f13.net

    Welcome!

    If you've made it here, you probably know who I am. Maybe you have heard of Wing Commander and its sequels, or perhaps Strike Commander, Privateer or Freelancer.

    If not, you're still welcome!

    I grew up making video games. I sold my first game at the age of 13 and created Wing Commander when I was 21. But 10 years ago, at the height of my career I took a break. Not because I stopped loving or playing games but because I had become frustrated with the limits of the technology at the time to realize my vision.

    I decided to pursue my desire to create detailed worlds and tell sophisticated stories in film.

    I always said the moment I became interested in making games again was when I was going to come back.

    With the power of today's computers and the reach of the internet I finally feel I have the tools to build the connected experience that I always dreamed of. A world that would be more satisfying and richer than any film I could work on.

    With films you tell stories but with games you create worlds.

    If you've played my games, you'll know that's what I love to do.

    I'm here to tell you that I have been working on something for just under a year, something that embraces everything that my past games stood for but takes it to the next level.

    I hope you'll be as excited by it as I am.

    My new endeavor is still in its early stages but I invite you to take the journey with me.

    If you register below you'll become an insider that will not only give you early access to the game's website and forums, but you will also get the opportunity for rewards and privileges that no one else will get. It's my way of showing how important your early involvement and support is.

    The full announcement will be at 10am Eastern Standard Time (UTC -5) on the 10th day of the 10th month of this year.

    My name is Christ Roberts.

    And if you would indulge me I would like to create a world for you.

SWG Space Combat was quite awesome.  It's just they didn't have it at launch.

Though I'd still love a new Privateer.  (Military life isn't for me. ;)

Is Freelancer the one that came out with the mouse controls a few years ago?

Yeah, came out in like '03 I think.

It was supposed to be a sequel to Starlancer, in the lame "it takes place a thousand years later in a different place and has none of the same ships, factions, characters, or setting" way.  I never played Wing Commander, but I really liked Starlancer, between missions it had these neat little first person FMVs whenever you switched from one screen to the other so it really felt like you were walking around in the carrier.  That blew my mind at the time.  It was also kind of hilarious in that it had a killboard where all the top aces from the war were listed, and you'd see new pilots move up the ranks or older pilots removed when they died, but nobody apparently noticed that your character was sitting at the top with like double the number of kills as the "elite top ace" everyone else fawns over.

Yeah, came out in like '03 I think.

It was supposed to be a sequel to Starlancer, in the lame "it takes place a thousand years later in a different place and has none of the same ships, factions, characters, or setting" way.  I never played Wing Commander, but I really liked Starlancer, between missions it had these neat little first person FMVs whenever you switched from one screen to the other so it really felt like you were walking around in the carrier.  That blew my mind at the time.  It was also kind of hilarious in that it had a killboard where all the top aces from the war were listed, and you'd see new pilots move up the ranks or older pilots removed when they died, but nobody apparently noticed that your character was sitting at the top with like double the number of kills as the "elite top ace" everyone else fawns over.

    The Roberts Space Industries Reveal is Coming Soon

    Hi Everyone,

    Our time for the big reveal is nearing! Please tune-in for the live internet broadcast via Gamespot at 10am EST on October 10, 2012.

    Once the announcement is made there will be NO more golden tickets distributed and together we will forever be the founders of our new universe! Be sure to tell your friends to register before 10.10.10 so that they can be included.

    Several of you have asked to attend GDC Online in Austin in person and we would love to see you there! Please fill out this form to let us know you're coming so we can provide further details and make arrangements to include you.

    As a Thank-You from all of us at Roberts Space Industries, every Golden Ticket Holder -- should you choose to join us on our new adventure -- will receive defining gold decals for your spaceship to immortalize your early support.

    Together we will shape the universe - one or one million polygons at a time.

After a quick tour around the asteroid field, Roberts parked his ship on an exterior wall of the enormous carrier ship, where some other spacecraft had been parked. He exited his own ship, walked across the exterior of the carrier, and boarded another small craft, before flying back around and landing the second craft in the belly of the carrier.

Furthermore, Star Citizen will include what Roberts describes as "Millenium Falcon-style" ships, in which player will actually be able to get up and walk around to different stations. Friends can climb aboard and mount the turrets in the back. Even more exciting, was the prospect that some player-controlled ships would be large enough to carry a smaller ship in its hanger bay that a friend can jump into when the fighting breaks out. A helpful thing if, as Roberts put it, "we're going on a trading mission to the edge of the galaxy where there's no law and order."

How is this not setting off people's bullshit detectors?

This is ridiculously over ambitious & doomed to failure.

Why does the trailer feature a ship with a landing strip? They're in space...

Seriously what?  We can't talk about it even if we think it's going to fail?

When I said I missed old school difficulty to gaming you probably didn’t think that I would make the pledge process more difficult than fighting the toughest boss monster in Demon’s Souls!

Well neither did I!

Wednesday morning we set out to prove that PC gaming and Space Sims are not dead… and prove it, we did!

We're absolutely floored by the attention and humbled by your comments. We hoped everyone would be excited about the big idea behind Star Citizen and Squadron 42 -- but we had no expectation about the kind of praise and interest we received yesterday.

The downside of all this attention was that the huge number of people from all around the world trying to learn about Star Citizen and make their pledge, crashed our custom crowd funding page and also took down the core community site.

Until then, we were on track to break crowd funding records. Now, thirty hours later, we're only just getting the core site back online. The proper crowd funding page is still unfortunately down, but we have a backup site that, while not having the full range of features we intended, can take people’s pledges. With this site we have to update the data manually as there is no way to easily collect the crowd funding statistics on a live basis, which is why you haven’t seen a counter on the backup site. We are working very hard to get the main crowd funding plug in to play nice with the rest of the site, so we can deliver the seamless experience we envisioned when opting to have the crowd funding integrated into the main community site. Don’t worry, no one has lost their golden ticket, and we will ensure that everyone who makes a pledge on the backup site is connected to their community account. Please be patient while we organize this process.

We didn't just set out to raise money to build a game; we set out to build a community. The intention was never to shut off the forums, disable the Golden Tickets or stop the flow of information after the launch; anything but. We hope you'll bear with us as we get the community back online. The features you've enjoyed for the past month will continue -- the Comm-Link, RSI Museum and Time Capsule -- along with much more information about Star Citizen and chances to interact with its development team. As we move forward in this endeavor, you are our strongest asset; a vanguard of dedicated fans who will help us build and promote this game.

If you're one of the lucky few warriors that snuck past the Java trolls and WordPress goblins to access the pledge site yesterday, thank you so much for your dedication.

If not, we promise we’ve beaten back these evil interlopers and ask you to pledge and spread the word to make this new universe possible. We are listening to you on the forums, are committed to giving you daily updates and will be rolling out some exciting new features in the coming days that hopefully make up for our initial snafu.

We lost the opportunity to break the first day record, but the race isn’t over yet! We currently stand at $455, 590 raised from 4,564 pledges which is pretty impressive considering the outage we’ve had. Seems everyone wants the RSI Constellation and physical goodies!

But we need get this up. Space Sims trumped RPGs in the old days, let’s get a little of that inter-genre friendly rivalry back!

If you haven’t made your pledge yet, please do as I would hate for the technical problems to have derailed our initial momentum. We still have a ways to go but I have no doubt with your support we will get there. This is our chance to tell the world: PC gaming and space sims are BACK!

Chris Roberts
Cloud Imperium Games

Why does the trailer feature a ship with a landing strip? They're in space...

Why does the trailer feature a ship with a landing strip? They're in space...

tracker-beam

Goal: $2,000,000
Raised: $688,128
Space Sim Fans: 7,164
Crowdfunding ends in 26 days

Why does the trailer feature a ship with a landing strip? They're in space...

Not bad, but I still don't know what he thinks he can do with $2mm. Maybe finish a fully functioning playable slice to shop around for some real funding?

SWG Space Combat was quite awesome.  It's just they didn't have it at launch.

Though I'd still love a new Privateer.  (Military life isn't for me. ;)

Star Citizen – Forgettable Name – Plz change it!

Ben Lesnick:

“Interesting thread, guys! We’re watching all of this closely, of course. It mirrors the development process pretty closely… Chris was debating the name up until the very last minute possible (about a week before the announcement, when he had to start his press tour with a visit to PC Gamer… and needed a name.) Lots of late night e-mail conversations trying to pick something.

For my part, Star Citizen has grown on me an awful lot and I’m rather proud of it now. I think it’s the sort of name you’re going to appreciate a lot more once you get into the world of the game, where citizenship (and the question thereof – pirates!) and the sheer number of possible careers for players are going to be a big part of the game. Heck, it makes a lot more sense than ‘Strike Commander,’ a game that was rarely about commanding strikes…

… all of that said, I AM very amused by Joystiq’s headline about our crowd funding efforts: “Chris Roberts’ new space sim Star Citizen has already raised over $455,590 despite being called Star Citizen”

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Difference between ‘Member’ and ‘Subscriber’?

Ben Lesnick:

“The way it should work is that subscribers are users who haven’t posted yet while members are those who have.”

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Anyone get anything from a Support or a Dev?

VG:

“All pledges, regardless of where they were placed, will be recorded and matched to your ID. I know we might seem silent, but we are very active behind the scenes, believe me”

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General pledging FAQs

Ben Lesnick:

“I’m working through all the support emails right now and am going to catch up on the forum posts.”

“The plan is to let you increase your pledge after the 30 days… but we may have different packages available at that time! (We’re running low on some already…)”

VG:

“Obviously, because the site went down and the backup site has been collecting pledges since Wednesday, we have a lot of data to merge, but rest assured that regardless of what email you used to register or purchase, and/or whether or not your account here works properly, your pledge will be properly credited to your account.”

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Perma death or not

Ben Lesnick:

“The short answer is that we just don’t know yet. It’s too early to balance the game exactly.

I know Chris is very keen on the idea that death is an actual punishment; that there has to be some impact for losing your life beyond just respawning somewhere else. Whether that’s some downgrade in equipment or a loss of credits or something else is totally up in the air right now. (My guess is that your base ship is safe… wouldn’t be fair to sell you one via pledges if you could immediately lose it!)

I did watch him talking about optional insurance during one of his press interviews the other day, which is one way to do it. That would play into the whole you-take-your-own-risks/control-your-own-destiny aspect.”

 

Christopher Roberts:

“Love this thread!

I promise I will take the time to answer this in a comm-link in the near future.

My concept for the dilemma  of modern day instant re-spawn, no penalty vs. old school lose everything start at the beginning will hopefully cater to most of the view points here. Both sides of the argument are valid and I want to strike a balance. I will promise you it wont be like a modern day shooter with zero penalty but it wont be so harsh as you lose everything (well in most cases!). Your ship is a large part of who you are in this universe so there will be multiple options to make sure you don’t have to start from the beginning if you get unlucky. But in all cases it will definitely be an inconvenience if you get blasted (kind of like a car accident is even if you have insurance)!”

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General information about ships

RSI Facebook:

“We’ll release more information on the ships soon! If you think of it like Privateer, the Aurora is the Orion, the 300i is the Galaxy and the Constellation is the Centurion…”

““The Constellation is the top of the line fighter; think the Centurion in Privateer. The big carrier is a “Bengal class” and we aren’t selling those… you’ll have to earn one in the game.  You will always have your preorder ship — no way to lose it permanently. You can also buy other ships and upgrade your starter as the game progresses.”

“…ships can be changed in the game later. You’re not locked in to one, you’re just able to start with a special one if you pledge more money. Think of starting Privateer with a Centurion instead of a Tarsus!”

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General information about landing on planets : cut-scenes or seamless?

RSI Facebook:

“We’re looking at both options for planets. I know we’d LOVE to include atmospheric flight, but it’s a money/time issue… so I can’t promise it just yet! Thanks for your support!”

“Everything will be bigger than Freelancer! You will certainly land on planets, visit bases, etc.”

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General information about Localization

RSI Facebook:

“ There will be localizations. Merci and Danke Schon. Thanks”

———————————————————————————————–

What are the specs going to be?

RSI Facebook:

“Too soon to know! But we’ll try and get you a rough idea in the next week.”

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General physical goods information

RSI Facebook:

“The citizen cards are physical items that replicate something you’ll have in the game – sort of your in-game identity card.”

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General modding information

RSI Facebook:

“Hello! Yes, the idea is that there is both a living central server that everyone can connect to AND the option for Freelancer style player-run worlds where modding/experimentation/etc. are all encouraged. We’d also like to work with the mod communities to integrate the best of the best of what they come up with on their servers into the main world.”

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Question about Physics

Christopher Roberts:

“First post on the forums! I finally have a few spare minutes.

As someone that was taking Physics at Manchester University before I dropped out to make games full time I can assure everyone that the physics model is COMPLETELY accurate and its a full rigid body simulation. I know because I wrote the code.

Maybe I should have done a better job in the demo, but if you are flying at speed and you set your desired velocity to zero you WILL see the top front thrusters articulating and firing to slow your velocity. If you watch my demo you will notice there is some momentum with the Hornet when I slow down close to the bridge. It may not have been apparent on the screen, but I can assure the Hornet does not stop on a dime. if you load it up with more mass (like extra weapons) you feel the effect of this.

There is no drag modeled – everything is done as it would be in space.

Additionally there is actually counter thrust being applied inside the physics and if you had your hands on the controller you would feel it. If you look closely you will see the inertia of this – the ship doesn’t stop rolling or pitching on a dime. There is however a very good reason why you don’t actually see the thrusters fire entirely accurately.

The problem with visually depicting the proper thrust is that it would actually look pretty horrible (trust me this is how I first did it, and is still pretty easy to switch back to as I’m actually doing some extra work to make the visuals looks nicer).

The reason is because there is no drag in space, so even a micro amount of thrust starts the Hornet (or any spaceship) rotating until you apply counter thrust. So what is really happening is that the flight control system is always applying micro thrust and counter thrust to achieve the pilot’s inputs. This results in the thrusters flickering off oand on in micro amounts and you actually not getting a good feel of the general application of thrust. I think you know I like things to look cool (come on, we all know you probably wouldnt be engaging in space dogfights at WW2 speeds, but its so much more fun than what the reality would probably be), so what happens is that the system is still modeled accurately, but I use the angular /linear velocity delta to drive the visual represntation of thrust. Here’s my code comment

//Note the thrustGoal is actually the linear velocity delta (desired vel – current vel of
//the vehicle & rotational vel rather than the actual linear & angular acceleration / thrust.
//This is because, while inaccurate its cooler to see more constant thrust that gives
//you a visual clue as to what correctional movement / velocity vectors the vehicle is using.
//If we just used the acceleration as opposed to the desired velocity correction, the thruster flames
//would flicker on and off – especially in the Wing Commander use case of Space, where
//there is no atmosphere to provide drag.
//Of course if you pass the actual accelerations to SetThrustGoal, then you’ll get an accurate
//visual representation of what a thruster would really do

I hope that clears up any confusion!

I will admit that the ship doesn’t need to have wings or fans on the front, but the idea behind that is for possible atmospheric flight (this is not a promise of planetary action for the early build but allows for expansions in this direction), and as a RAM scoop. Plus it just looks / feels cool.”

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Cheaters/botters be gone

Ben Lesnick:

“Interesting question, and it’s something we’re going to be thinking a LOT about in the next two years. My gut tells me that the first big anti-cheating factor in our game is the fact that it’s skill-based rather than click-based. If you want to win a space battle in Star Citizen you damn well have to handle a joystick… and as I think pretty much every air and space combat game ever has proven, you can’t be an AI and do that well.”

