Star Citizen is having a huge last week before the holidays. Let’s round it all up, shall we?
First, the patch: Alpha 3.8 was pushed out to all backers on the PTU last night, with planet tech v4, the impounding system, dust storms, wind physics in the flight model, new orbital stations, tweaks to New Babbage, server side object container streaming, tons of bug fixes, and piles more.
Newsweek – no, we don’t understand either – has an interview with CIG’s Sean Tracy focusing on the update’s server side object container streaming. Say that 10 times fast. Actually just call it SOCS. It sounds super boring, but as Tracy explains, the game is trying to get as much stuff loaded in players’ PC memories as necessary – true persistence can’t work without it, after all, if you’re not seeing the same versions of everything, from shops to containers to ship damage and movement. Star Citizen is meant to be so massive that typical “segmented world” tech doesn’t suffice, so SOCS essentially just loads only what the player needs at any given time. The interview is not exactly light on tech, but it does explain part of why it feels like SC is taking so dang long: Brute force just wasn’t going to work.
Next, the devs are back for another round of Pillar Talk, which is the series where Chris Roberts himself – accompanied by three other top devs – give a roundtable overview of the patch highlights.
Finally, remember when BBC tech program Click was promising another investigation into the game’s delays? Well, the episode went up this week. It’s not really as dramatic as it originally sounded and there’s not much new; it’s chiefly recap and a follow-up to the program’s previous deep-dive, with interview clips from folks like Sean Tracy and Eric Kieron Davis – and even Chris Roberts. But it also interviews some ex-staff to talk about scope creep and delays, plus talks about the legal battles over refunds and money – the huge piles of money people have spent on the game, and the huge pile of money and time it’s taking to make it. “It takes time to build games of the sophistication and simulation detail that gamers expect now,” Chris Roberts is let to explain.
We’ve got another interview coming tomorrow ourselves, along with the real Inside Star Citizen, so stay tuned for that.
