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Let's post our ideas for Star Citizen. The galaxy's a huge place, full of curiosities and splendor! Please be polite and have fun, while we discuss in detail the additions we want to see in SC. Constructive criticism is always welcome, keep it friendly... Here are a few ideas I will start us off with: -Planets- Planets should have highly varied biomes and environments. These should include ocean planets, desert worlds, jungle moons, cavernous lands, ice planets, swamps, (and a personal favorite) lava worlds! It would be cool to have various atmospheric conditions, such as excessive heat or cold or toxicity, even radioactivity, which could have specified suits designed for protection from those environments (without which players would perish!). Planets should also definitely have varying levels of gravity, some with no gravity at all, and some with intense gravitational pull and pressure, suit required. Gas giants would be really cool, where traversing the upper atmosphere would be OK. There could be floating outposts, etc. Then moving too close to the core could crush most ships... Also would be cool to see asteroid-based outposts, with subterranean areas. -Weather- Weather should factor in on at least some planets, but not all. Some planets should remain placid, while others could have weather cycles such as: sandstorms, blizzards, high winds, etc. It would also be interesting to have electrical/radiation storms where again, special shielding would be required to survive. Another interesting addition would be meteor showers, perhaps not damaging to the player in most cases... Of course, the most intense weather should be on planets with lesser city-populations. There should also be 'weather' cycles in space the likes of radiation/electrical storms, where ships' shields would be rendered ineffective. Perhaps here or there, a neutronic wave front (Star Trek, Ahem)! Deadly nebula! -Ships- The ships so far are absolutely bad-ass. Can hardly put it into words just how right they look and feel. I do have one minor issue to discuss regarding player immersion: Planetary entry/re-entry seems a bit off... It feels somewhat awkward orienting the ship into a nose-dive and then accelerating toward the planet. While that should still be an option for entry, it seems lacking, if it's the only way. Players should be allowed to let their ships drift slowly downward towards the surface (with a horizontal orientation relative to ground), all the while getting pulled to greater and greater speeds due to gravity. Currently it seems as though there is no gravity, requiring ships to nose-dive and hit the thrusters. The level of gravity should also have effects on how quickly ships take off, and how much fuel is consumed. Also some of the more lightweight craft should be capable of water-landing and flotation, some, not all. -Weaponry- Weapons are also looking pretty nice, and I can't wait to hunt some bounties and pirates with the Scourge Cannon! Turrets on ships are awesome and so are the weapons additions to the ships main systems. Weapons turrets on ships should not be automated. Automation would detract from the challenge of the game, and we never want that! Instead the player should be able to either hire NPCs or other players to man different positions aboard their ship. Also it seems some of the infantry firearms are being slightly 'overdone', so to speak. For example the Devastator shotgun seemingly has way too much level of detail and unnecessary bulk added to it. My suggestion is to lean more on the side of realism. I know it's Sci-Fi. Still I hope devs don't get hung up on making things like fancy-diamond-encrusted-platinum-laser cannons with under-barrel flame throwers..! It would be amazing to see (in rare cases), Orbital Weapons Platforms that could, if accessed, rain supreme firepower down on the planet's surface, destroying small outposts, structures or towns... Of course it would be necessary to make accessing it an extreme challenge. Accessories are nice. But keep away from over-extravagant weapon design. -Exploration- Exploration should be the fundamental, key point of the game. While some may argue that it is space battles, I tend to disagree. With so many space craft, vehicles and weapons, the gameplay will quickly become boring and the equipment redundant if there is not a vast amount of exploration. Here are a few thoughts on aspects of exploration: Artifacts, Flora and Fauna. Scattered throughout the verse there could be a plethora of different types of Artifacts to be found, only through rigorous exploring. There should be ancient ruins with old alien technology, perhaps rare weapons. There should be Obelisks and Pyramids