“It was meant to be a five minute video,” remarks creative producer Jared Huckaby in the background of the final minutes of Star Citizen’s latest video. However, since this video features Chris Roberts, a man who is not very good at giving short answers by his own admission, fans of the game instead get nearly 30 minutes of CIG’s boss talking about progress on the game.
The video can essentially be broken up into three larger portions. The first part talks about progress on server meshing, where Roberts remarks that about 20 engineers in total are working on the matter. Roberts hopes to have server meshing completed by the end of this year, and notes that the work of server meshing will be an overall boon to Star Citizen as multiple servers will be handling different portions of the game’s world instead of having one server managing most of the load, resulting in a generally smoother gameplay experience for everyone.
In terms of more immediate updates, Roberts hopes to have alpha 3.14 arrive by the end of July, and also talks up the features of alpha 3.15, which will be headlined by the start of the game’s more involved death and respawning mechanics, hospital features, and a personal inventory among other things. After that, there’s the digital CitizenCon for 2021 coming this October, and then by the end of the year CIG should be coming back to their physical offices, while Roberts and his family will be moving from California to Manchester, UK, in order to finish work on Squadron 42.
Finally, Roberts takes some moments to talk about a feature that he’s been helping to code that will create more specific geometry for player avatars based on the equipment they’re wearing. Right now, player geometry is based on their skeleton, but this new feature will focus on “skin geometry” which will take into account the size and shape of helmets and armor, creating a more realistic mesh for cloth pieces and hair to drape on and more predictable shot landing when FPS weapons are fired.
