Star Citizen News – Major Crusader Delay – 3.9.0 This Weekend?

Welcome to some more Star Citizen… 3.9.0 is apparently REALLY CLOSE to going to 1st Wave PTU… not just very or almost BUT REALLY REALLY close.

What’s that actually mean tho, well over the last couple of weeks CI have been trying to resolve some stability and desync issues with the Evocati Build of 3.9 and that has caused them to hold the patch back for the wider PTU in addition to the disruption caused by the “global situation” and CI working from home.

CI said on Friday as part of their LIVESTREAM they are trying to get 1st wave ptu out this weekend and Zyloh added to this on Friday evening:

“Quick note since I’ve seen a lot of folks asking about Wave 1 PTU. We won’t be going to Wave 1 tonight. As we mentioned in the Livestream earlier, there’s a chance we open it up over the weekend, and we’ll keep you posted as soon as we have more information.”

This leaves us still waiting on wider PTU for 3.9 but as soon as CIG has it’s blockers that it’s identified cleared then it will go with the public facing PTU.

CI also had a little something to say in the Newsletter about testing: Are you ready for it?

The PTU is the last step before a live release and gives dedicated players access to the patch before everyone else. Access is available in waves, with most players being eligible for at least one of the rollouts. When you’re in, all we ask is that you flag any bugs to the Issue Council so they can be rectified before launch. Alpha 3.9 is full of game-changing features, from a fully-realized New Babbage to the Esperia Prowler, so do yourself (and us) a favor and get adventuring! PTU Wave 1 is imminent so stay tuned!

Also in that newsletter we had a teaser of Mining Consumables which should be in Alpha 3.9

In the Roadmap Round Up To add to the lack of 3.9 frustration tho there were some more disappointments on the Roadmap with Features being pushed out of 4.0 the Q2 2020 Patch.

Support for Server Meshing development has been highlighted as high priority across all involved teams. As a result, Server Meshing support work was prioritized and scheduled for Q2, resulting in Server to Client Actor Networking Rework tasks to be shifted back one quarter to Alpha 4.1.

Death Animation Improvements

Further work was required on the physics side for these improvements, and physics support priority was given to Body Dragging. While Body Dragging will maintain its intended release in Alpha 4.0, Death Animation Improvements will move back one quarter to Alpha 4.1.

Crusader & Orison Landing Zone

We have had to move both Crusader and its landing zone, Orison, back to the end of the year as the team required more time to create these locations. The reasons for this move are threefold: 1) the re-prioritization with focus on GrimHex and other environmental work in progress, 2) the additional time it took to complete New Babbage, and 3) delays from transitioning to a new work-from-home environment due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. As Alpha 4.2 is not yet visible on the roadmap, we will be removing these cards for the time being, but we expect to re-surface them for the 4th quarter in the near future.

This will also see the Mission Givers Lisa Gibbs and Devin Bautista move to 4.2

CI did clear up the mysterious PvP Bounties feature that was in 3.9 but they didn’t seem to know much about what it was doing there.

After confirming with the team working on this card, we’ve determined the tasks included largely consist of preliminary work for Bounty Hunting improvements that are coming in a later quarter. This Epic was not intended to be displayed publicly at this time, resulting in its removal from the Roadmap. We expect to add additional Bounty Hunter themed cards in the future as front-facing features release dates are decided upon.

They have added some additional Features to 4.0 though:

Heightmap Improvements | Updates are being made to all the heightmaps used on planets and moons to fully take advantage of their higher resolution. This will mean more detail can be utilized during the painting process.
Cutlass Blue | Building, balancing, and implementing the reworked police/militia patrol variant of the Drake Cutlass into the game.

There are 2 Features that they have added which have caused a little bit of polarization in the community.

Elevator Panel Updates | The utilitarian elevator panels are being updated to use interactable screens, as previously this was done through player inner thought.

AND

New Babbage – Shop Additions | Introducing a novelty Kiosk in the New Babbage spaceport interior which will sell souvenirs and knick-knacks. Also coming to the spaceport is The Factory Line, a flagship store for microTech, which sells their top of the line products, such as mobiGlas, simpods and various computer-related items.

The elevator panels are meme worthy as they seem pretty minor and they kind of already have them in the game, they just need to be updated for all locations/ships. The Shop Additions have some people complaining about knick-knack shops as a priority.
I actually see this as a bit of a marketing failure in the description of those features, if they had been rewritten to say Stanton UI Updates – Updating the Legacy UIs of Statons and Landing Zones to use the New more Interactive System AND Completing the New Babbage Landing Zone with additional Shops that will allow customization eventually of habs, ships and more with flair items etc…
I can totally understand the prioritization of a few devs to get certain tasks like completing zones and updating UIs so it’s done BUT some peoples hot takes will see this as the reason that Crusader has been delayed.

Could this see Pyro pushed to 2021? Well it’s certainly possible as it looks like a lot of tasks may get shifted by a quarter. At the moment it looks like maybe CI are about a month delayed in terms of development due to the recent working from home stuff and although it’s understandable that some features are slipping from 4.0 to 4.1 or later it’s still disappointing.

I was talking to a couple of devs about Theatres of War recently and they said that they have made a huge amount of progress on that and testing should start reasonably soon. As a content creator I am looking forward to playing that!

In Star Citizen Live the US Persistent Universe Feature Team gave us a little bit of tangible info:

Manual Waypoints for Quantum Travel is something they want in the future BUT they don’t want quick blind jumps for avoiding combat. They are working on exploration mechanics and you will be able to have some freedom doing that.

There are plans for Long Range Scanning POI as part of this.

There will be other ways for trade UEC with players other than Service Beacons.

We will see fuel requests for Server Beacons next.

Cargo and Refinery Decks are a whole set of locations and assets, it’s a big addition to stations. You’ll have cargo fees and times to unload and load with these as well AND you’ll be able to rent storage space here for Cargo.

They want to evolve the friends system to be able to quickly jump into a friends server and see where they are. 3.9 is a step towards that with an extended friends cap of 800 slots aswell.

Arena Commander is getting a update to allow for the rental of more gear.

We will be able to sell stolen ships and gear in the future.

Items and Shopping UIs will give more info in the future.

Ship Stats Pages are a bit broken.

And that’s it for the news this week…

I do have a couple of other bits tho.

I have a Rust Server that I have just put up, it’s one of my fav games and I am going to be giving away Star Citizen prizes for some community building on that server for participation.

The Server is BoredGamerUK and I’ll put a link to more info in the video but you can find more details on my discord.gg/boredgamer I’d love to see people there building things and blowing them up!