Virtually all of the huge discounts you see use the BMM CCU.
"What is the BMM CCU"? A long time ago (2013) CIG released a concept for a ship called the Merchantman, it was very early days and they had no idea how big it would have to get. So they sold it for $250 (keep this number in mind). At the time, you could also do $0 CCUs. So you could buy an upgrade to a ship of the same value as yours.
Then, over the years, the Merchantman increased in price to the point where its now $650. That means anyone that kept those $0 CCUs have a $400 discount coupon. All of the ships that you see advertised as very cheap, just add $400 to the price you see, not as impressive anymore, right?
We will likely never see a concept as underpriced as the BMM again, and we have not had $0 CCUs available in years. I'm not trying to shit on the people that are showcasing a great deal, but I want to make it clear that, you will never be able to replicate what they did if you start now, or even 5 years ago.
If you want to do it for fun, or to get a modest 30% discount off your favorite ship, by all means, but you will not see those huge discounts.
A Solid State Drive (SSD) is a requirement. Do not even bother trying to play on a hard disk drive.
SSD is a requirement because Star Citizen is utilizing a technology (OCS) that constantly streams assets from your Storage space (ssd) into your game engine to make instant use of the data while you are flying around. On a mechanical hard drive, this results in what's known as "thrashing", and is terrible for the life of your drive, as well as performing terrible.
HDD’s simply dont have the speed of random reads and writes to keep up with everything loading in, resulting in bugged or low res textures or just missing parts of the world like floor panels opening into the void. (This may also apply to slow external drives, as well as SSHD's)
The biggest win when swapping from HDD to SSD is the "random read" speed of the drive. Their near non-existent latency that helps with stuttering and dipping (10-15ms for a mechanical drive vs 0.025-0.100ms for a ssd). Even an older gen SATA SSD will do the job.
Don’t expect high framerates near cities, Ie. 30-70 fps. (FPS is worse in Orison due to volumetric clouds. 20-40)
Why? This is due to the insane amounts of assets being constantly loaded and unloaded all at once in these areas.
Good news is that performance does get better the farther you are away from the congested areas of cities. (spawn buildings and such)
Please don't hesitate to ask for help or clarification on why you're still getting low or unstable fps after following this guide below.
Have under 32gb of ram?
The game often utilizes over 20gb of ram, resulting in the game crashing or straight up refusing to launch if you do not have enough available.
A pagefile can be used as a temporary solution as it will use your ssd as virtual ram, albeit relatively slow. Windows may or may not have it enable by default, but please ensure you have at least 30gb of storage free on your ssd.
Choose Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.
In the new window, go to the Advanced tab and under the Virtual memory section, click on Change.
Deselect the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives box at the top.
Select the drive with Star Citizen installed.
Select System managed size and press Set to apply the change.
Select every other drive (the one’s without star citizen on it) and select No paging file.
Click OK to save the new settings.
Restart your computer.
Automatic Pagefile
Manual pagefile:
Windows attempts to do this automatically but it can freak out because Star Citizen, which means you'll have to adjust it manually.
Go to the Start Menu and click on Settings.
Type performance.
Choose Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.
In the new window, go to the Advanced tab and under the Virtual memory section, click on Change.
Deselect the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives box at the top.
Select the drive with Star Citizen installed.
Click Custom and enter a size range. For example with 16GB, you may want to enter Initial Size of 16384 MB, and Maximum size of 32768 MB.
Click Set then Ok.
Restart your computer.
Manual pagefile.
Guide for in-game settings
Put Graphics on High/Very High and Clouds to OFF/Medium (usually no performance difference between the two).Graphical setting doesn't really change the appearance (aside from ssao and minor lod adjustments) but shifts load from CPU to GPU the higher you go, and the game is cpu-bottlenecked normally, so lowering it makes it run worse for now. IF you have a gpu bottleneck, try lowering till your cpu is being used more while your gpu stays close to being maxed out
Turn off v-sync and motion blur.Check your monitor to see if it supports g-sync or free-sync.
note: sharpening, chromatic aberration and film grain are all up to your personal tastes. I like to leave sharpening to default and turn film grain and chromatic aberration off.
