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.