Arena Commander V0.9 is here, and it is a big one! You can now update your copy of Star Citizen via the launcher client. Today’s patch is the most significant iteration of Arena Commander yet, featuring new game modes, game balancing and bug fixes! What can you expect to find?

Racing

Do you have what it takes to win the Murray Cup? We’ve added a simulation of the famous race to the Arena Commander game. In order to accommodate racing we have added a new map, New Horizon. Compete with your friends to finish the course as quickly as possible… but be warned: racing isn’t just about having the fastest ship, it’s about being the best pilot!

Vanduul Swarm Coop

Put your new friend codes to good use! Take on the Swarm together with up to three of your wingmen for the toughest Vanduul Swarm experience yet.

Friend Codes

Star Citizen is all about communities, and it’s time to start enabling that on the game side. We’ve launched our initial friend code system with Arena Commander V0.9, which will allow you to group with other citizens in the module’s co-op modes. Whether you’re racing for the cup, teaming up to capture the core or taking on the Swarm together, AC is more fun with friends.

Leaderboards

When fighter pilots gather, they invariably want to know: who’s the best? Arena Commander’s leaderboards will show you who are top pilots are… and on the technical side, this kicks off the web-game connection that will be needed for many of Star Citizen’s future features!

PLEASE NOTE: We are aware of an issue when loading into Arena Commander from the cockpit of your ships. This does not affect all ships and will be fixed in Patch 13.1. For the time being we suggest loading into Arena Commander through the pause menu.

New flyable ships

Arena Commander V0.9 adds two of our racing ships: the M50 and the 350R. If you’ve pledged for either of these ships, they’ll be available in your Hangar to fly in all of Arena Commander’s game modes.

Grab all the latest info and buying options on these incredibly fast ship : Start Your Engines!

New Hangars

Your home just got a new coat of paint… and then some. The team at BHVR has rebuilt all three Star Citizen Hangars in the new expandable room system that will eventually open to the Persistent Universe. Did we say three? There are actually four Hangars now, with the addition of the long-awaited asteroid or ‘pirate’ hangar! Additionally, players will now be able to select which Hangar they wish to use via the website. If you have access to the highest tier hangar (Asteroid) you will be able to elect any of the lower tier hangars if you prefer them aesthetically.

Self-Land

Aeroview

Revel & York

VFG Industrial

Hangar selection

Hangar selection

You can now also select which hangar you want to load the game in by configuring this selection in your account on the website. For each hangar pass that you have obtained with a ship or purchased in the store, you get access to all hangar types below it and can select it. In the upcoming weeks, you will even be able to pick which ship you want to display in your hangar from the web interface!

Six Degrees of Freedom

As we’ve continued iterating and improving on the physics based flight model, we’ve now implemented 6DOF controls and flight mechanics for all of our ships. This will allow players to move along every axis and shows off the flexibility of our flight model as well as what makes space flight so cool!

New control schemes

You can now select between multiple popular preset control schemes. This represents the first pass at personal customization the full version of which will be coming shortly, planned for patch 13.1 which will allow you to completely customize your control scheme.

HUD Improvements

v0.9 introduces some significant usability improvements to the Combat Visor Interface. Navigation within each context window has become much more streamlined, in addition to becoming navigable with a mouse cursor. We’ve also introduced new hotkeys for managing your ship’s power and shield allocation quickly in the heat of battle.

Lead Target Indicator

Your HUD now features a lead target indicator which will extend from your active target. This is your targeting computer’s (ITTS) attempt at telling you where to shoot in order for your weapon groups to hit the target. It accounts for relative velocity, acceleration, and the average projectile speed of your weapon groups. This change to targeting means that you no longer aim at the ship itself and rely on ITTS to auto-fire on the predicted hit location. Instead, pilots need a little more skill: you’ll have to fire at the ITTS lead indicator! We’d originally wanted to have this system in place for V0.8 so we are very excited to introduce it with 0.9. This is a big change to how Dogfighting works in Arena Commander but is more realistic, and fun.

Fixed Weapons and Convergence

With the introduction of the Lead Target Indicator we’ve also introduced fixed weapons and fixed weapon convergence. Now class one weapon mounts are properly fixed forward and no longer gimbal. They do however now automatically converge based on your range to the target lead indicator to ensure that if you line up your gun cross properly, you won’t miss.

Improved Ship Performance

We’ve increased the top speed of every ship. With this we’ve also reworked the afterburner mechanic to increase acceleration instead of top speed. We’ve also added the ability to temporarily boost the output of your maneuvering thrusters to more quickly arrest undesirable angular velocity, such as in a tight turn.

Improved Sound

We’ve added a number of sound effects that help make the ‘Verse feel more immersive. Everything from the ships, weapons, and environment have completely new sound effects. We have also fixed numerous sound bugs and given our legacy sound effects another pass to make sure they meet the quality of our new sound effects.

And that’s not all. You can find a complete list of new features, balance changes, bug fixes and known issues in the R13 Patch Notes.

Since Arena Commander V0.9 makes so many changes to the game, our crack publications team has updated the previously-released Arena Commander manual. You can download a copy here.

And to further celebrate Arena Commander V0.9, the M50 and 350R are temporarily back in the pledge store! If you’re interested in backing for an M50 or a 350R, you can learn more (and see our most fun ship commercial to date) here.

Finally, for those interested in ship stats we have a post from the design team talking about how and why changes have been made to the ships now integrated into Arena Commander. You can find that here.