and rare trinkets that could be sold or held as trophies. There could be mysterious devices, like the Orbs in Mass Effect (the first game) with strange properties. There could be alien tech that could be found and then saved for use at a far later date. Regarding Flora and Fauna, there could be a huge variety of harvesting options for certain crafting items. There really ought to be many creatures, perhaps mostly neutral/friendly. However some animals, in rare cases could turn out to be hostile, and highly challenging to face. Perhaps giant worms, or insectoids! Another thing could be infected worlds, or derelict ships (think Dead Space, or The Thing) where your only choice is to fight for survival or run for your life. There should also be intact derelicts. We've seen plenty of demolished ones. Some should be intact, abandoned in space, or even on land. Exploration should not, and I can't stress this enough, should not stem solely or mostly from missions! Let the missions be vast and varying in type by all means, a multitude of missions is always welcome. But please don't conflate missions and side quests, with exploration. -Armor & Apparel- The armor should of course have good variety. Weight should factor in, which I believe it currently does. Also there should definitely be highly specialized suits for specific tasks. Of course there'll be a space suit for EVA in outer space, but adding other specializations for other armor sets/suits would be great too. There should be a set more suited for enduring intense heat, or cold or radiation. There should also mostly be non-EVA capable sets IMO. Body armor should not be conflated with EVA suits, and they should for the most part be separate, with a few exceptions. It would be cool to see a lot of options other than simple armor for combat and space suits for EVA. One thought would be a stealth-suit with either quiet movement or even invisibility. Mostly I'm hoping it will prove an actual challenge to obtain armors, so that everyone isn't immediately buffed just after they begin playing. Let there be lots of varying, quirky outfits to be found. -Miscellaneous- NPCs for hire or available as crew members should use a rating system the likes of the one used in Metal Gear Solid V. They could have a certain class of career like 'linguist' or 'gunner' or 'medic', and within that specialty a certain set of ratings. Players should be able to activate distress beacons (false or genuine). If a player's ship is captured, they should be given the option to fight aboard the enemy ship in order to escape (think Han Solo and co, the capture of Millennium Falcon!). Where are all the AIs? This is the future after all... There should be robots of some kind or another, even perhaps a sentient machine race! There should also be a minimal amount of spawn/respawn actions. I realize this is counter-intuitive, given there's a massive universe to traverse. But it will add to the replay and return-to-game value; if people can easily spawn their ships and/or fast travel around it will make things overly-easy. It's nice that there's a wait-timer for summoning ships (at least destroyed ones). However, if a ship is not at the station at which you are staying, it should take time to arrive near you, and there should be a fuel cost and fee. Having all your ships easily at your fingertips will take away from the immersion and challenge of the game. It should also be more challenging IMO, to acquire cash. Gaining millions of credits should take a very long time. The quicker people progress in the game, the quicker the MMO will die. I don't believe there should be a 'difficulty setting' option. The universe in general should prove pretty damn challenging, with areas of extreme and lesser challenges. Some mini-games would also be cool, so long as they remain within the Persistent Universe. Game modes are a bad idea. It's understandable at this point, given there are players currently in the game who want something working. But later on, when development is (mostly) "complete", having different game-modes will detract from the main MMO. All hoverbikes should remain as hoverbikes, and not be turned into flying-space-hoverbikes! Please remove the flight-function for hoverbikes. Having flight for them is ridiculous and totally misses the point of a hoverbike. While I do agree that they should have some (slight) altitude control and perhaps a jump/boost, they should not be able to simply fly away, especially up into space. A hoverbike is like a speeder from Star Wars, it's not for flight; only for elevated, fast, ground travel! This goes for all ships and vehicles; if they have a specialty let them stick to that specialty, no blurring lines, except perhaps in rare cases.

