homepage Forums Miscellaneous Outer Space Simulation & Combat Games Star Citizen Citizencon 2023

If you have time to spare, here's the full videos for what they showed off over the weekend.
Day 1 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1956739712 skip to about 31 minutes for the preshow or 1 hour 2 minute mark for the actual start
Day 2 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1957651690 again, skip to about 31 for the preshow and 1 hour for the actual start.

There's shorter versions on the youtube page.
Maybe once I've seen them and have time I'll write up a brief summary.

Here's the Squadron 42 trailer

They claim it's feature complete, they're just polishing it.

Holy sh!t!


Thanks for the heads up. I was going to sign up for the 2016 beta, but I guess I missed it?

If this is near release then that's a good thing, but I harbor my suspicions. We will see. The trajectory taken by this game has left me filled with skepticism. I don't want to offend those who do like and support this so I'll temper my comments, and it's probably best to wait and see, which sounds funny when it comes to this game.

Citizencon though.... the jokes write themselves.

(secretly I hope it is awesome though)

Star Citizen is graphically superior to any other game in existence, even in Alpha. Technology wise, it also does things almost no other game is capable of, either.

What the Alpha does have is bugs. But that's what an alpha is, right?


Squadron 42 I remain more hopeful now, after seeing the presentation on Sunday. I have been playing the Alpha persistent universe again over the last week and notice a number of improvements from the last time I played a year ago. This project has come very, very far since I played the very first release of player hangars way back in probably 2014, or whenever that was.

Those who insist games like Starfield are actually good are in for a great shock when they play Star Citizen. I find it hilarious folks are in such awe over the tech, but, then again, most haven't been helping the game become what it is.


Some of us have been banned many times on their forums, but because of our persistence, we have lead to dramatic shifts in development--such as controller support. There was a time where keyboard and mouse were the ultimate ship flight tool. This is not the case anymore. Now there is parity in peripherals and strong support for all of them.


I have a feeling they will start licensing their engine technology sometime in the future to provide additional funding. Chris Roberts is quite dedicated to making this happen. Yes, even I get frustrated with the delays, but a lot of "core technologies" needed to make the game happen, that we have been waiting years on, has begun to appear in the last twelve months and these techs are powerful, working, and game changing. If ever finished, I don't believe there will be any other multiplayer games worth playing, save for DCS, and genres that have nothing to do with this one. There's so much potential beginning to emerge.

Particularly for a game that isn't released yet and they've had several of them over the years. Does seem silly and the name is stupid, I won't argue that.



The graphics of Star Citizen did ruin Cyberpunk a bit for me. After crawling around Hurston and Arc Corp, Night City kinda lost it's look for me. And I liked Cyberpunk.



Shoot, even if the game was never released, the tools they created for others to make games based off it would be mind blowing. Particularly if you saw the first few hours of the day 1 video.

Synopsis of the longer videos for those that don't like extremely long videos.

Day 1
Shaping the Verse; The Future of StarEngine.
Clouds, Fog and Weather. They showed off different lighting and weather effects. Looked good and as someone who's played a bunch of flight sims it's kind of on par with what I'd expect. Looks good. One thing of concern is I'm not sure how dynamic it is, if at all, yet.

Fire Effects. This was spectacular. The fire, damage, smoke and lighting effects are a treat to watch. They go over a bit on how they did it and showed some videos of a fire raging through a ship. The video also showed some firefighting using both a fire extinguisher and opening the area to the vacuum of space. What gets me is we had stuff like this way back in Far Cry 2, why hasn't anyone else done this since?

Water Effects. Fairly neat. Again they show off a bit on how they did it. The gameplay video and stills showed better looking waves to what they have. Also wakes from low flying aircraft as well as ripples and waves from different objects impacting the water.

Renderer Planets and Vulkan. A lot of technical details in this one in new upscaling and renderer updates. They also announced and showed off HDR. Showed some cool scope effects that probably won't be noticed by most people since they'll just be aiming straight down them. And they also showed off some blood, sweat and tears on some character models.

