Star Citizen's annual Foundation Festival returns from July 2 to 14, celebrating the Star Citizen community and welcoming new pilots to the 'verse. This year's event also features a Free Fly period, giving all players free access to the game and the chance to fly eight distinct ships and vehicles - a perfect introduction to Star Citizen's rich and varied universe. Hot on the heels of the Alpha 4.2: Storm Breaker release, which introduced new missions and the towering irradiated Apex Valakkar, a colossal worm-like creature from the depths below, the Foundation Festival arrives at the perfect time to prepare new players for the adventure ahead.

To get started, newcomers can check the New Player Essentials, packed with helpful tips, guides, and must-know information to take their first confident steps in the 'verse. There are also in-game tutorials, beginner friendly articles and videos on the Welcome Hub, and the Guide System further connects beginners with veteran players eager to lend a hand and share their knowledge.

Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) is excited to announce the recent release of Star Citizen Alpha 4.1: Orbital Assault, a significant milestone in the continued evolution of a shared, physicalized Universe of endless possibilities. Packed with immersive new gameplay elements and revolutionary technological advancements, Alpha 4.1 solidifies Star Citizen's position as the most ambitious and immersive space simulation in gaming today.

Fight from Planet to the Stars in Alpha 4.1: Orbital Assault

• Laser Quest: A brand-new multi-stage sandbox event will challenge players like never before. Seamlessly battle new fauna in the sands of Daymar before carving a path to an orbital platform for an epic combined-arms showdown.
• A Curious Collector: An enigmatic new NPC has arrived in the Stanton system, in search of rare minerals and discoverable, rumor has it he offers the highest tier loot and rewards to those with the goods.
• Crossroads of Crime: A brand-new Arena Commander 'Crossroads of Crime' map featuring three major bases and interconnected playscapes. Supporting game modes such as Free Flight, Elimination, Team Elimination, Gun Rush, Single Weapon Elimination, and Tank Royale, this map adds fresh competitive depth to Arena Commander.
• Quality of Life Enhancements: Improved kiosk interactions, enhanced item recovery mechanics, and significant backend optimizations ensure smoother gameplay.

Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) surprised fans with a live playthrough of Squadron 42, their upcoming epic single-player narrative space adventure. Revealed onstage at CitizenCon 2954, the live showcase of the opening moments of the game offered attendees the most in-depth look at the visually stunning Squadron 42 yet, demonstrating action-packed space combat, grand cinematic storytelling and incomparable scale and fidelity. Squadron 42 is in the polish phase of production, with developer CIG revealing their intention to launch the game in 2026. Following the conclusion of the presentation, CIG released the full recording of the live playthrough on their YouTube channel.

Squadron 42 is a cinematic, single-player sci-fi adventure set in the universe of Star Citizen. Fight the good fight in an epic and immersive narrative full of action and intrigue; facing off against ruthless enemies in strategic FPS battles on foot and intense space combat from a cockpit. The epic space adventure will be experienced alongside a stunning all-star cast including Mark Hamill, Eleanor Tomlinson, Gary Oldman, John Rhys-Davies, Sophie Wu, Jonathan Bailey, and Henry Cavill.

Leading gaming accessories maker Turtle Beach Corporation today unveiled its all-new, eagerly anticipated Turtle Beach VelocityOne Flightstick, a universal simulation controller joystick for air and space combat simulation games. Designed for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Windows PCs, the VelocityOne Flightstick is the gaming flight stick of the future, equipping gamers with immersive, accurate controls for navigating air and space flight sim and combat games. A total of eight axes, including contactless hall effect sensors on the main X&Y axes, provide precise control while two multifunction levers handle main engine power and adjustment of control surfaces. VelocityOne Flightstick's precise nano trim wheel allows for fine tuning of altitude, and an OLED Flight Management Display makes for easy adjustments. With 27 programmable buttons, a rapid-fire trigger, an integrated trackpad, and Bluetooth connectivity to its companion app, Turtle Beach's VelocityOne Flightstick arms gamers on Xbox and Windows PCs with a multitude of controls. VelocityOne Flightstick is available for pre-order now from www.turtlebeach.com and participating retailers for $129.99 (£119.99/€129.99) MSRP and launches November 17, 2022.

