Grrizz

After a year long delay and gaming media misreporting saying it was delayed indefinitely, Star Marine has finally been released to the Live servers just in time for Christmas.
With this patch comes a new flight model, Dynamic Music, Cinematic camera (handy for those people creating in game content), new character models, facial animations. One other thing to note is that the splash screen now says Lumber Yard rather than CryEngine.  

(thank you @Gyre-Taenn for capturing this)
UPDATE: JUST RECIEVED THIS EMAIL
Either way it's fun to finally have the FPS side start taking shape rather than the ok feel the guns have had in 2.5 which lacked recoil.
here's a backers video showing the new camera and models off.
The next patch will bring planetary landings, better netcode and better AI.
 
Free fly code:   WELCOME2SC
Enter code here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/promotions/welcome-to-sc
 
 
Source: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//15653-Star-Citizen-Alpha-260
+me

About development time in general:
WALL OF TEXT INCOMING!
 
I think people needs to get a bit of a perspective on things here.
CIG is making 2 games not one. A single player and an MMO which is vastly more complicated than any other MMO out there.
Having said that they just reached the development time of a bigger single player game at 4 years - and those other games are made with an established budget, team, engine, and most of them is just an improvement on its predecessor.
CIG needed to build the studios, the teams, gather the budget, completely rewrite the engine (as theres no engine out there which can do what they need), and they are shooting for tech that hasn't been tried before.
 
Also we need to admit there was some wasted time in the development, but again if we put it into perspective its understandable: CIG did not know how much funding they have in the first two years so they worked their way towards a smaller scope-smaller team etc.
After a while it seemed clear that as they have a steady income, and much more funding they dreamed of, they can go full out, so they boosted up the team (now ~370 strong), the scope changed (this was the backers choice they voted to continue the funding, and add more features), and ofc this brought changes in the development as well, they needed to change the pipelines, and set up again the development roles, and ofc this took up some time, but as a result they are much more effective now. 
 
As of now what we can see: the engine conversion was done early this year, ship- and assets pipelines are simplified and pushing out stuff faster, planetary tech jumped in from nowhere, Star Marine is coming in.
The teams are now set up for pushing content, they have a clear sight on what to do and how, the foundation of the tech is done. So after 2.6 will come 3.0 in a few months and that will be the first "game like" iteration of SC. After that they will start to add game mechanics (mining, salvaging, etc), and assets (bases, planets, etc).

144 divides into 24 evenly which is good for 3D movies, 120 divides into 24 unevenly which is fine for 2D but not ideal for 3D, 120 has the benefit of also evenly dividing into 30 and 60 so which is best to use depends on what you are viewing (only minor differences though).

Its the next evenly dividable number buy 24 (cinema fps) after 120 It also gives you an even number of frames per eye for 3D when the movies at 24 fps per eye (3 repeats per eye) i.e. evenly dividable by 48.

Excellent start to the thread  

Excellent start to the thread  

Excellent start to the thread  

Personally I think 3 years is short even for S42, take COD as an example, they were on 2 year development cycles and have since moved on to 3 year development cycles and that's just giving an existing game a bit of a facelift and new story while coming from existing/established development companies with a known budget. Bear in mind CIG has not only been building a game but a company too, with a development budget that quite unexpectedly grew more than 5 times in size which would for the most part negate a lot of their early planning and budgeting unless they just skimmed the excess (something I'd personally be very disappointed about if they did).
 
E:D would be another good example in which it took about 5 years with the last 2 or so being at full burn to release what is a good but fairly Spartan game as it stands.
 
I would love to see this game sooner rather than later but I also think their current timeline is quite reasonable for what they are making.

Personally I think 3 years is short even for S42, take COD as an example, they were on 2 year development cycles and have since moved on to 3 year development cycles and that's just giving an existing game a bit of a facelift and new story while coming from existing/established development companies with a known budget. Bear in mind CIG has not only been building a game but a company too, with a development budget that quite unexpectedly grew more than 5 times in size which would for the most part negate a lot of their early planning and budgeting unless they just skimmed the excess (something I'd personally be very disappointed about if they did).
 
E:D would be another good example in which it took about 5 years with the last 2 or so being at full burn to release what is a good but fairly Spartan game as it stands.
 
I would love to see this game sooner rather than later but I also think their current timeline is quite reasonable for what they are making.

This point in development (alpha) is mainly about backend and base functionality, you generally don't bother with client optimisation till you get to beta, although because of the open nature of this game they have done a lot more optimisation than you would normally see at this point. Once they get the background work done churning out content to fit over that framework becomes a lot quicker and client optimisation becomes more practical because things aren't changing as much.
 
