In this episode of Inside Star Citizen, the development teams explain the future of caves, more varied, more beautiful and faster to produce, and how they plan to improve the experience for new players.
caves
Currently in Star Citizen, rock caves of a similar style are spread throughout Stanton. This is the first iteration of the caves that appeared in 2019, and which allowed Cloud Imperium Games to gain initial experience with this feature.
The developers worked for a year on the production process of the caves. They seek to reduce the resources needed all in improving the quality of the result. The creative process they arrived at allows a designer to whitebox a cave without asking artists, then send it to Houdini (a graphic creation tool) to obtain an almost final result.
In the next patch, the developers will implement in game the new archetype of sandy caves on Daymar, Magda, Ita, Wala and Hurston.
They try to keep the feeling of claustrophobia existing caves, but want to make moving inside them smoother (less bumpy) and improve the visuals.
They use more natural light to illuminate caves, resulting in more cinematic scenes.
At the release of the patch, there will be no assignments and it can only be reached on foot. Caves with access for ships and vehicles will be added later.
others archetypes are in preparation and will come to enrich the universe: rocky, aesthetic, icy, surface… The rocky archetype is intended to replace the current caves.
The developers are very satisfied with the result and will further improve the process.
New Player Experience
Star Citizen is a game difficult to access for new players. Todd Grandpa, the director of the persistent universe, is well aware of the problem, and explains how Cloud Imperium Games intends to improve the situation.
In the past, a tutorial had been put in place, but the project changed so much with each patch that it was too expensive to update it with each iteration.
They now want to implement a new system to guide new players, which is also required for Squadron 42. With this tutorial, the developers want to accompany the players in their first interactions, starting with their home, purchases in the shops, access to the spaceport and the first take-off, the first space missions and on foot…
This feature requires a combined effort from multiple teams over time, and is therefore not not planned for patch 3.18. A new more global version will be implemented when the project enters the beta phase.