If this doesn't get you hyped, are you really a follower of the Church of Chris Roberts?

All, I've been putting together a short map over the last few days describing an orienteering approach to find the Drug Lab on Yela. Most of the other content and guides I've seen rely on triangulation (which is extremely difficult due to the extreme small size of the target). This guide shows how to use known and distinctive landmarks to quickly and efficiently fly to the Drug Lab. In fact, I know find the Drug Lab much easier to locate than the Javelin. (To be fair, I've made this run more than 10 times now). This location is difficult to find in any condition other than full sunlight. It also only renders at 7km (but you need to zoom to even see it) and does not become visible to a ship in motion until about 2km. The Yela Drug Lab offers for sale two types of banned narcotics that can be sold to Grim Hex or Levski. It also produces alcohol. The profit margins on these substances is very high, however, the quantity that can be had is very low. You will not fill a Freelancer to even 1/3 of capacity. This makes this trade location ideal for those of us running Auroras, Mustangs, Avengers, and Reliants. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10cQBy7Z4ZRGzrXaJsPdjSAAAomY62UbasJHTJWjAVFc/edit?usp=sharing I'd like to continue to refine these kinds of guides, so please leave any feedback below.

Nice gallery of Star Citizen 3.0 in game screenshots from Berdu.

Great watch and explains/answers a lot of questions. Is Star Citizen 3.0 Server Capped - "Why I get playable frames... and others don't" - #nobullshit

It is ready and waiting on the Download page

Today we'll go over S42 and playing in 3.0

looking on reddit for bits like this (these are links that can be easily read if you click them): I hope others post details like this, because everything helps. Issues, non-issues, it all is information that can help manage expectations and minimize some of the rage. and this reminder also needs to be reinforced as often as possible:

Chris Roberts himself had some things to say about the Live release of Alpha 3.0. A lot of what he says can be related by the many frustrations we're all having in game some, or most times while trying to play. In the Holiday Spirit, I thought it would be helpful to share a few insights on the performance of 3.0. The number of players on the server has a lot less impact in client performance than one would think. During the final stages of PTU we ran tests with 50 players, 40 players and 30 players per server. While there was a slight improvement in performance it wasn't proportional to the player count at all as can be seen from the 3 samples below. The top one is a full 50 player server, the middle is a 40 player server and the bottom is a 30 player server (the X axis is FPS, Y axis is sample count). There is a slight shift to the right as you decrease player count but it is relatively minimal. From the data we see it is not so much about player count but more about WHAT the players are doing. In our internal testing we didn't witness the performance issues that we saw on PTU or Live once thousands of players got in and started doing all sorts of crazy things. Fill up a Caterpillar with cargo, blow it up over an Outpost on a moon and you can bring the clients and servers to their knees (as you've just added hundreds if not thousands of additional objects to simulate). One other common issue that can kill performance is interpenetration of objects as that causes an overload on physics, especially if its on a larger object. An example of this is the Asteroid Mission (which we disabled last night) that was spawning on top or near Olisar and being sucked into the local grid causing all sorts of issues and deadlocks. In addition we need to do a better job of efficiently handling the bigger ships which can bring in thousands of additional elements to update as opposed to the smaller ships that have a lot less items and geometry. Have a bunch of people fly around in Starfarers and Caterpillars and you're straining the clients and server far more than you would be with a bunch of Auroras and Hornets. We have solutions for all these things, including moving physics to a batch updating model from an asynchronous one which will allow us to scale the physics much better (currently we are limited to only four threads for physics regardless of the cores on a client or server), level of detail updates for objects on the client from the server (don't update or update less frequently when far away, unbind an object from the network if far away from the client's view), Object Container streaming (whole areas of the game are only streamed in when needed on the client, allowing for dramatically less objects on clients) and they are in various stages of progress but they are not something we can complete in a week or two. At Citizen Con we announced that we are moving to a quarterly release schedule that is less feature bound and more focused on regular updates. The release of 3.0 is the first step in that strategy. We could have spent a few more weeks dialing in performance and bugs before going "Live" after we returned from the Holiday break but as most of the company won't return until the second week of January (as we worked a week deeper into 2017 than we did in 2016) we would then not be going Live until the beginning of February. Considering that for us to hit the Q1 release date we need to be going to Evocati in the middle of February, it would put us in the same situation as this year where we ran late as we were focusing on features versus dates. Going live with 3.0 allows us to merge back into our main development branch, continue the performance and optimization work (which will be a big part of future releases) and deliver it with solid testing for Q1 2018. So while it may be frustrating that there are some performance issues and bugs, 3.0 is a step along the way in the Star Citizen journey that will get better and more polished as we go. If you are getting performance in the sub 10-15 FPS range there is definitely something not right, especially if you have a quad core CPU, 4GB video card and at least 16GB. I have seen people reporting 5 FPS when other people with the same specs are getting 25-30 FPS. This is likely a result of the game paging out to disk because of low memory, although sometimes we hear about this on machines that have 16GB or even more, which needs more investigation by us. Is it other apps in memory? Bad page allocation (need 10 GB have 16GB allocated)? Or memory leaks in the game? PCs have lots of advantages but one of the downsides is the huge diversity of configurations which make it hard to pin point the cause of some performance issues. We are investing in additional telemetry both on the servers and clients so we can automatically detect when things aren't performing how they should based on the raw specs of the machine and hopefully determine some issues that are causing the abnormally low performance. Of course this will take a bit of time , so please be patient. Finally I want to say thank you to everyone out there for supporting Star Citizen, your enthusiasm and dedication really does energize the team and myself. We are building something truly special that is only possible because of you. Happy Holidays everyone! As I mentioned reducing server player count has little impact on client performance (which is why I posted the graphs). You can also see that it is a small sample that are getting sub 5 FPS performance. Having said that, we want to have everyone as long as they are running with a minimum spec running at least 30 FPS eventually but it is important to understand that everyone's experience isn't the same on 3.0, its just people that have poor performance are going to be vocal about it, which is fully understandable. Right now we're rather puzzled as to why some people that have machines that should be performing much better aren't. It is a high priority for us to address. On the serialized variable / object culling that is in progress and we should have a first pass in for the next full release in March 3.1 is expected to be in March Source: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/1/thread/star-citizen-alpha-3-0-performance-tidbits