“I’d be a damn liar if I told you we were going to make sure it never happened ever. The fact is, there’s a segment of the audience that’s GOING to try to exploit the system and that IS going to figure out how to turn our game against us. It’s just a 100% certainty. So what I will promise is that we’re going to be a damn sight more reactive to this stuff than others have been in the past. Star Citizen is being designed so that we can update it quickly rather than rebalancing with big patches every six months. What’s more, we’re building the game WE want to play… and if someone has figured out how to mess it up, you can believe me we’re going right in and closing that loophole as fast as we can.”

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I think SWG would have been a wow like hit if it had their space combat stuff in there from day one. It was a great addition but by the time they added it the people had already started the exodus.

To say we’ve had a lot of questions in the past five days would be an understatement. We’re hard at work on an official RSI FAQ to supplement the great work being done by users at the forums. It will have its own place at the website soon, but we wanted to go ahead and share the work-in-progress here since many of you have questions you need answered now! Please post additional questions in the comments and we will do our best to keep this updated.

My community account is not showing my pledge!

We are currently working to sync our pledge database and our community database. Your pledge will show correctly soon and we will send out a message when this process is complete. If you pledged from a different e-mail than your RSI account, we will contact you after the database sync to incorporate your pledge manually.

Is my Golden Ticket gone?

No! We have a record of your Golden Ticket and it will be returned to your account in the near future. We won’t forget our earliest fans!

Is Star Citizen an MMO?

No! Star Citizen will take the best of all possible worlds, ranging from a permanent, persistent world similar to those found in MMOs to an offline, single player campaign like those found in the Wing Commander series. The game will include the option for private servers, like Freelancer, and will offer plenty of opportunities for players who are interested in modding the content. Unlike many games, none of these aspects is an afterthought: they all combine to form the core of the Star Citizen experience.

What are the “Citizen Cards”?

Citizen Cards are physical props to prove that you have supported Star Citizen and will be one of the first pilots in space when the testing process starts. They will be wallet sized cards that you can carry with you anywhere you go. Citizen cards will also appear in the game itself, showing your character’s social standing, credit account and so on. We’re hoping to make them available to backers by Christmas 2012, so you can gift the game to friends and have something to show for it!

Can you tell me about the different ships?

We’re working on concept art right now that will show you the different levels of ships! For now, imagine the sort of ship advancement you encounered in Privateer or Freelancer, with the Aurora being the basic ship and others being improved or more specialized craft. The top-of-the-line ship in our pledge campaign is the RSI Constellation, which is a multi-person craft that includes a turret and a smaller fighter that can be manned by your friends!

How will modding work?

Players will be given full control of their game! When operating private servers, players will be able and encouraged to mod the game. It doesn’t stop there, though: we hope to institute a ‘mod approval’ process that will allow the best of the best player created ships and other additions to be integrated into the central persistent world as well.

Can I upgrade to a bigger ship?

Yes! You will always have your ‘pledge’ ship, but you can purchase and fly others to your heart’s content in the finished game. Star Citizen will feature plenty of other ships and we expect players will want to earn credits and figure out which suits their particular style of play best. You can also upgrade to a bigger ship during the crowdfunding phase by pledging additional money.

What platforms will Star Citizen be available on?

Star Citizen is a PC game through and through and could never be played on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 or WiiU. We currently plan to support Windows and are examining our options regarding possible Linux and Macintosh releases. The Cloud Imperium team includes many Linux and Macintosh fans!

How can I work for Cloud Imperium Games?

Please e-mail hr@cloudimperiumgames.com with your information.

Will Star Citizen only be in English?

No, we plan to support many languages. A huge percentage of space sim and PC gaming fans come from Europe and especially Germany, and we want to make sure Star Citizen is accessible to everyone. The game will initially be localized to French, German and Spanish with plans to handle other languages afterwards.

Can you explain the stretch goals?

The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period. We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.

Why Direct And No Publisher?

Publishers are useful in the old physical distribution world, but the Internet is the great equalizer. Notch didn’t need a publisher to reach 20-million Minecraft fans. Riot games didn’t need a publisher to reach 30-million League of Legends players, and Wargaming.net didn’t need a publisher to reach 20-million World of Tanks gamers. If we were building a big “AAA” console game it would be crazy to try without a publisher. But we want to build a PC game and publishers increase costs because of their need to recoup their sizable overhead cost. We want to make sure all the money raised goes directly to the development of the game. So we’re throwing ourselves on the mercy of the PC gamers out there that share our vision and passion for the platform and the space combat genre to raise money outside of the “cartel” of traditional publishers. The game will cost less, be more creatively pure, and, most importantly, be built for the real “core” audience – not some corporate suit worried about including all the casual gamers.

Is Star Citizen “free to play”? A subscription game?

To play Star Citizen you need only to buy the initial game. There will never be a monthly charge for usage. Some in-game items may be available as microtransactions, but we will NEVER sell anything that can’t be acquired through honest (and fun!) gameplay.

What will the gameplay be like?

Star Citizen will feature gameplay similar to the original Wing Commander and Privateer, with a more realistic physics system. This means that it is NOT a ‘click to kill’ interface like most modern MMOs; your success in combat is going to depend as much on your skill with a space fighter as it will with your ship upgrades and your pocket book.

Why not Kickstarter?

We love Kickstarter. We’ve backed projects on their site, and believe everyone in the development community owes a debt to Kickstarter for putting crowd funding on the map, and making it legitimate. But for us the ultimate goal of crowd funding is about connecting the “crowd” directly with the creators with as little friction as possible. By building a crowd funding component directly into our site we can insure everyone who wants to back the game can – we provide multiple payment options to make sure that wherever in the world you are there is an option that can work for you. It means you just have one destination to support the project, read updates, and most importantly participate with other members of the community! All on a site that’s designed around the game universe being created, providing the least friction possible. Kickstarter, as great as it is, can’t deliver this experience, which is why we’ve decided to go it alone.

Can you estimate the system requirements for Star Citizen?

There will be a lot of optimization in the next 24-months, plus the usual fast pace of technology, so it is hard to say absolutely. At the moment you will be able to play it on a 4GB dual core PC with a GTX 460 or greater, but not with full fidelity. If you’re running an i7 2500, 2600, 2700 or better with a GTX 670 or greater you will get the full experience and we will only scale up from there. You will need a dedicated GPU. Since the game is built on CryEngine, their system requirements will stay roughly the same as ours.

Am I the only person who thinks Star Citizen is a great name for a "Privateer Online" style game?

Now on kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen/). Rather open video to go with it.

Star Citizen adds Kickstarter! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zN5q7sBKmc&feature=youtu.be)

You are like a litmus test for disaster.

There's a term to made up for manipulating Kickstarter as a promotions tool, since, "Game X appears on Kickstarter!" is easy copy for blogs to write. Which you want so that more people pour money into the Kickstarter.

I didn't look - if Star Citizen fails to hit its target on their own site, are they refunding the money or keeping it?

Yesterday afternoon, Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander, Freelancer and Privateer fame) was down to visit another studio to share ‘war stories’ regarding CryEngine 2. On his way back home, he decided to give me a ring and talk a bit about Star Citizen, Eve Online, and the future of space sims while braving the dangerous I-405.

Star Citizen is a newly announced space simulator game with ambitious, if not outright grandiose, goals. Featuring a full single player campaign (with coop mode possible), multiplayer private space combat servers, an entirely moddable interface as well as a public, persistent online universe, Star Citizen seems to promise something for everyone even vaguely interested in playing internet spaceships. Of course, with any ambitious plan there are always doubters, naysayers and (dare we say it) even haters - but Chris Roberts is unfazed by these facts of life. His enthusiasm and belief in the vision of Star Citizen goes back many years and will not be stopped any time soon.

For those of us that have seen the announcement trailer and subsequent footage to come out, it seems like a hugely exciting project. How long have you been working on the game so far?

Chris: Basically I’ve been working with a small team over the course of the past year to get the early prototyping and production done. The team has varied in scale from just me, essentially, to about 10 people. That’s just the actual work though.

Star Citizen is the game, essentially, that I wanted to make when I was working on Freelancer. A very big game, with both single player and multiplayer, a game that you could play with other people on a large scale. I feel I never really got to realize that dream. Microsoft was the publisher of Freelancer and at the time was very focused on getting the Xbox developed, as well as titles for it. I never got to do Freelancer the way I wanted to - it has always felt like a bit of unfinished business.

If EA didn’t hold the rights to the Wing Commander franchise and you somehow ended up with them, would Star Citizen be called something like ‘Wing Commander Online’, or do you feel that the game is essentially different from Wing Commander or Freelancer to the point that you would have renamed it anyways?

Yes, if I somehow owned the rights to Wing Commander still, this would definitely be Wing Commander: Star Citizen or something like that. Star Citizen really is the spiritual successor to all of my work with Wing Commander, Freelancer and Privateer. If I had to sum it up, it is essentially Wing Commander and Privateer blended together.

You have stated that you expect to have an Alpha up and going in about 12 months, with a beta roughly 10 months after that and then launch. For a game of this size and scope, do you think you can really be done in the next two years?

Really it is all about constant iteration from launch. The whole idea is to be constantly updating. It isn’t like the old days where you had to have everything and the kitchen sink in at launch because you weren’t going to come back to it for awhile. We’re already one year in - another two years puts us at 3 total which is ideal. Any more and things would begin to get stale.

Speaking of constant updates, you’ve stated that you would like to roll out updates on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. How sustainable is that vision and what kind of investment of resources do you foresee that taking?

Obviously we would scale up the staff over time until, once live, we have about 20-30 people generating content, not counting high-level development of new features. The idea is to set up a structure for the players to use and add in new content as the spice, where the player-generated content is the meat. Eve Online does this very well. You don’t want to be like [Star Wars] The Old Republic, where all your content is heavily scripted.

Implementing more intelligent procedural systems as in real life, driving player behavior, and then sprinkling in some studio developed story content is what will give us the longevity we need.

You mention Eve Online and obviously have some knowledge of it. Have you played it, or just followed its progress?

I have played Eve a little bit but never really got hardcore into it. I’m more of an in-the-cockpit kind of guy. The game concepts, the ideas that CCP has put out - they have done a great job of it. They are the only ones, really, holding the fortress for space [games]. As for playing Eve, it is really a matter of scale. For myself, I would rather be in a cockpit as opposed to flying a big freighter or something from a distance.

There are obviously some close similiraties on a conceptual level between Star Citizen and Eve Online. How much has CCP’s progress with EVE impacted your current development of Star Citizen?

The main thing is that they proved it could work. Eve Online is a bit larger scale, but has most of the same stuff as when I was pitching Freelancer. Dynamic universe, player driven interaction, etc. CCP has done a really good job of proving that the concept works. What I want to do now is basically make Star Citizen the Call of Duty to Eve Online’s Company of Heroes, in that Star Citizen will give more of a first person, in the moment experience while Eve Online provides a strategic point of view.

The thing that would be really cool, for me, is to have player’s making their own groups like in Eve. My ideal scenario would be something like one player setting himself up as some kind of Criminal Overlord out in the fringes of space, with an asteroid base and hired [player] muscle, harrying other people. Then those other people band together to go take out the Criminal Overlord and his group in order to maintain their own safety or profits.

[Editor’s Note: At this point in the interview, things nearly came off the rails as a typical LA area driver decided it would be a good time to slam on their brakes for no apparent reason. After confirming that Mr. Roberts was alright, we continued...]

You have planned many ways for players of Star Citizen to make a living, including trading and mining. Mining in Eve is literally one of the dullest experiences in modern gaming. What are you planning to make mining something fun to do?

[Laughter] Mining and trading will take some level of actual flying skill, whereas in Eve you are just sort of clicking a button every once in awhile to make money. It’s sort of like playing Farmville and I hate that stuff. I feel that the first person, active flying experience in Star Citizen will turn, for instance, a boring trade run from Eve Online into a more immersive and exciting experience.

Other games in the past have sought to provide a sort of two-part game, though not on the same level as we will see in Star Citizen with its Squadron 42 component (referring to the single player/coop mode of the game). In particular Age Of Conan springs to mind. However, AOC was fairly terrible, as the first 10 or 20 levels was fully voice acted, really high quality content - and then there was nothing. Could you go more in depth as to how the Squadron 42 aspect integrates with the overall Star Citizen universe?

I know just what you mean. I played Age of Conan and yeah, the beginning was really cool then you seemed to really run out of content. We’re definitely going to avoid that with Star Citizen. Squadron 42 is going to be the kind of military campaign, a linear campaign, reminiscent of Wing Commander. Something where, if you only have a little bit of time or you just don’t want to deal with everyone else trying to backstab you. You’re in the military and you go out on these missions. Once you finish your tour of duty, you muster out into the open universe and pursue your goals. In the end, players may prefer one or the other, in which case they will just have to wait for more content to be put out.

Star Citizen also has plans to enable privately hosted servers that can run mods of the game, either in coop campaign mode or as a small scale space combat server. Will players be able to transfer characters between these private servers and the persistent universe hosted by yourself? How is that interaction going to be handled?

You know, I really don’t have a good answer for that right now, its a bit of a problem that we’re working on ironing out. Probably you will only end up being able to transfer your character itself, not any of the money you earn on the private server or the ships you acquire. The whole point of the public persistent universe is to make sure people stay honest and are coming by their goods legitimately. You won’t be able to mod yourself a megaship in a private server and then take it out into the universe.

The most recent FAQ put up on the Star Citizen website definitively states that Star Citizen is not an MMO. Obviously, with single player and private hosted servers, it isn’t just an MMO, but doesn’t the online persistent universe make it an MMO in some way?

To be honest, all these classifications are a bit silly. We stated it isn’t an MMO because when people hear ‘MMO’ they think of subscriptions and World of Warcraft. We wanted to reassure old Wing Commander and Privateer fans that this they wouldn’t have to pay a subscription to play a game they love. Obviously at no point does this mean you won’t be able to play with your friends - who doesn’t want to do that? It is an MMO in the aspect of having a big, massive galaxy, a persistent universe, that sort of thing. But it will also have a full single player game, so it isn’t always an MMO.

What kind of consequences will there be for death in Star Citizen? Can your ‘flesh and blood’ avatar be killed?

Well, when your ship blows up, you’ll be floating out in space and someone can pick you up and take you to the nearest space station or planet. There will be things like insurance for your ship and even for your cargo in the event of its demise, but there will also be things like tariffs and taxes in the safer parts of the galaxy - someone has to pay for that protection. So in some parts you won’t need insurance, but will pay taxes. In others you won’t pay taxes, but will definitely need insurance. It is sort of like the real world - if you live in a bad neighborhood, you pay more in insurance. In Star Citizen, insurance rates will vary depending on where you get it.

I like setting up the world and letting the players gravitate towards whatever they want to do. As a developer, you are always surprised by what the players want to and eventually end up doing.

You plan on having Star Citizen not only support the typical mouse, keyboard, joystick and gamepad that you find in PC gaming, but also things like rudder pedals, flight chairs and the Oculus Rift. Why go to such great lengths to support equipment that isn’t that prevalent, and what kind of impact will this have on development costs?

I feel like I’m making a game for the enthusiast. If someone not only spent the money on a gaming PC to play Star Citizen, but also dropped 100, 200 dollars on some other equipment, I want to be able to say to them ‘You paid for it, you should be able to use it’.

In terms of development time, it doesn’t take much. Input is input and if I didn’t think we could accommodate all those different types of peripherals, I wouldn’t have the support in the game.

Earlier today you launched a Kickstarter campaign after previously going with your own crowdfunding solution. How is all of that going?

