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 May 1, 2024
Progress Tracker
As you might have seen in the recent Letter From the Chairman, our development team is in the process of outlining the necessary tasks to achieve Star Citizen’s full 1.0 commercial release. While our production schedule is still in progress, we intend to share a portion of it with you soon by updating the Progress Tracker up to the end of 2024 (with more to be shared later in the year!). We’re nearly finished and aiming to provide more details in the coming weeks, so stay tuned to the Roadmap for more information very soon!
Release View
Arena Commander: Grav Royale
The team encountered a critical issue with this game mode that requires additional testing. For the time being, we’re removing this card from Release View until this is resolved.
The following features have passed their final review for Alpha 3.23.0, therefore we are toggling their status to Committed:
Distribution Centers
Creating new traversable areas offering gameplay opportunities in corporate industrial environments. This initial release includes the surface levels of the facilities, with underground areas coming in a later update.
Vulkan Graphics API Support
Converting the Star Citizen renderer from DirectX11 to the Vulkan Graphics API. This allows spreading GPU submission work over many CPU cores, and enables many new tech features that were previously unavailable, such as Ray Tracing. Vulkan is able to be opted into via the options menu with this release, but it will eventually fully replace DirectX11 in the future.
Water Simulation & Rendering Improvements
The water in Star Citizen now support a multi-scale GPU wave simulation to support dynamic reaction to thrusters, aerodynamic wake, explosions and collisions. The rendering has also been overhauled, with improved waves, reflections, refraction, underwater fog, and helmet effects.
Volumetric Clouds Update
Updating Star Citizen’s volumetric cloud technology to improve overall visual quality and performance, including the addition of both volumetric shadows as well as the implementation of ground fog.
Image Upscaling
Implementing support for GPU upscaling, including DLSS, FSR, and an in-house TSR solution.
Replication Layer Update
Over the course of the 3.21 patch cycle, the Replication Layer will be moved off of the game servers and set up as its own standalone service. In the short term, this allows for greater server recovery in the event of a crash. This is also a critical next step toward Server Meshing.
That’s all for this week!
