At PAX East Cloud Imperium Games demonstrated the dogfighting module of Star Citizen and Reddit's Zazzerpan was on-hand to test it out.
The dogfighting module will allow players to fight against other players and AI in a deathmatch-style combat system.
Zazzerpan's thoughts after playing the game are below.
- Control Scheme:
"I played with both the mouse and with the 360 controller (our tables didn't have a HOTAS) and the the experience was fairly smooth. There didn't appear to be anything more than basic flight controls mapped for the M+KB but it's possible I just couldn't find them.
"The mouse's vertical handled pitch, the horizontal was yaw (I'm fairly sure, I'm a bit foggy here) making A and D roll. Look keys were the arrow keys.
"The 360 controller had a ton of stuff mapped to it. So much that it seemed that you needed a modifier key be be able to use everything. Left analogue was flight surfaces, right was camera. The response was very quick, quicker than the mouse's (since the mouse had a bit of a dead zone it seemed like). Overall it was a better experience than I thought it would be since I'm not very used to controllers. Still they will need to figure out how to manage the already large amount of things you need to map."
- Stability:
"Beyond a graphical glitch the first time I launched it I had no issues. However I watched people play for over an hour and there seemed to be fairly consistent issues with respawning after death (it's possible it's not set-up in this demo). Over all though it seemed much more stable than Chris's (Roberts, a CIG designer) experience with the multiplayer build.
"Performance: I don't know what it was running on but it ran smooth as butter and as I'm sure you saw it looked amazing. The details around the cockpit are breath taking."
- Miscellaneous:
"Our Hornets have lost their flip up displays. There now appear to be a few MFDs within the dash itself but they were blank at the moment (they will have non-essential information in the future I'm told).
"I think the game will work well with a HOTAS since it obviously require a shit done of mappable buttons/keys. They should be a good middle ground between controller and mouse.
"Gforces look really cool. However I feel the tilting animation is a bit strong now. The pilot should be strapped into the chair so I don't think they would move a solid 45 degrees each time. Still it's going in the right direction.
"You'll begin to see more and more video coming as people post them. There were a bunch of people taking shakycam footage of us playing.
"Guns demonstrated convergence."
Clouds Imperium games has said the module will be released at a later date to backers but have yet to specify when this will be. Star Citizen generated funding of $31 million last year.
