I mentioned Katie Byrne a couple of months ago in this topic - she’s the ex-Elite Dangerous super commander that switched to maining Star Citizen after her disappointment with the ED Odyssey release.
Four months into her Star Citizen experience, she gives an honest, fair, and suitably rational critical assessment of her experiences, the project as a whole, and the current state of the game.
Worth a watch by both sides of an often polarising discussion.
Morphologis does very good job of summarising the 8+ hours of presentations, panel discussions and content from the Virtual CitizenCon event held a couple of weeks ago. There was a fortune of information shared throughout the day, much of it on a fairly technical level. This is a good effort at translating a lot of that into a more understandable format:
If you’re interested in watching the three different approaches to completing the Pyro Artifact mission that is mentioned as being shown in the Life In The 'Verse keynote presentation, they start at the 1:13:46 mark in this video:
New Star Citizen alpha patch is live on the Persistent Universe servers. Some pretty extensive changes to the death and respawning mechanics - medical gameplay, hospitals, limb injuries, body looting (and the subsequent (temporary) loss of items if it’s your body being looted!), a couple of new ships, some amazing looking extreme environment suits.
Change the way you play forever. With new hospitals, medical gameplay, a revamped healing system, dangerous new missions, and more, in Alpha 3.15 you’ll face Deadly Consequences.
Very looong and detailed patch notes to go with it:
Also, the annual (in-game) Intergalactic Aerospace Expo is back again this year. Starts in a weeks time, so will give more specific daily details, ships available, etc. then.
And Jax “Not Clarkson” McCleery and Kimmy “Not the Stig” are back too…
There should be some decent days’ worth of free-fly activity for new player who want to try out Star Citizen without having to commit any cash to it at this point. Remember though that even if you only want to try things out for free at the moment, you will still need an active Star Citizen account.
If you are creating your account for the first time (or want to make an alt account to mess around with), be sure to use one of the MEW members Referral Codes listed in the OP. The only time you can use a referral code is at account creation time - it cannot be applies retroactively.
Using someone’s referral will grant you bonus in-game credits (UEC5000) when the game does go live. (Assuming you upgrade your account from being a free-fly player to becoming an actual backer of course.) The person whose code you used gets a Referral Point which, once they’ve earned enough, gets them some in-game rewards as well.
In order to have your account converted from Free to Backer status, you must spend a minimum of $40 on it. Only then will you (and the person whose referral code you used) get the bonuses. Currently base game Starter Packs cost $45 (excl. VAT) which gets you full access to the final game (no other subscriptions), and starter ship, some starting cash, and immediate access to the alpha builds outside of free-fly periods.
There’s also a Referral Bonus running at the moment to coincide with the Alpha 3.15 release that will score you a free Argo Cargo ship, in addition to the other bonuses, if you become a $40+ Backer before 1 December.
At this rate it BETTER be free!
Worth a watch, regardless of your opinion of the process. These devs are working their arses off to create a complete, huge, totally immersive space-based MMO. (And a second, single player game, Squadron 42, at the same time.)
Those still idiotically suggesting Star Citizen is perpetuating a scam that will never end, insult the incredible efforts of the hundreds of artists, programmers, developers, writers, and others working on Star Citizen.
I see dead people in my hab… 
Dexter’s Hab?
Long post warning. TLDR - I spent some time with the recently released Star Citizen α3.16 patch. Here’s some pretty screenshots and a bunch of words explaining them. 
Spent a little time in Star Citizen over the last couple of weeks to check out the α3.16 new patch. I wanted to revisit some of the locations and environments that I haven’t been to for a long time and see some of the things I haven’t seen at all. It’s still buggy as heck and bananas resource intensive, and I did have a fair number of crashes, but my word, when it works, it’s marvelous.
Here’s a sampling of the sites I saw and the places I went to. (Some links to the Star Citizen Wiki fansite or the official Galactapedia as well, because that’s the other thing I was impressed by - the amount of lore and world building that has been going on is ridiculous.
