As part of the ongoing eight year birthday of Star Citizen’s launch (of alpha development), Chris Roberts tapped out a lengthy letter to the community in which he talked about the community, the developers, and a broad-strokes plan for both Star Citizen and Squadron 42, all while drawing parallels of each title’s development to the Apollo 8 project and the first landing of a human on the moon.
“We chose to build a game of Star Citizen’s complexity and ambition, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. We are building a game that I, and I dare say all of you, have dreamed about since we first started playing games, a game that I never imagined could be possible due to the economics and technical challenges. And like Man in Kennedy’s Moonshot speech, we have achieved a lot already in our quest for the stars […] While we’re well on our way to the Moon, metamorphically speaking, we’re not there just yet. We still have some key technologies to complete to round out the seamless universe.”
Those key technologies include iCache, server meshing, and the Quantum background simulation program, all of which are described as key pillars that will make Star Citizen work. Once those tools have been completed, Roberts promises that CIG can “open the floodgates in terms of locations and content,” and that completion of these pillars is “well into development and the question is no longer ‘if’ but ‘when.'”
The letter also continues to address the SQ42-shaped elephant in the room, promising that the upcoming new roadmap, which should be visible this December, will give a better idea of where development is heading. That said, he also puts a big asterisk on the entire matter by noting, “Any one of our Roadmaps are only a snapshot of where we are, what we think we have left, with our estimates of how long they will take. But they are just that, estimates, and so can be wrong and often are,” and once again says that the game will be done when it’s done. In the meantime, the promised first episode of The Briefing Room has been released and is embedded below.
In other and perhaps slightly more pressing Star Citizen news, the release of alpha 3.11 means the game now requires systems to have AVX instruction support, meaning only systems with CPUs with Sandy Bridge or Bulldozer and later (depending on if you have an Intel or AMD CPU respectively) can run the game. An announcement post on the forums stated that CIG expects “very few [players] to be impacted by this change.”
