Star Citizen has been pretty controversial recently. Robertson Space Industries, the developer, has been accused of not delivering of having major staff issues, many backers requested updates on time tables and finances, and it even seemed some former employees corroborated these stories. Well RSI hopes to put to bed all the malcontents with patch 2.0 for the alpha which brings major changes. The change will add three new flight modes, Quantum travel, and move to a “third order motion control system,” what ever the heck that is.
Here’s what we know about the three modes: ships will now launch in the first flight mode precision mode. During this launch top speed is reduced and acceleration scaled back in exchange, the player gets finer and easier maneuvering. An opposite mode will be called cruise: “Velocity at the expense of control,” as Cloud Imperium Games explained in yesterday’s update. The third mode, which is called SCM is quite the same as the current area commander flight model, but now calculates maximum velocity dynamically as a function of force and mass in order to optimize each ship’s performance in a fight.
Additionally we will get Quantum Travel, which sounds like something out of bad scifi, but is similar to cruise mode, utilizing a quantum drive, and enabling long distance travel over short time periods. The limitations of the Quantum Drive mean that any ship equipped with one can achieve the same maximum velocity of 0.2c—that’s one-fifth the speed of light—but some will take longer to get there than others. In the blog post it says
“At these speeds, tiny variations in angle will result in massively different flight paths, so this is where slower ships will have the chance to escape a faster ship accosting them,”Of course, traveling at these incredible speeds is quite dangerous, so the ship computer will automatically pull you out of Quantum Travel if the possibility of collision is detected or the ship has any downed shields.”
2.0 will also feature many bug changes, fixes, and the standard patch balancing and content addition you are used to seeing in a major patch release.
check out the blog here for full info and some nice videos of the new stuff in action.