Something new in this patch is having to choose a starting location. This locks all of your inventory items, weapons, armour, ships, and vehicles to that location and forces you to think about your equipment loadout and the ships or vehicles you use. No more magically being able to retrieve a new ship when you get blown up on the other side of the system. If you die or get killed, you now respawn in a medical facility rather than in your hab. And you lose the items you were carrying at the time of your death. PVP players will be happy to hear that looting the bodies of those you kill is now possible.
Active medical gameplay is also now in (from the previous patch already, but now with more clinic and hospital locations). It is actually quite detailed in it’s first iteration. I haven’t had a chance to investigate the system at all yet, but Citizens who are into the medic role may be interested to read about the system and its mechanics:
All of these changes are temporary - you’ll get to select a different starting location and will get all of your lost gear back when the next patch - α3.17 - goes live in March. If you can’t wait for that, you can also request an automated offline character reset through the SC Support service via your accounts Hangar settings that should restore most, if not all, of your possessions.
Anyway, onto my in-game shenanigans. What follows is taken from 3 or 4 different play sessions. There were a couple of times I realised too late that I hadn’t taken any screenshots. But hopefully what I have collected gives you enough of a decent overview.
As my starting location and home base I chose the industrial city of Lorville on Hurston (Stanton I) because I haven’t been there in literal years. The corporate planet is owned by Hurston Dynamics who manufacture weapons and process raw materials on the planet. It’s a polluted hellscape of a place, with suitably grim NPCs wandering around aimlessly and loads of heavily armoured corporate security all over. There’s an ominous big brother is watching feeling everywhere you go.
And then I crash to desktop. Again. Darn you, game! 
I want to start doing one of these posts every major patch if I can, just to have a visual record of the progress (as slow, slow, glacially slow as it is) the game makes. The next patch, α3.17, is due to be delivered at the end of Q1 (March). That may run some time into April on the Test Server before it goes to Live. At the moment, the Roadmap targets include some interesting additions. Of particular interest to me are the persistent personal hangars, the ability to sell items and loot back to shops or secondhand dealers, and the introduction of NPC Taxi Transport Missions. That said, the Roadmap Progress Tracker and the Tracker Release View have not been updated since mid-December before the development teams went on leave. Most of the CIG studios return to work this week and begin the process of finalising the 3.17 patch plan over the next week or two.
Here’s BoredGamer with a decent look ahead at the plans for α3.17:
Thanks for the write-up, I quite enjoyed that. Thank you for sharing. I know I give this thread a lot of bash, but I just like to make fun at times, compounded by my love for Elite Dangerous. But seriously, I would really love to have an opportunity to try this game out. I know I tried it during a free-play weekend when I still had a PC but that was a few years ago now.
Your screenshots are looking incredible, also, I didn’t even know Flickr was still alive. 
Pleasure. Hopefully I will find the time to do more in the future.
You’re not the only one. 
And this is not the only place I take stick for my SC obsession. Most of my mates and family think I’m an idiot too. I don’t mind - I see it as an investment in planning my retirement entertainment and leisure time. 
That’s something I’ve never quite understood though. (And not calling you out at all here again.) I like ED too. And NMS, Kerbal, Homeworld, Endless Space, Star Trek games, Star Wars games, Lego Star Wars games, Aliens games, FTL, Halo, Outer Wilds, Mass Effect, Rebel Galaxy, Beyond Good & Evil, hell even Satisfactory counts as a “space game” in my mind. I like a lot of games that have a space-related theme and think there should be more of them because they provide such wonderful, escapist, “forget the real world and its problems for a while” fun. And isn’t that the whole point of games - to have fun?
I honestly don’t get why me saying “I have fun in Star Citizen and am enjoying following the development process” is such a triggering statement for some people. I get enjoyment out of lots of different games. Why can’t I enjoy more than one space game at the same time?
That said, one very noticeable shift in the space game zeitgeist in the last 4 or so months has been the flood of (previously) very committed Elite Dangerous players that have switched over to Star Citizen. And not just random low key ED players. People like Drew Wagar who literally wrote the Elite Dangerous novels, Commander Katie Byrne who regularly solo killed Thargoids, and Black Maze, all of whom have many, many years of playing Elite, and all of whom have transitioned to playing Star Citizen. And there are many others.
