(Citizen Star News) - by Citizen Ed - 2015-04-03

Note: Publication delayed a day while we worked out some issues in the new format. Moving from a recording of a live show to a more produced (and condensed) format.

Citizen Star of the Week

GreyHeadedGamer for his series of Star Citizen Island videos exploring our favorite ships and in game assets.

Vanguard lead the way to $77 Mil

Img Source: reddit

Torps are not standard Vanguard, but will be available as an upgrade. - Ben, RtV

April Fools

This year’s CIG april fool’s gag was, In My Humble Opinion, inspired. Starting with what I like to call “Capture the Fish” mode, when players logged in to the game they found that the fish had escaped their captivity and transformed the hangar into one big aquarium.

On the forums conversations were transformed by word substitutions, swapping “fish” in for “ship”, “fin” for “wing”, “sea” for “space”, “sail” for “engine” and the like. All this lead to some surreal conversations.

Pledge store had some truly entertaining additions, nautical and fish plus wing commander favorites as well as random scifi references like the Planet Express Ship and Farscape’s Moya.

And don’t forget to check out the April 1rst special edition of AtV set in the year 2055!

Update: The image of CIG VP of Marketing Sandi Gardiner with "The Trout" (that ended up being the video thumbnail) is from Sandi's facebook:

Current State of the Arena Commander Alpha

Continued instability, improving but we’ve obviously still having problems

Will Leverett is a Hero! : WLeverett_CIG

Thu, 04/02/2015 - 05:56 Just doing my part as the last button on the CIG shirt. :)

1.1a Patch being evaluated for PTU, which will feature a flyable Gladiator

The announcement of upcoming Pirate Swarm mode sparking “Pirate Rights” arguments.

FPS Pulling together

SataBall

Img by Lonestar Kilrathi

Sataball was discussed way back in November 2013 in the Lore Builder feature:

Linux (lack of) Progress - 10FTC

No longer have faith in the CryTek solution. Looking at OpenGL Next/Vulcan

Descent Underground progress

Slowdown in the crowdfunding. Needs help.

Back da Wingman and his crew!

Staffing

Will Lewis no longer at CIG

Will's tweet to the SC Community

Jenny Varner Moved to LA

New producer - Lisa Ohanian in LA formerly from Activision

Miles Lee! Miles comes to us from Daybreak Game Company (Formerly SOE) where he was responsible for internal server deploys, live server deploys and build system maintenance. Miles will be our QA liaison to DevOps and will be helping in our efforts to expand our automated testing. - Monthly report

New Design Director, Todd Papy (recently hired from CryTek former God of War Dev), came over from Frankfurt and spent a week with Tony Zurovec discussing high level design for Star Citizen and delving into the nitty gritty of things like NPC AI. Some great discussions came out of Todd’s time here that you’ll get to see the fruits of hopefully in the not-too-distant future. - Monthly report

James Wright Interview:

Q: Coming from SXSW it was great seeing people who hadn't seen this level of detail in a game before be exposed to Star Citizen. A: We’re really just starting to scratch the surface on the kind of work we have to scale well, and it’s tech we have to build to be able to do what we said we’d do, to have capital ships fighting with each other while groups board, and you have local physics sim on the capital ships with local gravity, and you have two capital ships duking it out with a bunch of fighters going around and, you can’t do that unless you build tech to support that kind of scaling. As an engine programmer it’s kind of exciting. Reddit Discussion

Wired Article

Reddit Discussion

Reddit - Anatomy of Article Being Published

Imgur Album of Print Version

Teller continues to produce some great images

Human Element - Why Star Citizen Will Succeed by Years1Hundred

- Reddit Discussion

Bonus:

Because Ben forgot the Caterpillar

Img by Lonestar Kilrathi

Disco Lando Wants Your Arena Commander Highlights!

And that’s the news for now, this has been Citizen Ed of Citizen Star News dot com. Hope to see you all next week ... in Star Citizen!

Note: Let us know what you think in the comments below. Specifically I am curious if you prefer using a more radio announcer style or relaxed conversational style. I've gotten mixed feedback on that.

We like were this is going, but do realize there is room for improvement. Still learning the ropes of this kind of video creation. Promise to improve! - Ed.

See Also

COMM-LINK - Weekly Rundown