A new
Roberts Space Industries Letter from the Chairman has an update from Chris Roberts on the status of dogfighting in
Star Citizen, RSI's
crowd-funded space combat and exploration game (thanks InBlack). He explains
that the overabundance of funding they received has allowed them to proceed
faster than anticipated, which, counterintuitively means they are delaying the
dogfighting module they intended to be one of the first elements of the game
released to the public. He explains that they are holding this back to implement
their own netcode, rather than using Crytek's, while expressing other concerns
about doing things as they originally planned. "So rather than force the team to
crunch through the holidays chasing something 'good enough'," Roberts
writes,
"I am going to make the tough choice to delay the dogfighting module for a
couple of months to allow us to take our time and deliver something special."
The post is very lengthy, so this is a relatively short excerpt:
Outside
of having the dogfighting use the proper backend there is a lot of finesse and
detail that needs to go in to get the dogfighting ready for the community’s
consumption – The HUD, Damage states, various FX – these are all in progress and
look very promising but in my personal opinion aren’t quite ready for prime
time.
I feel that the Dogfighting module, especially with Star Citizen’s greatly
increased profile, needs to be more polished than a typical “alpha”. There are a
lot of eyes on the game, and more than a few people wanting us to fail. Because
Dogfighting is the first module that will involve significant gameplay, it has
to be good – I don’t feel that we will get a pass just because it is pre-pre
alpha.
So we had two choices: either fork development and spend time building something
that would involve throwing away work in order to meet the December deadline and
deliver something that wouldn’t have the level of polish I’m happy with, or stay
on course to build something that would lead directly into the finished
game.