Star Citizen Single Player SQ42 missions will be shown at Citizencon. Procedural planets with forest as well!

Remember what we say at Gamescom well that wasn't all of it. Also no game beside ARMA has unified TPS/FPS but it doesn't get the stabilization correctly. Chris Robert seem a lot more enthusiast being interviews about all this. Sounds like he confident on what there working on.

This article will extensively detail the interviews and provide some initial insight to our future postings. We also discuss past interviews with Roberts and the progress from then til now. Timestamps for the video are below, if you prefer that content.

4:00 - Updates in the immediate future, Arena Commander update, Star Marine and FPS system refactoring.

6:50 - Alpha 3.0 initial discussion, including brief detailing of professions, gameplay, and locations/worlds.

8:40 - Procedural Planets V2 information, including discussion on artist authoring, world-building techniques, and planetary biomes.

10:00 - Biome details (specifically), height maps, and distribution maps.

11:55 - Weather systems in Procedural Generation V2.

14:20 - Artist hands-on with every single plan, artist production pipeline and time required to make planets.

15:10 - Scheduling challenges and planet-building that meets stretch goals.

16:50 - Biome rulesets, edge blending, avoiding carbon copy planet generation.

21:20 - What will be shown at CitizenCon?

Roberts immediately jumped into Star Marine and Squadron 42 updates for CitizenCon, then focused on update 2.6. The 2.6 update will drive the FPS game mode to include new vision stabilization technology that more closely mimics the human eye's function when walking or running. This eliminates undesirable headbob, but manages to keep the unified first- and third-person animations and models as CIG wants them.

Unifying the view points means that first- and third-person views of a character show the same skeleton, animation, and mesh in both points of view. Most FPS games use separate animations and body positions between points of view. Crysis 2 is an easy example (and in the same base engine): The player's arms are effectively attached to the side of the head in first-person, allowing a down-the-barrel view for better gameplay. Multiplayer has the arms lowered, nearer the mid-section, and bullets appear to fire at an angle out of the guns. Call of Duty, another example, has more intricate animations and movements in the campaign than in multiplayer, which must use a simplified art set to focus on gameplay and production time.

Roberts referenced glitches in CSGO, Crysis, and Battlefield that are a result of the non-unified systems. Battlefield's neck glitch is among the most comical and exaggerated examples.

To explain this focus on points of view, Roberts elaborated:

"There's a disparity between what you see in first-person view, when you're faking it, and what really is happening. We don't cheat at all. Where your gun points is where you're shooting. That's another big difference -- almost every FPS, the center of the screen is where you'll shoot. The bullets don't fire straight from the muzzle of your gun. [...] None of that's fake [in Star Citizen/SQ42], so when you actually aim, you aim down the sights.

"What you see [your friends] do is what they're actually doing. That's really important, and we're kind of doing that to a level that I don't think anyone else has done that. That's more important for Star Citizen than it is for Squadron 42, because Squadron 42 is a single-player game, so we could have faked it. [...] We're quite happy and proud of where it is.

"We're doing a lot of work on Arena Commander itself. It hasn't had a lot of love and attention since we focused on 2.0, which is the large world, so we've gone back, changed the flight handling and modeling, balanced things to be sort of up-close dog-fighting. We're just about to roll-out to the Evocati test group. They're our first-wave of community testers, so they test stuff very early. [...] We've been balancing and testing flight changes and model changes. Dog-fighting is going to be more up-close and have the original sort of Wing Commander spirit. [...] We've rebalanced things and changed stuff in the flight model."

Very few FPS are accurate in the way firing a gun works in a actual person perspective.

RIP other games.

When are they going to show the economy in action? I'm not too impressed with a procedural generated planet. Open worlds mean nothing in an mmo with nothing to do on them.

They need to get the PU up and running in a state where its playable 15+ hours a day then I'll be impressed.

Oh cmon now, these threads are getting abit ridiculous, ok we get more info about SC than most games during periods, but this is just fluff stuff really, it minimises any impact on this forum now.

