It’s time for another week to come to an end; and that means it’s time for another “Around the Verse” video update from the folks at Cloud Imperium Games. This week, it’s more talk about the 3.0 Alpha for Star Citizen. You better get your calculators out, because it’s time to brush up on physics.
The episode focuses primarily on the quantum travel mechanics that will govern how players move about the universe in Star Citizen. Alpha 3.0 will overhaul that system with distance in mind; instead of just clicking your destination and be greeted with the “same experience regardless of where you were going,” alpha 3.0 players will find that long trips feel quite different from short ones.
“What that gave us is no matter where we choose on the Star Map, whatever location, we’d get that nice little curve,” CIG’s Mark Abent explains. “So if I were going to Mars, I would accelerate and max the speed and then decelerate again, but if I were going to Pluto, I’d go all the way up, even higher speed, cruise a little bit, and then go down. […] When you’re accelerating up, if you don’t hit a certain speed, you don’t get the tunnel effect. You just get these little sparkles ’cause you’re not hitting [the] sound barrier of the quantum. […] But if you go a little further out, you hit the barrier, so we trigger on the effects, and it makes it much a more dramatic thing.”
Check out the official site for the written update, or check out the video below:
