What’s Delaying Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 AND Why It’s Important To Fix!

What’s Delaying Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 Live and what is the experience like when things work well on servers… that’s what we are going to be talking about today with some Dev Responses…

From Spectrum Chat Star Citizen’s Live & Development Director known as Mycroft_Holden outlined that a major issue with the entity graph was what they were holding the patch for currently saying.

So what’s going on is from my understanding this is part of input delay, lag and desync that is an issue. And when there is going to be very active servers with XenoThreat, Fleet Week, a new patch and tons of players… then this is only going to get worse.

CIG do have a variety of fixes that they are putting in for this tho… but it’s obviously delayed their timeline somewhat.

We know their stance is to push it to LIVE ASAP but ASAP means as soon as-reasonably playable… they are going to want to mitigate that issue and potentially a few others.

Could this see XenoThreat delayed until after Fleet Week… Maybe?

One of things I want to point out is how important this all is as there was a really good praise thread and response as well:

High FPS Server, AI Is Awesome the OP here said:

Was fortunate enough to be on a 30fps server last night with 5 friends. We did an illegal DC mission, the majority of us limped out with various T1 and T2 injuries having fought through 60+ guards that were on point. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in SC.

Paired with actually using ground vehicles for infil/exfil to avoid the DC defenses. 10/10 experience, if servers performed like this constantly I’d probably lose my job and family. Take your time CIG.

CIGs ZacPreece Responded:

we did a fair amount of work for 3.23 to get more playable FPS AI experiences on lower frame rates, it still struggles but should overall be a step in the right direction

a lot of FPS AI fixes went into 3.23 as well since it was the first release where I was able to validate, bug fix and improve AI in the PU whilst ensuring they were working in DCs

It’s also why DC missions feel a lot better as they use defend areas, traits and a lot of the other bits we showed off at citcon

We’re bringing over the design philosophy for encounters from SQ42 to the PU such as more defined archetypes and encounters with specific intentions (everyone doesn’t have just a P4!)

Hopefully moving forward I can get in early enough to help shape the level design to have environments that are more suited to FPS combat as the hard part of the PU is balancing out it’s realistic environments with more combat focused sections

The FPS Horde mode in AC that we’re working on should allow people to see the AIs capabilities which will be nice

Speaking of FPS AI behaviour in PU environments, can you think of any improvements to AI in open areas specifically that we should watch out for? ^^

So far the NPCs seemed to do well in interiors and confined / limited spaces in general, but less so when engaged at medium range (100+ meters) e.g. around Ghost Hollow, at various unmarked settlements (sites of Northrock box recovery missions) etc.

this was mainly because the audible perception range of weapons was 50m, got upped to 150m.

suppressor audible range reduction got tweaked to make them way less ‘hollywood’ which caused the AI to not be really aware of the player, since we don’t have a combat manager that cheats player information it can make them look a bit silly with suppressors but creates a more grounded AI experience where they don’t cheat your location

outside areas should be better.