Star Citizen has passed a major development milestone: Under secretive test conditions, players have successfully jumped from one star system to another. This may be confusing to Starfield and Elite Dangerous players, who’ve been able to do this since their games launched, but this is Star Citizen, and it’s actually a pretty big deal.
One of the core ideas underpinning the technology in Star Citizen is that its solar systems are each meant to be handled by a separate server or cluster of servers. This makes the act of traveling seamlessly from one system to another a surprisingly complex engineering problem for the space game – one that Cloud Imperium Games has been working on since around 2017.
The concept is called “server meshing,” and in theory, it’ll one day allow Star Citizen players to seamlessly travel across a massive, connected universe by means of naturally occurring wormholes that are held in place by interstellar gates. For the recent closed test, only two such gates were active. These connected the existing Stanton system, which Star Citizen players have been flying around in for a while, with a new system called Pyro.
Details are sparse for the time being, since the test was limited to Evocati – Star Citizen players who have signed a non-disclosure agreement about their participation in various test flights. However, videos and first-hand accounts of the game’s first successful warpgate travel have begun bubbling to the surface, and the community is highly excited to be seeing the glimmer of forward progress on a game that has now been in development for over 13 years and raised over $668 million in crowdfunding.
The warp travel system is still in development, and players on the official Discord have reported black and white placeholder art assets in the “tunnel” they’ve flown through during their jumps. A potentially more serious issue is the traffic pile-up on the other side – one player described a “graveyard” of demolished ships on the Pyro side of the new gate. All the same, the general sentiment is excitement at the prospect of this important new feature passing a key milestone, and hopefully making its way to the game’s persistent universe.
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