In this week’s Around the Verse, Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts and Sandi Gardiner tease CitizenCon — now just a week away — as team members from its global studios arrive in LA. In the meantime, the UK studio offers a report on the scanning and radar systems in the game, followed by a section on balancing ship flight, handling, and missiles, which leads Roberts to reminisce on how past games — like his — have handled creating visceral dogfighting.
“It’s actually kind of ironic because it’s exactly the process I ended up going through 24 years ago when we were doing Strike Commander. So Strike Commander wasn’t based in space; it was modern jet fighters in this futuristic vision of the Earth where mercenary squadrons were working for the highest bidder or the corporation. [… ] We’d done accurate flight modelling and all the speeds and everything were based on what an F16 would be, or a MIG 25 or the various craft that you would be … fighter planes you would be fighting with. But we found when we were flying around and dogfighting that we really weren’t getting this up close dogfighting feel that we wanted and Wing Commander had from what was done previously. […] We were wracking our heads to see how we could do that better and we basically said, “Let’s try halving the […] distance and speed of everything.’ And when we did that it felt right. So even though it wasn’t fully, actually accurate and right it was … it felt good as a dogfighter up close, firing guns. And that’s kind of the same process we went through here on the flight model changes we’ve done.”
There’s an update on the lobby and leaderboard interface as well. Watch below!