My long-standing offer to share time in the SC universe with anyone whenever I can still stands. I have a number of ships that you’re welcome to use and will happily spawn them for you if I can.
Remember though that outside of Free Fly events, you will need at least a Starter Pack attached to your account to get into the game. Star Citizen Starter Packs are still available for $45, while Combo Starter Packs that combine both the Star Citizen MMO and the Squadron 42 single player game into one pledge are $60. Despite what you’ve heard, that is genuinely all that you need to spend on the game to get full, immediate and (mostly) unrestricted access to everything in it. Yes, you can spend hundreds or even thousands on bigger ships and fancier skins and other cosmetics, but you don’t need to. Most of those things can be earned and purchased in-game.
Sadly, early last year CIG was required to start charging VAT on all South African users so the real costs to us are $51.75 for a Starter Pack and $74.75 for a Combo Starter Pack. (Still a good deal for a one and done MMO payment - no subscriptions ever. And an equally good deal for a 60 hour+ cinematic single player campaign game and full access to the MMO as well.)
(There are ways to avoid the 15% tax charge by changing your location and providing CIG with a fake address, but I can’t in good conscience suggest you do that. Vote a political party that sees taxation on digital goods as stupid into office.)
You don’t need to purchase a game package if all you want to do is try a Free Fly session whenever they happen, but either way, I strongly recommend that you use one of the referral codes from MEW SC backers that you can find in the table in the first post on this topic. That way, when (and I think you probably will :D) you eventually do spend a minimum of $40 on your account, you will receive bonus starting credits when the final game does eventually go live. Soon™
Visit the Star Citizen Welcome Hub for more starting to play guidance and ideas. And always, shout if you want more info.
I very much share your sentiments, I was quite heavily involved with ED way before its official release, but my love for the game aside and in no ways do I ever imply to bash or hate on SC for whatever reasons. It’s not just about playing “space games”, to me ED and SC fall into the same kinda category as “space sim” (I just find ED to be more “realistic” as it is based on our known universe), and that is another reason why I love them, for their sim faring genre. As much as I would love to try out SC, sadly I do only own an Xbox and a MacBook, neither of which are supported by SC. Now that doesn’t give me a reason to hate the game or the devs, it just limits my access to said game.
Jack Frags ventures into the Star Citizen universe for the first time with a couple of mates. Things work. Things don’t work. Hilarity ensues.
Intelligent, balanced and mature analysis of the history and current state of Star Citizen here. This is the first of a new series of videos that Drew Wagar will be doing, looking into the story of the game.
(I think I’ve mentioned Drew Wagar before. He’s the author of two licensed Elite Dangerous novels, and obviously a long-standing ED fan, supporter, and player who became disillusioned with Elite last year and started to focus on Star Citizen instead.)
Thanks, I’ll give this a watch. I generally enjoy his content, I wonder what happened to FrankieonPC 
Can’t work out how to share it from my phone, but there’s a long post on his YT account from about a week ago in which he explains why his content focus is changing and what his plans for the future are.
Jack Frags ventures back into the Star Citizen universe for a second time, and remains somewhat impressed…
Star Citizen just left me speechless… - YouTube
Alpha 3.17 is out and on the Live servers for play testing.
Ship-to-ship refueling, the first iteration of river tech (that’ll evolve into lava flows too), inventory and loot reselling, and the first of the Hull series of expanding cargo ships - the Hull A - are the focus.
Expecting a few more features, refinements, and a new ship to be added in a 3.17.1 release in the next few weeks. This to coincide with the annual Invictus Fleet Week event which should start around the 20th.
Anyone speak Database Architecture who can translate into Dumb Dude English for me?
The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe.
The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players.
For PES (Persistent Entity Streaming) to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services.
Taken from a (massive) update on the state of things at CIG and the Star Citizen and Squadron 42 development.
His full post is here if you’re interested. But be warned that it is a long read…
The annual Invictus Fleet Launch starts tomorrow so another chance for Citizens to test fly a range of the military ships in the game, and for potential new Citizens to get into the universe for free. IFL runs for 12 days this year, so plenty time to pop in. I will put a full info post together later today if I can. But in the meantime, you can check details on the RSI site: Invictus 2952
