Capturing a Visceral Feel & FPS Module Work

Chris Robert's Letter from the Chairman is an interesting one where he discusses the work being done with performance capture. His hope is that Star Citizen will feel more visceral as a result of using one to three camera's on each actor's face, and up to fifty cameras capturing the movement of each player's body. According to Roberts, this amount of intensive performance capture will allow more emotion, nuance and subtlety than in any game he's ever created before.

Instead of watching a film play out in front of you it will feel like you are inside a living world, living a story that you only normally see on the big screen but it’s YOUR story, not one of some protagonist you need to associate with! By the time the shoot is over, it will have been longer than Wing Commander 4 (42 days) or even the last feature film I produced, Outlander (51 days.). You need this kind of time to capture real performance.

Additionally, Roberts goes into great detail about issues that the FPS team is facing as it prepares its portion of the game. In a nutshell, the current state of FPS simply doesn't live up to the standards developers wish.  From here, several key back end systems are detailed, including a pair that have been natively developed for Star Citizen.

It's a long, but interesting, read and you can find it all on the Star Citizen site.