With Star Citizen's alpha 2.6 recently released to backers, Chris Roberts' Cloud Imperium Games also sneaked in a "Director Mode" for the camera, allowing the community to go wild with screenshots and video of the game.

Today, they released a video, which you can see at the bottom of the post, showcasing some of those screenshots and videos, and they look really gorgeous.

On top of that, the game overtook another crowd funding milestone today, breaking a whopping 141 million dollars.

Last, but certainly not least, the developer reached out via email providing information on the development focuses right after the holidays, including an upcoming 2.61 patch.

There are many exciting things in store for Star Citizen this year. We’ll continue to modify and improve our game engine to better suit Star Citizen’s unique needs. Gameplay will get deeper as new systems come online to provide players the chance to do more than pew-pew. I also expect exciting advancements as we integrate our revolutionary tech, like subsumption and procedural planets, into the game. On the Community front, we’ll be releasing Spectrum, our new and improved community platform, and revamping our current shows and adding new ones in an effort to best communicate with all of you.

This week Star Citizen devs got back to work after some much deserved time off. Presently the Production Team is huddled with the different team leads updating and detailing out the tasks we have for this year. You’ll begin to see some of these details once we've had the opportunity to refine the Star Citizen and Squadron 42 schedules.

We were happy to see positive feedback from the Alpha 2.6 release and impressed by the number of stunning videos and images being created with the new camera controls. We have been digesting both our own and your thoughts on Alpha 2.6 now that it has been live for two weeks. We are planning releasing an incremental patch, 2.6.1 with some of the features that slipped out of 2.6, bug fixes for increased stability (although 2.6 was possibly our most stable patch to date) as well as continued balance and gameplay tweaks. Expect to hear more details on timing in the next couple of weeks.

2016 was a noteworthy year in Star Citizen’s development. 2017 with Squadron 42 and Alpha 3.0 is looking to be even better.

Before you roll into the video below, let's bow in the general direction of full disclosure, and mention that the author of this article is a proud backer of the game, pretty much since the time in which no one believed it would even reach its crowdfunding goal on Kickstarter.