Star Citizen Give Up On 3.18.0 Letters BUT We Shouldn’t Rush It’s Release

Hello & Welcome to some more This Week In Star Citizen… we take a look at what CI have got planned this week as well as the new 3.18.0 PTU patch that’s come out and some dev response posts including some more answers about Gen12 renderer and SC’s performance.

From This Week in Star Citizen

Red Festival is fully underway! Celebrate the coming of the Year of the Rooster in 2953 with contests, new paints, and ways to earn tons of aUEC in the ‘verse. Plus, the Nine Tails are back in Crusader space, and the CDF needs your help repelling the Siege of Orison in the return of this dynamic event. For all the details, head over to the Lunar New Year landing page.

This past weekend, the filthiest race in the ‘verse kicked off their fourth annual event, the Daymar Rally: the largest in-game community-organized racing event. This year was the biggest one yet, with over 1,000 people taking part, including racers, security teams, refuelers, and support staff. We’ll know the results of the race soon, but we wanted to shout out everyone at ATMO esports for putting on the event every year, the amazing commentators, all of the participants, and the thousands of you that tuned in to watch the broadcast.

On the Alpha 3.18 front, our team is laser-focused on getting the PTU open to a wider audience ahead of a live release as quickly as possible. We’ll have more updates very soon!

Now, let’s see what’s going on this week:

Tuesday’s Lore Post is titled Portfolio: Rise of the Red Festival. Originally appearing in Jump Point 10.1, this portfolio is a look at how the discovery of the Davien system helped launch a holiday focused on Earth’s lunisolar cycle into the stars.

On Wednesday, we’ll be reposting last week’s Squadron 42 Monthly Report newsletter as a Comm-Link.

Inside Star Citizen returns this Thursday with the Turbulent Environment folks from our Montreal Studio as we discuss new derelict locations coming to Alpha 3.19, plus a check-in with current progress on the upcoming Lorville landing zone redux, first seen at last year’s CitizenCon 2952.

This Friday brings with it the return of Star Citizen Live with special guests, Live Game Director Todd Papy and Development Director Guillaume Voghel to talk All About Alpha 3.18 (At 5pm UTC on the SC Twitch page). We’ll also open a question thread on Spectrum for this week’s episode, so make sure to get your queries in!

It’s great that CI are finally back to having ISC and SCL episodes!

Let’s take a look at Star Citizen Alpha 3.18.0 PTU… the alphabet ran out of letters… so now it’s just a mass of numbers denoting the true identity of the patch BUT it’s still wave 1 and on the US/EU servers… It’s changed and fixed quite a bit tho…

Reinforcement update – Added a workaround to check to see if reinforcements do not leave the ship they will be counted towards the hostiles remaining total even once the ship has left resulting in the mission being incompletable

VMA Update – Players will currently need to unequip items from the previous ship to equip onto a new ship. UI isn’t completely updated to show this but more updates will come in future builds.

Assigning specific UI to attract screen & manufacturer for all platinum bay shopping kiosks.

Fix Wise it addressed many issues:

Bounty on escapee will persist even after they have cleared their crimestat
Racing missions not appearing on Contract Manager
The Mining Extraction Rate Issues
Changes to loadout cannot be saved due to the “Save Changes” button being missing
Mobiglas Exit Button “X” was incorrectly scaled
Target for the Eliminate_Specific scenarios was not spawning on Caterpillar Derelicts
The turret interiors on the Cutlass series have a VisArea and will appear invisible when crewed by players
Delivering Mission package to Yela drop off doesn’t Progress contract
The Contraband door was not opening at SPK
Missing MFD’s in Cockpit of Esperia Glaive
Light persistently blocks the player’s FOV within various ship’s pilot seats and some variants within Vehicle Loadout Manager
UGF Missions were failed after a Client Crash
Fixed 1 Client & 7 Server Crashes

There are still a load of Known Issues but let me highlight the most egregious.

Trading – Cargo invisible in multiple ships
Elevators and Trams are “Jittery” during transit of Player Character
When flying near another ship, ship seems to hit an invisible box that kicks it in random directions
Fully loaded C2 landed at Area 18 results in Slow Framerates or Crash
QED does not mark ships as hostile
Once a mission has been completed at the settlement the AI will not respawn for the next mission resulting in it completing upon reaching the location ALSO reinforcements don’t leave their transports but are still counted towards remaining total enemies.

I did see a response to the patch notes post from a backer here:

Dear CIG, Please ignore all the fools that want this build to rush out into LIVE environment. They have no idea what they are asking for and I will love to leave this in your capable hands. Here hoping that whenever you do decide to release it to LIVE, it will be as solid as 3.17. DO NOT RUSH it, and take your time to polish it. Thank you,

Upcoming Launcher Update for Linux Users

If you are having issues running the launcher on linux then please checkout CIGs post on a workaround for this.

Some questions for Silvan on Gen12

Can we expect a performance increase when the r_gen12 command is eventually removed, is it even causing a drain in performance?

There is still a performance drain although it should be fairly minimal. Getting rid of the legacy code is much more important for our efficiency, since we no longer have to fix bugs and maintain two different systems. It’s a huge relief that we can remove the legacy renderer fairly soon.

Are there plans in the short term for visual improvements to the cloud rendering? They still have the visual artifacts that make the clouds look like small dots in certain circumstances. I think I remember reading somewhere that Gen12 can fix that, but I’m not totally sure.

Gen12 has nothing to do with the clouds. Carsten our Technical Director who owns this system is still doing some R&D on it. His newest improvements to the system are still not yet ready. But i’m sure it’ll come

Is there any limit to how many planetary atmospheres can render at the same time in Gen12? For instance, standing on Daymar and looking at Crusader, could we soon see the true appearance of Crusader with its volumetric clouds as opposed to the long distance LOD appearance? For clarification, see pictures below (true “white cloud” variant vs LOD “bacon ball” variant).

Yes there is a limit of one at the moment. Rendering more than one atmospheres is just not a good tradeoff for the performance it costs. I would rather say we should update the Distant-Planet proxy to look nicer and closer to it’s real shaded planet.