14 DAY TRIAL // Cloud Imperium Games has released a strange video from Star Citizen, showing a poor defenseless ship get trashed, meant to show off the impressive in-game damage model.
Star Citizen is the biggest star of the crowdfunding movement, and its open development process is yet another gaming industry anomaly.
Whatever your stance might be on massively multiplayer online games or persistent, sprawling science fiction universes with a rich back lore, which are influenced by the actions of the players, one thing is certain: everybody likes seeing spaceships blown up.
The video starts off pretty slow, showing some of the smaller guns putting dents in a ship's fuselage, but things quickly ramp up, and after the 1 minute mark, you can see entire chunks being blown off and floating into space.
The damage model and physics computations are definitely impressive, and you can learn more about the optimized technology behind the feature in a new blog post by Roberts Space Industries.
Star Citizen is shaping up to be quite an impressive game
For the time being, the folks at Cloud Imperium Games are still trying to wrap their heads around some of the particularities of the system.
For instance, some of the in-game ships are so large that they're basically standalone floating levels, so there are still some questions regarding how to handle hull preaches and how to portray critical damage in the vacuum of space, and what impact that should have on the players inside the ships.
The game's scope is huge, and aside from the persistent multiplayer universe, the developer also wants to enable users to play in a separate single-player module.
The devs have also demoed the first-person shooter module, a small fraction of the content planned for launch, and highlighted some action taking place in what looked like the Battle Room from the "Ender's Game" novel by Orson Scott Card. Or its big screen adaptation, if you're into that kind of thing.
The action takes place in the 30th century, within the Milky Way, following the decline of the massive United Empire of Earth. One of the central themes tackled by the game will be citizenship, which players will be able to earn through various actions, such as enrolling into the military and performing certain duties.
The game is looking at a 2016 release, headed to Windows PC and Linux.