Surely its time to have a mods rule, limiting it to BIG-Gameplay show offs-patches.

Chris Roberts says a million things ... these are all distractions from delays. as oflow said, the game was suppose to have an economy/a.i 2 flipping years ago... (5 working systems). We still don't have one, 3.0 aint even gaurenteed this year. all this planet tech (which won't add anything to the GAMEPLAY for years probably) is a distraction from the fact that many of the basic systems are nowhere near finished still.

no more SC threads until Citizencon, and a mod should make the thread imo.

Not interested.

Roberts making more promises for twenty minutes. Very impressed!

Are you still banging on about how this game should have been finished two years ago? I know fine well that you are fully aware of the difference in scale from when the game was first crowd funded to where it is now.

Or have you completely forgotten that they originally planned to have an interactive cut scenes going from space to a fixed location planet side? Mix that into the major screw up they made in giving Illfonic the fps side to develop (you know, the "C.I.G. have delayed Star Marine indefinitely" hooha that site like GS tried to spin into "it's been cancelled") , leaving them with nothing but a pile of unusable code to chuck in the bin and restart. Add it together and that's an easy two year, and more, delay.

Other than having to create and develop their own net code and fully redesign Cryengine the Illfonic f*ck up is the root of all their ills.

@oflow They're only introducing the first career paths into the game, the economy will come after people can actually spend 15 hours of play earning money. Besides the economy core is already in there, you earn money from the basic missions available and can spend that money in shops.

I know everything you know, and the kotaku article reinforced it all. (again, but don't mistake me for a hater, I'm just not defending Chris Roberts, or his decisions, many of which have been bad.) hell, the kotaku article proved that each team has to pick up on every different aspect, meaning how many people are wasting their time developing this planet-landing tech further in Frankfurt, that could be getting more core-basic systems in place sooner? This is Chris Roberts prioritising flashy for appeasment/sales... maybe its neccesary who knows, but articles of him TALKING about EVERYTHING all the time is absolutely pointless in System Wars, its borderline spam at this point.

Maybe if they were PROPERLY transparent, and said "Look, while we ARE doing this now for no good reason other than flash over substance, we have [insert names here] working on Economy/A.I/Mining/Asteroids and here is how THAT's going" planetary landing in a BASIC form (v1.0) was fine for now.... but I can't say im pleased v2.0 is taking priority.

Saying it's illfonic's f*ck up is not honest either is it? it could of been either end... judging by the state of the company at the time, I'm more inclined to believe it was CiG, you can't mess up something that much if you have the proper documentation and communication in place... given the overall state of the company.

I like how we still have no worthwhile A.I being demonstrated, was Behaviour another "f*ck up" too, or were they another victim of the state of CiG in 2013-2014?

With all this money, why do they only have 3 turbulent employees that clearly can't keep up? what is being asked of them is obsurd. Will they be the next victim? let go and then Foundry 42 bitches about having to make the website and its backend too? (tbh I think this should of been internal from the beginning...)

Anyway, rant over... not every SC article should be mentioned in System Wars... its spam.

An obvious disaster obliterating Chris Roberts already checkered career and standing testament for generations to come as to the dangers of propitious talk.

The main entertainment will be watching this wrenched ship go down in flames while Chris and his allegedly racist wife scramble with promises of patches, fixes and free content as ways of an apology.

Most likely 1-3 years down the line a oh-so-candid interview in which Chris (probably divorced by now) says "maybe I was wrong in over promising" as he dubiously joins the ranks of Peter Molyneux and Sean Murray in the pantheon of disgrace.

@MBirdy88: I know you're not a hater, you're a sceptic and that fine but going on about the game being two years late at this point is kina silly when you know reasons behind it. I also agree that there are far too many SC threads being thrown out. (I posted the new Around the verse in Wasdie's thread the other day for that reason).

As for Frankfurt, they were brought in for two reason (I only knew of one before reveal of atmospheric flight) and that was to fully re-do the fps side (primary reason) and as it turns out to create the procedural planetary systems. We all know Manchester is Squadron 42 and cap ships, LA is the head office with all the designers, artists and story tellers but are also doing the majority of work on flight models (along with Manchester) and smaller ships. Leaving Austin with back end design and support, which includes economy, careers and planet hubs, net coding, servers etc.