@Imperium Member PTU has been opened up to first wave testers, concierge members, and subscribers. This means that a good chunk of us already have access to 3.0 right now! If you don’t yet have access you have two options: Be patient, the devs are doing their best to get it to you as soon as possible. Subscribe for that sweet delicious early access. In either case, access or not, you are invited to join Imperium and the Star Citizen community this Saturday for a very special Game Day event! As mentioned in the most recent Game Day Announcement, in the case that 3.0 is in PTU for the upcoming Game Day (this Saturday the 25th of November 2017) we will be playing 3.0 and featuring it on the Game Day Stream for those of you who can’t yet play or would rather just watch. Along with the 3.0 shenanigans and the stream we will also be doing a bunch of giveaways of RSI gift cards, game packages, and Imperium branded clothing. Be sure not to miss this one!

Emails just went out! Get your PTU while it's hot!

Greetings, citizens! I was made a small video with a visual comparison of the changes in the recently launched 3.0 PTU testing. If someone wants to know, how it was "before" and "after", open this video and find out If something is changed to live release, I'll make a similar video, but with a comparison of "PTU 3.0" and "Live 3.0". Enjoy watching! P.S. If you liked it was interesting, support me in: Citizen spotlight Spectrum Reddit

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report

This coming Monday at 6pm PST we'll go over the Pioneer Ship + Play Times with 3.0 Here is a good theory crafting vid.

Have some ideas on how we can use the forums to coordinate game play when 3.0 comes out and to record what we are up to (just-in-case we need someone to help pick up where we left off on a long story arch or epic Unit / Squadron endeavor)

HYPE TRAIN!

I for one plan to use my trusty Freelancer (or the reworked Cutlass Black if available) with a Dragonfly and land on the planet for the first time. I would probably park my ship in a cave so it would be harder to find while I'm using my land vehicle. If land vehicle fuel is infinite in their first iteration, then one of the first things I would do is to circumnavigate the smallest moon once in a Dragonfly. What are your plans?

