The first Around the Verse of 2019 from Cloud Imperium Games has gone live. The episode covers what they have planned for 2019, both for Squadron 42 and the Star Citizen persistent universe.

The episode is just under five minutes since a lot of the team are still on the holiday break and just getting back in to star up work again on Star Citizen. The video does cover what gamers can expect to roll out throughout 2019, including the upcoming release of the ArcCorp planet, which is basically Star Citizen’s version of Coruscant from Star Wars, and another planet called Microtech (sp?). RSI CEO Chris Roberts explains what’s on the manifest for the new year and what backers can look forward to going live throughout the four quarters.

ArcCorp will be a fascinating planet to see live and in action because the entire planet is canvassed with a city. I’m curious to see how much of the pattern of buildings will repeat, how much of it will be explorable on foot, and what the density of the ground-level will be like for those who decide to drop down to the street level? I tend to doubt that will be as dense as Grand Theft Auto with NPCs and whatnot, but that’s where the curiosity comes in.

I’m also curious if they’re using textures for the surface for the LOD or will it be based on material shaders to save on memory? I thought that was a brilliant use of the material layers in that 4K Star Wars demo to give the impression that it was actually textures. It captured the same fidelity of a UHD layer but without the memory footprint. You can check it out below in case you forgot what it looked like.

Beyond the two new planets there will also be the inclusion of new moons that can be explored as well. We didn’t get to see the moons in action but I’m sure we’ll see them explored in more detail, soon.

Roberts also mentions that they will be implementing object entity persistence so that interactive objects will be able to persist across a server for an indefinite amount of time. So you might take a crate, leave it on a planet behind a stack of trees, leave the planet, fight some bounty hunters who have been tracking you down, and then go back to the trees and retrieve the crate containing some stolen parsec chips or whatever.

That level of persistence will add an extra layer of emergent gameplay for players to the already expansive persistent universe.

Additionally, the team will also be implementing server meshing, so that this will increase the overall server performance as more and more players pile into the ever-growing universe.

You can keep track of the current development for Star Citizen by visiting the official website, which outlines the current developmental roadmap for both the persistent multiplayer universe and Squadron 42.