Star Citizen Hits Major Milestone – Alpha 3.17.2 Development Heats Up
Star Citizen has hit 4 million user accounts… We’ve got some new PTU updates as CI tries to get 3.17.2 ready for prime time and CI talk about the Snake Pit, a race track they’ve made more official for the PU in the latest patch.
Star Citizen has hit 4 million user accounts… no doubt a good portion of these are going to be alt accounts of players so Star Citizen is not at 4m unique players BUT it’s going to probably be close to 3m. Star Citizen is making a record breaking amount of money month on month and smashing previous years highs, from all sources it’s raise well over $500m (half a billion). It will be interesting to see where we are after this years CitizenCon and IAE in November typically providing a massive amount of funding too
We have had a couple of 3.17.2 PTU Patches (l & m) that are attempting to fix some of the more major problems with Star Citizen’s AI functionality / Netcode Jitter vs Stability issues.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.17.2l PTU
- Tonkified the Nova Tank with a great increase in health
- Temporarily disabled decoupled lighting on lower planetary effect LODs which should give great client side performance gains in storms and dust
Bug Fix wise
- Fixed multiple areas of missing atmosphere in the new grimHEX hospital
- Fixed a visarea issue in the Aegis Hammerhead near the portal leading to the main elevator room
- There should no longer be a Visarea issue in the Port Tressler galleria
- Purchasing a rental vehicle from a rental kiosk should now properly update displayed money on the Kiosk and mobiGlas
- Fixed 4 Client & 2 Server Crashes
- Greatly increased the fuel reserves of the Khartu-Al
- Moderate reduction in hull health for the Nova Tank in response to player feedback
Bug Fixes here
- Fixed an issue causing many elevators around the PU to be be unresponsive or inaccessible
- Crash Recovery back into the PTU should now function correctly
- Red Wind Delivery mission should no longer create duplicate mission boxes
- Fixed VisArea issues on multiple doors on the upper deck of the 400i
- Tumbril Nova Paints should now correctly be applied to the body
- Fixed 2 Client Crashes & a Main Thread Deadlock
This still leaves various Known Issues with the main ones listed being:
- Actors are teleporting around after networking updates (Ongoing improvements and testing)
- Some Enemy AI will not engage Security AI or Players
- Several locations at grimhex do not have an atmosphere
- All weapons are held like a pistol whilst moving in EVA
- Destroy the Reclaimer Objective Results in CS2 for destruction of vehicle
- Some Enemy AI will not engage Security AI or Players
- Weapon holsters or un-holsters unintentionally
- Components and interior zones remain when ships are destroyed
- Ships on landing pads end up in “unknown state” for location and have to be reclaimed after the ship is stored or streamed out
- Medical beacon does not complete mission/payment when player is brought back from incapacitation
- Missing Ships on SCOUNDREL PACK (and others) on PTU 3.17.2 (This is a PTU only issue that is being worked on)
I am hoping that 3.17.2 will go to a wider PTU this weekend as it’s still currently Wave 1 PTU so quite a small test group currently… but it depends if CI think it’s ready for that or not. And with how unstable it’s been for me with 30k server crashes and CTD client crashes… well it needs more time to get it in a good place before live at least… tho CI might already have fixes in the works.
Its aggravating that it seems we can have a super stable verse BUT with terrible AI and jitter OR functional AI and improved netcode BUT mega unstable. That’s why the PTU is for testing BUT I’d love to know your recent experiences of the 3.17.2 PTU branch.
But there is even more coming to 3.17.2… This Time on Patch Watch CI talked about a Race Track that’s been added to 3.17.2 or really it’s been made into a more permanent POI. So let’s learn about the Snake Pit… CI said:
This week, we want to try something different and talk about how our excitement for your adventures translates into the ‘verse.
To give you the full scope, we need to backtrack a bit. Two racers, Osashes and BlackMaze, were scouting the Stanton system for natural tracks for their community-driven Extreme G Racing (XGR) Stanton Cup.
Just 8km away from the Rayari McGrath Research Outpost on Clio, one of microTech’s moons, they found what they were looking for – a series of canyons from which they designed a thrilling course to challenge any pilot. The Snake Pit was born, with iconic checkpoints like Turn’n Burn, Close Contact, Emerald Avenue, The Pinch, and Drifter’s Paradise.
