- The team is working on female animations in order to get female characters into the game soon.
- Female NPCs are ready to go as they mostly don't require as many animations as a player character does.
- It's not as simple as slapping on animations designed for males. Female animations need to be "feminized". As an example, a female character should not walk with the same center mass as a male character would.
- Tanks would be very easy to put into the game. Any kind of tracked vehicles would be. The engine already has all the parameters in place to make them.
- The devs are constantly trying to improve the game's performance. Quite often the problem is the artists are allowed to run wild in creating things but then when the tech teams come in to find out why the game is only running at 10 frames per second, they end up finding a lot of highly inefficient artist choices having been made.
- Huge strides have been made on reducing the number of asset errors that go through the build process. Two years ago they hit a point where they had over 16,000 errors. For patch 2.6, they managed to push the build through with zero asset errors.
- The devs look at Star Citizen's current state as one giant test environment. Even the current "Live" game is a testing ground to them.
- Anti-aliasing is something that will be worked on. Shader development is what they want to work on first and then they will implement whatever AA they decide to go for. Sean Tracy thinks that supersampling is where it's at. As of right now, they don't want to put AA in the game when some of the other graphical settings haven't even been set, nevermind optimized. The hit to performance would be too great and cause a lot of development downtime as they redo or rethink their AA solution.
- Delta patching is on the way and will be great for both devs and the players. This will dramatically decrease the time it takes the devs to send various builds across the world to their four different studios and the time it takes the player to download new patches. It was a high priority to begin with but there were other things even higher on the list. Otherwise, this would have happened a lot sooner.
- Chris Roberts sometimes mentions battlemechs. Since Sean Tracy and his brother ran a popular mod about them, Sean has threatened Chris that if he keeps it up he'll put battlemechs in the game when he's not looking.
- Sean Tracy feels that there is a layer missing in the game right now and it's power armor, similar to mechs. Right now, a ship could camp a landing pad and there isn't much you can do unless you call in for someone from elsewhere to come take the ship out. Players should thus have an option to equip a powered suit that can carry some of the smaller ship weapons in the game. Anti-personnel or even anti-vehicle weapons won't be sufficient for dealing with most ships in the game. The Titan, a powered suit, is something that has already been talked about and concept art shown for it. It will be in the game eventually.
- Pirate Swarm, one of the modes for Arena Commander, will become much more difficult in patch 2.6.1 thanks to AI improvements.
- The Mega Map tech they're working on behind the scenes will dramatically speed up loading times across the board. For some parts of the game, loading should be virtually instant.
- Your handling in the game is already affected by the size of your weapons and the amount of ammo you have. However, the relative difference in mass is so minor that it's not detected by the players in any meaningful way. Larger vessels capable of carrying tons of cargo, however, may have their handling affected. The calculations are already being done to try and make it so that what you have inside your ship, on your ship, and how much of it will impact your ship's performance.
- An updated schedule report is coming very soon. The company is at the end of its beginning-of-the-year summits where the teams get together and discuss the plans for the upcoming year. Also, HR decided that this was a fantastic time to do everyone's employee review at the exact same time... (The schedule report has since gone live, with 2.6.1 planned to be released on February 17th, 2016)
- Mega Map is also the tech the team is using to make player hangars opening up and letting them fly out into the world possible. (It would allow the player to be inside their hangar without worrying about a performance hit being taken with the game trying to consider what is going on outside. Mega Map would give the devs a tool to effectively allow the game to only concern itself with what is in your hangar and then quickly stream in assets appropriately as the doors are opened)
- The team is looking at different ways to "hand wave" the fact that potentially thousands of players could be trying to leave a hangar that exists for all of them in the same space. So instead of having no room to leave, they would find a way to make it so that, at least temporarily, you're the only one in that immediate area.
- For Star Citizen, they first push for maximum realism and then scale back certain ideas based on what is actually fun. One of the things Sean Tracy tells his guys when the topic of something being realistic pops up is to go outside, sit at a bus bench, and then come back and tell him how fun it was. They would also like everyone to know that they do not advocate ever going outside.
- There is nothing officially announced yet about planetside racing but it is something they want in the game. Because of the massive amount of area that planets have, they would like to give players the ability to create the race courses themselves.
- All kinds of races would take place. It wouldn't just be the high performance, built-for-racing vehicles. Even the Argo transport ships and Dragonfly snub fighters / hover bikes would have their own races.
- They don't know how crazy they want to get with it. Not sure if the race tracks would permanently persist or only as long as players were in the area. Would they do tournaments? Would they allow people to vote / bet on the races?
- The devs really want to give players the ability to create many things in the universe. They feel that some of the best ideas and creations have come from the community already.
- They will absolutely give the players long campaigns, scripted and unscripted events, and whatnot but they feel that the players can often create better experiences for themselves than even game designers can.
- Items 2.0 will allow the team to turn individual entities into components of other entities. So cargo, weapons, ships, and even people will become a part of any larger entity that they are inside of or attached to. This greatly reduces the system's need to constantly track every single entity in the game as if it is separate. Other games have had this tech before but it's such a huge deal for Star Citizen to work properly. (As an example, if you came across a ship with cargo in it, there would be no reason for the game to have to render that cargo and send all the information on it until either you're now a part of that entity as well or the cargo suddenly becomes separated from the ship. It's the idea of taking potentially thousands of entities and turning them into hundreds or less that the game needs to constantly concern itself with. As of right now, every entity in your immediate area is being rendered at every frame, which is incredibly inefficient)
- Sean Tracy's favorite planet in the game so far is something he can't actually talk about but will be arriving in 3.0. Tyler Witkins' favorite is MicroTech. Jared Huckaby really likes Nyx.
- A new snow component is being added to the engine to replace the old one from CryEngine.
- When asked what Sean Tracy is looking forward to doing the most in Star Citizen his answer is "finishing it".