Star Citizen – Why Did Alpha 3.24 Break At Launch
Welcome to some more Star Citizen News, it’s September 10th 2024, what’s been going on? What’s going on this week?
Newsletter – Jumptown is still running until September 12th 8pm UTC.
There is a ship sale on as well as part of that.
That said… 3.24 has bugs that are prohibitive to play… a lot of players are playing 3.24.1 on the PTU or waiting for Alpha 4.0. We also know a lot of CIGs focus is on 4.0 as well.
The Alpha 3.24.1 Patch (that’s in Open PTU currently) fixes a huge range of the issues in 3.24 but also adds.
Argo ATLAS Titan Suits, Exo-Suit.
Big Powerful (currently unique) tractor beam…
Everyone has access to them in the PTU, you can just spawn em in your hangar.
We don’t know when they are going to go on sale… but I would expect them to turn up real soon and as part of that 3.24.1 live patch as they do kinda appear in the 3.24 trailer.
No idea how much they will cost tho!
In regards to the issues that 3.24 current live build has had Benoit Beausejour – Chief Technology Officer talked about it in SCL.
How did the 3.24 update go?
The release was a bit rough because there were several fundamental systems involved in the development of Star Citizen, such as instance systems, hangars, player synchronization, but we’ve been working on fixes since the update’s release to improve the situation. Many have already been released, and more are in development. The 3.24 update also allows us to monitor the game’s optimization much more closely thanks to new metrics and information we can now analyze. The hangars are the first Instance Location areas, and this new technology will allow us to continue developing more content for the game.
Benoit also explains why some bugs couldn’t be detected before going LIVE, such as the Hauling Missions. In internal testing, the PTU, and with Evocati, the testing process is more ‘serious,’ and players completed the missions fully on average. On the LIVE environment, many players abandoned missions, picked up another, then abandoned that one as well. What happened is that the database and tables stored these cargo spawn requests per location in the PU, creating a queue that blocked new cargo generation requests. Player behaviors are very different across environments, and we needed to release 3.24 Live to continue addressing these issues, so thank you for your patience.
Why did players have to wait so long for a new Server Meshing test?
The previous test provided us with a lot of information to improve Server Meshing, Hybrid performance, and Game Server Communication, which needed improvements due to excessive interaction delays—what we called the NMQ, the Network Message Queue. The RMQ, Replication Message Queue, is the new adaptation of the NMQ, allowing us to ‘listen’ to far more information requested by players, such as opening doors, equipping items, etc…, to better manage interaction delays. Now that this new system is ready, we’d like to have the community test it to continue improving it.
► Right now, some servers are running on NMQ, and others on RMQ, to compare the data. When the time is right, all servers will switch to RMQ.
There are some RMQ and SMing tests that CIG is keen to do working towards 4.0’s release.
Last week they ran into some snags and prohibitive crashes.
So they are investigating and solving those before putting it up for test again.
This may well be open to everyone. CIG will be testing Stanton with SM on and the new RMQ with some updates(it is on a 3.24.x build but with that new stuff). The are aiming for 800-1000 players per shard for these tests.
Hopefully they will turn up this week.
How can we increase the game’s Server FPS?
Mainly, the physics engine has to handle many entities at once, which can reduce performance. Server Meshing, among other things, will greatly help manage entities and their physics calculations. We’ve seen very good performance improvements during the latest Server Meshing tests. There are also plenty of optimizations that can help in this regard, but Server Meshing is going to be a real game changer for balancing server load, and increasing server FPS.
Is Pledge Item Recovery still planned?
We had to remove it from 3.24 because we needed to send the update for LIVE testing, but we talk about it very regularly, and it will come as soon as possible in a future update.
The RSI Website got some visual updates… expect more updates in the coming weeks and months.
For those of you that missed it ISC looked at Space Cows and Character updates coming to Alpha 4.0. The Quasi-Grazers (Space Cows) have 5 varieties that will appear in the patch with different amounts of hair, eggs and skin tones. They are actually relatively developed. You can harvest eggs OR on the Artic ones the tongue. Lots are on microTech and they will knock you over!
Character updates include new hair styles, beards, stubble, piercings and tattoos.
There was a little rekindled discussion on Master Modes last week after YogiKlatt who is Principal Vehicle Programmer at CIG responded to some Spectrum messages. He outlined the need for Master Modes and their direction. However not everyone agrees with the intention, direction or even what it has / will address for star citizen’s flight and combat model. I remain confident that CIG will get the current MMs into a good position over the next year or 2… first more for PvE for the needs of Squadron and then better balanced for PvP a little later.
Later Tuesday – the Narrative team brings us a new lore offering with a Whitley’s Guide to the Esperia Prowler. Feared by Humanity during the Tevarin Wars, the Prowler was given an unexpected second life thanks to Esperia.
This Week’s ISC is on the RSI Zeus MK2 and the new MFDs that are planned for I believe an Alpha 3.24.x patch.
Friday, Star Citizen Live is a Q&A with Chad McKinney (Senior Lead Gameplay Engineer) on all things cargo and hangars. There is a Question Thread on Spectrum you can upvote or add to. And the show will be at 3pm UTC on the SC twitch.