Well, the website had some issues when we first announced the game. People weren’t able to see their pledges right away and I’m sure some weren’t comfortable going with just some website. I like Kickstarter a lot, I’ve supported multiple projects on Kickstarter, so when we had these issues Kickstarter came to us and said ‘how can we help?’. They’ve been excellent at helping expedite the process of getting a Kickstarter set up for people that want to use them.

Not using Kickstarter to begin with was never about saving the 5% fee they charge or anything like that. It was about making pledging as frictionless as possible for those who were already supporters of the site and the game.

Any parting words for the Eve Online community or in general?

If Eve players are interested in more of a first person, spaceship type of experience, it would be awesome if they backed Star Citizen. I really want to show the big publishers that there is significant demand not just for space games, but for PC games as well, and that people love them!

Thanks very much for taking the time to talk to us!

So there you have it - words straight from Chris Roberts. To find out more about Star Citizen I highly recommend checking out the website for the game. Unlike some that stay stagnant for weeks or months while in development, Mr. Roberts is committed to putting out updates on various aspects of the game as often as possible.

And if, as Mr. Roberts said, you fancy yourself a bit of a cockpit kind of guy like him - definitely back the project. It has raised over $1 million USD on the RSI/Star Citizen website itself in about a week and an additional $100,000+ on Kickstarter (in just a few hours).

Odds on EA suddenly deciding that the time is right to revive the "Wing Commander" name at some point in the next year or two?

With Shepard reportedly not being in ME4, I'm curious where the series will go.

POST 1

    Hi all, I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m the designer/coder for the Star Citizen HUD and additional 2D elements. While a good deal of my work wasn’t integrated in time for the live demo, that was largely because what we’ve been doing has pushed the limits of Scaleform and CryENGINE – and is radically different from the standard game HUD formula that’s prevailed for the last decade.

    Taking inspiration from previous Chris Roberts ship controls, nothing in our work is similar to the templates you’ve seen in more recent games; it’s been engineered from the ground up to deliver an unparalleled degree of control and detail to the pilot. Chris is an inspiring guy to work for, and I’m honored to have been picked for the job. We aren’t cutting any corners.

    All the elements of the HUD systems we’ve developed are based on procedural algorithms and can be customized to different ships and styles to a huge degree of depth and flexibility, keeping the scope of the universe in mind. My task is to pack as much useful information as possible into tight, clear displays, to give pilots those crucial visual cues that can mean the difference between life and death in a dogfight.

    The HUD will be your friend, and learning to read it reflexively will shave crucial milliseconds off your reaction time. Sometimes it feels more like I’m developing an avionics package for the military than for a game! For my qualifications, I have 15 years in Flash/Flex development, including dozens of casual games and a custom gaming platform for a Bitcoin site I operate. I’m very much a DIY, self-employed developer, and this is my first team effort in over ten years. But this is a game I’m dying to play, and I couldn’t say no… I’ve been a fan of Chris’s work since I was a kid playing Wing Commander, and it’s a dream job for me to work with the team he’s assembled.

    There are lots of reasons to pledge to this project, but one of the best (in my view) is that the authenticity of the flying/fighting experience is going to be unparalleled. I can confirm that all the pieces are in place to ensure that it will be – and as for the avionics, I think this HUD will be the gold standard in “AAA” games for the next decade or longer. I hope to hear your feedback as we go along, and thank you all for showing your support and helping to building this awesome game!

POST 2

    I’m looking forward to showing off the design, and I’ll see if we can’t get a sneak peek in here pretty soon! You can catch a tiny bit of it in the “Immersion” video at [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVua...&>feature=relmfu which shows some of the earliest integrations of marks, radar and ship displays when you climb into the cockpit. Although this is just the tip of the iceberg, you’ll notice the screen displays there look quite a bit different from anything in the other videos. What you’re seeing (for HUD-skeptics) are functional components with a lot of data layers and controls built in, but they aren’t engaged >yet in that video.

    Mea culpa, by the way. I was trying to do something that hadn’t been done before, which was part of the reason we missed our integration target, which is most of the reason why the targeting reticles and gun pips weren’t in for the live demo (which is why Chris missed the enemy ship — and why some people seem to doubt the HUD exists). But I promise the end result is well worth it; you’ve never seen this stuff in a HUD before, because we had to rewrite parts of the CryENGINE/Scaleform integration code and roll a whole bunch of new graphics methods just to make it work.

    I’ll shut up now before I say too much, and leave it to Chris to make the big announcements

POST 3

    Thanks for such a warm welcome! Can’t believe so many people stopped by to say hi while I was sleeping. I’m by no means able to answer all the questions, and I should be getting back to work :P but I guess I can give you all another good teaser…

    I’m seeing a lot of questions about 2D vs. 3D displays, and about 3D HMDs vs. cockpit-projected HUDs. In fact, Chris made the decision to use all three types in Star Citizen from the beginning.

    There’s a fixed holographic projection within the cockpit, which overlays things that don’t move with your head, e.g. velocity, acceleration, attitude, altitude, heading and targeting data. This projection has depth for greater effect (along the lines of what you see in that Scaleform promotional video), and also uses some (non-essential) stereoscopic depth cues to assist the pilot in reading certain situations more quickly. You don’t need an Oculus to get all the same info, but I’m not saying the depth cues won’t give you a slight edge.

    In addition to that, there’s a separate projection on the inside of the pilot’s helmet which can be loaded up with with deeper data sets (e.g. ship status, weapons selection, power balancing, navigation maps, communications, etc). This HMD projection stays in your field of vision when you turn your head.

    Finally, elements from both of these projections can be shunted to the flat LCD displays or brought back up to their respective projection, and have been designed to shift shape, color and opacity, and/or break into separate elements, depending on whether they’re being displayed on a flat screen or holographically. So yeah, there was definitely some inspiration from Minority Report and Iron Man, but at the same time these elements are very much in the CR space sim style, and my primary goal is to remain true to his original vision.

    I should stress that these projection layers exist, and about 80% of the gizmos are fully functional; in tests, they have been added to the projections and screens and run successfully with dummy data. The part that’s not yet complete is the full integration that sends active environmental data to the components. The HUD is a platform in itself with 62 custom classes and a 20-page API manual so far. There are hundreds of data points that need to be connected up to the ship’s systems, so we’re still in the process of getting the cockpit fully “wired”.

    And no, we’re not deviating from the classic polar-mapped radar screen! But we’ve added some nice touches like sector heat mapping, and ship-on-your-tail alerts.

    Additionally, someone asked me about incorrect and/or damaged displays. Every element in our HUD responds to damage. As Chris built the fly-by-wire system to procedurally handle an infinite range of ship states based on damage to various components, that philosophy was extended to have damage also rendered procedurally in the HUD. Just as one example, text in the HUD is not pre-rendered or even generated on the fly as a block; it’s printed procedurally to the displays one character at a time, with a greater likelihood of transcription error (or garbled transmission) depending on specific damage to your avionics or communications systems. Response to damage is a bedrock feature of every element in the HUD and has a negative impact on boot times, data latency and accuracy. If this sounds like something not recommended in a scaleform project, it isn’t – and they said it was crazy – but we’ve refactored, honed and optimized it to work.

    So, I’ll end it here before I give away all my tricks, but I’ll drop back in from time to time. Meanwhile, stay tuned for the next vid!"

POST 4 (21.10.12)

    Good luck to all of us!

    I just want to say, as far as modding the HUD, a lot of things (e.g. colors, custom drawing styles) are written to be extremely moddable. I imagine custom skins will be an early addition. Totally custom HUDs that include unique ship configurations are probably further down the road. We’ve overcome some major technical hurdles with Scaleform in terms of getting all of our procedural elements to work, although the trade-off is that we had to mod the SDK a bit so it’s not as easy to compile these things in. But the HUD is made to be very, very flexible… we’ve already got some in-house programs written to ease the process of integrating new elements and new ships… so I do think community modding of the HUD is ultimately in the cards.

    Also: Personally, and not speaking for RSI, I’m a big fan of Privateer, and the exploration/trading side of things (although with some good dogfights to spice it up). Actually one of my favorite games from back in the day was Starflight, which was pretty much all about that. I still have great memories the planetary analysis that would piece together the atmospheric and mineral composition of new planets you’d orbit. My 9-year-old best friend and I (can’t resist linking to him) decided to start a software company to build an open universe after playing that game, which ended a year later with a journal full of dozens of solar systems and a bunch of hypercard stacks.

    So from my perspective, civilian uses for the HUD and ship’s systems are absolutely crucial as well, and they won’t be neglected in Star Citizen. It’s one of the reasons I’m thrilled to be part of the team.

Source

http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/forums/topic/hello-from-one-of-the-devs/

Example Vid of Scaleform

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zKDuzVbi50Q#!

Hello everyone!

Less than two weeks ago, I reached out to the gaming community to help me prove that the PC game wasn’t dead. That there was still an audience for the kind of games I created with Wing Commander and Freelancer. To prove that Space Combat wasn’t finished as a genre

I hoped that the answer would be yes, that the demand would be there and that it would come together in a way that would ultimately let me build the world I have been dreaming about for many years.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly it all happened.

Last night, just four and half days after our Kickstarter campaign launched, we passed the $500,000 mark, making it successfully funded, and another Kickstarter success story.

As I write this we are less than $50,000 from reaching the RSI goal of $2 million in overall pledges that makes Star Citizen a “go”. It’s unbelievable.

I’m proud to represent this cause and I’m tremendously humbled by the incredible community that has rallied to my side. Not just the donations–which have been astounding –but also the stories and the creativity I’ve encountered interacting with you in the comments and on the message boards and elsewhere. Like me, you have all seen Star Citizen, no matter what you may have called it, in your head for many years… and thanks to your collected efforts; I’m going to build it for you.

I have two pieces of information to share with you tonight. The first is the long-awaited design document about Star Citizens five pledge ships. Time and time again you’ve asked what an Aurora or a Hornet or a Constellation is. I’m happy now to be able to share our design concepts. These are the specifications we’re building on as we create the game world and they’re the descriptions I have sent to the artists who are putting together the ship models. Normally you wouldn’t see this kind of inside information, especially not this early, but I hope you will find it interesting and get a kick out of getting an insider’s view of how game development works.

The second piece of news is the news that you can finally upgrade your pledges at RobertsSpaceIndustries.com. If you’ve decided you would like to upgrade to a higher tier of ship or if you would like to increase your support for the project for any other reason, you now have that option. In addition we have heard you loud and clear on the Forums, on Kickstarter, Facebook and on the recent poll. You want the ability to add additional ships to your base package. So we’ve given you that option too. I hope you’ll enjoy seeing our plans for these ships and then choosing the one that best fits how you want to play the game.

Tomorrow, we’re going to be adding additional information about stretch goals… more specific levels and in-game rewards that you can achieve. In the near future we will have the upgraded forums online and we will start opening additional content at the RSI website. There’s a lot to look forward to!

So, pilots: we’ve won our first furball! But, there’s plenty more work to do. Let’s knock out the $2M in overall pledges that green lights Star Citizen, then set our sights on the stretch goals. The more of these we can hit, the richer and more varied the game I can deliver. We’re less than half way through the campaign, so I know we can go much further. If you’ve already backed, spread the word. If you’re still waiting to, then please join the cause.

Thank you, truly, for your unbelievable support. We have $45,840 to go! We can get there by MORNING!

Chris Roberts

Dial the shillage back a tiny bit.  

Hi everyone!

I get a lot of questions about how the whole persistent universe works and what I mean when I talk about battle instances.

I’ve given some answers but as it keeps coming up, I thought it would be good to give all of you a longer description in how this all works and fits together.

One of my goals with Star Citizen was to create a huge open world that you could adventure in solo, with your friends, mingling with NPCs and other real people.

Freelancer was built to have up to 128 players in multiplayer, but as a few of you know that was more a theoretical maximum than something that was really practical, especially back in 2003.  When I started building Freelancer, partly inspired by the work done on Ultima Online (which was in development when I was still at Origin), the fun I was having playing multiplayer games like Command & Conquer  and Diablo I had wanted to bring the Privateer experience into the bold new world of multiplayer.  My original vision for Freelancer was to first release a single player game and then follow it up with massively multiplayer version with a dynamic economy and a world that reacted and adapted to the players actions.

I didn’t get a chance to deliver this vision and ultimately while Freelancer was a good game, it fell short of what I was aiming for.

With Star Citizen I was determined to combine what I wanted to achieve with Freelancer, with the personal experience that I think both Wing Commander and Privateer were so strong with.

But me being me, I wanted to combine things I like about the promise of a MMO, but avoid the aspects that I’m not so keen on like splintered player groups, griefing and grinding. I also was really impressed with how Demon’s Souls merged the single player experience with the multiplayer side.

 

All of this helped form my thinking on how Star Citizen is going to balance the difficult balancing act between multiplayer and single player.

All multiplayer games – whether they are a persistent world massively multiplayer game (MMO) like World of Warcraft or just an online multiplayer game like Battlefield 3 – have a limit to the number of players that can be active in anyone area or level. This number is usually inversely proportional to the amount of data that needs to go between the client and the server. For a game with complex physics and a fully destructible terrain, like Battlefield 3 the number of players that can active in an instance is less than a game with less real time fidelity like WoW, or Eve on Line.  But in all cases there are always more players than any one server instance can handle. For a persistent multiplayer world like WoW the solution is to split up the player base into more manageable groups called “shards”, which are a permanent instance of the universe that look after a certain amount of players.

One thing I don’t like about most MMO structures is the fragmentation of the player base between these “shards”. If you had joined much later than a friend of yours, there may not be room on his world instance anymore and you have to join another parallel one and so cannot play together. This is one of the nice things about the Eve Online design – everyone plays in the same universe.

In Star Citizen there is going to be one persistent universe server that everyone exists on. So you will never be separated from your friends, and if you want you’ll be able to join up and adventure together, you can.  Due to the fidelity of the dogfighting and physics simulation we can’t however handle thousands of players in the same area of space. Even if you had enough internet bandwidth to handle the data going back and forth and a super computer for the server there’s no PC, even with quad SLI that could render that many spaceships with Star Citizen’s fidelity.

So the “magic” of Star Citizen’s multiplayer design is how we combine a persistent universe with a more traditional (and easier to implement) temporary multiplayer “battle” instance.

The way it works is that the persistent universe server, which we’re calling the Galaxy Server, keeps track of all players’ assets, group relationships and locations inside the Star Citizen universe. As the Galaxy server isn’t handling any realtime action it can handle our complete player base, which right now would be about 45,000 players, but is designed to be able to scale to millions if need be. The other key thing the Galaxy Server does is dynamically place players based on their location, skill level, alignment and player versus player (PvP) preference into battle instances. Think of a “battle” instance like a Battlefield 3 multiplayer session or a World of Tanks Battle with the key difference that the selection of players is done transparently and is “in fiction”.

An illustration of how this would work is like this –

I start out planet side on New Pittsburg. I decide to buy a few tonnes of steel to fly to the shipyards of Terra. I’m currently in the hands of the galaxy server that communicates with my client and handles my purchases and interactions on the planet as these are not real time in the manner that the space action is. We render these in the manner of Freelancer, as detailed 3D environments where we see a third person view of our character in a location and we can click on Non Player Characters (NPCs) or terminals to buy / sell, upgrade your ship, get gossip, hear about a mission and so on.  You’ll also be able to interact with other players via a chat interface. We haven’t fully worked out the player avatar handling planet side but the bar or private clubs will be where you can meet / chat to other players. Besides populating the bar with NPCs, the game will also populate the bar with other players. If there are more players planet side than there are slots of avatars in the bar the ones visible to you will be based off your friends list and then it will be based on relevance to you – a player looking for a wingman, one from a similar group, or maybe someone that you’ve been given a mission to find or hunt down. You will also be able to see the full list of players in the room if there are more players than there are slots. Default would be a drop down list for this, but as I hate anything that breaks the immersion, we’ll probably come up with a better in fiction way of seeing the list of players – maybe you tell the bartender who you’re looking for, maybe you can look at the door list for the bar.