Global lighting and Ray tracing. Helps make most scenes a bit better. I fear I may need a bigger video card and game in a walk in freezer at this point though. This one was also full of a bunch of technical details on how some of this works, so for those nerds people excited about such things, you may want to tune in.

StarCloth, StarHair and Maelstrom. StarCloth shows off clothing effects. They look neat, but we'll see how well they work on release. It'll supposedly get the clothing to move and conform realistically without the weird clipping you get in almost any video game that has multiple armor/clothing options. StarHair is the same, but with hair. The comments in the videos are full of people complaining about how long they go onto these two topics and how upset they are at them using engineering time on these. Maelstrom is the environment destructions effects. They showed off a ship blasting a run down outpost and it did look spectacular. The cherry on top was the larger pieces of rubble tumbling into the ocean and causing some nice splashes and ripples.

Audio Enhancements. Here they showed off some changes they made to how sound works in the game. Most notably, when flying in the vacuum of space you don't really hear what's outside the ship unless it impacts or otherwise affects your ship. Gives off some real BSG vibes.

Persistent Entity Streaming. This is the huge technical one. Supposedly this is and has been one of the largest hurdles to overcome. I don't even know if I'm qualified to write a summary of it.
The demo they showed had multiple clients connecting to a couple servers. It showed every object being connected to other objects and different rooms. As the players or objects move around they disappear from the various clients or servers as they're in a place where it doesn't effect the client, but then pop right back in as they come back into view/distance to the player. That's probably a too short and bad summary, but I don't know how this stuff works. I might have to watch it a few more times.

Fix It and Fly It
Resource network and engineering activities. This showcased some of the new engineering gameplay, mostly for larger ships. There will be nodes throughout the ship. For you Star Trek fans think EPS conduits or something. These link the power plant of the ship to all the various other components. As they take damage you'll lose power to sections until they're repaired or replaced. The same goes with ship components. On large ships the engineering consoles will also be where you mess with allocating energy to and from various components to either get more out of your shields, weapons, engines, ect.

Maintenance: What is a malfunction? They show off what'll happen if you ignore damaged components or push them too far. They might break or start a fire. They then showed gameplay where a large ship was under attack and as things went down the player at the engineering console used it to direct damage control parties (all just other players at this point) to where they needed to go to keep the ship up and running.

Talking Ships
Crusader Spirit. This is a new line of ships that they're showing off. Been out in testing for a bit though. They talk about how they designed it.
RSI Zeus. Another new ship, looks like a flying dorito. Supposed to be a modern (by game time reckoning) upgrade to what is in lore the first commercially available ship with a quantum drive.
New explorer variant to the Drake Cutter
They showed off a graybox of the RSI Polaris and the Banu Merchantman.

Navigating the Verse
This had much needed changes. Adds a local map that can either be bought (in game) or found, or it'll start filling in as you traverse the area. Should make navigating easier. This also allows you to place manual waypoints that can be shared with other people. Also includes changes to the in game HUD.
Most needed of all is the changes to that jankiest POS in the game, the StarMap. New one seems to work better and is more readable. They also said they're working on adding filters and an ability to type in a location and find it that way. Can't wait for that. You can keep all the ships and other fancy effects, this is the one that matters now for players in my opinion.

Day 2

Character Advancement. Here they start out by showing a bunch of new NPC types and looks as well as location in the Pyro system. Introducing new gangs and their various outfits. That also let them show off some new tattoos since one of them is basically Space Yakuza. They didn't really go into the backgrounds, just where they operate and what they look like. They also showed off some new effects of dirt and grime on both players and clothing.
StarCloth. This is kind of a repeat of the previous day, only with different outfits shown off. The comments have a lot of people complaining about it. It also teased a new looting mechanic/screen that seems to be more streamlined than what's currently in the game.
StarHair. Yes, another sort of repeat segment showing off how the hair moves and is affected by different environments and objects. They also went into excruciating detail on the new hair styles, colors and hair dying options.
Character Customization. Here they go into more detail on new customizations on the face, head and eyes. Starting with having more starting heads to base things off of and then a slew of new shaping tools. Looks like you can make just about any human head you can imagine.