"VelocityOne Flightstick melds Turtle Beach's expertise in controller design with the latest technologies to give air and space combat sim gamers a groundbreaking, modern flight stick controller experience," said Juergen Stark, Chairman and CEO, Turtle Beach Corporation. "While our award-winning VelocityOne Flight products continue to impress the flight simulation community, there's a massive audience of gamers who love air and space flight combat, making the Flightstick perfect for games like Microsoft Flight Sim 2020, X-Plane, Elite Dangerous, War Thunder, Star Citizen, Everspace, and Star Wars flight games to name a few. However gamers want to fly - whether casually, or by the seat of their pants with their hair on fire - it'll be a better experience with VelocityOne Flightstick in their hands."

Port Royal is the name of the latest component of UL Benchmarks 3DMark. Designed to take advantage of the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API, this benchmark features an extreme poly-count test-scene with real-time ray-traced elements. Screengrabs of the benchmark depict spacecraft entering and leaving mirrored spheres suspended within a planet's atmosphere, which appear to be docks. It's also a shout out to of a number of space-sims such as "Star Citizen," which could up their production in the future by introducing ray-tracing. The benchmark will debut at the GALAX GOC Grand Final on December 8, where the first public run will be powered by a GALAX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti HOF graphics card. It will start selling in January 2019.

The free, one week-long trial for Star Citizen is now live, but something is amiss: users trying to connect to Roberts Space Industries' website in hopes of registering and downloading the game so as to see what all the funding (and fuss) is all about in a more hands-on approach are being met with a 504 Gateway Time-Out error. It seems that the company - or one of its service providers - is failing to provide enough server oomph to sustain all the users trying to get a piece of indiscriminate space flying on their hands. Provided the servers are fully restored before the end of the trial, you can access here to register, and here to download the game's executable.

Star Citizen, the entirely amazing game that could (but may never be, considering the pace of development), is going to have a free trial between November 23rd and November 30th. The announcement, made by Cloud Imperium Games, comes as a celebration of sorts for the game, as they're readying release of the first ever explorable planet in the game - Hurston.

As an added bonus, Cloud Imperium Games will allow those who partake in the festivities to experience the thrill of flying one of those amazing ships the game is particularly known for - in unlimited fashion, for free. The new Free Fly event will see ships from all in-game manufactured being offered for trial at a rhythm of one manufacturer per day - but no, you don't get to keep the keys. Just the feeling of the behemoth or nimble space-farer you choose to take for a ride. Cloud Imperium is also promising "some surprises in store for those of you who make the trek out to Hurston and see what Lorville's all about, as well as some fun interactive activities on the website", so you should all stay tuned. Check out the announcement website on the source for a comprehensive listing of the flyable ships that are currently available in-game.

Positional audio, like Socialism, follows a cycle of glamorization and investment every few years. Back in 2011-12 when AMD maintained a relatively stronger position in the discrete GPU market, and held GPGPU superiority, it gave a lot of money to GenAudio and Tensilica to co-develop the TrueAudio technology, a GPU-accelerated positional audio DSP, which had a whopping four game title implementations, including and limited to "Thief," "Star Citizen," "Lichdom: Battlemage," and "Murdered: Soul Suspect." The TrueAudio Next DSP which debuted with "Polaris," introduced GPU-accelerated "audio ray-casting" technology, which assumes that audio waves interact differently with different surfaces, much like light; and hence positional audio could be made more realistic. There were a grand total of zero takers for TrueAudio Next. Riding on the presumed success of its RTX technology, NVIDIA wants to develop audio ray-tracing further.

A very curious sentence caught our eye in NVIDIA's micro-site for Turing. The description of RT cores reads that they are specialized components that "accelerate the computation of how light and sound travel in 3D environments at up to 10 Giga Rays per second." This is an ominous sign that NVIDIA is developing a full-blown positional audio programming model that's part of RTX, with an implementation through GameWorks. Such a technology, like TrueAudio Next, could improve positional audio realism by treating sound waves like light and tracing their paths from their origin (think speech from an NPC in a game), to the listener as the sound bounces off the various surfaces in the 3D scene. Real-time ray-tracing(-ish) has captured the entirety of imagination at NVIDIA marketing to the extent that it is allegedly willing to replace "GTX" with "RTX" in its GeForce GPU nomenclature. We don't mean to doomsay emerging technology, but 20 years of development in positional audio has shown that it's better left to game developers to create their own technology that sounds somewhat real; and that initiatives from makers of discrete sound cards (a device on the brink of extinction) and GPUs makers bore no fruit.