Having bought my cargo I launch into space. If there are players already in orbit there will be an orbit instance already created. If it’s not full then I will be placed into that. If it is full then a new one will be dynamically created. All orbit (and battle) instances reserve slots for friends and persons of interest (POI), which can be NPCs or other players, so if you’ve launched and there are multiple orbit instances and you have friends already in orbit you should be placed into that instance. This is also the dynamic that will be applied if you want to follow another player – you can “tag” them as a POI and then the game will do its best to place you in the same instance as your POI. For instance if you tagged someone planet side and they launch your PDA with its future version of Siri will notify you that your POI is leaving, giving you a window to launch into space too.

Once in orbit I can pull up my Navigation computer and set a course for my destination. If its several systems away like Terra, the nav computer will chart a course through the relevant jump points. You will be able to adjust this like on Google maps, so if you click a different jump point on the system map it will then re-route you on the shortest path to your destination with that jump point as the first “jump”

Once I’ve plotted my nav course I would then engage auto-pilot and head towards my first “way” point on the path to my destination (a jump point, an interim space feature, like an asteroid belt and so on). At this point I’ve been handed back to the Galaxy Server, which is determining whether I will encounter a hostile, someone that has tagged me as a POI, or a predetermined encounter on the way, or if I’m going to run across ongoing battle instance that is relevant to me (some members of the instance are aligned against or with me). These encounters could be with an NPC or a live player(s) and are sorted on skill level and also – which is important to all of you that like a more single player experience and don’t want to deal with griefers – based on your player versus player (PvP) preference. So if you’ve set your game settings to be low PvP and you’re in a relatively safe area, you’ll likely have an NPC (PvE) encounter as opposed to a PvP one. Of course your ranking and any reputation you earn won’t be the same with a PvE encounter versus a PvP. My hope for this dynamic is that it will allow people to first play Star Citizen in a safer more single player open world style, but as they grow in confidence and want to test their mettle against other real players they can take the training wheels off and get into battles with real players. There will also be areas of the universe that no matter what your PvP setting is, will be PvP. These will be systems that are on the fringes of the policed galaxy and will be notorious for pirate and other illegal activity. They will also be the most lucrative areas – if you can survive.

Now if you’re flying with your friends, who you can link to via the game POI “tagging” system, they will be with you when you’re pulled into a battle instance, whether it is against NPCs, real players or a combination of both.

Once the Galaxy Server has determined that you will have an encounter based on the above criteria it either dynamically creates a battle instance, or puts you in one if one already exists at the encounter point, and that instance has room for new players.  To exit this instance you either have to resolve the hostilities by defeating who’s targeting you, negotiating an exit or just outrunning them. Once in an instance you can put out a distress call to your friends. There are two ways people on your friends list (or squadron as we’re going to call it) can help. We save slots in all instances for friends to warp in to fight. To do this they need to be in the same system. If they are they can autopilot in to your rescue and will be dropped into the instance. If they’re not in the star system, if they can get to your system before the battle is over then they can join (but will only be able to join once they’ve reached your system). The second way for your friends to help out is by “dropping in” on your ship. This only works if it’s a multi person vehicle like the RSI Constellation. In this scenario they don’t need to be in your system, they just will drop in inside your ship and will be able to move around in first person, climbing into a turret to man it, or jumping in you P52 to fly it in combat while you fly the main ship (or they could fly your main ship and you pilot the fighter)

Once the hostilities or the event (sometimes you could be pulled into an instance because you came across a derelict ship or space station and we want to give the player a chance to explore) that triggered the drop out of auto-pilot has been resolved, you can hit auto-pilot again, get handed back to the Galaxy Server and go about your way on the nav course you’ve plotted.

You will always drop out at jump points and planets, where you will need to either make a jump to another system or land.

This process is continued until you reach your final destination, which in my example would be Terra, where I would use my comm system to negotiate a landing slot, which would take me down to the planet’s surface via an in-engine cinematic. Once planet side I’ll be able to sell my cargo, replenish my supplies and look for new opportunities via the third person planet side interface.

The advantage of this system is that is allows you to tailor your experience towards your preference – solo, co-op or full PvP. It also doesn’t partition you into different, parallel versions of the Star Citizen universe as everyone is kept on the persistent server. Because our battle or orbit / space instances are temporary, you’re never stuck

with one group over the long term and due to our heavy emphasis on friends and co-op, there will always be room for your friends to join you on your adventure; whether it’s against other players or NPCs.

The same instance system underpins the single player Squadron 42. If you’re playing off-line, your computer will be acting as the server and client, there will be no opportunities for friends to join and everyone will be an NPC. But if you play Squadron 42 through the Galaxy Server, even though your missions and space areas are pre-determined (you don’t get to pick where in the galaxy you are flying if you’re in the military) we will allow your friends to drop in / drop out to take over NPC wingmen and if you want extra skill ranking you can allow other players to drop in and take over enemy ace characters. This system is pretty similar to the Demon’s Souls setup where people could drop in as a Blue Phantom to help you kill a boss monster or fight off another invading player, or you could drop in as a Black Phantom to someone else’s world and try and kill them for XP and other gamerewards.

The key to all this is to allow player choice – you want to play alone you can, want your friends to join you in co-op we allow that and if you want to be challenged by other real players you can do that. The special part is that it can all happen in the same holistic universe.

I hope this helps in terms of understanding how we’re balancing the aspects of multiplayer as well as making the game fun.

Sounds like Pirates of the Burning Sea. Not a bad thing, but not really the omg-how-many-people-are-here?! that Eve can sometimes deliver.

Hm. I'd be more interested with a rich freelancer-style galaxy on a privately hosted server with centralized authentication, more like minecraft.

I have no need of Eve Numbers in a battle.

Wing Commander and Freelancer creator Chris Roberts has been busy. Though he took some time off from game design to work in the film industry, he recently announced his return with a new space sim called Star Citizen. After showing an initial demo and releasing an early trailer, Roberts started crowdfunding to get Star Citizen off the ground, securing more than $3 million dollars between Kickstarter and his own website. Many fans donated $250 or more, often to secure themselves a space ship they didn't know the look of or function, acting simply on faith that Roberts and his team could deliver something special. To learn more about the RSI Constellation (the first big ship to be revealed), the team's approach to ship design, and Star Citizen overall, we interviewed Game Director Chris Roberts and Lead Conceptual Artist Ryan Church.

"Who doesn’t want their own Millennium Falcon?," responds Roberts when I press him about why the Constellation has been a common pledge level despite its $250 price tag, "What’s been interesting is that people have been signing up for the Constellation just on the promise without knowing what it will look like. I’m guessing that now people can see the attention to detail they may just want to upgrade."
   
Indeed, as a longtime fan of spaceships and science fiction universes like Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek, I'd say the ship looks impressive. It features a gigantic, pod-like cockpit at the front, a pair of turrets on the top and bottom of the ship, and a general aesthetic that makes Constellation look like a combination of the Han Solo's famous ship and the titular Firefly-class ship from the now defunct TV series. There are even places on the ship that Roberts and team have yet to decide the purpose. "You should be able to eat a meal or drink something in the kitchen! I don’t think we’ll go to the extreme of requiring you to do this to keep your energy up, but it is a nice texture moment. I would like the sleeping quarters play into the game the same way a bunk bed did in the original Wing Commander – which was as an in-fiction save point, but I’m not going to let you save anywhere in space. But I think when docked / landed the sleeping quarters will be where you 'wake-up' when you load your game to start a new session."

This is all part of Chris Roberts' greater vision for Star Citizen, that it earns the sim part of the space sim title. This is exemplified by the Constellation's cargo bay. Roberts says "the goal is to be able to walk back into your cargo hold while flying and actually see the cargo you’re hauling. There’s a big focus on simulating and showing everything that you would imagine to be inside and functioning on a spaceship in Star Citizen. So if you’re hauling it you should see it in your hold (if you can walk back into your hold), if you activate a system, you should see your pilot avatar lean over and switch it on, and so on."

Church and Roberts thus work together from concept to finished product, with Church beginning with Roberts' description and then figuring out how to make it functional. "It's much like designing a car or any other product," Church tells IGN, "there are the engineering requirements and then there's the feeling you want to convey -- look at a Ferrari and a Lamborghini. Both are high performance Italian sports cars but they have very different looks, different surface form languages. So I will start pretty rough and send a bunch of variations to Chris and he will weed them down and distill out what he wants. Once the shape and configuration are locked in I put on my engineer's hat and work backwards from the functional requirements to the form."

This is exactly how the Constellation came to be. Church writes, "The design brief for the Constellation was that it has a crew of three, is heavily armed and has an 'iconic' shape. That's tough to do! But I think we've succeeded- it has a very aggressive shape in attack/landing mode and can configure itself to a more benign looking cruise mode. At every stage while building it and figuring out the functionality I'm thinking about the Constellation class ship as a potential user: what would I want to fly? What would I want to be seen in? These questions resulted in not only the look of the ship but the layout of the interior and a lot of the functionality like the way the weapons can retract and change the silhouette of the ship."

Though the Constellation may be inspired by the likes of the Millenium Falcon, it has one advantage over such a craft: a deployable fighter. This small craft has no ability to navigate the warp gates that will separate the gigantic sections of Star Citizen's universe, but according to Roberts, "is important to counter act the Constellation’s lower maneuverability compared to a pure dogfighting player ship." The addition of a fighter and all the other considerable armaments of the Constellation doesn't mean it'll be everything, either. "It all comes down to how the player decides to modify and upgrade his ship and what he wants to focus on – dogfighting, trading runs, exploration," writes Roberts, "A lightly armored, but very maneuverable ship piloted by a good pilot would have a chance."

We still have yet to see the array of other ships that are being created, and as a bit of disclosure I've tossed in $125 myself for a freighter, but this first design is encouraging. There's just so much attention to detail, and if Roberts and company manage to pull off the gameplay elements detailed in our first preview, then Star Citizen could set a new standard for immersion when it releases in 2014.

Your ships have lifetime insurance policies and for the next year you will have the ability to purchase further tiers or upgrade existing ones at the initial prices. That's not true of everyone else: if you want to back Star Citizen and participate in this amazing community, you still can. but it's going to cost you a little extra as of now, and you aren't going to have as many extras (no lifetime insurance, for example.)

Uh, what the fuck does that mean?

From what I read you can insure your ship for if/when it gets blown up to soften the cost of replacing it. Apparently the founder people get that for free. Sounds like a nice founders perk.

I went back and forth on this one. $30 isn't exactly a huge deal

The initial cost is the same but insurance for retail will expire after a period of time and a new insurance policy would have to be purchased.

Insurance is going to be a tricky mechanic, they will probably have to do what EvE does and have the payout be significantly less than the replacement cost or else people would just blow up their ships on the last day of the policy.  I imagine your ships will be getting blown up fairly often so the insurance not expiring will mostly be moot since your ship will probably be destroyed before the policy lapses, then you'll have to buy both new ship and new insurance - retail and founder alike.

six mil, eh. from the kickstarter alone.

well then~!

engaging stupid optimism drive. unshielded.

The single player game is going to happen before the world. The world is slated for 2013, the Squadron 42 is this coming year. Alphas and betas before that.

I find it hard to attach any sort of meaning to the 6m figure. Is that much or little?

Halo 3 cost $55m + $200m marketing budget.

Halo 3 cost $55m + $200m marketing budget.

Why does a niche game need marketing?

Its not a game for everyone, intentionally. Word of mouth may be all it needs.

blather

I put it in, but I don't know if it did anything.

My count is still zero.  You can try adding Lantyssa at the bottom of your account page.  I'm not sure it actually does anything besides making me feel good.

From what I read you can insure your ship for if/when it gets blown up to soften the cost of replacing it. Apparently the founder people get that for free. Sounds like a nice founders perk.

You get a free stripped-down Rifter.  Whoopie.  Huge money savings there.  Look out galactic market.

Yeah, you pretty much have an infinitely replaceable hull for the ship you got with your prepurchase.  That's it.  Cargo and equipment's up to you to replace if you get it shot out from under you.  And if you paid the $30 you apparently have the crappiest ship in the game, so free hull replacements for that are a bit underwhelming.

In Squadron 42, this is pretty easy to achieve. You need to complete the mission to move forward and you can’t save while in space. You die you just go back to the previous save point, normally before you launched on the mission.

If you don’t manage to eject in time, or someone blasts your ejected character (which carries a harsh penalty if you do this in “civilized” space), your badly charred and almost dead avatar is recovered and you wake up in a med bay.

This is also true if you are killed in a boarding action and your teammates can’t or don’t recover you. If this happens it is assumed that your dead body was evacuated into space and then recovered.

Every “death” creates wear and tear on your body. Depending on where you were hit and how you died, your character may require a new body part, which can either be cybernetic or organic. Eventually after too many deaths, your character’s body will just give out, and instead of waking up in a med bay, you’ll be attending the funeral of your fallen character from the eyes of the beneficiary you specified when originally creating your character. If your old character has done something noteworthy (akin to an in-game achievement), his headstone might read “Here lies Chris, discover of the Orion 2 jump point, slayer of the Dread Pirate Roberts, and a Citizen of the First Order.”

I do not recall an article about microtransactions.

It's no different than Guild Wars 2, other than the initial fan investment, which is like macro-transactions up-front.

Roberts seems almost child-like in his naivete regarding griefing. Permadeath will be way too juicy a target for griefers. 50 throwaway characters using up some vet roleplayer's last life will create comets made of frozen tears. I will definitely be with the goons on this one, if only to avoid being targeted  :grin:

Roberts seems almost child-like in his naivete regarding griefing. Permadeath will be way too juicy a target for griefers. 50 throwaway characters using up some vet roleplayer's last life will create comets made of frozen tears. I will definitely be with the goons on this one, if only to avoid being targeted  :grin:

Whats cooler than having an offspring who retains the history of a previous character, including partial ( Faction? ) affiliations and ( Player ) recognition?

Whats cooler than having an offspring who retains the history of a previous character, including partial ( Faction? ) affiliations and ( Player ) recognition? That's rather dam awesome from a Role-player perspective if you ask me.

To celebrate the release of the Aurora, we’ve put together a special AURORA SALE WEEK promotion! We’re making a special edition version of the Aurora, the Aurora LX, available for a limited time. The LX will be available in the finished game, but this will be your only chance to pledge for it through the site (existing LTI Auroras may be upgraded through our promotion for $5 or in the finished game using in-game credits!) It features a unique paint scheme, twin lasers, leather seats (visible in-game!) and a four-missile mount with Talon IR 4 Stalker missiles pre-loaded. The standard Aurora includes an empty missile hardpoint and fabric seats… this is the luxury model! Several new packages including the LX will be available through Saturday, May 4th:

I thought it would be good to explain a little of our thinking in the Aurora promotion that we are running with the Aurora brochure. According to our database we have over 40,000 users that signed up but have yet to back. Some of these may be accounts of people that have pledged but their account is unlinked. Some are secondary accounts of people that have backed through a different account. Some of these will be people that signed up but have since decided that they are not interested in Star Citizen. The last group are people that are interested but aren’t ready to back yet, either because they are not convinced just yet, or are waiting until they can play something. A really interesting statistic is that almost 20,000 of the accounts with Golden Ticket status show as of not having a pledge!

