

Multi-Crew Gameplay, Starmap & Personal Hangars

Welcome to some more Star Citizen, diving into a summary of Calling All Devs which covered Multi-Crew for Arena Commander, Route Planning & Personal Hangars also a bit on Stability that I saw on Reddit.

They are going to be assembling a dedicated team to work on Star Marine and Arena Commander to add new game modes, maps and features to those modes.
Multi-Crew Arena Commander should be something they tackle in the future, allowing you to spawn in the turret or co-pilot station of a ship, so a group could use a single ship in Vanduul Swarm for example or you could have a Constellation v Constellation PvP battle with all the stations and turrets manned.
A lot of the code and work is already done, they need to add some additional functionality to the lobbies so you can specify where you’d spawn.
The creation of this dedicated team should help evolve multi-crew, AI, Balance & turret gameplay as well.
The plan is to have that team this year.

Quantum Route Planning
They are working on a route planning feature for the Star Map (potentially it could make it into 3.3), this will take into account how far you QD can travel in each jump, how much fuel is required and pick the shortest path by default.
You’ll also be able to edit the route to go in a certain direction or avoid an area.
There’ll be essential information like where fuel/rest stops are, so that you aren’t caught short by running out of fuel so much, tho you will have to plan routes will at least some intelligence.
The whole Starmap will be getting made more User Friendly and Fun too.
Potentially they may have you gathering information about certain stations and areas that is updated as you visit them. Starmaps and info should be a commodity and will be able to be sold to other players. They talk about potentially having areas where you can buy info that players have sold, info might have value based on it’s age, whats been detected or where it’s been mapped.
They are still working out the possibility of dropping waypoints and destinations in the middle of nowhere or entirely freely on the star map. This creates a lot of issues inclduing being able to circumvent patrol routes, would trade lanes form & exactly how the system would be handled, but may be awesome for exploration.
They haven’t ruled it out yet BUT haven’t confirmed it either.

Personal Hangars
They are working on the common hangar elements at the moment for Hurston.
They are planning to integrate the current instanced hangars into these major landing zones.
Different types of hangar may be restricted to certain areas, like a R&Y hangar may be on MicroTech, a Self Land Hangar on Hurston.
These hangars will allow you to customize them too with flair & potentially other bits and pieces & other players will be able to visit these as well.
They are going to keep adding and updating the hangar common elements, so different planets might have variation or some unique pieces BUT then they can reuse what is sensible for other hangars across the verse.
Hangars will be of various sizes & you will be able to rent them too.
They are still exploring some ideas too.
Something was said about Player Habs (we know they are building more advanced spawn rooms and locations for Hurston BUT it was cut from the show to reveal at a later time)

A question was asked on Reddit “Where is stability on the Roadmap
Bearded-CIG Replied:
“We tend to define stability as anything that abruptly interrupts the play experience ( client crashes, disconnections, server crashes, etc) where performance is how well the game runs.
I gather data on how frequently stability issues are affecting our players and send a report on it for almost every PTU build that we release so that producers have a mathematical measurement of how stable both the game client and the game servers are. It helps to answer questions they have with regards to “how bad are things” and “how does this compare to the public environment” which in turn, helps them to prioritize if we need to focus on stability issues or other problems. I then record that data so that we have historical context of what past builds of the game were like. Since stability is something we look at every time we release a build to the PTU, I don’t think it’s going to show up on the road map.”