[UPDATE] As of 9 p.m. EDT Wednesday, the dogfighting module has been
delayed for an indeterminate length of time:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13898-Arena-Commander-V8-Delay
Chris Roberts said:
Today at 4:00 PM PST, I sat down with Star Citizen’s production leads for a ‘go/no-go’ meeting. We went around the virtual table, like a ground control team preparing to launch a rocket, and the decision was that we are not able to release Arena Commander tomorrow as there are too many blocking and critical issues outstanding.
...
Unfortunately, as of tonight, there are still two blockers and half a dozen critical issues (which we would like to fix before launch.) Our biggest issue today is a newly developed DirectX crash which breaks the single player Vanduul Swarm mode every backer will be given access to.
It would be foolish to release an unstable build, even if pre-alpha for the sake of meeting an internal deadline.
...
[T]o keep our backers as informed as possible, I’m asking the production team to provide DAILY updates for the community until Arena Commander V0.8 ships. This will be the raw stuff: lists of bugs and other information to tell you the current health of the build. You will see the same information I do, and you will be able to follow as we resolve each “blocker” preventing the build’s release.
I want you to know that we’re very close… just not close enough to launch tomorrow. Stay tuned!
[Original post:]
In a weekly update, the developer behind PC space sim Star Citizen has announced when pledgers can expect to begin playing the Dogfighting Module, known in-fiction as Arena Commander:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/...13883-Arena-Commander-Weekly-Report-May-12-16
I’d like to walk you through exactly what the next two weeks—if all goes well—mean for Arena Commander’s development:
- May 17th: our IT groups will be updating our global internal server infrastructure. A lot of the internal tools we use for game development (checking in builds, storing assets, etc.) are in dire need of downtime and update; we’ve been running them in the red zone so we can have 24 hour round-the-world development on Arena Commander. During this downtime we will also be switching over to a much more flexible and advanced architecture for our content management system Perforce. We will be upgrading to using Perforce Streams which will allow much quicker and more flexible movement between code branches for our development team. This prepares us for the added complexity of launching and supporting a live multiplayer service like Arena Commander. Saturday’s update will allow us to push the final Arena Commander update out to the world with much more confidence (corrupted data from these servers was a major issue at the PAX East reveal!)
- May 18th: with the new servers in place, we will split off the “Arena Commander Release” branch of Star Citizen. This will separate the Arena Commander you play from the rest of the game that is being developed by other teams. So data checked in by teams around the world that doesn’t have anything to do with dogfighting (such as FPS weapons, planetside maps or future ship assets) won’t cause additional bugs for the team to worry about.
- May 19th: The QA team will begin their final troubleshooting session with the new Arena Commander Release branch. They will go through the entire game and catalog all the current bugs they can find – ships not spawning in the correct place, physics not functioning correctly, disconnects during battle and so on. This will help to generate our final “Must Fix” list for release. It is important to remember though that our internal QA team cannot find everything and it is very likely that we will not fix everything prior to release. We are releasing playable code to the community much, much earlier than you normally would in AAA game development. Because of this it will not be as polished as a final game would be so we are going to need a lot of support from all of you to help us in bug finding and gameplay feedback!
- May 23rd: The official cross-studio playtesting of the Arena Commander Release begins. This represents a “pencils down” phase where, unless you are working on an authorized must fix issue the team is expected to QA the game as much as possible. After this point, only a limited number of “designated driver” team leads will be able to check in any changes to the game itself.
- May 27th: By this point, we hope to have the egregious, game breaking issues resolved but there will still be plenty of known and unknown issues. This is also our deadline for making sure the launcher is hardened for the deluge of users and the first set of necessary servers for the release have been spun up. After this point all check in privileges will be revoked and will only be returned on an as needed basis by senior Production staff and myself.
- May 28th: The release candidate build of the game will be compiled. If all goes as planned, this is the version of Arena Commander you will be playing! The team at Turbulent will begin switching over the website to the version that will make Arena Commander available to backers. I will personally ‘sign off’ Arena Commander as ready for the community on the evening of the 28th. To be clear, we fully expect that there will be bugs remaining, potentially some bad ones. That said, our primary focus is getting a version out to the community to help us find all the issues and work together to improve Arena Commander.
- May 29th: This morning, the web team will spin up additional authentication and web servers in the in anticipation of high traffic during the release. The engineering team will begin “warming” caches on cloud servers around the world, making sure the release candidate game is ready and waiting for users. By the end of the day, we will update the website making the game available, and the first public release of Arena Commander (which we’re calling v0.8) will be live to the world for testing!
After this we will continue to work hard finishing off game modes, making balancing calls and hotfixes as we spin up more and more servers, allowing for more and more concurrent multiplayer games.
- v0.9 will be an intermediate step with additional features, polish, fixes and the Squadron Battle game mode.
- v1.0 will be when everyone can access the multiplayer and all game modes are in (Capture the Core comes in with v1.0).
They've said before that everyone will gain access to the single-player horde mode called Vanduul Swarm, but online multiplayer will be rolled out slowly to pledgers in order of their citizen numbers. (Find your citizen number by going to
https://robertsspaceindustries.com, mousing over "MY RSI" in the upper-right corner and, when you're logged in, clicking on your profile picture. It'll take you to a page that says "Uee Citizen Record #XXXXX" near the top.)
The only ships available in Arena Commander version 0.8 will be the Hornet, Aurora and 300i. If you don't own any of those, you'll get a loaner ship that most closely matches your pledge level.
The Avenger and Cutlass will be added to Arena Commander shortly after version 1.0 is released. It may be a while before multiple-person ships like the Freelancer and Constellation are added, though — they'll be in version 2.0.
In short, we'll only be seeing this little guy for two more weeks: ༼つ ◕_◕ ༽つ GIVE DFM