My dream is to make Star Citizen the first AAA game that has been 100% funded by the crowd – besides being a milestone there are many reasons why this a good thing, but the most glaring is that this will ensure that the community and developers are 100% in alignment. Both our priorities is to make the best game possible, no compromises. Star Citizen is going to cost approximately $20M to make. We have this covered already between the incredible funding we’ve received from you and the commitments from investors. But here’s the truth: I’ve been holding off on closing investors because your commitment means we won’t need as much money as we originally expected. Every dollar we make from crowd funding means one less we’ll take from outside investors.

To achieve this we need to bring in new people, as all of you have given more than we could have ever expected you should not be expected to contribute any more to the cause. What better way to get some new members than a sale to entice them to join before the new site and their access rights change? Which is why we decided to create a sale for the unveiling of the Aurora in all its glory. We’re really proud of the work that’s been done on the Aurora – I think you will agree that no other game goes to such detail in designing and realizing a universe. The Aurora is indicative of what we are looking to achieve in terms of detail and immersion in the final game, and while it is the cheapest player ship available it is by no means a “Starter ship”.

As part of this we’ve decided to create a little mini campaign around the new site, complete with some stretch goals, rewards for all backers and a 24 hour live cam setup to celebrate the new site going live at the end of May. For those of you that will want to add the Aurora LX to your collection now we’ve created a couple of options for you to contribute a little more money towards development and get in return add the LX to your fleet. I want to stress that if you did this it would only because you wanted to contribute to the development funding not because you have to. You will be able to earn credits to buy this ship in game once we go live. So please do not feel obligated to do anything. Everyone has given more than enough. This is purely a “for the fun” sale / event to hopefully push our funding along.

So $10mm is actually more on the trajectory of a AAA game. However, I hope he realizes the budget he really needs has inflated quite a bit since Wing Commander days. Hopefully he's got a good Producer behind him who's been there/done that.

But at least he's talking a more realistic actually-build-it goal than the "$2mm for a new MMO/./11!" ones.

In a recent update (http://robertsspaceindustries.com/the-aurora-revealed/), Chris Roberts declared, "Star Citizen is going to cost approximately $20M to make."

This endears this project to me further, because that's precisely the budget target I've been been saying MMGs should be designed for.

I pledged 40 but I plan to slowly upgrade my pledge over the months. That 315p looks nifty *jealous* - I am eyeing the Pirate Pack. Tractor Beam? Yes please.

EDIT: Lucas, you are Italian. Doesn't it make you a bit uncomfortable too that Roberts Space Industries' acronym is "RSI"?

People paid $250 for ships for a game that's not going to be out for quite a long time yet?

So?

They ARE game play.

People paid $250 for ships for a game that's not going to be out for quite a long time yet?

Its not a CGI mockup. Its proof of development, and experience. They ARE game play.

Its not a CGI mockup. Its proof of development, and experience. They ARE game play.

But, $300 for a non ship in a non game where nothing but a hands on experience will even tell you whether it's fun, especially for an audience core enough to know who Chris Roberts' is and remember what Wing Commander was and probably having played enough games to rant enough about to long since learn how often high promise takes a nose dive into vapor?

I don't get it.

The $13 million goal adds frigates to the roster of player-flyable ships and introduces one very cool new element for gameplay: the Command and Control Center. Found as an optional seat on larger ships, the C&C lets you coordinate the battle between multiple ships: let your friends or NPCs who are flying escort know where to go and what to do.

Wait what?

What happens if you have to quit while you are in space and they don't hit the $14M mark?

You guys may be reading too much into it. That sounds like a single player option, that's an option instead of needing to land somewhere.

I got an email from RSI noting that today was the final day to get the "Aurora LX, ORIGIN 350r, M50, Starfarer, Caterpillar, Gladiator or Retaliator."

Mind you, of that list, only the Aurora exists as more than a name. The rest have no stats and no concept art, just a short description of what it's going to be for someday, in theory. :oh_i_see:

Also, the price tags on those are in order: $25, $100, $80, $175, $225, $150, and $250. SC has already become a rich man's game.

Indeed.  I know a guy who is pretty big into the game so far and keeps giving me  updates.  He says everything will be available in game via in game methods or whatever, but given the price points, I have to assume these ships are going to take a LONG time to get in game.  I have to say, the whole thing makes me feel a bit alienated from what would otherwise be a project that, at least on paper, looks like everything I'm looking for.

The difference between this and HEX is that people spending hundreds of dollars on Star Citizen are crazy. Never mind thousands. HEX is a clone of a fun, highly successful physical TCG and will have a secondary market. There is no prior example of Star Citizen's lofty goals ever being crystallised into a fun game - and actually MANY examples of MMO sandbox worlds that failed hard.

The difference between this and HEX is that people spending hundreds of dollars on Star Citizen are crazy. Never mind thousands. HEX is a clone of a fun, highly successful physical TCG and will have a secondary market. There is no prior example of Star Citizen's lofty goals ever being crystallised into a fun game - and actually MANY examples of MMO sandbox worlds that failed hard.

Preaching to the choir, I made a similar point a couple of pages ago.  Also, in Hex levels had the huge draw of weekly drafts (for life no less!).  That kind of sustaining value feels easier to drop money on than "Here is another 50 bucks for another virtual space ship" for me.

We have all the Wing Commanders and two Privateers as pedigree, plus several other space games such as the X series and EVE for concept.  People spending large sums of money on either are crazy, but that's our choice.  Don't do it if you don't have faith in the product.

There has never been a successful attempt to make what Star Citizen is trying to be.

   Wing Commander Saga: The Darkest Dawn (2012),
    Brute Force (2003), Microsoft Game Studios
Freelancer (2003), Microsoft Game Studios
    Conquest: Frontier Wars (2001), Ubi Soft Entertainment Software
    Starlancer (2000), Microsoft Corporation    
    Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (1996), Electronic Arts, Inc.
    Super Wing Commander (1994), Electronic Arts, Inc.
    Wing Commander Armada (1994), Dong Seo Interactive
    Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (1994), Electronic Arts, Inc.
    Wing Commander / Wing Commander II (Special CD-ROM Edition) (1994), Electronic Arts, Inc.
    Strike Commander (1993), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.
    Strike Commander (CD-ROM Edition) (1993), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.
    Strike Commander: Tactical Operations (1993), Electronic Arts, Inc.
    Wing Commander: Privateer (1993), Electronic Arts, Inc., ORIGIN Systems, Inc.
    Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi - Special Operations 2 (1992), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.
    Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (1991), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.
    Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi - Special Operations 1 (1991), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.
    Wing Commander: The Secret Missions 2 - Crusade (1991), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.    
    Wing Commander (1990), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.
    Wing Commander: The Secret Missions (1990), ORIGIN Systems, Inc.    
    Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988), MicroProse Ltd.  

I am impressed by the hype. If that game flops we are going to see a spike in the suicide rate among the 20-40 year old male pretend space pilot demographic. :why_so_serious:

If that game flops we are going to see a spike in the suicide rate among the 20-40 year old male pretend space pilot demographic.

Why is this even in the PC/Console Gaming forum anyway? Isn't this MMO?

Why is this even in the PC/Console Gaming forum anyway? Isn't this MMO?

The whole forum separation has gotten really weird and that's probably a sign of how games have been evolving in the past few years. World of Tanks is in the MMO section and it really is not one. MechWarrior is the same identical game and is in the PC/Console section instead. And Star Citizen, well, no on really knows exactly how the single player/multiplayer are gonna work, but seems like there will be some persistent centralized servers, but you can run it offline too or on private servers, so hard to place it.

Can enjoy that purely on the basis of him kicking moviebob square in the nuts at 2:40

It’s unbelievable: Star Citizen fans have helped us reach the $15 million mark without any special promotion! Ten years ago, big publishers decided space games weren’t profitable… and you are proving them very, very wrong!

The $15 million unlock adds another flyable ship class to the game, the oft-discussed escort carrier. Every backer will also get a free digital 42-page Upgrade Handbook manual with their game which goes through the process of customizing and overclocking ship systems! We’re excited about putting this one together, since it goes right to the heart of what’s going to make Star Citizen unique.

The previously-announced $16 million stretch goals are:

- Arena mode: Arena mode is a simulation within the game, although it is not the simulator itself. Players will have access to an actual training simulator in their hangars, which will be used for the dogfight alpha. The Arena is something bigger. It is a galaxy-wide event, where players come to specific locations, pay their entry fees, and jump into space battles to prove who is the best dogfighter of all. Think of it as a combination of a sports tournament and modern-day gaming contests. Each winner will receive credits for the victory, and the best of the best will meet in higher and higher rounds until a grand champion is crowned.

- A laser pistol for every pledger before this point. Keep your ship safe from boarders with a pistol by your side.
------------

With today’s achievement, we’re happy to unlock the $17 million rewards:

$17 million

- Ship upgrade package for every pledger containing an engine modifier.
- Additional flyable ship class: battlecruiser

Thank you all for your continued support. Tell your friends, Star Citizen is coming!

Star Citizen is profitable right now only because the money hasn't been spent on development.

I havent been on a hype train since vanguard.

I think I'll start by replaying freelancer

I did that recently, with the Discovery mod. I recommend.

In other Star Citizen news, Roberts recently told Eurogamer that he no longer needs traditional investor money to make the game. "I'm actually not taking money from investors now. The budget for what we're delivering is about $20 million, and we're almost there [via crowdfunding] -- we'll probably be there before the end of the year," he said. Don't forget to click past the cut to view the video!

The first release of the Hangar Module is coming! We will be making the very first revision of the Hangar online exclusively for backers the week following its unveiling at Gamescom at our event on the 24th of August. The presentation will stream live on RSI from 2 to 3 PM CST. The module itself will be available for download for all backers starting August 29.


I’d like to take a moment to discuss exactly what you’re getting. First and foremost, the Hangar Module you will load next week is by no means a finished product. It is the earliest build of anything I have ever shared with the public. In fact, it’s at an even earlier stage than I would feel comfortable giving to any publisher I’ve worked with in the past and long before I would be sharing builds with QA in a traditional game development schedule! But Star Citizen is all about trying new approaches in game development.


The Hangar Module was not something we promised during the initial crowdfunding campaign. We had originally promised to share how the game was made with regular updates on our website and give early backers access the full game’s Alpha and Beta builds. But once we started development we came upon the idea of taking the constant public iteration that you get with a “live” online game and applying it during the game’s development to allow us to engage and involve the Star Citizen community of backers in the process of the making of the game. The Hangar Module seemed like a natural choice for our first public facing deliverable. While it may not be as glamorous as the Dogfighting Module which we aim to deliver by the end of this year, it requires a whole bunch of content and functionality that the final game will use, from the ships and their data structures, to communicating with your account to installing and patching the client. The Hangar Module will be the base foundation that everything is added as we release additional modules, eventually cumulating in the full persistent world alpha / beta.


Revision 1 of the Hangar will be very simple. You will be able to walk around, enter the initial pledge ships and explore a ground level in CryEngine that shows the kind of detail we are putting into the full game. It is intended as a very basic example of our direction that we are putting out to reward our backers, something to give you a chance to view “your” ship for the first time. Be warned, we have only just begun the QA process. This is the first stable build, not a slick “open beta” or anything designed as a promotional tool. We’re letting you in on the ground floor because we want to open up the process. Expect to encounter crashes, rendering bugs and other issues. Your feedback will help improve Star Citizen.


We need your help to test the hangar, just like you will be testing the game itself. After release, we will open a special forum for reporting and tracking hangar bugs. Your reports will go directly to the team, who will act on the bugs. Please don’t report them to the support e-mail, as our CS staff won’t be able to walk through hangar issues just yet!

In the coming months, we plan to release additional “major” Revisions of the Hangar, where we add more functionality and content. Things like detailed customization of your personal hangar, persistence of the state of all your items (what is equipped and where), in client item purchasing and the ability to invite your friends to your hangar will be part of later revisions of the Hangar Module.

Just because we’ve launched a module to the community doesn’t mean that it’s completely done. It just means its ready for the community’s feedback and stress testing! Our plan is to update each module (Hangar, Dogfighting, Planet, Ship-boarding) multiple times as new features and content are completed before the full integration into the persistent universe.

Over the coming months additional ships and upgrades will become available (as they are completed) and we will continue to enhance the level of interactivity. The goal is for the Hangar to go from a very simple pre-alpha build to a full featured module before your eyes! It’s something no one has done with an AAA game before. It’s a little daunting, but it’s also another new way to share the development process with our backers.The first release of the Hangar Module is coming! We will be making the very first revision of the Hangar online exclusively for backers the week following its unveiling at Gamescom at our event on the 24th of August. The presentation will stream live on RSI from 2 to 3 PM CST. The module itself will be available for download for all backers starting August 29.


I’d like to take a moment to discuss exactly what you’re getting. First and foremost, the Hangar Module you will load next week is by no means a finished product. It is the earliest build of anything I have ever shared with the public. In fact, it’s at an even earlier stage than I would feel comfortable giving to any publisher I’ve worked with in the past and long before I would be sharing builds with QA in a traditional game development schedule! But Star Citizen is all about trying new approaches in game development.


The Hangar Module was not something we promised during the initial crowdfunding campaign. We had originally promised to share how the game was made with regular updates on our website and give early backers access the full game’s Alpha and Beta builds. But once we started development we came upon the idea of taking the constant public iteration that you get with a “live” online game and applying it during the game’s development to allow us to engage and involve the Star Citizen community of backers in the process of the making of the game. The Hangar Module seemed like a natural choice for our first public facing deliverable. While it may not be as glamorous as the Dogfighting Module which we aim to deliver by the end of this year, it requires a whole bunch of content and functionality that the final game will use, from the ships and their data structures, to communicating with your account to installing and patching the client. The Hangar Module will be the base foundation that everything is added as we release additional modules, eventually cumulating in the full persistent world alpha / beta.


Revision 1 of the Hangar will be very simple. You will be able to walk around, enter the initial pledge ships and explore a ground level in CryEngine that shows the kind of detail we are putting into the full game. It is intended as a very basic example of our direction that we are putting out to reward our backers, something to give you a chance to view “your” ship for the first time. Be warned, we have only just begun the QA process. This is the first stable build, not a slick “open beta” or anything designed as a promotional tool. We’re letting you in on the ground floor because we want to open up the process. Expect to encounter crashes, rendering bugs and other issues. Your feedback will help improve Star Citizen.


We need your help to test the hangar, just like you will be testing the game itself. After release, we will open a special forum for reporting and tracking hangar bugs. Your reports will go directly to the team, who will act on the bugs. Please don’t report them to the support e-mail, as our CS staff won’t be able to walk through hangar issues just yet!

In the coming months, we plan to release additional “major” Revisions of the Hangar, where we add more functionality and content. Things like detailed customization of your personal hangar, persistence of the state of all your items (what is equipped and where), in client item purchasing and the ability to invite your friends to your hangar will be part of later revisions of the Hangar Module.

Just because we’ve launched a module to the community doesn’t mean that it’s completely done. It just means its ready for the community’s feedback and stress testing! Our plan is to update each module (Hangar, Dogfighting, Planet, Ship-boarding) multiple times as new features and content are completed before the full integration into the persistent universe.

Over the coming months additional ships and upgrades will become available (as they are completed) and we will continue to enhance the level of interactivity. The goal is for the Hangar to go from a very simple pre-alpha build to a full featured module before your eyes! It’s something no one has done with an AAA game before. It’s a little daunting, but it’s also another new way to share the development process with our backers.

Found @ the labeling of a 325a

Greetings Citizens,
I hope you are all enjoying the early release of the Hangar Module. Now that the build has rolled out to many fans, we’re going to add a new layer to keep the experience interesting! Today we’re unlocking additional items in the RSI store that you can use in your Hangar. Two types of items will be available: decorative hangar items like posters and trophies as well as ship upgrade parts like laser cannons and tractor beams.

