Star Citizen ’s latest installment of Around The Verse has finally arrived, focusing on the tech behind the Coil featured in Squadron 42. It may look like a mess of junk and electricity, but Cloud Imperium Games wants players to treat it like a character.
In last month’s Holiday Live Stream demo, the player character dug into the depths of the Coil to rescue SAC Rebecca Trejo. While its presence was somewhat fleeting in the scope of the larger presentation, it’s got a significant place in Squadron 42’s lore. Long ago in the Odin system, a star went nova to the point of decimating an entire nearby planet. Formed out of that wreckage is this mass of electricity, gases, debris and other hazards that will play a critical role in the game itself. It can trap you, fry your ship and drastically alter the way your branching journey unfolds.
Calling back to Stephen King’s The Mist, the true terror of the Coil is that players won’t know what to expect once they’re inside it. Story beats may guide players to specific parts of the mass, but it’s still a huge maze to get through. Like all things in the Star Citizen universe, the Coil also responds to environmental factors like the sun and harsh weather conditions. The Coil’s ultimate goal is to intimidate travelers with its labyrinthine design and cinematic scope.
Realizing the full stature of such a tremendous object has been an understandably laborious task for its developers at CIG. Built off the fog effects of Dreamworks technology, it’s essentially one expansive volume with all of its geometry inside a single container. Outside that container are two merged graphs for its shell and outer haze. This compartmentalized design allows CIG to edit large swaths of the Coil on the fly. For example, days before the Holiday demo went live, developers agreed the cloud didn’t look menacing enough. As such, it was given the reddish hue we see today. The design also used to feature more clearly defined walls and fewer clouds.
With so much procedural fog in play, the biggest technical challenge of creating the Coil has been reducing the amount of memory it occupies. While the pre-alpha phase has generally been about getting the mass to look and feel a certain way, its technology has to be refined to render less of the volume at once. In terms of raw numbers, the Coil must operate at 10 percent of its current resource consumption rate to be fully optimized for modern PCs.
Traversal and points of interest also major factors in the remaining creative process. Much like Star Citizen’s planetary design procedure, Squadron 42’s developers now have to take this massive object and fill it with sensible pathways and interesting stuff to do. As it stands now, the current thought is that adding more closed-off corridors might help guide players to important locations. Because nothing of this scope has ever been made for a game before, the Star Citizen team is essentially “defining the work” to be done by future developers. In other words, lots of thought has gone into bringing this massive cloud to life.
Star Citizen is in alpha for backers on PC. For more on this episode of Around The Verse, tune into Reverse The Verse at 3 p.m. EST. Also, be sure to check out the fully redesigned Roberts Space Industries website for the latest production schedule.
What are your thoughts on the first Squadron 42 ATV? Are you captivated by the majesty of the Coil? Tell us in the comments section!
