Inside Star Citizen | Alpha 4.3 Patch Report

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   You're here. I'm here. We got one take. Let's talk about the elevator in the room. Now, up until this point, freight elevators were mostly used in singleplayer short-term environments like personal hangers. There would usually only be one user, and on the back end, it would be stowed when you left and a fresh new freight elevator presented every single time you went back in. Now, while certainly not perfect, these tended to operate better than the ones out in the wilderness at say outposts, which like many other things in the verse, tended to compound their issues over time the longer they were left to run. Now, of all the known issues with all the freight elevators in the game, most tend to revolve around simple things like it just doesn't work and bigger problems like all my items

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   have vanished and they're now lost forever, which itself can often tie into other issues with things like long-term persistence, which we're going to have an SCCL on with Benois soon to discuss some new developments there. So, if it's okay with you, we're going to stick to freight elevators for the time being. Now, at this point, I'm not really telling you anything that most active players don't already know, but it's important to note that these issues have been egregious enough that we'd already started a directed repair initiative months ago. It's just not completed yet. Obviously, maybe super obviously. As with transit, when working these issues, we try really hard to avoid what are known as pack fixes and focus

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   instead on trying to uncover what is ultimately the root cause that will create all this instability underneath. And that process can often seem like absolutely nothing is happening for days or even weeks at a time. So last month, what happened with Race for Stanton? Well, sometimes changing how we use old features can be just as painful as adding a bunch of new ones. With a higher concurrency in daily active users than any patch this year, large numbers of players were driven from their private freight elevators in their personal hangers to the more troublesome ones out in the PU. Uh, statistically rare states became common and less common issues became fertilized and grew into bigger unavoidable ones. Although

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   in many cases, this still took hundreds or even thousands of players using each freight elevator to manifest a single issue. Now, like with transit before it or the infamous 30k issues of old, who remembers those? The issues you encounter in the PU are not always due to one or two bugs, but often dozens and dozens of underlying conditions beneath and around it, which throwing thousands and thousands of players at have helped us address more successfully than ever before. And since the release of Alpha 421 and up until the recording of this video, we've identified the root causes of 44 individual freight elevator issues with 20 of them being classified as blockers or critical and almost all of them with causes only revealed by

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   running thousands of people into them over and over and over again throughout this event. Now, in a phrase that should be very familiar to our software engineer enthusiasts out there, as we worked to fix each issue we encountered, the resolution would often reveal another lying in weight underneath. But this is a good thing. Yeah, we did all this intentionally to force progress so we can finally fix freight elevators like we did 30k and are still doing with transit. No. Now, while the project will definitely benefit from what happened long term with all the fixes and hardening that's been going in and that will continue to go in throughout alpha 4.3 and beyond, the answer to what really happened isn't particularly exciting or salacious or any different

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   than what I imagine most of you already suspected. We knew there'd be issues like there have been, but we underestimated how they'd compound on top of one another at higher stresses. It's been a sometimes frustrating process for everyone on both sides of the project, but at the same time, we're super proud of the content and cadence we've achieved this year and of the strides all of our teams are making to make this the most compelling year of Star Citizen gameplay yet. For every single step backwards, I truly believe we're taking multiple strides forward. And the overall improvements to the experience along the way are what keep many of us motivated to continue going month after month. And with this uh new Onyx facilities content drop being

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   spread out over multiple releases, we're going to continue taking the time to improve existing experiences along the way. And to that end, as some of you probably have already heard, it was in the loading screen and whatnot, we're also going to go ahead and extend the Race for Stanton missions while we continue to work on freight elevators throughout Alpha 4.3. It'll mean another month for folks to try to dethrone Hursten from the lead they hit so very early. For you to earn any of the individual rewards that are still outstanding, and for us to continue beating on freight elevators about the head and neck with the proverbial pipe along the way, and all while you continue your exploration of ASD's latest malpractices. Speaking of which, we've also made the

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   decision to keep relatively quiet on Onyx facilities and ISC and beyond. We do this to better let you investigate and discover things for yourself. But that doesn't mean there isn't more that August has to offer. So, let's go ahead and use our remaining time this week to explore the other aspects of this new release in Patch Report Alpha 4.3. [Music] For several years now, we've had these ground storms with rain and snow and whatnot, and those are sticking around for a while yet. But in alpha 4.2, we continued to get our feet wet with the

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   first iteration of dynamic rain. And now two months later in this release, we're continuing our climate campaign with the nayent version of dynamic snow, which leverages the same system to sleep the skies wherever the surrounding situation is sound. Sorry. It's a small thing to let us avoid rain falling on snowy areas, but these incipient iterations will continue to develop both in gameplay and in its sights and sounds over subsequent releases. And meanwhile, in Things You Can Wear and Hold, almost every patch this year has had a new armor and weapon to discover. And in August, you'll find the new specialist light stealth armor. There are a few different variations floating around, including a neat ASD one and this one from Wiccolo. It's an interesting visor, but it does beg the