You may have noticed that the RSI website now includes a ‘credit ledger’ which shows your United Earth Credit (UEC, or “Imperials”) balance. When you download the Hangar Module for the first time you are awarded 5,000 UEC to play around with in this new system. Many of our early backers also have credits they earned during the first days of the pledge campaign. Credits included in pledge packages are not yet represented here because you will need some credits in order to start the game itself; we don’t want players bankrupting themselves and locking themselves out of space travel! You can use these credits to buy ship parts and hangar items which you can then interact with in your hangar.

The key is that this all ties directly in to the finished game. The items you see for sale through the website are the ones that will be available galaxy-wide in a number of stores. Here you access it through an online store, Voyager Direct, which is a futuristic equivalent of Amazon.com. You may well need to travel across the galaxy to find an especially rare or advanced laser… but you will always be able to purchase a reliable Behring M3A from a local arms dealer. To prevent players from stockpiling credits and damaging their game experience, we are imposing a strict 25,000 UEC-per-day limit and an upper bound cap of 150,000 UEC on your ledger at any time. Similarly, you cannot melt these items as you would a game package: once you have purchased them they are considered ‘played with.’ When the game launches you will be able to sell them to NPCs or trade them to other players… and until then, they’re yours!

There are several limitations you should be aware of right now. At this time, decorating your Hangar is not persistent. If you move a laser to a particular ship and then quit the game it will go back into your storage area. Additionally, only one of every decoration will appear at the moment. While you can have multiple lamps in your web inventory, only one can appear in each hangar at this time. Both of these things will change as the Hangar Module expands. Ultimately, the web store will go away and be replaced with an in-game interface starting with the first release of the Planetside Module.

As previously stated, additional Imperials will be available for purchase within the limitations discussed above. Please keep in mind that you are not under any obligation to purchase Imperials at this time. We are giving you the option right now because there isn’t a way to earn credits in the game (as we’re still building it!) and this is a great way to let you support the development of the game as well as play with other game elements we’ve already created. But be warned, purchasing a stock of extra lasers through the catalog right now will not provide any great advantage when Star Citizen launches; there will be a lot more to discover in the living universe and some of the best weapons or upgrades will have to be earned through gameplay or sought out by traveling to the appropriate planet to buy them. Ultimately all items in the store today and in game will be purchasable via UEC earned in game. Outside of the initial ship package everything will be purchasable through UEC in the final game. There is no pay to win here!

The UEC Store is a great way to let players start interacting with the game world while continuing to support Star Citizen’s development. As more features of the Hangar Module are rolled out, we will offer further ship parts and decorative (and interactive) items for your hangar. This will be one of the ways we demonstrate our dedication to keeping the Star Citizen setting fresh: just like the game will have a responsive live team, the Hangar Module will feature a continually expanding amount of content!

Please enjoy your new found freedom to experiment with items in your Hangar! This is your first taste of how ship upgrades and other personalization elements will work in Star Citizen…

   

Many Citizens have experienced delays and other issues downloading the Hangar Module and patches. We are aware of the issues and are working to resolve them as quickly as possible. Wondering what happened? Here’s the explanation from our cloud hosting service:

    It used more outbound bandwidth from the storage server than we’ve ever seen by an order of magnitude for the 30 minutes or so following your release.

We are establishing a “origin shield” (not related to Origin Systems or EA’s hosting service) to improve load balancing and make the hangar download speeds more reasonable. All part of the testing process!

   

    KNOWN ISSUES:
        BUG: A wall and ladder do not render in discount hangar
        BUG: After first initial launcher patch when patcher auto restarts the sound effects may not play, toggling the mute button and restarting the launcher usually sloves the problem.
        BUG: The installer on some systems doesn’t install DirectX properly. Usually re-installing DirectX manually solves this problem. Still requires DirectX 11 and DirectX 11 compatible graphics cards
    LAUNCHER:
        NEW FEATURE: Added support for patch notes, which are also available on the website
        NEW FEATURE: Hourly patch checking, as long as the launcher is running it will check for new patches every 60mins
        BUG FIX: Closing the game client now restores the launcher music if mute is off
        BUG FIX: Launcher audio fader code works better
        BUG FIX: Now saving the state of the mute button
        TWEAK: Launcher now as a max download limit of 4MB/s to help steady traffic during heavy loads.
        TWEAK: “Webget Request Failed” message is now more descriptive
    HANGAR:
        GENERAL:
            NEW FEATURE: Ladder now forces 3rd person on use.
            BUG FIX: Interior ship lighting fixes
            BUG FIX: Adding missing foot IK helpers
            BUG FIX: Added collision detection to vehicle orbit camera
            BUG FIX: Blendspace animation fixes on door exit
            BUG FIX: Fixed 350r power plant
            TWEAK: Adjusted the fog and fog color
            TWEAK: Specular of the metal on the constellation
        HOLOTABLE:
            NEW FEATURE: Sounds for holotable
            NEW FEATURE: Added holotable to all hangars
            BUG FIX: Lots of holotable fixes
    NETWORKING:
        Added 32 more authentication servers to better handle game client authentication load
    DATA:
        112TB of patch data transferred
        59,370 download requests for the installer
        Peak transfer rate for downloads/patching: 35.31 GBps
        39,232 users have agreed to the EULA
        2,085,000 UEC have been given out to users as part of the hangar V1 reward program. (users get 5,000 UEC by downloading)

Hey guys - long story short, we hear you. The VD store ended up coming across pretty much exactly the opposite way we wanted.  We're working out a plan right now to make this right and I will have more for you as soon as possible.

I was unable to spin my ship like in Eve, I honestly miss that.

So, let me get this straight. People are excited about walking around a spaceship.

Is there really no ACTUAL GAME you all could be playing?

Did you play with the small console near your ship? You can spin for days. I will say, while the interface for that looks fancy, its kinda hard or clumsy to use. I hope it is improved. Less style, more function.

They paid good money for the privilege, of course they're excited.  :why_so_serious:

Also, 20 bucks for a golf cart is hilarious.

People paid money for this shit?

Oh, sure there will be plenty of opmitiztion. But considering it was just a hangar view the specs are more likley to go up rather than down.

Roberts himself somewhat bragged about the hardware requirements at an interview to PC Games at Gamescom in Köln. (link (http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Star-Citizen-PC-256428/Specials/Star-Citzen-Systemanforderungen-1085005), german):

• 8 GB RAM minimum to play
  
• asked if more than 8GB will be beneficial "can't say yet but, but it is likely"
• 64-bit OS mandatory
• quad-core PC needed
• current generation graphic cards like GTX 770 "probably only good for medium settings".

That's quite steep. Not that I disapprove, the phrase PC Gaming Master Race needs to be filled with meaning again.  :grin:

What I want to know is how they make a space sim require such power. Do they model the physics of entire solar systems and let you nudge planets off their orbits?

As some of you may have noticed we launched the very beginning of our IN-GAME store with Voyager Direct yesterday.

It had a soft launch (we deliberately kept it back from the weekly email) so we could roll it to get feedback and see how to integrate what is a tricky thing into Star Citizen at such an early stage of development.

Even with a soft launch quite a lot of people started using the store (no surprise the Buggy is the top seller!)

Unfortunately there seems to be some misunderstanding in our intentions with the prototype in-game store, as the forums erupted with a significant amount of “discussion” last night!

I have read all of the criticism and there have been many great points. One of the great things about Star Citizen’s development is that we can get feedback like this… and use it to figure out how to make things better.

The intention of creating Voyager Direct right now was the very opposite of what a lot of people are upset about. It is not supposed to be a cash shop! It’s meant to be the very opposite!

I felt that it was important that we should make clear what are in-game items, earnable via game play. This was the whole reason of segregating these new items into the Voyager Direct store rather than the pledge store. We intend for players to be earning UEC in a limited fashion as early as the dogfighting module (say for fighting so many test battles, or winning a team battle competition) and felt Voyager Direct would be the first step in getting the basic systems in place. Ultimately you will be purchasing all these game items inside the game from in-game vendors on various planets but this won’t come online until the Planetside module. Since the web team at Turbulent had already built a store interface and the team here was already creating items to outfit the hangar and ships, it seemed like an easy option to create Voyager Direct now to allow all of you to play with and check out some of the game items as they are created rather than waiting for Planetside module to see them in engine. The concept was that people that wanted to show their support and contribute towards the development cost of the game could buy some items to play with in their hangar but by establishing the prices in game terms it would also make it clear that these items are all earnable in game. I should also point out that Voyager Direct is intended only to sell cosmetic items or basic ship items that would be available on pretty much any planet – the better items will always have to be bought by actually flying to the appropriate planet or earning the via gameplay. There is no need to buy anything from Voyager Direct – it is all OPTIONAL and should be viewed the same way that you view paying for a subscription or buying a skin. All of this will be earnable in the game, without too much time invested.

I’m very opposed to having a game where ANY of the items, outside of your initial game / ship package can be only purchased with cash. I hate the bifurcation of items in most online games, even when they are just for flair items. I want Star Citizen to allow players to earn everything they need in-game for ships, upgrades and even flair.

Our plan is once Star Citizen is launched the games ongoing running and content costs (which will be significant as we’re a data & content heavy game) will be supported by the ongoing purchase of new game packages as well as the money the game will earn by some of the players choosing to buy some UEC credits with real money as they don’t have the time or patience to earn the item in game (and for this I wanted to establish a cap so someone can’t just come in and buy everything, although with a skill based game with a heavy rock paper scissors approach to ship design and weapons this won’t help that much as you think). We are making the bet that this will be enough to cover the game ongoing running costs and we will not need a subscription like other big online games live Eve Online or World of War Craft. But it is a risk as we’re taking some of the things that games use to support on-going running costs like sale of flair items and making them not require money just gameplay.

I was disappointed to see so many people feeling that we were trying to gouge people or do a money grab. I thought I had been very clear in my post yesterday that everything was optional and only should be done with the intent of supporting the game financially as opposed to something that was required. The whole team is incredibly grateful for all the incredible support we’ve received but as far as we’re concerned anything beyond the most basic pledge is optional and should be done to support the game’s development and not because you feel like you have to.

I do agree that pricing structure feels off – part of that is the problem of a blend of real world prices (cosmetic items to show support had been established at $5) and the in-game prices we need to manage. One of the other things we have been focusing on is the idea that the pledge or add on ship you opt for now should be cheaper in real money terms than its equivalent in UEC when the game is live, so the few weapons have been priced to our best guess as to what these should be relative to the actual in-game costs of a ship once the game is live. This leads to a dichotomy in value – of course a poster should be a lot less than a laser gun! It also doesn’t help that we’ve established an exchange of 1000 UEC to $1. 5000 UEC for a poster just sounds a lot more than $5! I am inclined to halve the prices in the Voyager Direct Store, with some of the smaller flair pieces, like posters getting a reduction even beyond this.
Holotable concept by Chris OliviaHolotable concept by Chris Olivia

In addition there’s been quite a few complaints about having to “pay to test”. Which absolutely was not the intention! From a testing perspective what everyone can do now with their basic hangar (and don’t forget you can move items around between ships now) we have everything we need on the testing front. There is no need to buy a poster to help test it. The real testing will happen when you can earn UEC in-game and you then buy all these items. But we appreciate everyone’s eagerness to help out, so I’m investigating the difficulty of implementing “TEST UEC” now rather than waiting for the dogfighting module – the idea would be that everyone would get a certain amount of TEST UEC at different periods and could use the credits to buy items that would exist for a day in your hangar to check them out, try them on your various ships, walls and so on. This is doable but does require some significant work on the web side, so if we take this route it will be a little while before it can be implemented. We had originally planned this for the dogfighting module (as it is useful for people to try different load outs in balancing) but we can move up the schedule if enough people think it’s important.

In the spirit of community involvement and discussion and as a big thank you for reaching $17M I think the best thing to do is to give everyone a further 5,000 UEC and let you voice your opinion on some of the proposed solutions (and know that if you vote to reduce the Voyager Direct prices we will credit back the difference in UEC to people’s accounts for people that have already spent UEC)

So let us know!

I tried to use it, it popped up a hologram type thing with a menu but I couldn't interact with it beyond closing it.

I have an ironclad rule where I never ever purchase a game before release for any reason. I am probably going to throw some money at this project, though, because it's the one thing I want to succeed enough that I'll provide to the cause.

Thing is, though, is that I don't want to buy a ship, nor the hype goodies. I want to start the game from rock bottom, ground zero, in the straight up schlub ship. Like starting in the Shuttle in EV Nova, getting to eagerly anticipate the initially fast-paced diversification in ship options. I want to support a project, not buy myself up as a Space Romney.

If it is not supposed to be a cash shop, why is it a cash shop?

I am really, really curious to see how long the honeymoon phase will last here.

Choose the option most important to you for Voyager Direct:

A  I think the Voyager Direct items are overpriced! Please reduce them by at least 50%.  = 29%

B  Provide us with a testing system now in the form of Test UECs or temporary test items rather than wait for it to be implemented in the dogfighting module.   =23%

C  I would rather have the cosmetic items in the pledge store for real money instead of UEC.  = 5%

D Now you’ve explained this, I’m ok with the current set up. = 43%

Total Votes: 10,219

Star Citizens: 239,314

I finally got into the thing. I like that the Freelancer is so cramped that my avatar has to turn his shoulders sideways to get up and down the boarding ramp. Also, the ship's console UIs appear highly reminiscent of the early Wing Commanders.

How much did this mind-blowing experience cost you?

(but yeah, as expected, my i7-920, 6GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 560 is struggling quite a bit)

How much did this mind-blowing experience cost you?

I am the first one to get excited about the dream of future games I might like, and that's why I contributed to this one too. But damn, Star Citizen is evolving (very quickly) into a religion, its fans rabid zealots eager to empty their pockets to the feet of the prophet, who graces them with digital promises.

But 400€ for hopes, feels really really strange disturbing even to me. At this rate, we might as well give Scientology a try. Have you heard about their sci-fi vision of the universe? It is no less ambitious than Chris Roberts', and apparently makes you really happy after you've spent enough money on it.

I am the first one to get excited about the dream of future games I might like, and that's why I contributed to this one too. But damn, Star Citizen is evolving (very quickly) into a religion, its fans rabid zealots eager to empty their pockets to the feet of the prophet, who graces them with digital promises.

We'll see.

But 400€ for hopes, feels really really strange disturbing even to me. At this rate, we might as well give Scientology a try. Have you heard about their sci-fi vision of the universe? It is no less ambitious than Chris Roberts', and apparently makes you really happy after you've spent enough money on it.

so I dont get all the hate

so I dont get all the hate. or do I? and its just jealousy

Have you paid attention to all the updates about development? as in, been following along. I personally, and likely others, get a good impression from them.

Starting Money: 5,000 UEC
Lifetime Insurance
Deluxe Green Collector's Box
Spaceship-shaped USB Drive
CD of Game Soundtrack
Glossy Fold-up Star Map
Beta Access
Alpha Access
Hardback Engineering Manual
Squadron 42 Digital Download
Star Citizen Digital Download

Starting Money: 5,000 UEC
Lifetime Insurance
Deluxe Green Collector's Box
Spaceship-shaped USB Drive
CD of Game Soundtrack
Glossy Fold-up Star Map
Beta Access
Alpha Access
Hardback Engineering Manual
Squadron 42 Digital Download
Star Citizen Digital Download
----

- Squadron 42 hardback manual
- Origin 315p ship
- Aurora LX ship
- Origin M50 ship
- The Making of Star Citizen (hardback)
- "Shut up and take my money!" ship skin
- Gamescom hangar trophy
- "Centurion" subscription (3 months so far, ongoing)

Have you paid attention to all the updates about development? as in, been following along. I personally, and likely others, get a good impression from them.

