(Citizen Star News) - by Citizen Ed - 2015-04-11

Hello and Welcome to Citizen Star: This Week in Star Citizen! today is April 10th 2015 (Updated April 11th)

I am Citizen Ed of Citizen Star News dot com, where we put the Citizen first!

Each week we like to recognize individual contributors from the community as “Citizen Stars” This time we’d like to highlight Vladimir Kuznetsov (YouTube account World Beyond) who created the awe inspiring video Homecoming. Standout original Music and Voice over make this tribute truly remarkable. This piece was a bit older, was featured in the CIG Fan Spotlight Feb 18th, but I had reason to watch again. No less impressive with time. Thank you Vladimir!

Citizen Star from previous weeks - Teller continues with his renders and hijinks heavy on the space crab this week.

Squadron 42

•Chris Roberts dropped a ton of new SQ42 information in 10ftC.

•Ben’s clarification.

•Certainly what Chris said shows that they have changed the way they are thinking about Squadron 42. Previously they had talked about 5 episodes of 10 missions each that seemed to comprise the whole of the game. Now the follow episodes are being counted as the Mission Pack follow ups, which controversially is not covered by people’s pledge packages. (Well people that backed before the 6 Million mark, have the first mission pack included.) After reviewing Ben’s clarification and the funding goals, have to say CIG is not breaking any promises by structuring the release this way, even if it was a bit confused communications over time.

•Squadron 42 2nd Episode 2 is entitled “Behind Enemy Lines” The Blastr leak about Admiral Bishop is the plotline, Blastr reporter apparently forgot Chris asked him not to report that.

•Widely reported that SQ42 has been expanded into a three part trilogy which is true. Mission Packs plans have been scaled up to full blown episodes.

•We still don’t know exactly how Squadron 42 Ep 1 will be released. Seems unlikely it will all be finished before the end of the year. Will it be delayed or broken up in parts?

•Chris is in England now doing a marathon performance capture for 3 months. Cast is set but they are keeping that close to the vest for now. They are promising that we’ll be pretty excited about some fan favorites showing up.

1.1.1 Launching

•Sledges still overpowered.

•Gladiator Flyable

•Gladiator, Super Hornet and Cutlass can all take second player gunners

•Should drop into “stable” any time now. (Now available.)

FPS/Star Marine

•Confirmed to being delayed due to the back end work caused by the 1.1 troubles, by Ben this weeks RtV

•New art

•Everybody is really enthused about it, and we have high hopes that it will be released before the end of this month or soon after and really impress us all.

Staffing… lots of staffing news

•Archivist - Cherie Heiberg - Pleasantly surprised at the wide-spread excitement about this hire. I figured I’d be one of the few that realized how important this is. Cherie will be wrangling up all the legacy information into a coherent database, which would presumably become the basis for the Galactipedia. Interview in this weeks AtV - Reddit Discussion

•Darian Vorlick is now Producer for Arena Commander with Lisa Ohanian taking over as producer of the ship pipeline.

SCAA interview with Darian Vorlick.

•AtV Featured an interview with Austin Artists: Patrick Thomas (Lead artist PU), Vanessa Landeros (Animator and motion capture specialist), Josh Coons (3D artist), Lee Amarakoon (Effects artist: Made the snow globes)

•Some new faces there and worth checking out.

•Inside CIG - Frankfurt

•Seems that Europe is uniting under the Foundry 42 brand.

•Surprising number of the team have been working on Star Citizen since the beginning since most of the team are ex-CryTek.

Big News on the CryTek front

•Kotaku reports Amazon is the mystery licensee (unconfirmed) and paid around 50-70 mill for something… everything? How does this relate to CryTek’s sudden all out efforts on VR? This is all unconfirmed aside from this original story (although many sites are running articles based on the Kotaku story).

Descent: Underground Funded

Congrats to the Wingman, the Descent:Underground - Kickstarter crossed the funding line 3 hours before close, … and then nearly slid back under. (Note: I am being told that Kickstarter won't allow a project to defund.)

Ben forgot the Caterpillar

•Got a Fan made 3d print: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/322ai5/the_fanmade_caterpil...

•So Ben is now on a mission to forget all the ships and collect 3d prints of them all.

Coming Soon; Watch out for:

•Xi’an Space Plant

•Genesis Starliner

•Hullapolooza (Hull series)

•Star Marine! (Please oh please)

•Exploration Deep Dive

•Heavy Breathing (and FPS Stances) Design Doc

Breaking News Update, April 11th 2015

Image by /u/dsyncd

•1.1.1 has been deployed. Multiplayer has some serious problems but they are working on it. Clearly DevOps has some room for improvement on the deployment process, but we should remember this is a moving target with changes being made constantly.

•What I like to call “The Heavy Breathing Deep Dive” has been released. A discussion on FPS stances, and the effects of breathing and fatigue on accuracy. Very interesting stuff.

•In a Letter from the Chair, Star Citizen’s benevolent dictator Chris Roberts has decreed a change to the release designation. 1.1.1 is a release of the Star Citizen ALPHA. A big relief to all of those who spend a lot of time explaining things to people new to the game. It’s good to be officially moving from the pre-alpha stage into alpha.

•I love it when an Alpha comes together! Let’s get the Star Marine in there, plus Planetside/Social, Arena Commander, and edging into the Persistent Universe MMO platform. All expected within the coming months.

•Now on sale in the pledge store! Super Hornet and Gladiator. My old favorite and what is quickly becoming my new favorite. Gladiator handles impressively well, did not expect this carrier based bomber to be so strong a dogfighter. Both are going for $165 for a standalone ship. And surprisingly, there is a zero dollar CCU to switch between them.

And that’s the news for now… This has been Citizen Ed of Citizen Star News dot com… hope to see you next week… in Star Citizen!