The last update (2.6.1) came with the first alpha release of Spectrum. It’s actually pretty good, I wasn’t expecting that :
If anyone else was like me and thought “Are they bringing this to the Spectrum? Have they overcome the RAM-pack wobble issue?” then a quick Google is in order:
Spectrum sounds cool! It means I can now spam chat while on the train to work. 
I should add that they haven’t got the game to a point where I would be willing to pay to play. Maybe when 3.0 comes out and they allow us to land and drive around planet surfaces though. That I can get into.
It’s so hard to understand this guy, for me, but for the few things I get, i think he has many interesting news :
And a special edition of 10 for the chairman about professions in 3.0
enjoy the video 
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Their terrain proc gen looks pretty good (3:10 - 4:20)
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The snippets I found interesting (despite the procedural terrain proc you mentioned of course):
02:00 Interior flyby - pretty huge 
… I wonder if that will also work fully “multicrew-ship” like with every inside being synchronized with everything outside vice versa.
08:30 Volumetric Nebula - yes!! I love those. I would have loved if Inovae would have left this in within I:BS from their earlier prototypes sight. I hope they’ll add this also for fly-through, not only for some kind of static skybox stuff.
11:25 Lighing - looks nice within the dark rooms. Indoor-lighting is overally nice enough for me, I hope they won’t spend too much time more on this for the moment.
You might want to do some reading on nebulae. They are very large, and the ones with interesting structure to them are many light years across. Their total mass is no more than the sun, resulting in a density lower than that of our best laboratory vacuums.
If you were to fly into the region of a nebula, all you’d see is a gradual dimming of stars to your sides and behind you. Up close, nebulae are pretty boring, and are only beautiful when seen from vast distances. That’s why they’re best left to skyboxes.
If you want interesting flythroughs, look to weird ‘atmospheric’ effects in places with pronounced energy gradients. Gravitic, magnetic, kinetic, etc.
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While what you say is true, I don’t think RSI are going for realism on that front. Freelancer showed how much CR likes dense gas clouds and asteroid fields.
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I know. However I still think at this point it makes sense to skip realism at least a bit and have the nebula cover the surround blackness a bit. Of course it should not be dense in any kind, but it should affect the surrounding lighting and depth black rendered space a bit to provide some area of interest. Still it would be worth rendering them dynamic and volumetric for some visible structures, not static and 2D, even if only faintly rendered via the skybox.
E.g. Elite Dangerous for example that utilized nebulasa bit more for some nice visual effects.
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It’s going to have atmospheric flight. You’ll be able to actually fly through the huge cloud systems of gas giants. Why would you need to make something up to give you an identical effect?
Did they decide to do volumetric clouds after all? I fully support iNovae not doing unrealistic nebulae, but if they are not doing volumetric clouds at all (they weren’t last I knew), I’m not sure that you’d get the same effect from whatever system gas giants will have in-game.
Talking about Star Citizen there.
But Inovae still want to add in volumetric clouds and even dynamic / functional weather / storm systems in a post launch update if the game sells well.
(It was the $600,000 stretch goal)
I really hope volumetric clouds will be priority 1 when it will become possible for Inovae to handle it. I can’t imagine the Earth-like moon without volumetric clouds and oceans. It’s already so beautiful, but this moon in particular with clouds and oceans… it could be incredible. I wonder what it would look like in the volcanic one too…
And for Star Citizen, like for distance between planets, CR has already said that he doesn’t focus more on realism than on gameplay feeling. So as distance between stars and planets are not going to be realistic at all, nebulae are goind to be more visual, beautiful and “playable” than realistic.
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New 2.6.2 patch is pretty good, lots of little improvements, trackIR support again finally, and they’ve all but eliminated loading times in arena commander thanks to the megamap system. the 3 seconds to “find a game” take longer than the actual load in time, its pretty great. I remember when it would take multiple minutes to load in…
also, we got a new ship, the buccaneer. It’s a fun little ship, lots of firepower in a small package, not super fast though. I quite like it’s design compared to most other SC ships.
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I’m surprised no one here has mentionned the fact SC wants to support Vulkan only.
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/7581676/#Comment_7581676
And it’s already kind of “old news” 
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SC "wants’ many good things. But aik LY do not support Vulkan.
Of course, it’s for the moment only wishful thinking… but it’s still a good sign that most dev disagree, or are at least annoyed, by DX12 being closed to anything else than Win10.
Plus, it’s a small advertissement for Vulkan and probably a step further into Vulkan’s acceptance, on a wider scale.
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Having read the latest newsletter which talks about the upcoming release of Alpha 3, it’s almost at the point where I will put some money down. I’m quite happy to spend my time exploring planetary surfaces to be honest.
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And its suprisingly close, first release of 3.0 including the planetary tech is announced for end of June which is quite near.
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what a pity it is not what they have promised almost 1 year ago with a release date by the end of 2016.
I can’t understand how CR could have gone up on stage at CitizenCon saying it will be released by the end of the year when, from the schedule we can see that the majority of tasks has started in April.
I really don’t care for their promises. I was never heavily invested in this game, being more of an ED fan. So this will come when it comes but I have been holding off for the planetary landing part of the game. That was the thing that interested me the most. Waiting another couple of months is nothing.
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