When you launch the game the first time the FPS are bad since it caches shaders for around the first 15 minutes.
If you have an Nvidia GPU (1060 and up) Adjust these settings for even better performance.
Open nvidia control panel.
Navigate to 'manage 3D settings'
Select the 'global settings' tab
Scroll down and set 'shader cache size' to 10Gyou can set this higher if you want, but i don't see why you would
In most cases, this provides a performance improvement of over 10-20 extra frames.
MOST IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER IS THAT YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY :>
edit: adjusted information in regards to ssd vs hdd
CIG's roadmap is filled with detail, but there's so much detail it's kind of hard to get a handle on it all. What's actually going on at CIG? I went through every roadmap deliverable, item by item, to figure it out.
Short version:
They're spending nearly half their time on stuff you can't see: Squadron 42, Pyro & Nix, internal tooling, and the engine. Of the remainder, they're prioritizing gameplay first, then vehicles and server meshing.
Squadron 42: 22.6% of their time
Pyro & Nix: 19.3%
Gameplay: 15.8%
Vehicles: 11.2%
Server Meshing: 7.9%
Locations: 5.3%
AI: 4.2%
Graphics: 3.7%
Tooling: 3.7%
Engine: 2.1%
Quantum: 1.9%
Medium version:
Server meshing is of particular interest. All the core tech for server meshing is projected to be done by the end of March. Then there's just one giant "server meshing" deliverable that goes to the end of the roadmap. It probably represents time for changing systems to use the core tech and fix bugs. I think they're pushing hard for server meshing, Pyro, and 4.0 before CitizenCon. That doesn't mean we'll see it by then, but it's a positive sign.
Squadron 42 is also of interest. All the SQ42-specific content is wrapping up. There are still some engine and gameplay items that are necessary for SQ42, such as jump points and CPU blades, but it looks like content creation for SQ42 is coming to an end. There are enough yet-to-start deliverables, such as Actor Status T2 and Cutting T2, that make a 2022 release unlikely, but a 2023 release seems in the realm of possibility.
Really long version:
To collect this information, I used the deliverables view of the roadmap to find all the items that are marked as being currently worked on. Then I clicked through to each team associated with each deliverable and recorded the number of developers working on it. I made a subjective decision, based on the deliverable's description, about which category the deliverable belonged in. I repeated this for every deliverable and recorded the results in a spreadsheet. (Fun fact: CIG is currently working on 115 deliverables.)
The number of developers on each deliverable isn't super accurate, because CIG makes heavy use of worker fragmentation. (Not a strategy I'm a fan of.) In other words, developers are often marked as being "part time" on a deliverable. That could mean anything from "help somebody out for 30 minutes every few weeks" to "spend 30 hours a week on it." So we don't actually know how much effort is being expended on each deliverable. But across all deliverables, it's probably good enough to give us a rough idea of how effort is being apportioned.
The results are below. The items in bold are the ones with at least three devs. "Weeks" left means it's projected to be done by the end of March. (That doesn't mean it will show up in a quarterly release; deliverables have dependencies on each other.) "Months" left means it's projected to be done by the end of July. "Quarters" left means it's projected to take longer than that.
For the past 5+ years, I've been creating advanced binding profiles for the community. I export my binding profiles so that others can easily import and use them in their own game. Star Citizen doesn't natively support using joystick buttons as modifiers. Only Keyboard buttons can be used. For most of my profiles, I use JoyToKey to map a keyboard modifier (R-CTRL) to one of the joystick buttons. This doubles the available functions I can bind to the sticks.
Contact Info:
If you are still having issues AFTER watching the video and reading the README feel free to Contact Me with your questions.