A quick news bulletin as Development Director for Foundry 42 Frankfurt, Brian Chambers, has just confirmed that mining will be in Star Citizen 3.0.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report The productions schedule has been updated and things are on track for 2.6.1 on PTU next week. If you scroll to the end you will find the 3.x update details with some new details. Notable to me the Repair & Salvage update 3.2 will likely just be the hand tool, with ship based tools coming at a later date/build. 3.0 Trading – Be able to buy/sell commodities via kiosks and NPCs among the various landing zones. Cargo Transport – Pick up hauling jobs between landing zones. Automatic cargo load/unload, manual cargo transport. Piracy and Smuggling – Establish secure/non-secure areas. AI Security response to attacks. Add the ability to retrieve floating cargo from destroyed ships. Create buy/sell system for illicit cargo. Mercenary – Create Service Beacon System (for Combat Assist Contracts). Create AI distress scenarios. Bounty Hunter – Accept missions to terminate wanted players and NPCs. 3.1 Mining – Retrieve solid and gaseous commodities from planet surfaces, manual cargo transport, refining materials. Refining and Processing – Process raw ore into purified commodities. Most shops will only deal in one or the other form. Initial implementation might be to have dedicated shops handle the refining. Quantum Interdiction – Be able to interdict Player ships from Quantum travel. Refueling – Add Refuel Contracts to Service Beacon. AI tankers and fuel requests (as well as player fuel requests) Escort – Protect one or more ships from harm. Add Escort contracts to Service Beacon. Implement Quantum Linking (multiple ships jumping together) 3.2 Salvage – Strip commodities from ship hulls via handheld tools, retrieve crates and other valuables from derelicts and debris. Repair – Repair damaged ship via tools (later implementation will incorporate the Crucible), repair damaged satellites or stations. Mercenary – Covert Operations – Patrol areas of space, protect stationary entities, advanced mission scenarios: infiltration/covert (retrieve data/object from enemy, sabotage, etc.), hostage rescue missions) 3.3 Farming – Plant and grow crops, harvest when appropriate, and sell the final product. Rescue – Rescue NPCs from a variety of dangers (powerless stations, damaged ships in decaying orbits, evacuate personnel, etc.) 4.0 Travel to multiple Star Systems – The universe expands beyond the Stanton System. Exploration and Discovery – Find unknown asteroids, derelicts, fuel sources, bases, commodity locations, scanning of space and surfaces in order to utilize, share or sell the information. Science and Research – Retrieve samples from space and planetside locations for analysis, atmospheric manipulation, scan/analyze various phenomena.

Hey everyone :). So my name is Christoph or Bartfresse on the internet. I pledged pretty much a year ago and so far I got myself an Avenger Stalker and Reclaimer LTI (Constellation Andromeda Rental currently) I am obviously most looking forward on the Reclaimer and Version 3.2 but I will gladly settle for the first planetary version of 3.0 :). That is going to be sweet once its finally out in a couple of months. Otherwise I am more on the creative side of things, I have my own youtube channel which you can visit here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4-f5_hJi8zca4x0k4ntEnQ I have already made one Star Citizen gameplay video a while back but I intend for more content regarding SC in the future so stay tuned :). I am so happy about the new camera system implementation since 2.6 . It already enabled so many creative people to create amazing media. Can't wait what future updates in this field might include. Anyone attending Citizen Con Frankfurt this year? Let me know, maybe we can meet up then :). Greetings, Chris

Hi Guys Check this out. I haven't seen this posted here: http://www.gamersnexus.net/gg/2613-chris-roberts-on-star-citizen-procedural-planets-alpha3-citizencon An interview with Chris about upcoming patches and Citizencon. Mostly stuff we already know. EDIT: Part 2 is out: http://www.gamersnexus.net/gg/2617-chris-roberts-on-character-technology-weather-system-engine-arch

Here's the last ATV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7GG0y8Jmcs The interesting thing is, right at the start, CR says 3.0 should fall not far after Citcon. Did he mean 2.6 or?...