There's no chance of a general release before Citizencon now I don't think. Evocati might get their hands on it though.
A lot of the community have requested them to just release whst they have, (totally ignoring the meaning of the word 'blocker'), and it seems they have listened. They must be getting a little desperate to just get it out of the door though. It is a little embarrassing.
26 little bugs in the code, 26 little bugs. Knock one off the load, compile the code, find 64 little bugs in the code.
It's not that simple.
But it also plays into Chris's recent statements about early access. So if they're just going to ignore/hide bugs, cut stuff, then release what they have, that basically moves toward that EA goal. Though I don't see how it makes the project any less early access or not, because even in EA, you still have to decide what builds to release and which not to. e.g. the last patch I released for LoD was back in March; and I haven't released another build since then because quite a few blockers are pending as part of the major (vehicles) change that we did, as well as the UE4 parallel porting effort.
But that's the thing with early access, you're not entitled to anything because all you're doing is paying to access the game in dev, base on what the devs want to release. Star Citizen is different because technically,
as I wrote here, it's been in EA since the first hangar module, except that they weren't calling it that. Also, they were the ones building up the expectations of backers - especially having raised $160M while making insurmountable promises with release dates. In EA, they don't need to do any of that. Just do regular updates letting backers know what's going on, then release a build when they think it's ready. It's no different from how internal dev works.
Problem is, they simply cannot wipe away the previous approach to the project by simply announcing that they're in EA, so no more dates, we'll release a build when it's ready etc.
The fact that they're going to now release the builds to backers in stages via Evocati, is fucking hilarious to me because I remember back when I indicated that releasing a massive game in a "
staggered release" fashion was the
best way to do it when dealing with public builds, Shitizens were having a field day attacking me. Oh how soon we forget.
None of this matters because the project is FUBAR anyway.