One of the problems I see is that a lot of people get their sense of scale from public alphas/betas these days, when a public alpha is more like a beta and a public beta is basically a demo/pre-release server stress test which tends to skew peoples perception of where a project like this should be at, the reality is if you've ever had the fortune (or misfortune) of playing an actual alpha this is miles ahead of what you would see in closed development and most games at this point might have been announced but all you would have got was a 10 second pre-rendered teaser making you aware the game is coming in a year+ (or 3 after delays ).
 
Bear in mind that after a point money doesn't speed up development, things just take time to do and throwing more money/people at it wont speed it up and can even slow things down, more people can create more overhead in handovers etc. and more money tends to mean higher quality targets (if not siphoned off for pure profit).
 
Edit: This is how I see your average closed development vs. what the public gets these days;
 
                                                             Alpha                                                                                              Beta                   Release
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------|->
                                                                                                                                                  ^                                  ^    ^
                                                                                                                                 Closed alpha               Closed beta    |
                                                                                                                                                                                     Open beta

As many of you may know, Star Citizen's game packages will be split as of February 14th. This means that the multiplayer aspect (the Presistent Universe) and the single player campaign (Squadron 42, episode 1) will have to be bought seperately and won't come combined in one game package.
This caused a bit of an uproar with the people holding off buying the game, because they would have to pay extra.
 
Now, on the latest Reverse the Verse (the show after Around the Verse) community manager Ben Lesnick explained how it will work: "After the package split, you will be able to buy either Star Citizen or Squadron 42 separately for $45 each - or buy one and then "add on" the other one for only $15 - so the total for both after the split will be $60."
 
This is also explained in a news post on the Star Citizen sub-Reddit.
 
Personally, I'm fine with this. I think it's a good solution for newcomers while keeping it fair at the same time. 

I don't think people have realised this is the star citizen sub topic.
Star citizen leverages the cpu quite a lot so it would be more useful if you were able to let us know that.
The Universe currently has server bottlenecks still so that will probably be around 20 - 30fps on a 970.
Arena commander isn't too bad with optimisation but when there are a lot of players then all systems tend to chug a little bit so probably anywhere from 20 - 60 fps in arena commander. My setup normally gives me about 30fps in large games of arena commander. I hope this helps

I'm hoping to get time to finish it up over Xmas/new years, the last 6 months or so have been one thing leading on to another so down time has become the proverbial carrot on a stick for me but the plan as it stands is to have all my ducks in a row going into the new year - finishing one project this year and be on the more chilled out end of the slow 2-3 year ramp up of the next project after Xmas
In regards to this build I have a new idea on how to manage the bubbles too which I'm looking forward to trying as I was a bit worried just running a bubbler might be a bit overpowering visually, if it pans out it should be a bit like an under water stream with a few less aggressive bubble jets working their way through the stones... hopefully it'll workout like what I have in my head at the moment

Thanks, I really appreciate that
Just to let you guys know things are still pretty flat out for me at the moment, life has been busier than I had ever expected so I haven't had a chance to progress further. I feel bad for stalling things this long as personally I like builds that keep rolling on till they're done however the main things that are stalling this project could potentially result in me ending up with a lot more time and resources in the future so they are something I have to pursue.
I would like to reaffirm that the project is just stalled, not stopped and as hesitant as I am to say when I'll be able to get back into it (you all know my past assumptions have been way off the mark ) I would like to think my schedule will start to open up a bit more in a few weeks, lord knows I could do with the spare time as my little black book of ideas is starting to fill up with potential projects
 

Mostly been answered already but here's my 2c:
1) $45 for the base game ($30 if you get a special) is not bad IMO especially for what you get (Singleplayer campaign + multiplayer dogfighting/fps arena + persistent MMO sandbox universe). You don't need to spend any more than that, no subs and all ships will be available in game for in game credits (currently rentable in the arena mode) with the exception of future single player campaigns which will be charged for of which there are at least 3 currently planned with the first included in your current purchase and will be standalone games with an overarching story (something like Mass Effect aka each a game unto themselves).
2) At the moment the arena stuff would probably be OK but the PU stuff can be a bit hit and miss, it is an alpha though and current performance has no definite bearing on what it will be like at release (for better or worse ). That CPU might hold you back going forward though.
3) Very much a personal thing but I think most people seem to be pretty positive about it. Me, I'm having a blast, even in the baby PU I've spent several hours playing now and haven't even touched a mission I'm just enjoying flying around trying to squeeze through tight spaces at 1000m/s etc. or stealing other peoples ships and going for joy rides, the bugs can be frustrating but you have to be fully aware it is very much an alpha (not a beta or demo as some people seem to unknowingly compare it to) and while not the most stable one I've ever played is also far, far from the most buggy too.
Chat yesterday:
P1: "Anyone want to go gunner in my Tali"
P2: "I'm in"
P1: "Come to landing pad 10"
P2: "Did you just take off without me"
P1: "Nope, just got jacked"
P1: "GTA motherf***er"
Me: *Hehehe I got me a Tali *

