[HTML1]

Star Citizen has raked in over $63 million dollars from space-sim enthusiasts over the last year and we've seen just about every stretch goal imaginable for the crowd funded project. The team has promised everything from alien languages to player-made ships and the wish list is growing during the game's final months of development.

Throughout the development of Star Citizen, the team at Cloud Imperium Games has done a great job of offering updates, alpha tests, and behind-the-scenes looks at the development process. The latest development spotlight is actually not a new feature, but an improvement on one that has been around since the first demos.

The update is all about how ships look when they take damage. We've seen pieces of ships fly off when damage is taken already, but the team wanted to showcase ship damage in a more realistic and specific way. The new Star Citizen damage system includes four values of damage - temperature, burn, thickness, and deformation. The update reads:

"We’ve already shown in Arena Commander our very powerful and flexible system for controlling the damage on your ships, which combined with some awesome artwork gives some great results. But your ships are such a big part of the Star Citizen universe we felt we had to go several steps further... Whether it be a projectile weapon, an energy weapon, an explosion or scratching your ship after a dodgy landing, we want you to be able to differentiate them just from looking at your ship."

The update on Roberts Space Industries goes into great technical detail about the new system, but readers can get a pretty good sense of how it will work in practice by watching a few ships get smashed to smithereens in the demo video. The change is definitely not subtle and is a major improvement over the previous version.

The damage model demo was shared with fans at PAX East this past weekend along with a closer look at the Retaliator class. The Retaliator pre-flight check video is also rendered entirely in-engine and looks insanely impressive (as it should considering the game's ever-growing budget and development time).

The team behind the record-breaking crowd-funded game plan to make improvements to many of the game's systems and features after launch. The studio plans to go even further with the damage effects by eventually "adding more effects under the skin of the ship as gaping holes are revealed, adding touches like sparks on damaged equipment under the skin."

Are you impressed by the studio's constant desire to improve upon the game? Do you think it can live up to the insane budget that fans have decided it deserves? Let us know in the comments.

Star Citizen is available now on Early Access for PC and Linux. The full game is set to release in 2016.

Source: Roberts Space Industries