If you’re going to get into the snow, rain, dust, or mud of a planet in Star Citizen, you’d expect your character’s armor to pick up some of that schmutz, but right now the texture for dirty armor is pretty one-note. That brings us to the returning episode of Inside Star Citizen, which talks up a new trick that’s being worked on in order to improve immersion for filthy player characters.
The upcoming update will use the game’s Substance Designer tool to create procedural “biome accumulation” (CIG’s big juicy term for surface filth), which will eliminate the workload of the game’s art team so it won’t have to create individual visuals for every possible form of crud players can be coated with. Dirtier dirt is expected sometime later this year.
The second half of the video brings a sprint report all about AI behaviors, with previews of better low altitude flight pathing, enemy reactions to seeing a dead body, and NPCs getting themselves a tasty soda. There’s also an in-development look at a derelict outpost and a fly-through of an upcoming space-based point of interest – in this case a defunct space station. Also of note is the video’s opening, which remarks members of the dev team, including creative content lead Jared Huckaby, are moving to the UK as CIG’s new Manchester office gets built.