Life in the First Person.
Traversal. This mostly showed off new zero G maneuvers. Finally giving the player the ability to grab, pull and push off of objects. Something they've teased for years. It also has better transitions and animations when going from space back into a ship with gravity and vice versa. They've also reworked prone for better movement through tight crawlspaces. This also looks more realistic from the 3rd person to anyone watching it. They've also reworked ladders so you can better grab, climb, jump, and push off of them. You can also lean while on one. Slides are also being added. Not the ones at playgrounds, but more like how a baseball player slides feet first.

How Interaction works. This segment goes on how they're changing the interaction with objects. Looks much smoother and like it'll take up less visual space. It should let you just walk up to things and hit "f" with the ability to hold it down and pull up a small menu. Kind of like how most games do things these days. That menu also seems to be customizable. Animations to how the character interacts with buttons, switches ect also seem to be much improved. The new looting screen/menu also makes an appearance here and they go into a bit more detail on it.

Stealth Gameplay and Weapon wear. Here they show off different takedowns. Some of which look pretty good. What concerns me is they show some sloppy and slow ones based on the players "skill" what this means and how it goes up, they didn't really explain. Restraints also made an appearance here, so taking bounties alive may be an option one of these days.
Also, depending on your armor or other gear, you can now ping in first person. This acts kinda like the wall hacks in almost every game these days. It'll briefly show you the layout and where items and people are located. The range isn't great and it only shows up for a couple seconds. Enemies also don't get tagged and stay highlighted, they disappear too. Supposedly someone with the right equipment will be able to detect you when you're pinging something. So it's more like a sub's active ping that a magic wallhack that lets you see everything without risk.

Weapon wear is also being added. This makes the weapons look dirtier the more they're carried, used. Think RDR2. When dirty it looks like they give off more smoke, the sound changes some and maybe (might just be me) the ROF goes down a hair. They'll also jam sometimes and it'll happen more often the dirtier it is. We'll see how it turns out. If the wear is really fast just gimme a space AK that works. In 2953 you'd think some level of reliability would exist to carry a weapon longer than a day or fire more than three magazines before totally malfunctioning.
Weapons in general are getting reworked with different sound effects and more recoil. They've also changed/added new iron sights. Some of them in game currently are crap and these look better and you may be able to change the stock iron sights to different iron sights. I'm a fan of sights. In 2023 even the Amish have optics on their rifles and this game takes place in 2953. Other weapons changes include the ability to reload from the backpack or armor, at the cost of taking much longer to reload than one in a pouch on your armor. A new automatic pistol and fancy future beam energy weapons were also shown off. They're also gonna be making changes to forces on the player and making armor work better increasing TTK.

FPS AI changes. Number 1 they'll now no longer have infinite ammo. They'll use it better and go refill if they run low, or swap weapons to one with more ammo. They will now use grenades more often and frequently. They'll also avoid your grenades and other hazards better. The demo showed that some of them worked a bit better and didn't just stand there spamming fire or run straight into you. They took cover and moved with a bit more sense.


Taking Flight.
This one starts out with changes to all those little buttons in the cockpit. It's not DCS level, but some of them actually do stuff now and with the other changes to interaction, you can actually interact with them reliably. The MFDs are more easily customizable and if you have a helmet and a ship with few MFDs, you can cast them to the helmet HUD to clutter it up as much as you see fit to.
There's now different flight modes. A precision mode, for slow tight maneuvers or landing. A fast mode for moving fast, but weapons won't recharge and shields will be disabled. This fast mode also requires charging the quantum drive for some reason. Making it risky to run by dropping your shields and still adding a delay to when you can hit the high speeds. Finally, the regular mode we have now.
They then showed off some new NPC flight AI.
There's no gun convergence and the fix is to add a bit of movement on each weapon, even fixed ones. Not to set it yourself, but so that once you aim at a target it adjust the convergence onto the target on the fly up to certain limits.
Next there's a precision fire mode, which zooms in the sight a bit, reduces the rate of fire by a bit and paints sections of the target. This way instead of aiming at the lead pip, you aim at the ship components and the ship's gimbals will adjust to that part of the enemy ship. They used this in a demo to snipe the turrets off of a Hammerhead.
The atmosphere now has a greater effect on ships. Most ships now have control surfaces to help control when in an atmosphere. If you have something that's aerodynamic it should let you glide to some extent without engines. It looked a bit weird when they showed it off though.