To be fair there was more reason to upgrade to W7 because (discounting Vista for obvious reasons) the gap between XP and W7 was 8 years which made for a fairly substantial difference, going from W7 to W8 and W10 while bringing changes and improvements isn't as substantial of a move and thus isn't as attractive/important, personally I think the fact W10 has even close to the adoption rate of W7 is fairly impressive.
You can be sure they'll see an installation spike shortly before the offer runs out too as a lot of people will just be giving it the typical 6-12 month windows break in period

In terms of functionality and possible depth of gameplay the other options are still lacking. Stuff like multicrew/FPS/Ships are done in a lot more detail compared to Elite's "mile wide and inch deep" features (along with the fact they're in the base game not a paid expansion). The single player campaign is deffos a standout point, as no other big name space game has one.

a friend showed me this just now, and troughout watching it i was mixed between "wow" and:
"why the FUCK can these guys achieve this if electronic farts has to put a bajillion loading screens in sims 4..."

Its not permanent at the moment
There are no locks etc. so its very easy and a re-log puts it back in your inventory. Lots of stuff has yet to be implemented (alpha) and at the moment if you manage to spend any amount of time in the baby PU without getting your ship stolen or blown up whether you're in it or had it parked up and gone exploring a station you're probably in an empty server lol (not that there is such a thing at the moment ).
P.S. Talis are way more than $50

Whilst the Mustang is the good choice at the moment, the Aurora is currently built like a tank it just doesn't die! Also if you're not planning on spending too much down the line you may want to think about what you want to start out doing in the main PU (Persistent Universe) The Aurora is a much more universal craft to the mustang as it has better cargo at the current time as well as being nearly as powerful in combat if you buy some of the in game upgrades (Like the missile rack (Correct me if you cant put them on the base model) and extra gun mounts) The aurora also has a bed to sleep in so you can rest if you're not close enough to a space motel!
 
Though as @Wander Away said the mustang is slightly better in combat due to its smaller profile, gimballed turret and just as many weapon mounts.
 
Either way whichever you choose I hope you enjoy it and treat it well

Use one of these to keep it fair-ish
http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/478795-uoltt-star-citizen-referal-code-generator

We've had enough of those
The thread exists for a reason.

Some data for your maths
Version: Alpha 2.0.0-305217 (live)
Precision (all): 50m/s
Gladius:
SCM: 235m/s
Afterburner: 325m/s
Cruise: 945m/s
Constellation Andromeda:
SCM: 255m/s
Afterburner: 420m/s
Cruise: 975m/s
M50:
SCM: 285m/s
Afterburner: 400m/s
Cruise: 1030m/s
Avenger Stalker:
SCM: 235m/s
Afterburner: 320m/s
Cruise: 1150m/s
Aurora LX:
SCM: 190m/s
Afterburner: 300m/s
Cruise: 445m/s
Cutlass Black:
SCM: 220m/s
Afterburner: 300m/s
Cruise: 990m/s
Mustang Omega:
SCM: 265m/s
Afterburner: 400m/s
Cruise: 1120m/s
315p:
SCM: 225m/s
Afterburner: 370m/s
Cruise: 475m/s
P-52 Merlin:
SCM: 240m/s
Afterburner: 290m/s
Cruise: 1245m/s
Retaliator:
SCM: 180m/s
Afterburner: 230m/s
Cruise: 1020m/s
F7C-M Super Hornet:
SCM: 225m/s
Afterburner: 330m/s
Cruise: 945m/s
While the Aurora and 300 speeds were a bit disappointing threading the needle at Port Olisar in a Merlin at 1245m/s is a whole lotta fun
Edit: The other interesting thing I noticed is when I first took the Gladius out I bumped the wing tip, just a little scratch, a tiny bit of yellow right on the end in the damage display, it didn't affect SCM but my max afterburner speed dropped by 5m/s. I either wasn't astute enough or crashed before I had a chance to check its affect on cruise speed.

I'm on a GTX970 and the only issue I have at the moment is that changing resolutions (in particular making custom resolutions/frame rates) don't work in the control panel, this seems to be a pretty common problem judging by the NV forums on not only the GTX970s. If you don't use custom/non-native resolutions/refresh rates then its probably not something to be concerned about.

I downgraded my screen from 16:10 to 16:9 because 16:10 become rarer and far more expensive