A new Letter from the Chairman on the Roberts Space Industries website fills us in on the latest on Star Citizen, Cloud Imperium Games' upcoming space game (thanks Rock, Paper, Shotgun). The chairman reveals his film directing ambitions did not die with the Wing Commander movie, saying: "Directing the Squadron 42 shoot has been one of the most fun and creatively rewarding things I’ve done." The main focus of the post is the status of the game's first-person shooter module, which was said to be "near" back in March, but has not yet materialized. He outlines the obstacles that the FPS team still needs to hurdle before this is ready to go, and also discusses the impact this has on progress for the project as a whole, saying they are investigating a release of an updated build without the FPS stuff just to give backers a look at the latest changes. If that makes it sound like they don't know when the FPS module will be ready for prime time, it's because they don't. Here's word:

When will we see Star Marine? Tonight, I don’t have an absolute answer for you. What I will tell you is that we know exactly what we have to do, and we’re already well on our way to doing it. With allocation of additional resources and increased cross-studio focus on the FPS portion of the game we are on our way… we’re just not there quite yet. I’m confident that with the significant updates and changes to the backend architecture discussed above that we will have an experience worthy of the Star Citizen name; it’s just going to take some additional integration and testing. On the public side, I know that it’s time to open up our communications on the Star Marine rollout process: starting with this message and continuing each week, we will provide a high level update on the challenges just as we did for Arena Commander.

We ended the 2012 pledge campaign with ‘The Pledge,’ in which I outlined our new company’s goals to be open about our process. Today, I want to rededicate ourselves to this: I can’t promise you we’ll meet every internal deadline or that every decision we make is something you’ll agree with. There will be challenges that we struggle to overcome, and we will never be able to predict all of these with certainty…but I can promise you we will keep you informed and that we will not stop working until the game is done right. After all, that’s why we’re here in the first place. Your support is letting us create the game we want to make before anything else. Because of you, we have the freedom to make sure things work the way we want, even if it takes more time and more effort. We won’t let you down!