot to the immerison and realism of a game’s world… like Dead or Alive Xtreme 3.
Anyway, the reason for this episode of Around The Verse being short is that the PTU version of 3.2.0 is set to go live very soon.
There’s also been a number of updates that have been made just ahead of the 3.2.0. YouTuber BoredGamer rolled through a number of updates that they’ve added to the live build just before the release of 3.2.0, which you can check out below.
Alpha 3.2.0 is expected to go live for Star Citizen backers either June 30th or July 1st, so we’ll see if they can stick to the release schedule if the update can go live this weekend or at some point in the following week.
For more updates on the developmental roadmap for Star Citizen, you can check out the schedule over on the official website.
