The spaceships in Star Citizen already have a huge amount of detail, but when alpha 4.0 comes along, that detail is going to get even more granular. That’s the takeaway from the final Inside Star Citizen video for this quarter, as Cloud Imperium casts a near and far-reaching look at spaceship components and related engineering gameplay features.
Some of the plans are just that – plans – including having certain weapon types penetrate ships, adding more misfire incidents for damaged or degraded components, and functionalizing fuel indicators on the engineering UI panel, but many of the features of the resource network and related components will be applied, such as life support controls, physicalized ship components and the ability to swap out certain parts manually, the ability to repair damaged ship components, and the aforementioned engineering MFD.
The video also takes a close look at the engineer’s control panel, which effectively lets players direct a pool of power resources across several portions of the ship to increase their effectiveness, manage cooling systems, and see what components need work via a color-coded hologram of the ship and a notifications panel. The ultimate goal, according to the devs, is to provide more “true” multi-crew gameplay and give engineers a more direct role in managing and fixing a ship as it travels.
