(Citizen Star News) - by Citizen Ed - 2015-06-06

Citizen Star

Congratulations to Citizen Star Micah Westfahl aka Kenwe_Daoke on the Star Citizen Forums for winning the Ship Shape contest. Excellent work! As we’ve been tracking, a lot of great entries. I can’t imagine it was an easy thing to pick.

Ship Shape

In addition to a deeper look at the MISC Starfarer Ship on this weeks ATV Ship Shape segment, we also heard more about future plans from Lisa Ohanian on Reverse the Verse. She’s still looking at ways to bring us a more comprehensive look at ship status, which I think is good. The current content is great but I think there is so much demand for this Ship Status page or however the information gets communicated that people have hard time being satisfied by the more focused behind the scenes look on another thing.

Ships & Sales

On the ships and sales front

19K Reliants Sold - the thought of all those potential news vans just makes me giddy with excitement!

Crusader Industries Genesis Starliner getting close to concept.

Military Ships are all back in the pledge store, you got a chance to fly them free last week, this week you can buy them.

Starfarer interior nearing completion. (as per ship shape)

Progress

From the Monthly report, Ten for the X, Around the Verse and Reverse the Verse, we are getting a great deal of information about how things are going. We see a lot of activity, with indications of real progress. But CIG has clearly going through a “retooling” phase. In some senses they recently realized they are on a plane that needs it’s wings and perhaps a bit of the engine reworked midflight without landing. In other words, they are taking on some hard challenges right now and that is delaying some (or All?) of their estimates.

The instance manager which is a big chunk of the backend that will be managing spawning new “match” servers for both Arena Commander and Star Marine has been rewritten and is entering internal testing now.

Star Marine has been receiving some heavy iterations and polish as well. We may see a very limited version (perhaps no SataBall?) made available to a small number of backers within the next couple of weeks. It will be rolled out much like Arena Commander was, by groups of backers, earliest Citizen numbers first.

This new Instance manager, Star Marine and some set of Arena Commander changers will be the next release of Star Citizen Alpha… version 1.1.2

As for Social Module, I understand what Ben is saying about work still continuing, I know work never stopped. But at the moment I don’t know what it is we’ll be looking at or when. This as Ben says “Is the Long March to the Persistent Universe.” It’ll be very interesting what shape it’s in when we finally get to see it.

Arena Commander 2.0 “Multi-Crew” - Seems a long way off. Hard to say when we’ll see this.

Arena Commander 3.0 “Cap Ships and combined FPS with Dogfighting” - We hadn’t heard about this in a while. Travis mentioned it with “Capture the Idris” mode. At one point there was some talk of trying to pull that into AC 2.0, but looks like it’s back in 3. We likely won’t see this until 2016 sometime.

Squadron 42 - The Wing-Commander/Mass-Effect style solo/coop RPG also has considerable resources dedicated to it. Chris is still working hard at Performance Capture in cooperation with Andy Sirkus’ Imaginarium. And we can see from the Monthly report, that Foundry 42 UK studio is hard at work on the technical aspects. Hopefully we’ll see something out of that at the end of this year or early next.

So what does this all mean for the final delivery of the shipped Star Citizen “First Person” Universe MMO? Social will slowly be added to until some point where it gets called PU alpha, last estimated to happen at the end of this year. It will be added to then expanded until it’s basically complete and called Beta. Once they get a stable beta, we’ll get actually game play with backers getting to get persistent progress earn wealth, gear and ships, with no wipe expected… and then finally at some point, declared shipped and thrown open to the public. See no guarantees of this happening in 2016. Best guess Dec 2016 to sometime in 2017? Depends on how many times CIG needs to stop and rebuild the wings and engine in midflight.

And here’s a big scary list of just some of the other things I’ve not mentioned that we know they are working on:

Missiles revisions

Big changes hinted at for thrusters

Characters - A set for FPS Completed last week, except for the Sataball which they’ll be working on next week

Locomotion, getting the characters to walk right, still being completed.

Multi-crew - work on Freelancer halted. Focus appears to be on Constellation, finishing for AC 2.0

“Large World” (Making use of the 64bit floating point coordinate system)

“Zone” (arbitrary spatial partitioning) systems

New and improved Launcher

Revised conversation system

WWoSC Episode 3 time booked at the Google/YouTube Studio

More landing Zones for Social/PU

Universe Simulator

A raft of optimizations in the levels and engine.

Damage model updates of the various released and near released ships.

CryEngine SDK integration of the changes from new 3.7 revision. As well as purging crufty old bits of the CryEngine that are no longer needed. Chris has mentioned that 3.7 would probably be the last real merge. From this point on they’ll probably be picking and choosing what changes to accept from CryTek. So we will be well and truly forked. *rimshot*

I see many indicators that the CryEngine that SC uses is diverging fast with the one CryTek uses. I suspect that the people using the standard CryTek Sandbox are going to have a harder time getting anything out of these newer releases. The Monthly report specifically mentions “optimized asset storage formats” which will likely break compatibility.

So… even if we aren’t seeing it show up in the downloaded executable we are testing… we can see indications of a ton of work going on… some of it we’ll be seeing really soon now. A bit frustrating but also exciting. Hang in there Citizens!

Hope to see you next week … in Star Citizen!

See Also

Reddit Discussion

StarCitizenBase Discussion

COMM-LINK - Weekly Rundown - all the official communications