Star Citizen Alpha 3.3 Going LIVE & 3.4 Features Delayed
Welcome to some more Star Citizen with Updates to 3.3, 3.3.5, changes to 3.4 a quick talk about game dev branches all summarized from Around the Verse Pillar Talk that also had a little bit on gas tech too.
Around the Verse – Pillar Talk
As confirmed on AtV Alpha 3.3 is going LIVE later today 9th November
3.3.5 is going to a PTU of some sort (probably Evocati) in short order once 3.3 is released, this could be a few hours it could be a couple of days later.
Object Container Streaming is now stable enough to support 3.3 and their future plans, scaling their massive world on the client side.
Alpha 3.4 the December Release is going to see some features pushed into 3.5 as The sheer amount of work needed of this puts 3.4 at risk of release including. It takes time for them to get a game branch from their game dev build and work on it for release and then bring it back to gamedev once it’s live because of this they are basically staying on the same 3.3/3.35 game dev branch for 3.4, meaning they can bring the more simple things over to 3.4 and the more complex things will be moving to 3.5:
This means that ; Female Character, ArcCorp – Procedural Planet & City Improvements & the 300 Series will be moving to March 2019.
We will still be getting The Hurston Business District, a FOIP / VOIP Polish, Ships & Vehicles and a load of other updates in 3.4 though
They made this decision on Monday to do this as they want 3.4 in a Stable state for December 20th. It is more of a 3.4 light now.
Their goal with Game Dev and Branching is to make the process more efficient & stable.
They are going to quarantine section of the Game Dev Branch, then have some downstream dev streams that teams do their development in, the feature they are working on once finished will then get reviewed, go through a QA-Test Request to be fully tested. If it’s stable and doesn’t hurt performance it gets added into Game Dev where it is not quarantined.
Their new streamlined process is coming out at the start of 2019 & should make for quicker more stable builds.
On a 3.3 note again a PTU 3.3.0ad patch came out with 2 lines changes Ruto’s hologram should now properly appear & fixed 2 server crashes. This is not a stable patch tho, most likely they will have to fix the cause or roll these changes back for the LIVE build
They also showed some bits on their Cloud Tech in AtV:
They are making tools for volumetric Clouds, they can make a shape and the tool makes it into a realistic looking cloud, this process can turn months & weeks, into days and weeks.
Using Curl Noise and Splines they can make interesting shapes in the clouds too.
The tools basically turn geometry into volumes at high detail, it also allows artists to show and plan rather than just tell others what they want. It still requires a lot of work and then polish and they can use it for very dense obvious areas that restrict your view, or just subtle color variations in space.
With 3.3 LIVE I’ll get a Patch Notes & New Features Video, Quick Start Guide, State of The Game, Updated Setup Guide for VOIP / FOIP and some more how to / gameplay focused videos up in the next few days.
As well as a 3.4 Roadmap update once we have the changes in a bit more detail.
I honestly didn’t think ArcCorp was going to slip to 3.5 but at least they explained their process in detail in atv which I appreciate.