A Star Citizen Symphony of Destruction! Racing Auroras with XGR on microTech's River!

Had a LOT of fun racing Auroras on the microTech river with XGR the day after 3.17 dropped! The normal XGR Underground race format is to run a number of heats to split the racers in half - anyone who wins a heat gets a spot in the Pro Main race and sits out the following heats. With 14 racers, we ran seven heats. I didn't win any heats, so I got to race in all seven heats and the Amateur Main race! I hung back for the early heats to avoid collisions so ended up with a lot of "crash cam" and overtaking footage.

This sort of close racing felt amazing and was really only possible with the desync fixes in 3.17 - the positions of other ships and collisions you could see were extremely accurate, whereas in previous patches a one second delay in position meant that you'd see a ship traveling at 100m/s over 100 meters away from their actual position, making collisions basically random chance. Here, overtakes and collisions felt very tight and accurate (and when I screwed up, it felt like my own fault, rather than desync!)

XGR is running an (open!) championship ship race series over the next year, and there are also informal events and races hosted over in the discord (http://discord.gg/xgr). I'm really excited to run some of the tracks with even more crowded groups with the desync improvements! You can also submit your own time trials for River Zero at https://www.scr.gg/track/river-zero. Shout out to everyone who made this race possible! (Organizers, racers, spectators, streaming crew, the devs for taming desync, adding the river, and getting 3.17 out!)

BlackMaze's recap video of the race here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGxPaVX3dQQ Find the course and race it yourself: https://scr.gg/track/river-zero Come race with XGR on Discord! http://discord.gg/xgr