Star Citizen is once again making the headlines. On this occasion, the trending topic is the exclusive Legatus Pack bundle valued at $27,000. There are many things you can do with a sum of that magnitude like buy a new car, put a down payment for a house, go on a vacation, repay a student loan, etc. Oh, and apparently now you can be the proud owner of a fleet of spaceships in Star Citizen. The Legatus pack contains 117 spaceships and 163 extras in form of in-game items and skins. However, not any scrub can go out and buy the package. As a matter of fact, the Legatus pack isn't visible to the Average Joe's eye. To be eligible to purchase or even view it, you must have attained the concierge status. For those of us who aren't citizens of the Star Citizen universe, the concierge status is granted to backers who've spent over $1000 on the game. Is the Legatus pack out of your budget? Then perhaps you could be interested in a virtual lot of land.

Following on its plan to deliver quarterly updates to Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) today announced the release of Star Citizen Alpha 3.1 to its eager fan base. Star Citizen is an epic first-person experience where players fly highly detailed space ships, battle on foot through massive environments, explore life-sized planets and moons, and discover boundless adventure in an ever-changing and expanding galaxy.

New features in the 3.1 update include the much-anticipated character customizer, allowing players to add a distinctive look to their in-game avatars by personalizing their physical appearance, as well as the Service Beacon feature, providing players the ability to send out distress calls which other players can detect and respond to.

Squadron 42 is the single-player, story-driven portion of the world's most successful Kickstarter project, Star Citizen. The game, which originally made use of Crytek's CryEngine, has made the move to Amazon's CryEngine-based Lumberyard engine, which should deliver impressive visuals as well. Squadron 42 is being sold in a standalone version costing $45, and for that price, Cloud Imperium games is promising an epic sci-fi story, populated by more than 10 hours of performance capture of top-tier actors like Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, and Gillian Anderson, just to name a few (Andy Serkis also makes an appearance, he who is one of the most talented performance-capture actors of our times.)

With all those features, you'd be forgiven for asking "But will it run Squadron 42'" out of your current or future hardware - especially considering the history of CryEngine-based games. however, the system requirements are at the same time vague and, for the most part, unimpressive. They call for Windows 7 through 10 (DX11 title), a DX11-capable graphics card with minimum 2GB VRAM, and 4GB strongly recommended, a quad-core CPU, and the outlier of this sample, 16GB+ of system RAM. An SSD is also strongly recommended for the experience, which isn't all that surprising considering Lumberyard's roots.

Crytek has filed a suit against Cloud Imperium Games (developers of Star Citizen and Squadron 42) for wrongdoings regarding Crytek's CryEngine. Cloud Imperium Games has recently moved over to Amazon's Lumberyard, a free, cross-platform triple-A game engine which has been built-upon by Amazon, based and licensed from Crytek's CryEngine in 2015. Apparently, in doing so, Cloud Imperium Games has violated a number of agreed-upon items on their engine licensing contract, for which Crytek is now going after for damages and compensation.

The essence of the suit stands in that Crytek only licenced its engine for the development of a single game - Star Citizen - and that CIG is now developing a second one in Squadron 42, for which it had no rights to use Crytek's IP and assets. Futhermore, CIG agreed, when signing the contract, to use Crytek's logos as part of the game development and final game presentation, so as to provide awareness for the company, but has since removed them from all instances of the game.

Star Citizen is easily one of the greatest success stories of our times. Even though the game is currently in the alpha stage, Cloud Imperium, the company behind Star Citizen, managed to raise over $168 million through crowdfunding. However, the amount raised doesn't seem to cut it as the developer has decided to implement even more microtransactions into the game. Cloud Imperium has considered it necessary to start selling virtual parcels to their intergalactic citizens as another source of income. According to the company, the money will be reinvested into the game's development. If there's a particular planet, moon or asteroid that you would like to colonize, now is the time to break your piggy bank. However, it won't be cheap. You've been warned.

The current market price for a 4 km by 4 km lot is $50, while the bigger 8 km by 8 km lots are going for $100. As a Star Citizen landowner, the player will be rewarded with a fancy GEOTACK planetary beacon. This beacon prevents other players from invading the owner's property, while also serving as an aid for owners to find their way home. Cloud Imperium is kind enough to give the player complete freedom to what they want to do with their property. So, it's up to the landowner to decide if he wants to use the land to build a cozy home or put a business on it. Do you have some extra money lying around? Invest it in a virtual piece of land to start building your patrimony today!