For me it's just a game with a scope that seems incredibly difficult to achieve AND we've seen game after game which during development promises large scopes fail to actually deliver on that scope.  I'd pay good money for a game which actually delivers on what this game is promising, I just can't understand why people believe so fervently that this is the one that is going to make good on its promises.

I'm willing to put money into projects.  I did so with Hex, but I did so with Hex because the game it is trying to be is basically already proven.

Honestly, my issue with everything is that they seem to be very focused on pleasing backers and it remains to be seen how much that is distracting them away from the core game.  A LOT of polish had to go into the hangar app that may not really have been necessary at this stage of the development process.  

Chris Roberts talked about this, and has the opposite conclusion. This is part of the development plan, iterate early, get it out, gather feedback. He WANTS feedback and some polish early. The sum of all the modules = Star citizen persistent.

Hangar Module
Dogfighting Module
Social / Planetside Module
FPS / Ship Boarding Module
Squadron 42 / Singleplayer Alpha
Persistent Universe Module / Beta
Star Citizen & Squadron 42

Chris Roberts - as noted in the videos - believes in making shorter, calculated jaunts toward the finish line, rather than sprinting all-out toward the end (see: AGILE/SCRUM). The idea here is that there's still "crunch time," but it's in spread-out intervals that are more survivable: "I'm not saying our method will inherently make us brilliant and everyone else dumb, but [...] instead of having one crazy crunch at the end, it's sort of smaller sprints where there's little crunches, but you're in better shape towards the end."

$19 million

- Know your foe with a Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual free in PDF form to all pledgers.
- Manage Space Stations – Players will compete to own and operate a limited number of space stations across the galaxy.
- RSI Museum will air monthly, with a new game featured each time!

Why is the hangar as separate module? Isn't it just a location in the final game world?

I see. This game is why no one talked actual trash about us spending so much money on Hex. People were dumping money into an even more ridiculous pipe dream.

First person combat on select lawless planets. Don’t just battle on space stations and platforms… take the fight to the ground!

? Its already built into Crytek engine ( its like, what it does out the box ), and already going to be in game anyway due to boarding and plantside actions. This is likely just an arena type thing.

The engine isn't necessarily the problem. It's the constant scope creep that people should be worried about.

Unfortunately, motion capture is expensive. Very few studios have their own motion capture rigs: typically, development teams rent out the technology, studio space and talent for a limited amount of time. A day of motion capture costs between $25,000 and $50,000 and provides roughly 200 “moves”; simple gestures, limb movements and so on. More complex shoots which require props, additional actors, finger movements and other factors are significantly more expensive. Still more expensive are shoots that capture audio and facial movements. This expense-to-benefit ration means that there’s a great deal of preparation required for a mocap shoot… and that messing up or deciding you want something more in the game later means another chunk of money.

What we want to do is build our own studio. We want to dedicate an area for mocap and purchase our own mocap system outright. It would cost more than we have currently budgeted for mocap leasing to do this to start… but the result would improve the game significantly. With our own mocap system we could generate cutscenes and moves as we determine they are needed, which will be especially valuable for the Star Citizen live team charged with feeding the game constant content!  It’s even conceivable that we could rent it out when not in use, ultimately funneling more money into Star Citizen’s development!

Lead Animator Bryan Brewer is currently looking at two potential mocap systems for body movement. The first is the Vicon system, which he calls the Ferrari of mocap rigs. We would purchase sixteen of their 2.0 megapixel T20S cameras and sixteen of their 1.0 mexapixel T10S cameras for roughly $230,000. A second option is OptiTrack, the “Porsche” of mocap systems, which would be 24 4.1 megapixel Prime 41 cameras and 2 Prime17 cameras for significantly less: $150,000.

True, that's the main worry on the official forums as well, no matter that the vast majority of the so called "stretch goals" up to $21 million were planned well in advance. Another thing worth mentioning, is that the ground FPS portion (as well as anything else concerning "ground", including planetside stations) has been outsourced to a company called "Void Alpha".

Eve tried to create FPS functionality in an engine that never had any subsystems in it for FPS, ever. An Asynchronous based engine at that. That WAS two different games in every respect. Unless you mean Dust, that was CCP Shanghai and Unreal 3.

Its Behaviour Interactive (http://www.bhvr.com/en/) doing part of the work on the Planetside stuff, not "Void Alpha"

Eve tried to create FPS functionality in an engine that never had any subsystems in it for FPS, ever. An Asynchronous based engine at that. That WAS two different games in every respect. Unless you mean Dust, that was CCP Shanghai and Unreal 3.

One of my personal worry is, with ship boarding. There isn't much room on my freelancer for, anything really. Going to be one short pew pew if I get borded, if its even allowed on that size ship. Its a question i submitted to the Wing-mans forum question for tomorrows episode. The likely response is "we don't know yet".

My understanding is that any ship with a crew count greater than 1 can be boarded (and be used to board). But I also seem to recall seeing somewhere that you could only board ships bigger than (and presumably equal to) yours (by crew count).

What would be neat is if the FPS was integrated as part of the world itself, ie. you seamlessly walk in and strap into your space ship. Boarders attack your cargo ship, take off your seatbelt, open the gun locker and go shoot at em while the ship autopilots towards your destination. Or put on a space suit, roll down your side window and take pot shots with your pistol as the boarding ship approaches.

But it's not going to be that, not in a million years.

Boarding Information

As promised, we’d like to share the internal concept for ship-to-ship docking and boarding concept. Please note that this is the very early pitch—some details may change as we balance the game and build out/expand the mechanic!

Boarding Mechanics

The goal is to develop a system where player-to-player boarding is an occasional reward rather than something that becomes the focus of the game; we’re not building Grand Theft Starship. As such, we need a high cost of entry: players must dedicate both significant resources and skill to be able to put themselves in a position to board in the first place.

There are two major limitations on docking: 1) the target ship must be COMPLETELY disabled before it can be boarder and 2) docking requires the attacking player to dedicate credits and slots to several gate technologies, including a docking collar and a tractor beam.

Disabling a target ship is a much more difficult task than it was in Wing Commander, where leech weapons would simply wear down the target. In Star Citizen, the player needs to knock down the enemy ships’ shields and then (without causing a hull breach) pick off the individual thrusters. This is the skill barrier: if you can’t shoot well enough to take apart a ship piece by piece then you can’t board an enemy ship.

Tractor Beams are a dangerous technology. They take up a standard gun slot and are designed for collecting material significantly less massive than their host ship (escaped pilots, cargo pallets, bobbleheads, etc.) As such, there’s a constant danger of overloading when using them to dock, especially with cheaper models. Additionally, they require that the target ship be ABSOLUTELY DISABLED – firing a tractor beam at a ship that still has functional thrusters will overload it and severely damage the attacker.

A docking collar is needed to attach ships together. As with tractor beams, different levels are available which will allow connections to different sizes of ships; boarding something large like a carrier is much easier than something your own size, like a Constellation (disabling another Constellation’s thrusters will require a crack shot, to say the least, and a much more accurate collar.) If the game hits the $4 million mark, collarless external ship combat will be added with pilots in pressure suits wearing EMUs able to battle it out in space; explosive charges would be used to open the targeted ship’s airlock.

The standard VDU will not identify whether or not a ship is completely disabled; it will have a gut feel/skill element to it. Higher software upgrades will provide more in-depth scans of a target that will give you a better assurance that no maneuvering remains in place… for a price.

Also note that docking mechanics do NOT apply to ships with a single crewman or certain smaller bombers; the general rule is that if there’s not room to walk around then only the salvage mechanic can apply to it. You need a crewed ship to board in the first place and you can only board crewed ships which are larger than your own (in crew size.)

Combat

Once a ship has successfully tractored in a target vessel, it will dock at a pre-determined location on the hull (ie, you will always dock at one of the same doors on the Constellation.) There will be a 30-second period where the attacking player cuts open the target’s door. The defender can use that time to set up to fire back. Think an interactive recreation of the opening scene of Star Wars, with the Rebels nervously waiting to defend the corvette from Stormtroopers.

Players will have access to a variety of upgrades to help/hinder boarding operations. Armored space suits, hand scanners, explosives, more powerful (or functionally different) weapons and so on will be available to players on both sides of the equations.

Defending players will have upgrade options that can help put the battle in their favor: a self destruct process, a dead man’s switch, automated miniguns they can position in the cockpit and so on. It’s going to be a challenge to get onboard a targeted ship successfully, one that you’ll need to work with your friends to accomplish.

Finally, the cost to recover a boarded ship will ultimately be high. Since you’ve disabled and otherwise crippled it in battle (and cut into the hull to board) you must conduct repairs in deep space if you wish to keep the hull rather than simply looting it… during which the ship is in danger of being boarded by a third party. Boarding parties should plan to carry an advance repair bot with them or to suffer the difficulty of flying in a depressurized cockpit (limited life support time, less responsive controls.) Finally, only one ship can be flown at once: you will need to work with a partner if you wish to keep a boarded ship and your own craft.

during this time the ship is at risk of being boarded by a third party, which itself is then at risk of being boarded by a fourth party, which oh it just spirals out into an orgy of permanently fused ships job security through constant balance fixes

Some Citizens have asked if $21 million will mark the end of the funding campaign and the stretch goal unlocks. The answer is no: For a couple of key reasons –

The first is that goal of achieving $20M in development funding will actually be reached approximately at $23 million in funds raised. This is because we display the gross amount of funds received, but out of this we had to pay Kickstarter (approx. 10% of funds raised), Paypal/Credit card providers (approx. 4-5%), we have to reserve the fulfilment costs of the physical goods you have pledged for (over $1M right now) and finally the costs of building and maintaining the RSI site (which is a significant but very worthwhile investment, more so as some of the planned features like “organizations” rolls out).

There are also additional running costs beyond the development to be contemplated – customer support for the growing community, the cost of delivering terabytes of data and longer term hosting servers for the dogfighting and then later the persistent universe itself.

Did Eve try to make some other FPS when I wasn't looking?

Once you are doing digital releases to your fan-base you don't need to build towards an eventual, perfect, big release. You just get content out, get people to buy in, and then iterate. As long as you keep the game fresh and evolving people will keep following and the depth of the game builds over time.

Like MechWarrior?

Designed for supporting pirate operations, the Caterpillar features a large cargo hold for carrying loot, heavier armor than other freighters in its class and room for five crew able to serve in boarding operations. Despite its heavier armor, the Caterpillar isn’t a bulldog… a succesful operation will require a fighter escort.

I fear the future because this game (or lack thereof) might bury space sims again.

I predict that Roberts and company will deliver a reasonable, decent, space sim. It will not have all of the features promised. It will make the $40 dollar and under backers happy. It will disappoint the $41 to $75ish backers. Any backer over $75 is going to be a seething ball of nerd rage.

I predict that Roberts and company will deliver a reasonable, decent, space sim. It will not have all of the features promised. It will make the $40 dollar and under backers happy. It will disappoint the $41 to $75ish backers. Any backer over $75 is going to be a seething ball of nerd rage.

Eh, two video games is $120.  This guy iisn't some complete unknown.  If this is your thing, then I can see it.

What gets me is the additional buy in prices.  Is there a space demo, or a video of the game actually being played at any length in space?  There is no game but how about another round of expensive additional ships?  What comes next?  $400 fighter wings?  I am leery of this project and the ability to deliver. 

Edit: Also, I am tired of doubting and hating on every single thing as if it is the only vogue option for treating new things and ideas.

 :thumbs_up:

 :thumbs_up:

Question, because it kinda relates to the house buying nonsense in Shroud of the Avatar:

Are y'all paying into this because of personal game play desires? Or is it because you're hoping for an early land rush that inflates resale value of whatever you're buying?

Have they explained how the money is being spent, and what's the timetable, and how well the actual development has stuck to that? I'm far too lazy to search myself.

Question, because it kinda relates to the house buying nonsense in Shroud of the Avatar:

Are y'all paying into this because of personal game play desires? Or is it because you're hoping for an early land rush that inflates resale value of whatever you're buying?

I have loved Chris Roberts games since I played the first one, especially Privater and Freelancer. I have been looking for modern rendition of them for decades now. I don't spend my time in games worrying what others have. The description of this game is where I thought freelancer would go, it almost did. So I'm more then willing to spend a few bucks to fund it. Hes got a proven track record.

This is not going to be important to the future of crowdsourcing at all. Zero, none.

Eh, two video games is $120.  This guy iisn't some complete unknown.  If this is your thing, then I can see it.

Let's just say all our offices have been working hard to support this presentation.

So this seems to be the new video revealed at the AMD thing. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0tLbWv5K60)

*shrug*

If by alienating people like me they make more money from the ones who are left, then more power to them. But I'm not going to pretend I like this trend of crowd sourcing/exploitation.

When you’re happy with how you look, you will exit and return to the UEE recruitment office and officer. You’ll fill in your name on the MobiGlas form and also specify your beneficiary in case of death: this could be a family member, son, daughter, uncle, aunt or someone entirely new (although not another player character).
........
...
When a character finally does shuffle off the mortal coil, the player hasn’t lost what he has really put in the game time to build up – his ship(s), equipment and other assets. These pass to the next of kin / beneficiary. And there is a successor to carry on the family legacy or to avenge the deceased character. (“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!”)  This will hopefully create a competition between players to see how much they can achieve in the life span of their current characters. The ones that achieve greatness via killing a Star Citizen unique NPC or taking part in a unique event, like discovering a new jump point or system, are recorded in the Galactapedia and become part of the universe lore and history.
 (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/12879-Death-Of-A-Spaceman)

Then don't pledge? If you are in the camp of "There is no game yet" then do not pledge.

 :oh_i_see:

Seriously, I'm not sure what has upset some of you.

Personally I come upset from other gaming forums, where SC fans insist on comparing SC with whatever game the forum is dedicated to, ad nauseam.  Apologies if that anger has leaked here, in my posts.  In any case, yeah I'm not pledging and I'm waiting to see if there's a game.

You don't understand:  without alts, you cannot transfer your shit over, TO KEEP IT, when you decide to recycle your character and start a new one from scratch cause you don't like your face or you don't like the last choice you made in your career or whatever.

Also, I thought the quote said $60 from EA for the box (single player game), so the $30 for "two games" would be on top of that, no?

Also to be clear when a Character Slot NPC dies, you get to create another one to take his place, much like you would create a successor in the Death of a Spaceman mechanic. If you've designated a Character Slot NPC as your Character's successor, then the Character Slot NPC becomes your player character and you can chose to have your deceased player character slot either go back into your Character Slot pool or turn him / her into a Character Slot NPC (think of it as recruiting a new team member after the death of another) (https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/936613/#Comment_936613)

I'm not trying to go all rabid, because I am not all rabid, however their pay announcements aren't upsetting me because they aren't any different than what I expected. What did you think they were going to do to continue earning money to keep producing the game?

One of the things I'm trying to understand as this all goes on is that I don't have a sense of what this game's budget is relative to other big budget games made under the typical non-crowdfunded format.
....
I may have heard a figure around somewhere or even here, but I don't recall. And now I get to compare that versus 20 million bucks or so, and I want to get a good sense of if this is a huge budget for a game or not when you aren't dealing with publishers or advertising, and if it gives me a better sense of what amount of their scope creep is sane or feasible, at least according to their pocketbook.

They already collected far more money than they said they needed to make the game.

