It’s only available to a select few (thousand) on the public test universe for now, but the deployment of Star Citizen’s Alpha 2.0 has set certain sectors of the ‘Verse buzzing — and for good reason.
It’s not the only major inclusion, but the main reason for players going mental is the inclusion of parts of Star Citizen’s long-awaited persistent universe. In the test email that was sent out to those granted access, Cloud Imperium Games says that the initial rollout of the persistent universe will support up to 40 players, although only 16 controllable player ships.
“[The update] also includes our new Avenger variants, the first iteration on FPS, Multicrew technology, interior physics grid, quantum travel, IFCS, EVA, missions, and so much more. As we want to stress test the new content, we’ve disabled Arena Commander and ArcCorp for the time being,” the email, which has been reposted online, says.
Chris Roberts posted over the weekend that the studio is working “around the clock and over the weekend” to make Alpha 2.0 available to all backers. “This release really is a landmark in Star Citizen and video games history as we’re now pioneering technology that’s never been undertaken to this scale before and it’s all thanks to the belief in the backers who helped fund the team to make the dream a reality,” he added.
Alpha 2.0 also introduces the start of a brand new flight model, which introduces a precision mode that reduces your maximum velocity to give pilots better control around asteroids, take off, landing and so forth. SCM Mode, cruise mode, quantum travel a 3rd order motion control system have been added too, and if you want to get nerdy and stare at graphs that look like they were pulled out of a 4 unit maths textbook then you can do so here.
If you’d prefer to digest some of the changes in a video format, the video below shows off some of the features that are now available in Alpha 2.0. It’s a little slow and it’s not as flashy as a list of bullet points, but it offers a good compare and contrast with how fleshed out Star Citizen is becoming already.
Star Citizen’s funding currently sits just shy of US$96 million, with the team having raised US$4,237,201 in October and more money in the last week than the four previous combined. It only seems a matter of time before Chris Roberts’ grand vision finally soars past US$100 million.
Comments
30 responses to “Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 Hits Public Test Server, Internet Goes Wild”
Awesome work by CIG. I’ve been watching heaps of videos and it looks absolutely awesome!
The updates should start to come out fast and steady now that we are on one of the latest branches.
This whole update has been pretty amazing, it just shows how much a certain someone may have just been campaigning against them due to a bruised ego.
Who do you mean?
I think @vaegrand is referring to Derek Smart shooting his mouth off.
Oh OK, but I thought he was campaigning for accountability?
No, he was campaigning so that people would notice him.
Accountability is a “nice” way of looking at it, but more than anything he has no clue about big budget development. If you look at his dev history every game he has made has either only had a small cult following (see 3000AD, Inc) or a bunch of really shit scenario based shooters (see All Aspect Warefare or Angle of Attack) either way he hasn’t made anything worthy of notice in the last decade and even then his old titles aren’t spectacular either.
All round I would suggest looking at his twitter if you want to peer into the oblivion of what is essentially a mad man’s unjustified ego.
Don’t do it. The void will look back.
Derek also had massive delays with his BC3000 series of games with missing features or broken non-functional game for many. He really is just talking out of jealousy because of the success SC has made, that he was unable to generate.
Just another TALKS BIG developer but delivers nothing. Meanwhile Chris Roberts has delivered all his games in the past without any major hickups. (I think freelancer was the last one?)
Wait, there’s actually a game now?!
There has been a pvp arena type thing for ages, then they released the social module which was largely just a proof of concept and now this… which is pretty bloody cool.
I stopped following updates around the time they were letting people look at their ship in a hangar and there seemed to be a lot of doubt/concern/backlash recently that indicated the whole project was on the verge of falling over.
I might pick this game up one day, when it’s fully realised. I just don’t have the time or interest in alpha/beta testing. While I may regret not getting in earlier when special ships were on offer, I am sure I will nonetheless enjoy the complete experience when there is a “complete” to experience.
Fair enough, I am a fair schmuck and have an early investment (which I won’t deny also puts me in the position of being very optimistic) in ships. I feel that even at this point I would have gotten my money’s worth out of just the pvp if hours are anything to go by. That being said, I am checking my email many times each day for a confirmation email to join the new test server.
I don’t think you’ll regret anything. It’s been stated multiple times that everything purchasable now will be available just by playing the game when it releases.
This was my thoughts exactly! I though this was still all make believe!
It looks soooo good!
Shame it won’t run longer than 5 mins without crashing on me 😉
Looking forward to when it’s stable!
I can’t even download the damn thing to give it a swing. From what I hear people who can get it to work say pretty swell things about the shenanigans they have seen. Dealing with hitch hikers seems… interesting.
Apparently some early backers are getting shitty because CIG has re-listed some hitherto ‘limited’ edition ships for sale. If you’d paid hundreds of dollars for a limited edition ship because you were prepared to pay to have something that someone else might have to play hundreds of hours to get in-game, you’d be pretty pissed if that ‘limited’ availability suddenly disappeared.
Yeah that is unfortunate, the Phoenix is the prime example; it was only meant to be available to early backers.
To be fair, when those early backers bought it there were very few people who even knew about the game, so now that there are 1 million+ people involved with the game, allowing the sale of even 10,000 more ships isn’t a huge deal, it’ll still be a very limited ship based on numbers of players
I still think it’s disrespectful if not downright deceptive. After all, CIG doesn’t need the money. Chris Roberts said they could finish the game if the money stopped. Surely he wasn’t lying when he said that? And that was in late 2014, well after they passed $50 million in funding. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14184-Letter-From-The-Chairman
I think that CIG has not been honest with its backers despite all the videos and stuff they do. That is more of a PR exercise when you look at it. They are going on, convincing people that stuff is happening (not that I’m saying they’re not working on the game), in order to get more cash. They are putting ships on sale, not to balance out numbers, but to get more cash.
I backed the Kickstarter campaign when it first landed and hadn’t even been funded yet. Kinda amazing how far it’s gone since then. There are a few too many updates for me to keep track of though, I’ll just wait for the full game to launch. Even then I reckon I’ll just chill with Mark Hamill in the single player campaign.
Lol. 40 player max and they can’t even fly at the same time.
Welcome to software development.
The thing is, once they get into the optimisation flow, things will start to perform much better. Tweak some loops so things run twice as fast; now 80 players max. Better handle how some objects use memory; 160 players max. Profile the code and streamline identified bottlenecks; 320 players max. Introduce the distributed computing code that was being working on; player numbers limited only by the server count.
Robert has stated its likely they will stop at 50 and maybe if they are lucky 100 players, this however does not include NPC crew mates or ships.
Yep, I just read about that 50-100 player per instance limit.
Interesting technique that they’re using. Also, large battles can apparently be made up of multiple instances, with players passing from one instance to another dynamically. Unsure how that will affect gameplay, but I can appreciate that the limit appears to be based on network bottlenecks and the sheer scale of communicating with everyone about the state of every object in the battle.
40 people per instance for now :/
All ships will be available to purchase in game
Phoenix owner here. I think all these bruised egos regarding limited ships are silly. I pledged for the phoenix because it’s pretty, and I have no interest in preventing others from having one.
I’ve thrown $1250 into Star Citizen, mainly because I wanted Wing Commander 6/Privateer 3. and Squadron 42/Star Citizen is looking more like it’s living up to that dream 🙂