Happy Wednesday, everyone!
Every two weeks, we accompany the Roadmap update with a brief explanatory note to give you insight into the decision-making that led to any changes. This is part of an effort to make our communications more transparent, more specific, and more insightful for all of you who help to make Star Citizen and Squadron 42 possible.
With that said, let’s go ahead and dive into this week’s Roadmap Roundup!
-CIG Community Team
Notable Changes for February 8, 2023
Alpha 3.19
The upcoming release of Alpha 3.18 brings important advancements to the technology behind Star Citizen. The highlight of this update is Persistent Entity Streaming, which represents a monumental effort from our engineering teams. We are eager to share this update with more players soon and are thrilled about the improvements it will bring.
To ensure server and client stability in Alpha 3.18, both before and after launch, our team has decided to extend the 3.18 branch for an extra patch cycle. This will allow us to address any issues that may arise. As a result, the next update following the release of Alpha 3.18 will come before Invictus Launch Week and will feature a variety of new and exciting content you can read about below. Although this update will be designated Alpha 3.19, it will be built on the Alpha 3.18 code base.
Our production teams are currently evaluating the feasibility of integrating originally planned 3.19 content into the Alpha 3.18 branch. The items we are adding to the Release View today are subject to change and additions. Nonetheless, we wanted to share our tentative goals as of now, with potentially more updates/changes/additions coming in Roadmap updates ahead.
Release View
The following cards have been added to the Alpha 3.19 column on Release View:
Lorville Cityscape
Reworking the Lorville skyline to better fit the scale of the city and its distinctive buildings.
New Player Experience
An initiative for improving the initial (first 30 minutes) gameplay experience, which will help players understand the context of the world and introduce them to some of Star Citizen’s basic features. This update focuses on the experience in Area 18 and Baijini Point.
New Missions – Salvage Contracts
With more civilian access to salvage ships, contract brokers are offering salvage jobs for derelicts around Lagrange Points around Stanton. These brokers charge a fee for their services so this will require some buy-in, but the contractors are free to keep any salvaged material for resale.
New Missions – Ghost Hollow PVP Mission
Adding a new mission type to the Ghost Hollow point of interest in the Stanton system. Making use of the comm-array as well as AI nav-mesh, this mission type will create PVP encounters where players will need to fight for control over terminals for a chance at big credit payouts.
Progress Tracker
Due to some format changes to the data we use for Progress Tracker, our update for both upstream and downstream teams in 2023 needs a bit more time to get sorted. You can expect these updates to come in subsequent publishes.
That’s all for this week!