Right now they are more open and give far more information on the game's progress than any developer or publisher has ever done. That's why there are so many threads posted about it, they keep putting out information. Most backers only need to go to the RSi website to get 10 times the information posted in System Wars.

Maybe in the next 6 years the game will actually have a proper release.

Literally No Man's Sky.

I saw a sushi pillow. It was really cute.

Like this:

Confirmed. Squadron 42 mission will be showcased at Citizen Con. They'll show mission briefing, interaction with characters, getting inside your ship, heading towards objective etc. Plus new info:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbWh5inW7Fw

I will be enjoying seeing SQ42 at citizencon till than

Uh oh I hope your here when we start posting SQ42 gameplay

Sigh, I wrote a quick summary and wanted to post it but my post disappeared. Thanks a lot, Gamespot.

Oh well:

- We'll see an earth like planet during Citizencon. It will have forests, oceans, mountains, all that stuff. The demo will show what their V2 Planets tech is capable off and the stuff you can do there. Unfortunately we won't get this kind of planet in 3.0 because the Stanton system doen't have one.

- Squadron 42 demo will give you a feel of what a sequence/chapter in the game will be like. You will wake up, go get your briefing, get to your ship, do the mission including space combat and fps.

- The character models you saw last year are beyond ancient (in case that wasn't obvious by now) including Admiral Bishop from the senate speech trailer. Many things about them were broken and what not. tl;dr the game will have top tier quality character models like you would see in a cool cinematic, but live in the game.

Other stuff taken from reddit:

- planets will rotate around their own axis and revolve around their star

- dynamic weather based on dynamic heat map confirmed

- binary system mentioned

- space explosion casting light and shadow on planets mentioned

Also there will be a part 1 interview this friday with Sean Tracy, technical director.

Not sure what's more exciting, seeing an Earth like planet in this game or getting a taste of Squadron 42. Good thing we don't have to choose. heuheuheu

The hype train is gonna go into orbit next week.

I'm counting days here dude. Definitely looking forward to both Sq42 and new PU stuff. Roberts once said Sq42 is taking inspiration from Deus Ex and Thief, which is great.

A launch window for Squadron 42 would be what I'd really like to see, doesn't need an actual date just something like Q2 2017 would be fantastic, they can firm it up closer to the window. It would give us all an idea of what the internal target times are like and the single player game needs this far more than Star Citizen, which is being built around us anyway.

I believe when i see it. what about release date?

How many times are you going to ask this?

You will see your campaign mission you wanted on the 9th at least.

So is that what you're gonna do when you finally see that SQ42 gameplay you've been crying about for months? fall back to the "so whats the release date"?

SC is a tech demo until there a confirmed release date according to people

@lawlessx: Lol

A disaster in the making.

they show gameplay finally so what? it take 4 years to show us what are they working on. no i dont consider sneek peeks, beta, etc a proper gameplay.

now the thing is they confirmed last year game is going to release on 2016 now 2016 is coming to end and no words on release date.

So you just confirmed what i just said. That after months of complaining that there is "no gameplay" of star citizen and that the game was apparently a scam because they didn't release videos and trailers YOU wanted you will indeed start moaning about it not being released by the end of 2016.

boggles the mind why someone who didn't even back the game would care so much.

The haters will continue to hate long after the game has been released and is being enjoyed by millions.

Im not a hater. infact it used to be one of my most anticipated game untill they delay again and again without showing a single gameplay. i mean in 4 years after announcement we are now going to see a single player gameplay finally.

You are aware 4 years ago CIG had less than 50 people the single player campaign was going to be a much much smaller project than what it is now right? It think its been repeated over and over (mostly for those that still think the game was supposed to be last year) that the scope and scale of the game was increased to match the budget they now have.