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    question, with a blast shield down, how can I even see? How am I supposed to fight? to which the answer is I probably shouldn't quote Star Wars because Disney has lawyers. We've also got a new vault weapon this month called the Zenith sniper rifle that and let me read this text I have on the screen here from Zach combines the raw punch of a charged sniper shot with a rapid fire precision of a marksman rifle which which doesn't sound OP as heck at all. Zach. Now, there are some notes here about how loud it'll be and how important managing heat is because if you don't, it becomes essentially inoperable like me. And it's the latest in this year's line of vault weapons. And like all the others before it, you can be the judge if its advantages are

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    worth the trade-offs. Also, hanger respawning returns. Now, it's a small thing, but the ability to spawn directly into your personal hanger and get back into the fray should be a welcome one for anyone that's played the game for a while. Personal hangers are slowly becoming our first true homes in the verse. And this is yet another step in the right direction. Also, another step in the right direction, spawning ground vehicles from the freight elevators, which is not coming in alpha 4.3, but I've got a platform and I'm gonna use it to say everybody wants it. Benois and we're going to find time to prioritize it for the schedule after more fixes in the next couple months. First, let's move on to virtual currencies. Now, this year, we introduced Wiccolo,

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    the collector, and his emporium of esoteric effects, not the actual name. And over the last couple months, we've seen vehicles new and old get added to his inventory as variants with unique paints and components. And that's great. Or at least it was once we killed the RNG thing. Yay. What about the various ship shops in the verse? Where's My Golem, the Fortune, the Guardians? Well, in alpha 4.3, inventories are getting updated with many of the most recent ships that have been released. What this means is while you can still pledge for ships to support the continuing development of Star Citizen and you can still work for those fancy component variants of many with Wiccolo, you should also be able to pursue the base versions of newer vehicles for AUC and in a more

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    reasonable timetable from now on. It's our way of saying, "Yeah, we'll be better at this going forward." It was Tyler Wickens's fault. And while we're talking about spaceships, starting back in May and continuing with each monthly patch after that, the vehicle experience team began the next wave of flight tuning adjustments for every ship in the verse, hitting most of the heavy and medium fighters and interceptor subasses within. Now with Alpha 4.3, it's time for some light fighters to get their pass. This includes adjusting SCM and nav speeds to increase variation within the class, altering the linear and angular accelerations, adjusting health pools, and even swapping out some flight controller components. Now, there's a

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    whole list with details in the patch notes, but if you haven't flown your light fighter in a while, maybe give it a go this patch. And while we're talking about light fighters, what would a patch in 2025 be without brand new vehicles? And for August, we've got the long- awaited debut of the L21 Wolf. It's sleek. It's slick. It's kind of like a cool spaceship roar shack test. See, some people see a fancy hot rod. Some people see a Supermarine Spitfire. And some people like me see a Naboo Star fighter. But it's not. It's not Disney. It's the newest light fighter from Krueger Intergalactic, a brand previously known for the Merlin and Archimedes, two ships who share the same names as characters in an old animated film about King Arthur from

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    now. You can learn more about it in our dedicated behind the ships episode, also available on YouTube. And the L21 Wolf will be flyable as soon as Alpha 4.3 And lastly, let's go ahead and touch on this month's big content drop, the new Onyx facilities. Now, this is a big swing from our environment, level design, mission, sound, and every other team that's worked on them. And that's why I'm not going to say a whole lot. Everyone here really wants you to just get in there and experience them for yourselves. And don't forget, this is our first multi-part release of the year. So, we'll open up that third and final wing eventually, and you'll find out what Dr. your NSD has really been up to. It's more than just worm torture. I can promise you that. Ultimately, this month like this year,

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    we'll continue to see Star Citizen pushing its development into lots of new directions. And quite frankly, some are going to work better than others. Some are going to take us a bit to figure out, and some are going to be some of the best and most interesting content we've ever released. Align mine, Stormbreaker, Onyx facilities. I just want to shout out all the work everyone on dev is doing to keep this year interesting and to continue improving the existing gameplay systems along the way. And then of course the continued engagement with the project from you who are coming back month after month in record numbers to see where we're going next. And uh finally, if you are wondering why I'm at my desk, where I spend most of my day doing my other job behind the scenes that has little to do with ISC or SCCL, there's this little thing called Citizen

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    Con Direct coming up on October 11th. And the spaceship is currently locked down for the next 8 weeks filming for that. So, be sure you check out the latest post on the Bar Citizen global watch parties to find out where you can join our staff to watch it as it unfolds. For Inside Star Citizen, I'm Jared Huckabe. Thanks for listening to me yak about freight elevators for five minutes. And I was going to do a joke here at the end where I pretend to push a button and the elevator takes me down beneath my desk. But considering the work that we still have ahead of us in fixing them proper, it would probably go a little something like this. I'll just say we know what's left to do and we're on it. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.