This week’s Star Citizen Around the Verse kicks off not with development but with player footage of a 42-man dogfighter skirmish just above the surface of a planet, which looks really damn cool.
“We could probably have put that many ships together I think in earlier releases,” Cloud Imperium Technical Director of Content Sean Tracy says, “but whether or not that would’ve been still really playable or whether you would’ve had rubberbanding things going on – just having that entities right in the vicinity of each other and doing the formation flying around the different hills and things like that – that would’ve been a lot harder to do in earlier releases. But now that we’ve been able to knock down some of these performance hurdles, I think we’ve been able to really get them the ability to do this.
And that’s just the first two minutes! The bulk of the episode focuses on ship audio experience overhaul as well as a bit on the improved ship AI. Yes, dogfighting is cool, but when I got to the part of the episode when a Star Citizen dev demos the player characters actually emoting American Sign Language in-game? Chills. Skip to about 14 minutes in to see and hear that!
