Hi everyone, Over the years, the Community Team has worked to be your voice within CIG (alongside the awesome folks on the Player Experience teams), ensuring your sentiment, feedback, and ideas reach the right teams loud and clear. This also involves hunting down info and providing direct updates to you, whether through a Spectrum post, support article, Monthly Report, or an episode of Inside Star Citizen (ISC). That’s how features like Patch Watch came to be, offering a closer look at updates that might not appear on the Public Roadmap. However, Patch Watch focuses on patch-specific deliverables, and we see plenty of opportunity to extend this to more general topics. Today, we’re happy to introduce Star Citizen Comms-Dive (SCCD)—a new series that’ll focus on diving into hot topics and active discussions in the community. Much like the Patch Watch, this series won’t follow a fixed schedule but will drop when we have something relevant to share. This is a bit experimental, but we're excited to help enable discussion around the development of Star Citizen and find space to share news or updates that don't necessarily warrant an entire announcement. In many ways, the Community Team is quite similar to all of you engaging and inquiring on Spectrum, but we're lucky to know exactly where developers sit and have access to bug them for these kinds of quick answers! While we can’t respond to every comment or thread, we're certainly listening and sharing your insights internally. Your engagement is a huge part of what makes this project special, and Comms-Dive is another way for us to recognize the importance of your discussions and keep the information flowing. Thank you for the incredible energy you bring to this community. As always, your feedback (even on this initiative!) is appreciated. Let’s get into some of the key topics currently discussed in the community (with more to come): Fire Weapon Groups In Alpha 3.24.2 PTU.9359298 Wave 1, we adjusted the Weapon Grouping system to streamline controls. This change aims to bring input parity between FPS, turret, and ship controls for new players, while reserving RMB for precision targeting. We appreciate the feedback and have since updated the system in Alpha 3.24.2 PTU.9360177 Wave 1, to allow direct firing of gun weapon groups (1 to 4) independently. Note that this is still a work in progress, especially regarding EMP and QED/QIDs. We’re committed to improving usability and ensuring your feedback shapes the final product. Precision Targeting Precision Targeting is an ongoing work, and it will be essential for effectively neutralizing subsystems on larger ships. Coupled with a resource network, the Maelstrom upgrade, refined tunings, and a new array of medium-range weapons, larger ships are set to become a significantly greater threat to fighters than they are today. The ultimate design goal is to make larger ships very dangerous for fighters, but we don’t yet have all the necessary elements in place, so this change won’t be happening in the immediate future. Cave Exploration and 3D Maps The goal is to implement a fog-of-war system for cave maps. This means that the first time you visit a cave, you’ll need to map it out yourself, and once you've explored it, the data will be saved for future use. In contested zones or off-grid areas, the data won’t be pre-charted, so you’ll need to explore these locations to unlock the map details. There will be exceptions, such as when you're specifically sent to a location via a mission. In these cases, a mission giver might provide you with the necessary data. However, exploration remains a key focus, and these systems are designed to make it an integral part of the experience. Fullscreen mode The recent engine update has made exclusive fullscreen incompatible. While it's technically possible to re-enable it specifically for Vulkan, we've decided not to do so because it's a legacy feature that’s gradually being phased out. By focusing on more modern display methods, we can ensure a more stable and optimized experience across a wider range of hardware and setups. Borderless fullscreen is the way forward; it’s smoother, more responsive, and has no negative impact on performance in Windows 10/11. For those using exclusive fullscreen to play in lower resolutions, we’ve implemented a solution to do the same in borderless mode. Any performance drops players have noticed from the new window mode come from the new codebase in 3.24.2 and 3.24.3 that we are currently working on, not from the display change. The upscaling options will also be restored to their previous behavior, as the UI will now remain rendered directly at your upscaled resolution. Vulkan Development and DirectX We’re making great strides with Vulkan multi-threading, currently showing promising results in our internal development. Our goal is to make Vulkan the default rendering API, and thereby phasing out DX11. Global Illumination While last year's presentation may have looked good, if you re-watch it, you might notice that we were showing it without glossy reflections or any transparency in the scene. What would be less obvious is that it wasn't yet able to do real-time updates of the ray-tracing scene (we just had it trigger every couple of seconds if we weren't doing a frame-by-frame video recording) and there was a lot of fuzz on disoccluded pixels (we're still working on that, and it's looking better). We still don't have a date for when it reaches the Persistent Universe, most of our work is currently focused on getting things operational in Squadron 42, which will likely have overlapping needs and benefit both games. Greycat Industrial ROC, Inventory, and Trading Terminal We’re aware of the issue preventing players from selling minerals directly from their stored ROC vehicles. Our team is actively working on a solution to eliminate the need for transferring minerals one by one from the ROC to your backpack. Once this is resolved, you’ll be able to manage these transfers using Freight Elevators. We’ll keep you updated as more details become available, but we’re looking forward to making this a bit more user-friendly and intuitive. Mining Pods and Freight Elevators Exciting improvements are coming soon that will make team mining and refining much smoother. You’ll soon be able to take mining pods to Freight Elevators and have them transported by other ships. First, players will be able to remove mining bags from their ships and replace them with empty ones easily. Bug fixes will allow mining bags to be placed on cargo grids of other ships or stored in warehouses via the Freight Elevator. Additionally, the Trading Terminal and Refinery will recognize the warehouse as a source of unrefined materials. Lastly, refined materials will soon be transferable directly from the Refinery to warehouses, though containers will initially be limited to 4 SCU. This restriction will be lifted with a future update that allows players to split and combine boxes. For now, refined materials can still be sent directly to ships and autoloaded into appropriately-sized boxes free of charge. Polaris Point Defense Cannons The Polaris will indeed come equipped with its highly anticipated PDCs, which will automatically track and engage locked missiles to defend the ship as efficiently as possible. This may extend to ships as well, but is still being balanced and won't debut with the initial release. Ultimately, PDCs add a crucial layer of defense - though enemies can destroy them if they specifically target these systems. Additionally, the Constellation Phoenix will be receiving its PDC in the same update, as shown in our recent update, and more ships will be equipped with theirs in future patches. Navigating Jump Points as a Group Currently, you can jump as a group of more than 40 players at once currently, provided that each ship is aligned and tuned when the jump point is activated. The ships will then be pulled in one after another. If the group exceeds this number, they will need to spread across multiple jumps. As for the ATC, it's a feature we're actively working on for post-4.0 development. We look forward to your continued participation on Spectrum. Thanks for sharing your passion and feedback with us! o7