Star Citizen Incoming Update Preparing For Alpha 3.18

Welcome to some more Star Citizen there an important hotfix dropping for the latest Star Citizen Build, we have the week’s schedule which we will go thru and we have even more questions answered by that very awesome Lead Ship Tech Art Dev from CI on Reddit.

There have been various problems and issues with Star Citizen and there is a Alpha 3.17.2 – Hotfix Incoming that should go a long way to address these, however they might cause your food, drink and ammo to disappear… what? CI said:

Hey everyone!

During the post-launch period of Alpha 3.17.2, we identified several issues with how in-game transactions are both made and completed, thanks to the enthusiastic expenditures players made at the start of the patch cycle. The high amount of player activity at launch, alongside the Siege of Orison event, was a perfect recipe to rile up our backend. For those who really want to see under the hood: To try to avoid any major in-game outages during peak concurrency and keep some of the old legacy systems available, we had to favor availability over durability by accelerating the writes to SPC (super pcache) and allowing a lag between SPC and the game state database to build up. This came at the degradation of data consistency and durability, especially considering SPC wasn’t built to work in these conditions. As a part of the collateral damage, some of the records committed to LTP became inconsistent over time but we believe this issue affected a random minority of character LTP records.

That said, the state in which these complex caching systems got into allowed us to focus on analyzing some of the data patterns of where bottlenecks occur. This knowledge is already being re-used in stress testing scenarios for Persistent Entity Streaming. We’ve received an immense amount of Issue Council reports for these issues too (especially the most egregious ones such as logging in with an empty wallet), which has given us a wealth of data to be able to tackle them. Thank you to all of you bug-hunters!

As a result, we have been steadily deploying fixes for these issues over the past few weeks on the PTU, and we are now prepared to roll out some of those fixes to the Live servers, with even more (and larger/long-term) fixes coming in our next major update. The short-term goal is to make sure that the SPC service doesn’t enter this state again until those larger fixes are deployed in Alpha 3.18.

A side effect of these fixes necessitates a potential slight loss of player progress. With this update to Live, all players will be reset to the LTP database, which is essentially the same as performing a Character Reset. For those unaware, LTP keeps track of your wallet as well as ships, components, weapons, and armor (both purchased in-game and looted), but doesn’t retain any consumables (food, drink, ammunition, med-pens, etc.). The good news is, that any items that were able to successfully sync with LTP will be retained when the fix goes live, but please note that if any progress did not sync to LTP properly, you would discover this loss post-fix. We’re eager to get this hotfix out later this week, which will hopefully stabilize the backend and ideally prevent further loss of progress/items ahead of 3.18’s launch.

Thanks to all of you for your patience and understanding as we roll out these fixes, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. See you in the ‘verse!

They went onto say

3.18 (specifically PES) is a massive change to how persistence is synced and maintained entirely. Take a peek at last year’s CitizenCon panel for a refresher! (https://youtu.be/TSzUWl4r2rU)

So that should address some of the backend issues that Star Citizen has been having and things like the 0aUEC bug which some players have been getting too. It looks like Alpha 3.18 is going to a pretty major network overhaul as well.

This Week In Star Citizen

Later Tuesday, the Narrative team answers your questions about botany, architectural works of wonder, what to expect in Nyx, and more in Loremakers: Community Questions. These are actually quite information rich posts and I’ll be doing a video breakdown of it.

Thursday, we have Inside Star Citizen. This week, we’ll get an update on the Cave Archetypes feature set from the EU Sandbox 2 Team as they set out to add a new type of cave in Alpha 3.18. Plus, Todd Papy stops by to discuss the earliest steps in designing a NEW New Player Experience for the game coming in the new year.

I am looking forward to see what exactly they have in mind for that.

Also  Thursday, we have Jumptown, The Dynamic Event will kick off once again this Thursday at 10pm UTC, and will run through Monday. They also plan to run Jumptown again the weekend of September 2nd as well. We will see a full detailed schedule going live later this week.

There is no SCLive this week as a load of CIG staff are at GamesCom.

I recently put a video up looking at mintrieri the Lead Ship Technical Artist responding to question about Ships and updates / fixes coming to them in Alpha 3.18… that thread has continued further (I’ll link the original video downbelow) but this dev is answering a ton more questions and interacting with the community in a really microway that is making player feedback feel very valuable… obviously this can’t be done all the time but it’s nice when it is… let’s summarize the additional questions and their responses:

Any Fix for ship windshields suffering weathering effects/frost at about 10x speed?

A few weeks ago, I spoke with the Ship Art leads about the frosting and rain issues. They would prefer to do a pass when they can schedule it but they are aware of it. I will ask Ben about this again though as I know this can be debilitating when you can’t see out.

Cutlass Steel lighting fixes?

We’ll take a look at Cutlass Steel lighting.

Any chance you could fix the glaives extra zoomed in mobi glass bug?

Yeah, I’ll ask the Character Animation Team if we can adjust the pose. It might be that we are using the regular MobiGlas arm pose but because the character is laying forward, it doesn’t quite work. So, may require a custom pose for the Vanduul cockpits. 

Elevator Warping / Desync

There’s a lot of net code getting updated right now. After Server Meshing is in and working, we’ll be able to look more closely at the elevator warping and other desync / attachment issues. 

Elevators causing Vanishing Terrain & Falling Thru The Ground

I’ve seen players experience these issues many times, and there are a couple of things happening. When on a multi-floor elevator (versus a lift that just opens/closes), you are in the elevator’s physics grid which is inside the ship’s interior Object Container that is inside the ship’s grid. But, when the elevator animates out of the ship, it’s still part of the ship’s interior Object Container, so the transition can cause that “blip” where it’s not showing the environment while standing on the elevator because it considers you inside the ship. This transition and elevator code needs to be looked at by Engineering who understand the problems involved much better than I do.

The other issue you mentioned about falling through the ground is that multi-floor elevators do not collide with the terrain (because it thinks it’s inside the ship) which is an problem we’d also like fixed by code. If the elevator sinks below the terrain and you walk off, you can be below the terrain collision and so fall through. So, best to land on flat ground when possible for now.

Will CIG do more official Reddit AMAs & Why Aren’t the Hornet MFDs Fixed Yet?

I’ve thought about doing an AMA or something like that but it’s not my call to make. I do chime in on Spectrum and Reddit from time to time, but I mainly lurk and go fix things quietly. But, I think some of the issues raised here which have been around for years do deserve some explanation why they aren’t fixed yet, like those Hornet MFDs…

The Hornet MFDs turning black and flickering on/off has been a known issue for a long time as you know. And actually, the tech that would fix the Hornet MFDs would also fix the Rover’s seat exit. The Hornet MFDs are part of the Dashboard Item hierarchy which is separate from the ship hierarchy that contains the canopy, so the dashboard and canopy have to play an animation in sync to move the MFD displays. 

The problem is that we need to be able to trigger a Dashboard animation when entering/exiting the seat, and similarly in the Rover we need to trigger a door animation when exiting the seat. There has been some progress on this recently so we may able to test a new fix. A designer is looking at the Rover door currently and if that works out, I’ll apply that same animation trigger fix to the Hornet, but I don’t have a time-frame on this.