Star Citizen Alpha 3.17 Has Some MAJOR ISSUES – Can They be Solved?

Welcome to some more Star Citizen, official Star Citizen updates from Cloud Imperium are pretty bare this week.

There is no ISC or SCL as Jared / DiscoLando is relocating to the UK.

However we have had a new 3.17.0t Open PTU Patch and we are getting pretty close to a Live release now. I thought we’d go over that patch, look at the state of the PTU and what’s holding the live release up.

The Star Citizen Alpha 3.17.0t PTU made some changes

Tweaked injury triggers to be slightly more aggressive

Large hangars should no longer be missing collisions
HUD element Inner Thought prompts should no longer interfere with the Talon, 85X, and 890 Jump MFDs
Players should now be able to destroy AI Caterpillars and correctly receive mission credit
S5 Torpedoes should no longer prematurely detonate before reaching max lock-on range
Fixed an issue that was causing mining gadgets to constantly blink when not attached to a rock
Fixed an issue where Mustang variants ran out of boost too quickly

Fixed 1 Client & 1 Server Crash
Good Doctor Map crash on load fix
Fixed 1 Server Deadlock

Mining Gadgets seem to work fine, tho they can fall thru the floor and when attached to mineables they can actually be a meter or 2 away from the surface.

CI have a feedback thread for Mining Gadgets that has been getting some attention in fact there has been a dev response there

“hopefully in the next patch the “Red Blinking” should now only be active if the Gadget detaches from the minable

(Including pressing the detach button, to allow you to see if someone wants to steal them from your rock)

Once you hold them in your hands or have them attached to the Armor/Backpack (or lying in the showcase in the shop ) they will not blink red anymore.

Also we found an issue that might be the cause for Asteroids not being scannable/minable, no promises yet, but keep your fingers crossed.

In regards to balancing we are aware of the problems and trying to get some work on it done between other tasks.

It’s a little bit of a shame they are removing red blinking light from when they are on your back… I think it should be a thing you can toggle… then I can make an FPS tag / capture game with them.

Testing Focus

3.17 contains new streaming changes that we are testing on the PTU and players may experience infinite loading or very long load times along with possible missing assets in game such as elevators or ships not streaming in. We are updating and fixing these issues as we find them and each new build will hopefully address these more and more.

Ship Positional Desync Test

In 3.17.0 we have put in a networking update that should reduce ship to ship desync. We would like to know how well this update works and if there are any observable knock-ons. Relative to 3.16, you should feel as though the facing direction and position of other player ships are much more accurate and real time. We have created a feedback thread in spectrum so please let us know about any potential issues with this that could include ship jittering, rubberbanding, jittering, and other effects of that nature.

Due to recent improvements on desync we have uncovered hitreg bugs which we likely cannot resolve for 3.17. In the direction of the velocity vector the collision shape of a ship will be slightly in front of visual model (the exact offset is velocity dependent). There is currently no work-around so avoid hovering inside the velocity vector of another ship and lead your shots a bit more during combat.

MISC Hull-A
Lorville Hospital and Space Station Clinic Variations
River
Coffee Shop Vendor
Ship-to-Ship Refueling
Mining Gadgets
Shopping and Selling T0
Ship and Ship Components Inventory Updates
Player Injury Updates
DNA Head Texture Updates

Testing appears to be going very well too as the patch seems pretty stable however… there are various Known Issues and some accessibility problems that need to be addressed before a live build comes out… currently listed known issues are:

The Extraction Laser picks up more Shards than it can Collect at once, causing them to collide and be thrown
Turret acceleration changes have been reverted to pre-3.17.0 while we work on rebalancing and will be coming back in a future release
Players cannot buy components directly into ship storage (will be coming later in the PTU cycle)
AR Markers are present when opening the mobiGlas which can make it hard to read
Ships can explode after players exit them
Many mineable asteroids can’t be scanned
While docked to a Starfarer the Valkyrie will continuously tilt instead of remaining stationary
Attempting to log back into a ship bed may result in a long loading screen before being sent back to the Main Menu w/ Error 30009
Equipment in inventory doesn’t equip properly to character and bounces back into inventory
Ship retrieval can time out and place a ship in a claim state
AI Combat Ships can jitter during PvE combat
Equipment loadout stuck and remains highlighted grey
Items do not immediately transfer from loot crate to personal inventory

There also appears to be issues with missions & bounties not activating or showing up correctly… which would be what I would want to have priority for fixing. I’ve also had bunker missions not spawn NPCs or immediately complete.

There appears to be increased Desync and hit reg issues currently and as CI said the hit reg issues are unlikely going to be resolved for 3.17… however they need to get the Desync and rubberbanding / jankiness in good order before a live build imo.

This all combined with fiddly and slow inventories can all be pretty stressful.

Hopefully CI have enough test info and have solutions for a lot of this for the 3.17 LIVE build.

We don’t want to be in a state where we have less accessibility to content than a previous patch. Alpha 3.17 actually has quite a bit of content and the PTU phase has been pretty long so far. I still think CI are pushing for a live build this weekend… at least if thats possible BUT if there are too much in the way of blockers then that would be foolish imo.