Some Citizens have asked if $21 million will mark the end of the funding campaign and the stretch goal unlocks. The answer is no: For a couple of key reasons –

The first is that the goal of achieving $20M in development funding will actually be reached approximately at $23 million in funds raised. This is because we display the gross amount of funds received, but out of this we had to pay Kickstarter (approx. 10% of funds raised), Paypal/Credit card providers (approx. 4-5%), we have to reserve the fulfilment costs of the physical goods you have pledged for (over $1M right now) and finally the costs of building and maintaining the RSI site (which is a significant but very worthwhile investment, more so as some of the planned features like “organizations” rolls out).

There are also additional running costs beyond the development to be contemplated – customer support for the growing community, the cost of delivering terabytes of data and longer term hosting servers for the dogfighting and then later the persistent universe itself. (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13266-Letter-From-The-Chairman-19-Million)

Shocking twist: The game is monetized as aggressively as possible.

All that is left is slap together an actual game and a few centrally hosted multiplayer lobbies.... TADA.

A. come one people 3d space sims aint  that hard to make - they been doing them  on 1/100 of SC's budget.  world of tanks I hear making lots of dough and they didnt have free 20 mills 3 years before release

This is incorrect.

which is good thing.... - means they have people with actual brains thinking about business side ahead of time. Seriously everything in this project looks peachy - they got a lot of free $$$ from kickstarter, what they showed so far is quite impressive (for tech demo stage). All that is left is slap together an actual game and a few centrally hosted multiplayer lobbies.... TADA.

His plans started before Double Fine's Broken Age -- then known as Double Fine Adventure -- set a record on Kickstarter. "I'd seen what Minecraft did, and I said, 'It'd be interesting. I could probably get something out for $10 million. It's not the full game I want. And then alpha, sell it at a discount, get people in, and then finish the game off,' which was the big, full $20 million thing I'm talking about."

It was to that end Roberts began to seek investors. But when Double Fine hit it big in 2012, he shifted gears. But his original goal with crowdfunding was not to make money; it was to prove to his investors that his game would appeal to a contemporary audience.

"I was never making a two or three or four million dollar game. I was always making  $15 million game, minimum," Roberts says. "I'd lined up investors, and the crowdfunding was to validate that people still cared about space sims, or even about me, because I'd been gone for 10 years."

As it turns out that, thanks to crowdfunding, he no longer needs investors at all.

"The crowdfunding took off, and I could basically have more features than I wanted in the initial game, so the scope grew to what I'd always wanted it to be if I had an unlimited budget. And that was it."

I think there is nothing that could upset Bloodworth or make him suspicious about the direction the game is going. Anyway, you can keep posting all the old-scripted video you want, but it is still a fact that there is nothing that proves this game will be good or simply not plagued by many unfun things. Now, we are all cheering for this to be a blast (seriously, some of us NEED a new Elite/Wing Commander/Freelancer), but there really is not enough authentic evidence as of yet that tells us if this is going to deliver.

Anyway, you can keep posting all the old-scripted video you want

As far as continuing to seek funding from players. Who cares, if the game is fun, I hope its funded and expanded for a long time.

Star Citizen - Gameplay (GDC 2012)

What are you talking about? The controller was in his hand, he was moving the character, climbing into ships, flying the ships shooting the guns. That's not core game play of a space sim?

I personally would rather talk about news and info coming out of the development than this, over and over again.

I get what you're saying but they have put the monetization front and center by choice. When I go to rsi.com the first thing I see is another KS project! (The fuck?) The "comm" page is a Kickstarter project, lore shit, multiple packages explanation, more lore shit, funding goals, meet a team member...not much of the communication is about the core game.

Nope. This is incorrect again.

The stuff on the front page is just that, front page stuff.

This, is a Dev tracker that pulls from the Forums. The developers post daily and discuss things with players constantly.

http://partedveil.com/

When we started our characters we were only around 7 or 8 million in funding. So we started building with that in mind. Now that we have far passed anything that we have expected and we are at over 20 million in funding we are revamping our character design and face system.

I provided you tools to follow along. Enjoy.

The original plan was to raise 2 million using crowd funding, and use the number of people pledged, and money to secure funding to 23 million. Using a publisher, or investors.
...
However, in both cases, and from day one, the "design doc" has not changed or added anything.

When we started our characters we were only around 7 or 8 million in funding. So we started building with that in mind. Now that we have far passed anything that we have expected and we are at over 20 million in funding we are revamping our character design and face system.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13284-Letter-From-The-Chairman-20-Million

Schemes designed to maximize risk and potential massive disappointment for consumers by taking advantage of the fertile imaginations of those consumers, while ensuring that companies that make big promises are well-rewarded even if they create lousy games. The final quality of the product becomes almost irrelevant compared to the quality of the pitch.

This is awesome: (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13302-CitizenCon-And-MobiGlas-Concept) ( Check the other screenshot too )

Xi’an Scout Unlocked! The Khartu is the light attack craft of the Xi’An military. Contrary to Human ship design, the Khartu doesn’t have a traditional main thruster, instead featuring an array of maneuvering thrusters on articulated rigs. This design allows for incredible agility, making them the bane of UEE pilots, who bestowed the nickname ‘Quark’ because when all of the thrusters are firing, the ship looks like a spark flying through space. The Xi’an Aopoa corporation also manufactures an export model, the Khartu-al, for sale to human civilians as a dedicated scout/explorer. The export model features the same Xi’an maneuvering rig, but control surfaces modified for human use and a more limited armament. (Designer: Aopoa)

This whole process as it continues to drag on and more shit is sold and more features are added (hella feature creep saying otherwise proves how blinded you are by your investment btw) makes me want to play this game less and less.

jealousy

Creating ultra-detailed spaceships is the heart of Star Citizen’s development.

From concept to final texturing, a ship can take teams of expert designers months to create
the level of graphical fidelity and detail that have become hallmarks of the Star Citizen universe. Now Chris Roberts and his team of visual designers are looking to the community for the next great team of ship designs.

16 Finalist teams exit one by one until there is one Grand Prize winner honored with the addition of their spaceship into Chris Roberts’ new space epic, Star Citizen. Not to mention a $30,000 cash prize, a swag of other goodies and the first winning ships off the production press for each team members’ Hangar!

Whether or not you participate, subscribe to RSI’s YouTube channel to watch the drama unfold and see who can build Star Citizen’s Next Great Starship.

The weekly webcast show will kick off with sixteen finalist teams at 11am PST on January 31st 2014, which is when the specs will be released to each team for the main challenge; The Next Great Spaceship!

These sixteen teams of finalists will have to conceptualize, design, model, animate and rig their model while submitting their progress for weekly review by a panel of science fiction’s leading concept artists, designers and celebrities, along with the man himself, Chris Roberts.

Each successful challenge, takes you one step closer to the grand prize. Failure means you go ‘home’. In the end, the last two teams will be flown to Los Angeles to compete live in front of the judges and the community on June 8 2014, for the grand prize: $30,000, their ship incorporated into the Star Citizen universe, cool swag, and the title of...

The Next Great Starship.

- First look at Gladiator (bomber ship) concept art, now on sale, along with the other (heavy) bomber the Retaliator (shown later in the stream), also on sale 'til monday; the former costs $150 (€120), the latter $250 (€200) ;

The presentation came off to me as more of a stock holder update, which, I guess is appropriate.

So, the livestream quality during the event was awful, very choppy, but now you can see the recorded version in all its glory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5YJDOwil0k

That shit looks like an Amway meeting.

(http://i.imgur.com/iJbtCAK.jpg)

Public Transportation System – Need to get from one place to another but don’t have a starship? We’re building a galactic transportation system. You can travel via transport from system to system in Star Citizen and even ship items (like a ship you need moved to another hangar.) With this stretch goal, we’ll expand this system: star liners, long range transports, charter ships and flyable shuttles!

Last night, I showed a preview of the Hornet commercial. I explained that this release wasn’t just coming in hot, it was laser-scorched and burning. In fact, we downloaded the cut of the commercial you saw as I was presenting. I was expecting to release the finished commercial and brochure today, along with a promotion putting Hornet variants on sale. Unfortunately, they just aren’t ready yet. I want the Hornet release to be perfect, with a proper sound mix in the commercial and Hornet variants you can immediately interact with in your hangar. That won’t happen if we rushed to get them out today, so I’m delaying the Hornet release until next Friday. Check back then to learn all about the best dogfighter in the UEE fleet. If you would like to see the unfinished commercial, it will remain available in the recording of last night’s event; an improved version with enhanced audio is coming soon.

Does anyone have a link to the unfinished Hornet video?

Here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN5qK78xY9Y

I am still not that concerned with the stretch goals and endless crowd funding drive. I feel that it is a pretty safe assumption that I will at least get my 40 bucks worth from what ever game ends up coming out.  I do feel bad for the people with hundreds or thousands invested. I am not sure if any game that ever existed or will ever exist is worth that type if investment with no financial return.

And thats a very healthy approach. Its like a very very early pre-order :)

Not ready to enter the galaxy just yet, but still want to show your support? The Civilian package gives you access to limited forums and deeper areas of the RSI site. The credit can be upgraded towards a game package should you decide to join Star Citizen!

In the interest of being truthful, I only put in 40 bucks so I could play with the alphas of the single and multi-player. Something is broken in my head that causes me to like playing things that are under development.

Our unlock for this level is the addition of a Xi’an scout plane. The goal here isn’t simply to add an extra ship to the game, but to add a new type of ship which can be expanded upon as we go. Once we’ve put the effort into building an alien experience for the Khartu, we can apply it to other Xi’an ships moving forward. Essentially, the extra funding lets us build an even more immersive universe.

Enhanced Alpha – We will use additional funding to build a wider alpha test than we had originally intended for the first phase of Star Citizen’s launch. The initial plan was to first launch servers in North America and then expand to areas such as Europe and Australia to decrease latency in these areas, perfecting the game as we improve the experience around the world. This funding will allow us to invest in a wider infrastructure for our early testing, spinning up remote servers earlier. Hitting this goal will also allow us to increase the number of remaining alpha slots. Extra alpha slots not only means more Star Citizens will travel the ‘verse at launch, but that we will receive more feedback and more stress testing. This in turn will allow us to better balance and enhance the Star Citizen experience!

In our game power is a pull system, rather than a push system. Instead of telling the power plant to push more power to shields, you tell the shields to request more power from the power plant. So, power management is more about setting minimums for each device.

For example: Say you're running your shields at 80% to try and minimize your signature as you fly through known pirate space. Meanwhile your power plant is maxed out providing power to the rest of the ship. Suddenly you're attacked so you set your shields to 100%. The shield generator asks the power plant for the extra power, but the power plant cant give it without taking power from some other ship system. The last time you were in port you set a minimum on your thrusters that allow for maximum maneuvering, but your minimum on your weapons system is only half of what you need to operate them at max, so the power plant automatically redirects power from your weapons to your shields, leaving the power flowing to your thrusters untouched. If you still don't have enough power (and you're already at the minimums on all of your other systems, as can happen if you're running an under powered power plant) your shield generator will be starved and will be unable to meet your request. Sorry captain, its given you all shes got!

Hello and welcome to the first installment of LORE BUILDER, where we pick an unexplored aspect of the Star Citizen lore and develop it with the community’s help.

Greetings Citizens,

We are very excited to premiere the finished Anvil Aerospace Hornet commercial today, as well as the Hornet brochure. For those that caught a sneak peak of the Hornet commercial at the Citizencon event: you haven’t seen anything yet! The civilian version of the UEE’s venerable F7A Hornet, the F7C Hornet is a dedicated dogfighter capable of tangling with mercenaries, pirates, Vanduul and more.

We’re pushing the limits with Star Citizen, and this commercial is our best example yet. It’s rendered 100% in-engine in real time at 4k resolution. We scale everything for the super high resolutions that will be the basis of tomorrow’s gaming experience; our assets are designed with high polycounts instead of having details baked into their textures. That’s a big part of why NVIDIA and AMD have been demoing Star Citizen at 4k! The next generation of CPUs and GPUs will make this kind of experience possible in gameplay, and we are building Star Citizen to be ready. With the Hornet commercial, we wanted to give our backers an early look. If you have a 4k-compatible monitor, select “Original” from the video settings on YouTube (or download the 4k file directly here. ) If you don’t, 1080p is highly recommended.

Greetings Citizens,

It looks like the Hornet commercial and brochure were a resounding success; the president of Anvil Aerospace should expect a bonus this quarter! In all seriousness, the community is continuing to set funding records and is allowing us to do more with Star Citizen. At $24 million, you’ve unlocked the following stretch goal:

Public Transportation System – Need to get from one place to another but don’t have a starship? We’re building a galactic transportation system. You can travel via transport from system to system in Star Citizen and even ship items (like a ship you need moved to another hangar.) With this stretch goal, we’ll expand this system: star liners, long range transports, charter ships and flyable shuttles!

Pictured here is a monorail car, which will be used by the player to travel from place to place on Terra! A public transportation system may not seem as sexy as a new bomber or a cruiser, but it speaks directly to the goal of making Star Citizen an immersive, world-building experience. Instead of having a simple ‘fast travel’ option like an MMORPG, Star Citizen will feature a living, breathing system to support that gameplay requirement… a system that will be impacted by the economy and player actions in all sorts of exciting ways!

We’re also revealing the $26 million goal, which I think will interest a lot of players. We have become increasingly fascinating with the possibilities for larger capital ships in Star Citizen and would like to dedicate some of the additional funding to expanding their functionality:

Enhanced Capital Ship Systems – In addition to the command and control systems we’ve already outlined, we’re going to expand capital ship functions! Lead a damage control team to fight fires and repair key systems during battle, control internal bulkheads to slow boarders and man a number of consoles, like navigation and engineering, that will make commanding a capital ship feel even more immersive.
Thank you for your continued support. I hope you take as much pride as I do in the fact that you aren’t only bringing back PC games and taking a shot across the bow at big publishers, you’re taking Star Citizen to new frontiers. The team at Cloud Imperium can’t wait to show you what’s next!

Finally, one small change to the Hornet rollout. We’ve had a number of requests from backers eager to purchase the limited edition Super Hornet who will not be able to do so until the end of the month. Federal employees in the United States who are just getting back to work after the recent government shutdown are especially affected. We are grateful for your passion and would like to help however possible. With this in mind, we are going to keep the Super Hornet available an extra week through Monday, November 4th. We hope that helps give all of our existing backers an opportunity to upgrade to the F7C-M!

— Chris Roberts

Enhanced Alpha – We will use additional funding to build a wider alpha test than we had originally intended for the first phase of Star Citizen’s launch. The initial plan was to first launch servers in North America and then expand to areas such as Europe and Australia to decrease latency in these areas, perfecting the game as we improve the experience around the world. This funding will allow us to invest in a wider infrastructure for our early testing, spinning up remote servers earlier. Hitting this goal will also allow us to increase the number of remaining alpha slots. Extra alpha slots not only means more Star Citizens will travel the ‘verse at launch, but that we will receive more feedback and more stress testing. This in turn will allow us to better balance and enhance the Star Citizen experience!

Lead a damage control team to fight fires and repair key systems during battle, control internal bulkheads to slow boarders and man a number of consoles, like navigation and engineering, that will make commanding a capital ship feel even more immersive.

I was planning to get a Hornet before the November deadline, now I fear I will end up with 2 (partly because theres no indication the stealth armour can be put on the Super Hornet)

My complaint about this that the new Hornet packages have a different content to the existing Hornet package (Colonel) so you actually need to buy Colonel and then upgrade the ship to get that content (which means you can't get the unique content that comes with the Weekend Warrior package

*Checks off another feature in my fantasy MMG design doc that SC is actually attempting.*

You didn't play FTL?

Theoretically this might become a game at some point.

Theoretically this will be the greatest game of all time.

But I'll stick with FTL for now.