Cloud Imperium Games is publishing a big burst of Star Citizen news this weekend, as funding for their game passes $254 million in total. Can I just say that it’s nuts that this game has raised so much cash? To be more precise, at the moment of this writing it’s at $254,019,902. The sheer volume of ships and game mechanics has ballooned over the last few years. And with the wrap of this year’s CitizenCon events, CIG had more news to share to the excitement of fans.
Various panels and gameplay demo snippets took place during the annual convention this year. As part of these reveals, CIG had more to show in terms of ships, with a big focus on various in-universe ship manufacturers as part of the free fly period this past week. The Star Citizen dev was also demonstrating various other ships, including the new Kraken carrier. There were spotlights on various shipmakers and their offerings like Origin Jumpworks.
But aside form gameplay snippets and funny segments, Cloud Imperium also held various talks about their plans for the future. In addition to talks about ship design, criminal punishment in-game, and other topics, there’s one more panel that just got released.
This latest entry is an entire talk about how the development will work on developing the universe through a new scripting and AI engine. Called Quantum, the universe will be simulated to a minute detail using this new technology. The servers running the game will use Quantum to create believable elements through the realistic simulation of AI behavior. Going beyond simple AI routines, Star Citizen will mesh together all of the different gameplay and simulation elements to create a living game world. The development team hopes to reach a point where they have a system that can respond relatively quickly to player input and action, say if a player crashes market price for some commodity, which sounds incredible. This will also include NPC crew and other elements too.
Quantum is the brainchild of Tony Zurovec, whom you may know as the creator of the Crusader series back in the nineties. He also worked on the Ultima series. This pedigree should result in a much more refined design that will help speed up development and polish, at least I hope so.
And speaking of ship design, the teams involved in the creation of the digital spaceships also had some words to add to the fun. This second video takes an extensive look at the ship creation pipeline. The goal with this toolset is to speed up and refine the process of designing and creating starships for the game. During the course of the livestream, team members also took live questions from the audience and fans, so it’s a great time to hear what the team has to think on various topics.