In a standard Patch Watch, we probably would have just written:
The team added structures around one of the community’s improvised race tracks on Clio, located about 8km from the Rayari McGrath Research Outpost. The goal was to help new players to get into racing by providing clearer landmarks and some visual aids during turns. Our lighting artists also did a great job, so the track can now be raced both day and night.
However, that wouldn’t have done it justice! So we decided to take you behind the scenes and show you how our enthusiasm for your creative ideas, and our shared love for this project, often lead to new events, missions, and locations.
So, why don’t we let our developer Official_Neno speak for themself? Let’s go!
When the Montreal Studio opened up, we started watching many videos from content creators like SaltEMike, Citizen Kate (and Will), Morphologis, SuperMacBrother, and many other French and English streamers on Twitch and YouTube. One of them was BlackMaze. He started a series of videos highlighting the main differences between Star Citizen and other space games, and these videos were very useful to Star Citizen newcomers. As new employees in the Montreal studio, those videos helped us better understand the game, and we shared them with a few colleagues. So, naturally, as the videos started to focus more on racing, we ended up being more exposed to that subject.
At some point, I snuck into the XGR Discord and started attending their races just to better understand how difficult the tracks were, how long they were, their locations, how many racers participated on average, and so on. We wanted to understand what a proper racetrack should feel like, and over time, I started talking to a member of the racing community to get those answers.
The Snake Pit racetrack is actually the fourth track I built but, so far, the only one polished enough to be published to the PTU. Among others, we explored a track around a Javelin crash site, which was my personal favourite, but we never polished it sufficient enough to go live.
But, every once in a while, I get an urge to make a racetrack, and I can’t sleep until I get it done. So one evening, right before we branched the next Star Citizen Alpha build, I started working around the iconic Daymar to look for a new option to add something there. While working on Daymar, BlackMaze sent me his new time trial on their Snakepit track. So, as I had my editor open already, I just decided to check out the track they found in the dunes.
You should know that my piloting skills are still in training, so XGR’s race track surpassed my idea in complexity and length.
So instead of starting from scratch, I decided to draw on our racing pros’ experience and recreate a tested and proven track. We saw several opportunities to bring it to the next level, to make it more user-friendly, and to add geometry that would help new players get used to the track and hopefully spend less time learning the turns and give them more time for racing.
However, I didn’t want to break XGR’s iconic track, so I asked BlackMaze if it would be ok for me to play around with it to see if we could improve on a few things. So from there, I decided to spend the evening working on that track, and I showed it off the next day to my lead. Needless to say, he was pleased.
Since we had just branched into a new build and were only a few days from the first PTU release, it was far from anything we would consider a typical mandate to schedule if we wanted to realise it for Alpha 3.17.2. So my leads approached our Art Director and head of studio to show off the track. They loved it too, so they decided to pitch the racetrack to the Star Citizen Art Director and Star Citizen Live Director.
For the next few days, I polished the track in my free time because we still had the derelicts to ship, which was our priority. Luckily, we had some amazing lighting artists and QA testers that jumped in as soon as the track was ready, and with the help of our leads, QA’s excellent feedback, lighting artists, level artists, etc., we were able to push the track to the PTU servers in a matter of days. The support we had from our producer, leads, and heads of studio in Montreal and at CIG was terrific.
The idea of racetracks circulated in the Montreal team since day one. We have members of our Tools team that worked on racing games. We race go-carts together at least once a year as a team-building exercise. We play Forza regularly together. So racing is part of what we love, but we just never officially had a chance to do it in Star Citizen.
Most of us play Star Citizen in our free time, and some of us spectate the races that the community has created. I worked on multiple AAA titles before, but this level of community involvement and how it positively affects the game’s development is something that I was not used to. It is something unique about Star Citizen and something that the Turbulent and CIG teams love. We will keep supporting this, as developing a game this way is a lot of fun and extremely rewarding.
We learned a lot while making this racetrack and, hopefully, we can get more people involved and keep improving the quality level in case there is ever any other track we want to sneak into the game.
I am very excited to see how the reworked Snake Pit will affect the community and what SCR, Atmo, and all the other racing communities are working on.
See you on the race tracks!!
Boom, that’s it for your Star Citizen Updates today… 3.17.2 is making progress and I am still hoping that it will go LIVE end of next week.