spacegg

Alpha 3.3 has been in testing for couple of weeks now (Evocati). In the beginning there were two different versions; Alpha 3.3 and Alpha 3.3 with Object Container Streaming (OCS). OCS is now working well enough so they decided to merge those two versions and if there will be no serious blockers that's the version which will be release in 10th of October to all backers who has a game package. According to rumors OCS will bring some significant improvements.

Anyone here joined to Evocati group recently?

Which are the features your are looking forward most in Alpha 3.3?

Anyone here going to CitizenCon this year? Tickets are sold out but fortunaltely all presentations can be watched from YouTube some time later.

There are some interesting presentations this year. I'm going to watch all of them but probably most interesting are 'By design' and 'The Principles of Flight' which shows some changes in flight model.

Alpha 3.2.1 is now in PTU. I have been running it about 12 hours now and it has been very stable experience so far.

CIG pushes lots of information every week which can feel a bit overwhelming task to go through. I can recommend BoredGamer for those people who would like to follow the development but doesn't have interest or time to watch all videos, read web sites, etc. He is open for criticism and respects other's opinions so he is a great person to talk with.

They moved to time based schedule (quarterly) which has worked pretty well so far. So three months in theory but they may push a release later if absolutely necessary. Alpha 3.1 and Alpha 3.2 were released in time.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citizen/info

Live build is being resetted at least every quarterly releases but I guess nothing stops them doing it more often. Therefore I really can't recommend start to play it yet but just give a try or if you are interested testing, bug reporting or giving them feedback.

Star Citizen PU Alpha 3.2 is now available.

This quarterly release (Q2) includes some pretty big changes like planetside mining, improved grouping system, Kiosk system and many more.

In my opinion Tier 0 (first iteration) of mining implementation is pretty good already and as design document says it will still get much more versatile. It is great to see they are working on to give different professions more depth. Unfortunately Prospector is the only way to do mining at the moment and the Kiosk system doesn't support buying ships yet (hopefully in Alpha 3.3 it will).

Alpha 3.3 will be the release of this year and be a massive improvement overall. The patch includes nothing I'm not looking forward. It is hard to pick features I'm waiting most but probably FPS AI, Salvaging and Object Container Streaming are one of the biggest ones. OCS will make it possible to grow the universe, populate moons and planets, etc.

Those who are interested to hear more about development of Star Citizen I recommend to watch the video below:

@dray2k: Alpha 3.0 PU has the first iteration of their mission system included which is very basic and doesn't for example include chaining. The next system will allow players to make their own missions and hopefully there would be chained missions as well. Both of those features should be a huge change since a basic missions can change on the fly as their own complex adventures.

What I like is that missions will/should have lots of depth. For example bounty hunting mission is not necessary just dog fighting pew-pew but could be much more deep and complex. A player actually has to follow the target and find clues about their location and latest movements, like get hints in a bar where the target has visited etc. Once you have located the target you have to make a decision are you try get the dead or alive. Taking a target alive could mean that you have to board target's ship and take him down in FPS/melee fighting. Once you have captured the target you take him to jail. This is where for example Anvil Aerospace's Hawk ship should be pretty handy.

... or for example Taxi-mission could get a interesting twist because some other (pirate) player gets and hint about you are transferring a high status member and they tries to capture the customer and ask ransom for returning him alive.

Tony Zurovec is a person who knows a lot about AI, missions, etc.

Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Engineering Intelligence

All the ships (well, there are some exceptions) are available by playing the game. Buying a ship is a way to support the development but doesn't necessary make sense if it doesn't fit way you want play the game. Big ships like Idris are very expensive to maintain and keep running and I couldn't play enough to keep ship like that up and running. More expensive ship doesn't mean it is better than some basic Aurora since the ships are very different what they can do.

To me Star Citizen definitely represents as a next-gen game in pretty much all aspects. It is totally possible the project will still fail which would be a huge disappointment, not because I would "lose" $40 but because I don't think we are ever going to have a change to have this ambitious (space) game ever.

@ntm: It is good idea to go slowly with Star Citizen and Squadron 42. It will definitely take still some time before we have final product to play.

I find crowdfunding interesting topic and very positive thing for gaming in general;

• It has already brought some "dead" genres back alive and give players a bit more control over what games could be done in future.
• It has made development more open. I personally like that we are able to see and even test the development versions, give developers feedback and submit bug reports. But just like in Kotaku article the developers says and what we have seen happening around SC development being open doesn't come for free - unfortunately. I think gaming community has plenty to learn from open source community where testing development versions is normal and instead of whining about bugs, they are being discussed and filed to bug tracking system.

I'm skeptical about all crowdfunded projects I have supported but still be positive in a way I do my best to give teams feedback according to alpha testing. The reality is that software projects fails quite often and games are not expection. This is where games which has been worked behind closed doors wins - we don't even ever hear about them because publisher doesn't make an announcement.

CIG has made several mistakes but in the other hand thinking how complex and ambitious their game is and keeping four studios working with each other seamlessly is not easy for sure, I'm pretty forgiving about the mistakes. But I do understand people are frustrated about delays and changed plans from Kickstarter days.

Luckily the development of Star Citizen PU and Squadron 42 (finally) are pretty open so it is easy to see how the development is doing. Even better is that we are able to test SC PU test versions. Those whose has not supported either of the games I think they should wait and see where they are heading.

I'm not sure if they are adding any more new big features into Squadron 42. I think Tyler Witkin said a year or so ago that all the episode 1 missions are already playable.

Star Citizen PU is much larger game and it should get new tech and features over whole lifetime to keep it alive just as other MMOs does. I think all the alpha releases shows a steady progress and big improvements over each others. Since they are moving to quarterly releases and planning to get alpha 3.1 for evocati testers in February, I think they should show alpha 3.1 features pretty soon. I would expect at least scanning mechanisms (ships and people) and mining to be included.

It is good to be skeptical with crowdfunded projects and E3 trailers. In openly developed software are in a bit bad situation because developers are expected to give information but in software development you never know if plans needs to be changed.

I found the following article pretty interesting.

"Randall went on to draw a parallel to the film industry, where movies are announced years in advance, and pointed out that transparency like that wouldn’t work in video games. “Games change during development, this is a universal constant no developer would argue with, but toxic culture can’t handle that.”"

Kotaku: Game Designer Says Developers Would Be More Candid If Gamer Culture Wasn't So Toxic

@onarum: Oh, great that helped. Did you change resolution on the fly or before you joined to server? Sometimes, if you are lucky, you get in a pretty empty server when the FPS can get pretty high although it depends what other players are doing.

@onarum: Sure, on my computer the FPS dips occasionally as well but I do try to avoid those situation while testing. At least ~15-20 FPS is still testable. I'm surprised the game launches on my GPU at all but of course not an optimal GPU of choice for this game ;). I'm going to update the computer pretty soon.

I don't want to start to play the game yet because I can't stand loosing progress etc. ;). It is better just to concentrate for testing at this point (since it is still alpha and testing is what we should do) or at least wait for beta stage.

It seems they are pushing a new patch today.