The latest episode of Around The Verse tackles various updates and upgrades being made to Squadron 42, the upcoming single-player mode of Star Citizen.

The 20 minute video doesn’t waste any time getting right to the meat of the game and focusing on some of the ship modifications, as well as giving the Idris some moderate overhauls for the narrative effects. This also applies to one of the mining facilities in the game, which has been given a very distinct aesthetic to help with unfolding the story in Squadron 42. You can check out the video below.

Some of the basic graphics improvements have been made for the game, including upgraded refractions for glasses, visors, entities, glare, cracks, and cockpits. The team has also improved the contrails in the game, along with adding the ability to rotate and examine pistols, sub-machine guns and large rifles.

Vanduull ships are still coming along, in the development process, with both midsized and large-scale ships still currently in development at the studio. They didn’t talk much about what the time span will be with getting the ships implemented, but I imagine most people will have to rely on checking the roadmap for details on when those ships will make the cut.

The rest of the video talks about how players can interact with the NPCs in Star Citizen and the process of getting the story cinematics implemented into Squadron 42.

The process includes getting the face, body movement, and audio from the cinematics working in-engine. From there they work on cleaning up the animation transitions to work with the characters so that there’s a smooth transition from in-game play to the in-game cinematic. The implementation process requires utilizing the subsumption tool, which is very similar to the blending tree utility within Unity 3D or Unreal Engine.

The roadmap is still filled with tons of stuff that Cloud Imperium Games needs to get finished, but some of the major content on the horizon includes playable female characters that you can customize when alpha 3.4.0 goes live during the fourth quarter of 2018.

For more info, feel free to visit the official website.