Implementing Ray Tracing would slow down development on Star Citizen…even more

2019 is shaping up to be the year where games that have been in development hell are finally seeing the light of day. We’ve gone a staggering 14 years between Kingdom Hearts, Crackdown 3 is partying like it’s 2009 and I’m betting my favourite Batman cowl that we’ll actually see a new Splinter Cell game in 2019. With the return of Conviction’s overly-cheesy henchmen dialogue if all goes according to plan. FISHER!

One game that you probably won’t see released in a complete format this year? Cloud Imperium’s Star Citizen, which is currently still limping towards an unknowable finish line while shedding modules of minor content to appease the few true believers, like some sort of space-leper. What little Star Citizen content is out in the wild does have one benefit though: It kind of looks visually neat.

There’s some handsome technology rerouting hype systems to the forward thrusters, with the potential for Star Citizen to take advantage of the newest graphical kid on the block, Ray tracing. So will Star Citizen’s loyal acolytes ever see their PC systems pushed to the max with that fancy RTX technology? When asked about the possibility to implement Ray tracing developer Ben Parry blew out the candles on that graphical cake with a very definite no:

Not in the slightest. I expect, if we use it, it’ll be a massive headache and time-sink but might give us some subtle improvements in looks or performance if we get it right.

According to Parry, that headache comes down to the implementation of it having the possibility to slow down the development of Star Citizen. More so:

The added headache is that whatever we offered would have to be an “as well” feature rather than an “instead”, developing a feature for a single manufacturer’s top-end cards means also maintaining feature parity for everyone else’s hardware.
Personally I’d like to use it to make the shadows crispier.

Star Citizen is still chugging along, and by the time you finish reading this sentence there’ll be at least one angry fan writing a defensive post in the comment sections below. Either that, or I’ll once again be emptying our comment spam bin of hastily-typed referral codes for the long in development game. Heck, we’re still cleaning up after the last Star Citizen catastrophe.

Last Updated: February 18, 2019