Actually it's well under 4 years since development of Squadron 42 started. Foundry 42 wasn't opened up until September 2013, specifically for the purpose of creating Squadron 42. So that's 3 years, now take into account that they did not have the infrastructure of a well established studio and they've actually taken less development time than any other new AAA I.P. in the market today.

On the other hand, Uncharted 4, for example had been in development for 4 years before any actual gameplay was shown and that was created by a fully established and fully staffed developer, yet it has a fraction of the content that Squadron 42 will have when it comes out. We're looking at a 50 hour, fully performance captured (with A list Hollywood stars), branching story line, fully player perspective cinematic game. You want a small example of what to expect? Imagine Wing Commander IV with state of the art graphics, only instead of FMV everything will be rendered real time and missions will include FPS as well as Space ship combat.

Yet you keep complaining that we haven't seen any gameplay from Squadron 42 and when the time comes that they show us all gameplay, you're complaining that there is no release date. I've stated above that I'd like to see a release window for the game, we all want to see that. I am a backer, in fact I'm Golden ticket holder and original backer, meaning I signed up before the announcement on 10/10/12 and a fairly big backer at that (not compared to the major backers out there but I've put in more than the majority of the 1.5 million). I'm happy to wait for the game to be the best it possibly can be.

Out of interest, have you backed the game? If not, why the f*ck do you care, when you have nothing to lose?

@ghosts4ever:

1. You don't know how development works
2. You ignore the fact that they started with an extremely small squad
3. Why don't you have some patience and wait for CitizenCon?

I'm very excited about this. Now they should hurry up and tell us when we can expect the release, I'm growing impatient.

You don't consider Beta proper gameplay. Well you must be disappointed by literally every game until it's in your hands.

im expecting Q2-Q3 2017 ,but don't expect chris to give an exact release date. He used to give dates early on in the game's development,but he stopped once the backlash of missing those dates became abit ridiculous. development for SQ42 is technically finished,but now they're gonna take afew months to polish the game

Is SQ42 and Star Citizen the same game? Is SQ42 a small part of Star Citizen or something? Sorry, I haven't read much about this. But it seems these two are two different games, but they are always together in threads. Are they making two huge games at once? If so... what the ****?

@GarGx1: He's afraid that SQ42/SC will be a better FPS game than his Doom.

except it will not be primilary FPS game. just have FPS parts

of course it wont be better than Doom.

@Litchie: Squadron 42 is single player standalone game that takes place within Star Citizen universe. Star Citizen itself is Online persistent universe, a MMO. The goal was always to release Sq42 first. PU was added as a stretch goal. Both are using same assets. PU will take place after the events of Sq42.

@ghosts4ever: Who says the FPS won't be? Until the full game is released we cant be for sure.

I see. Thanks for the info. What is PU, though? I tried to look it up but no place I could find explains this.

It stands for "persistent universe". It's basically what many people use to refer to the online game Star Citizen.

Single Player Game = Squadron 42

Persistent Universe = Star Citizen

When people talk about Star Citizen, they are basically talking about PU (Persistent Universe). It's open world online game where you have freedom to go wherever you want and do whatever you want. PU contains AI as well as other players that will populate the universe. There will be different jobs for people to take around the galaxy. They can be mercenaries, pirates, bounty hunters, navy guys, explorers and so on.

Squadron 42 is mission based linear game with branching storylines like Wing Commander 3 and 4 but on much bigger scale. Levels will be sandbox but it won't be full fledged open world game like Star Citizen itself. Between different missions, you will be able interact with other characters, build relationships etc. Squadron 42 is first game in the trilogy. There will be two more games in Squadron 42 saga.

Not watching it as don't want to disappoint my self. I will buy SQ42 but not getting excited about.

@kweeni & @Cloud_imperium Ok thanks dudes! I feel like I know what the hell is going on now. Much appreciated!

When the bloody **** is this game gonna release? Is it a MMO RPG? And do I need 2x GTX1080Tis or 2 Volta cards to max this out?

first they should concentrate to release it then think about second and third game. we will be very old by the time when 3rd game will release...

You made your point. Try to move on.