Living on the Edge
This one shows off some of the Pyro locations and how/why they were designed that way. The list of assests used in Pyro is far greater than Stanton so there should be more visual variety than we had at Stanton where all the outposts were really copies of the same handful of buildings. The locations in this one are different. It's like a weird mad max style frontier out there in the Pyro system. With tons of locations that consist of towns, small cities, trading hubs, mining camps, homesteaders, gang hideouts farms wrecks, abandoned sites, ect. One of them is a town made on what looks like an oil rig and it looks pretty cool. It's a big system that has far more locations and planets than Stanton does. It's also playable in the Alpha starting with the first waves of testers. These locations will have different reputations so they may be hostiles or not depending on your actions. This gives you loads of locations to either raid or get missions from.
Pyro space stations were also shown and they look very detailed and not like the cookie cutter ones on Stanton. These are mostly in various stages of ill repair. With multiples ways to get around through maintenance decks/spaces/jeffries tubes. Some of them are abandoned and give off some serious Alien vibes. I spend more time playing this game by just walking around the locations and it seems there will be plenty for me to do there.

Destination Adventure
There's new distribution centers owned by different companies on the planets' surfaces. These appear a bit small for planetary distribution centers, but it's a game and that's already gigantic. These will give you more areas to trade from, get missions from, or just raid and steal stuff from. They even showed some gameplay of that.

Cargo handling is getting revamped with different cargo coming in different size and weight containers. Some new commodities will also require different handling, like temperatures, or they're volatile, or fragile or can't be transported via quantum. it also looks like that cargo may have to be loaded by the player.

Hangars also are getting changes. You can now store things there. Spawn and/or store vehicles in the hangar to then load on a ship. This is done via a new cargo lift which will also deliver the cargo to you for loading.

Player outposts will also be a thing. You can build it as you like. Decorate it. Store stuff there. Build or make things there with fabricators. Build ore extractors. There's also shields and turrets for defense.

Day 2 was finished with the Squadron 42 video. I'll recommend you just watch it. It looks great and I can't wait. That's also where they claimed Squadron 42 is feature complete and just in a polishing phase. This is Chris Roberts though, so who knows how long that'll take. The other claim they made was everything shown in those two days will be released sometimes between now and the end of next year.


Also, if you don't like walls of text or really long videos, go watch the TheNOOBIFIER1337's videos where he distills everything down into short summary videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7cyxOSih7E&list=PLZcv1kmz26utOW5mlPUg_WKckloW5TZEz ...maybe I should have led with this.

And here's a brief summary of the internet's reaction to the Squadron 42 video

I would consider buying a small amount of equity if such a thing were possible.

The engine licensing revenue could be huge if they make it.

So when is the official release date?

Hang on, I'll get my crystal ball...

In truth, soon I hope. I'm not getting any younger

Same answer as last year, Two Years™

That's why I play now, well, have been since the very first alpha release.

If the game never comes out, at least I've had some(plenty) of fun.

I bought into the game years ago... Sqn 42 was the reason. I was so excited. Then, I couldn't be bothered to wait any longer.
Now, even after seeing that video, nope, still can't be bothered.

Not sure where else to put this. Quality Sh*tPost making fun of the feature creep in Star Citizen.

That was excellent!

I'm still glad I got the refund when I did.