Now onto some of the community requested questions!
OE: Willem Schildkamp asks Will we still be able to land freely anywhere on planets (besides inside mission-areas or in/over cities)?
ST: Yes, absolutely. Since planets became a feature within Star Citizen, we have always wanted players to be able to land, take out their rovers, bail out of their ship letting it crash into the side of a hill and make their way through the universe. Where things are not as solidified is how we handle the mission areas and I like that assumption in the question that there is something we have to do there. How exactly we handle that that is what design is prototyping and they have all kinds of different things to try and in the next major releases we will hopefully some feedback from the community on this.
EKD: We are still living under the motto if you can see it you can land on it.
ST: If you can see it you can go there.
EKD: At least go there!
OE: Gabriel Rej asks Do you want to implement an EVA push/pull movement system for situations when we’ll be out of EVA fuel?
ST: Actually I can’t answer it directly as its not valid anymore. Myself and character art have discussed this quite a bit and have got this signed off by design too. We are put a base set of EVA within an under-suit or flight suit. So right now if you put this skin tight suit you don’t have any thrusters, you have to put a jet pack on to have thrusters. So we want to make even the base has a really weak EVA but it has some.
So that you can’t put yourself in the situation where you bail out of a ship and can’t go anywhere, as it’s just a game breaker. It is a super weak EVA you’re not going to use it constantly and is you put a jet pack or augment EVA it’ll be a lot faster. So it is up to the player how strong the EVA is. That is something we haven’t spoken about before so that’s something very unique and exclusive!
OE: Zorck1915 asks whether we will see any of the Xi’An, Banu or Tevarin alien races in Squadron 42 or will it just be humans and Vanduul?
EKD: So right now we are not in a position where we can tell you exactly if you will or will not see those other alien races, that will be something that we will be very excited to tell you about as we get closer to that release and as we get closer to those details a little bit later down the road. But you know we’re always looking at all of our alien races and what makes the most sense.
OE: Rodrigo Figueiredo asks Can moons/planets illuminate the night side of other planets with reflected starlight? – so all about albedos.
ST: I love this guy’s thinking, and you know the short answer is right now, no. We don’t necessarily do a ray trace for our lighting we have all kind of different techniques for it but with that said there are things that we’re working on like real-time environment probes and these things that will – when other planets are glowing or like the moon lights up our night if you’ve got a clear night and you’ve got a really bright moon you’ll be able to see a lot more.
That’s because the ambient level is increased and that would be represented in our real-time cubemap updates but this isn’t an actual light-bounce coming from the sun, hitting the moon, hitting the dark side of the planet. It’s actually more the sun is hitting the moon which is making the moon really bright and then when you’re on the planet then you’ve got a really bright spot in the sky that’s going to up the ambient level anyways.
So actually I guess even to kind of go backwards on my answer, I guess right now yes you would get that but not in the way that it’s kind of described in the question because it kind of implies there is a real ray trace reflecting off that moon and then coming down into things – it’s just the fact that the ambient level is much higher.
Now could we do something crazy like a ray march to move that stuff round and get shadows coming from it and all that kind of something? Maybe, but it would definitely be something that you’ve got to email your local graphics programmer about – Carsten Wenzel. And he could take a look at that, but right now it will actually affect it it’s just not exactly how it’s explained in the question.
