A famous musician once said; "Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans". We've all experienced a setback or two this year in our own ways, and Starcross Arena's production has unfortunately suffered a bit for it. The project, though a bit dormant, is most certainly not dead. We are continuing production of Starcross Arena, as well as other titles we've elected not to put out as Early Access for reasons that must seem all too obvious. We don't have many customers, but as long as we even have 1, and we do, we're going to deliver them a finished product. Because our customers rock. So, while we do hate to ask for further patience from our existing customers, there it is.
Now then, to the future! If you haven't seen the tech demo for Unreal Engine 5, I highly suggest you check it out. Exciting things that are directly applicable to a project such as Starcross Arena are coming, and we're looking at ways to achieve the maximum benefit of Ray Tracing techniques, and some planetary volumetrics added in recent UE4 iterations are very exciting, if a bit tricky to implement in their youth. Through some code-level adaptations we've gotten a reasonable flight pathfinding AI prototype working, that we're weighing against spline-based navigation for AI ships in the "overworld" portion of the game (gotta have a life outside the arena, right?). So, there are plans, they are in motion, they're just crawling in regard to results we can publish and expect our customers to be able to enjoy. Crawling is not stopping though.