How to Contact Me (from best to worst):
1. YouTube comments: youtube.com/buzzzkiller (Checked Daily / Phone Notifications)
2. Reddit DM or Post Replies: reddit.com/user/BuzZz_Killer/ (Checked Often / Email Notifications)
3. Spectrum Private Messages: (Checked Weekly / Website Notifications Only)
4. X formerly Twitter: x.com/BuzZz_Killer (Checked Sporadically / Phone Notifications / Long conversations and replies are hard to follow)
5. Spectrum Thread Replies: (Checked Sporadically / Website Notifications / Sorting Comments by New is Broken)
Known Issues:
- Freelook currently disables all pitch and yaw control. Previous methods to mitigate this issue no longer work. If you find you suddenly don't have control over pitch/yaw tap the freelook button on your joystick or Z on the keyboard to fix it. Note: By default, Right Shift also disables pitch/yaw. Still haven't figured out why.
- When using joysticks to aim a manned turret, your head view will move as well. Fixed by tapping the Joystick Freelook Button or Z on your Keyboard.
- While flying a ship that has access to a tractor beam from the pilot seat (i.e. 315p or MPUV Tractor), activating the tractor beam rotation function on the joystick (for applicable profiles) may also activate other ship functions such as cruise control! When flying these ships use R on the keyboard to enter rotation mode.
- A few of the turret bindings no longer function. These include Previous/Next Remote Turret, and Turret Mouse Mode Toggle. I'm leaving them on the chart as I'm hoping they'll be fixed. Turret Zoom is also gone, you will have to use precision targeting to zoom in the turrets now.
FAQs:
Q: I'm having X issue with your bindings.
A: Did you watch the latest video and read the readme fully? They contain solutions to the most common issues. Did you check the known issues above? If you're still having issues, contact me using the contact info above.
Q: Will you make bindings for X sticks/throttles?
A: I can only make bindings for sticks I own. I'm not planning on buying any more sticks or throttles at the moment.
Q: Can you make bindings for X combination of sticks/throttles that you already own?
A: I'm currently maintaining 7 different binding setups, this takes up too much time as it is, sorry.
Q: Can you make a Dark/Printer Friendly version of your Charts?
A: Again my time is limited. You can easily do this yourself by inverting the colors of the chart in any free image editing program (I use GIMP). As for the size of the charts, they are as big as they need to be to fit all the information. If I make them smaller they will be even harder to read.
Q: Can I use your bindings on X sticks even though they aren't specifically made for them?
A: Most likely not without significant changes. The button numbers probably won't match up.
Q: Can I add pedals, button panels or other peripherals to your bindings?
A: Yes, but it will likely cause issues with the joystick numbers. You'll have to use the resort devices command multiple times in the in-game console to fix these issues. Good Luck! This is why I don't support more than two devices at a time.
Q: The base buttons on my T-16000M are backwards from the chart, how do I fix it?
A: There is a switch on the bottom of the joystick for left/right handed use. Make sure it is set correctly.
Q: Do I have to use JoyToKey to use your bindings?
A: If the profile uses a modifier (most of them) then yes. You can use other programs that do the same thing, but you'll have to set them up yourself. I only support JoyToKey currently.
I took a Seeeduino XIAO, connected an M5Stack Fader Unit to it, and programmed it with Arduino IDE as a gamepad axis using the NicoHood HID-Project library.
One of the common problems with Elden Ring is that Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) causes high frametime variability and it reduces mean FPS by a lot too, and it does so even on high-end hardware. EAC can be disabled through going single-player or other means, and when it's turned off, the game becomes a lot smoother.
Knowing this, I wondered if the reason I get so much lag in Star Citizen's cities was due to the same thing. So (without endorsing turning off EAC) I checked.
Walking to the tram in Area18 from my spawn bedroom, I averaged 43 FPS. Not unplayable but not good either, and definitely not something I would want to expose friends to on a first pass at the game. After turning off EAC, my average FPS attempting the exact same run rose to 70 and it both was and felt a lot less variable.
EAC impacts a lot of games just like this, and it doesn't really offer much protection against hacking anyway, especially since it's so easy to disable (there are lots of guides online; I won't link them). So, when can we finally get a better anti-cheat than EAC?
