Squadron 42

The new flight model is functionally complete in Squadron 42, with no master modes, power-pip control and freeform quantum boost; the remaining work is bringing it into Star Citizen, including networking and multiplayer.

Gamepad improvements made for Squadron 42 will come back to Star Citizen, though they need fine tuning because flight model and quantum differ, and the team says it wants to support all peripherals.

Yes, that is the plan: Squadron's ships are well along in being converted to the new physics-based damage system, hero ships are getting extra breakup work first, and PU adoption is not dated.

Dave Haddock is narrative director working on story, characters, dialogue and scripts for Squadron 42 and Star Citizen, and was among the company's first five or six people.

Ahead of the shoot, Squadron 42's first chapter went through many drafts, and the writers spent about two months starting work very early to overlap with the UK team, which backfired because of traffic.

Creature work has started, beginning with the Quasigrazer, with several other creatures in development, but details are withheld and there is no promise of a big feature, as they would rather let players discover them.

Yes, Zanelli met Chris Roberts through the film Outlander, and Roberts asked him to score Squadron 42 because it's a story-driven, epic narrative and he'd shown he could tell a complicated story.

The new flight feature stays in Squadron 42 for now because bringing it to the PU means retuning every ship and component, multiplayer testing and finishing the UI, and it will likely be tested with Evocati before wider release.

The audio team has been given the green light to potentially quadruple in size to finish Squadron 42 audio while maintaining Star Citizen, and is hiring across sound design, programming, technical roles and a new Audio Rigger position.

Feature teams in the core gameplay pillar design systemic features with Star Citizen and Squadron 42 leadership, release minimal tiers to the live game, then hand them to content teams to use.

To bring feature teams and level designers closer, Squadron 42's FPS level design and social teams join the core gameplay pillar, letting the creative director focus on flight and features be tested in real gameplay.

Squadron 42 is described as basically a giant mission inside Star Citizen, where the same features can be proven more simply because the path is less sandbox, while Star Citizen still lacks mid-to-long-range combat and planetary AI.

Yes, the habitation section can be extended quickly if more personnel are needed, and the team wants Squadron 42 locations to feel fully realised and explorable rather than just corridors to an objective.

Squadron 42 is the top priority, so PU-only work gets less attention for now, while professions are built from activities, with resource gathering, trading, piracy, mercenary and bounty hunting named as the first focus.

Partly: some developers will roll over to the PU quickly, others will move to pre-production on the next Squadron 42 chapter, and some disciplines will roll off earlier, with resources evaluated as they go.

The changed cadence should help Squadron 42 because it shares the codebase and gets fixes in better shape sooner; they plan to revise the roadmap, aiming for a real game once persistence, orgs and server meshing are in.

The Squadron 42 roadmap took long because teams wanted to validate and estimate remaining tasks bottom-up, complicated by tasks shared with Star Citizen, since the roadmap mirrors their internal task tracking.

Squadron 42 is on the downhill slope, with features targeted by end of the year, then optimization and polish, then beta, though estimates could slip; remaining technical risk is mostly object container streaming.

AI is called the biggest remaining risk to the Squadron 42 schedule, with too few AI programmers and more being sought, alongside the time needed for content and polish.

The goal is smooth performance, at least 30 and closer to 60 frames per second, which he thinks is a good shot since single-player avoids multiplayer networking overhead.

Sean's team built an importer that stitches the performance-capture edit files together in about 30 seconds, instead of half a day to a day per scene.

As Director of Cinematics he co-directs the Squadron 42 performance-capture shoots and leads the team integrating them into cutscenes, most of which are meant to run in real time.

The shoot was an emotional mix of living the dream and feeling stuck there, with highlights of watching actors inhabit their roles and Gary Oldman asking about how his character would speak.

The character and animation departments contribute most, supplying fixes and raw animation, plus tool-side R&D so ships can be moved in cinematics.

He's confident about the very large number of Squadron 42 scenes, which mostly keep the player's viewpoint and agency, with full filmic cutscenes a small part and a balance between design and cinematics ongoing.

Chris Roberts says Squadron 42 will be playable offline without co-op, and smaller private servers for friends are still planned, though with less scale and slower content updates than the main universe.

Squadron 42 is estimated at around 50 hours with 50 missions of at least 30 minutes each plus time between missions, and the first episode is expected towards the end of next year.

No dedicated school is promised; Squadron 42 is intended as the training experience, with Arena Commander for practice and website tutorials, and targeting improvements for joysticks and gamepads are being worked on.

They want to release Squadron 42, or part of it, before the Persistent Universe is finished, possibly episodically in polished batches of missions, though this thinking is still in process.