6 years. It's easy to forget how long that is. What was your age in 2016? What were you doing? It's been almost six and a half years since development for SR2 started, almost 5 since the birth of this website, and 4 since the closed beta.
It's been a long ride, and the game has evolved a lot, looking back at the first open beta version it's hard to recognize the game. And here we are, on our last dab, the last update before 1.0, finally. Half a year ago I explained we wanted to polish the game for it to be ready to leave early access, and through 0.9.900, 0.9.910, and now 0.9.920 I feel comfortable saying we have done it.
We have tried many things for the career mode (trust me when I say many), and we have found something that seems to fit the scale of the game and how it plays well, not forgetting what makes SR2 special, and making the game more entertaining to play. It isn't Star Citizen but we are really proud of it, and we can't wait to start showing you more in the coming months. Now, to what brought us here: 0.9.920.
The 0.9.900 update improved what we had, 0.9.910 made the game more challenging, and 0.9.920 aims to add some of what was missing before. It's one of the most feature-packed updates we've released. I'll try to cover the biggest features here, but if you want to see the entire list you can find them on the release post here.
NEW PARTS AND FEATURES
- The new RTG and Generator parts give you more options when solar won’t cut it. The generator can generate electricity from fuel and the RTG can generate electricity from magic. Or maybe it uses radioactive decay. One or the other.
- Added two new crew compartments. The Crew Compartment can squeeze more Droods into a tighter space, but it’s more sensitive to atmospheric pressures and is likely to blow up if you take it into outer space. The Space Habitat is far more robust to external pressures, but you just can’t fit as many space sailors inside.
- New Sliding and Clamshell door animations for the cargo bay. The Cargo Bay has also been enhanced to support more customization for those of you who like to dig into the XML.
- Added a rounded style to the nosecone, fairing nosecone, and defaulted the heatshield to be rounded. Also added a depth curve parameter to support custom nosecone shapes for the XML wizards.
- The new Slant and Pinch sliders can achieve very interesting shapes with fuselage parts, especially with the Cargo Bay.
- Added digital night vision cameras, with an XML parameter to change their color (allowing for black and white cameras) and a parameter to hide the base of the camera
- Added a new Command Disc part capable of controlling the craft and with capacity for batteries and gyros
- Added a small variant of the solid motor for model rockets and separators, with a new graphite nozzle, more engine prefabs, and reordered the propulsion category
- Added options to hide the solar panel array cover, stretch the panels to change their aspect ratio, remove the holes between panels, change the sun tracking speed and define the fold angle the panels have when fully opened.
- Added Space Tourists and a new jetpack style for the very special astronauts Yuri and Sally.
- Added a Crew Assignment dialog so now you can hire astronauts and keep track of who you are sending to their certain doom.
FANCIER PLANETS
- Remade Tauros from scratch in an attempt to make it interesting, and overhauled many stock celestial bodies
- Added new settings to generate even higher resolution planet textures for scaled space.
- Added a launch pad in the desert base, accompanied by some intricate valleys, and renamed the base "Ali"
- Added runway lights. This new structure is available in Planet Studio so you can quickly add strips of lights to your own runways.
- Added anamorphic flares and overhauled the existing sun flares to support custom colors defined in the system, also making them fade based on the distance to the star. Also, changed the stock star to a blue dwarf.
As you can see, it's a huge update and we hope you enjoy it while we continue working toward the final release with career mode. Thanks for playing!