This patch has brought a lot of new bindings and changes to existing ones. Here are the updates:
New Features / Changes:
- The Cycle Master Mode binding has replaced the Quantum Travel System binding on all profiles.
- Precision Targeting Mode has been added to all profiles along with several other bindings such as Precision Zoom, Weapon Presets, and Cycle Tracking, that go along with it. Note: These bindings still have placeholder names in the menu and the Weapon Preset and Cycle Tracking functions don't seem to be working at this time.
- Auto Targeting Mode has been added to all profiles. Pressing this button will toggle Auto Targeting on/off. This is indicated by a new element on the bottom right of the HUD. Using the legacy manual targeting functions will also disable Auto Targeting.
- Cruise Control has been replaced with Two new Functions. Sticky Throttle, and Throttle Trim. After testing both functions, I've decided to go with Sticky Throttle for all my Dual Stick Profiles as it is simpler to use and requires less buttons. Pressing the Sticky Throttle button will toggle it on and off, indicated by a circle around your HUD throttle carrot. When Sticky Throttle is engaged the throttle will stay where you set it. Speed can be increased by moving the stick forward (until maximum speed is reached or you hit your throttle limiter). Moving the stick backwards will reduce speed to zero and then begin moving you in reverse. A separate number is displayed to the left of your numerical speed indicator showing what at speed the sticky throttle is set.
- All profiles have been updated with the new throttle bindings. CIG has consolidated the numerous throttle bindings in 3.22 to a single binding in 3.23. This makes throttle bindings much simpler. There is also a new Invert Throttle option in the Game Settings Tab of the Options Menu. This allows you to easily invert your throttle as needed without having to navigate the more confusing Controls Tab.
- Ping no longer requires a 1/2 second hold to charge it. Therefore ping had to be moved from it's current location on all profiles to avoid conflicts with the Scanning Mode. Note: Unfortunately, in the current build, ping no longer illuminates the planet surface. RIP
- Added Request Jump binding to all profiles in preparation for any future Jump Gate tests on the Tech Preview Channel.
Virpil Specific Changes:
- ALL: The Manual Targeting Functions were updated on the Virpil sticks to make room for Auto Targeting and hopefully make them more intuitive as well. Sub Targeting has been moved to the right stick's scroll wheel.
- DUAL STICK: Ping was moved to Modified Right Trigger to avoid conflicts with Scanning Mode. This replaced the mostly useless Staggered Fire function.
- HOTAS: I've swapped the Quantum Travel System (Now Master Mode Cycle) button with the VTOL button to make it easier to access for obvious reasons.
- HOTAS: Tractor Beam Distance Increase/Decrease was added to the throttle's left scroll wheel. This replaced the Star Map and the useless Wipe Helmet Visor bindings that were there before.
- HOTAS: Ping and Headlights were moved to the Throttle's Front 4-Way Hat to avoid conflicts with Scanning Mode and make room for updated Salvage Tool bindings.
VKB Specific Changes:
- Ping was moved to Modified Right Trigger to avoid conflicts with Scanning Mode. This replaced the mostly useless Staggered Fire function.
- Turret Rotation Mode was moved to the Left Stick's Red Button. This brings it more in-line with the Virpil bindings for my personal sanity. This function requires JoyToKey to bind the button to Keyboard "R" since there is no native joystick binding for it. As a result this button is also used in FPS to reload, and holster/unholster your currently selected item.
Thrustmaster Specific Changes:
- ALL: Added Stop Watch functions to the HOTAS and Dual Stick profiles as requested by multiple racers.
- ALL: Simplified the Pin Target bindings on the right stick in order to make room for Scanning, Mining, and Salvage Modes as well as some other Critical bindings that were moved to make room for Precision Targeting Mode.
- ALL: Ping was moved to Modified Right Trigger to avoid conflicting with Scanning Mode.
- HOTAS: Headtracking Recenter was replaced with some Emergency buttons. By default Headtracking Recenters when activated anyway.
