The PU of Star Citizen stands for “persistent universe,” but that’s only mostly true; players can’t land on a planet with their ship, place a few items on the ground, log out on the surface of the planet, and then log back in to find everything exactly where they left it. The technology to make that happen is persistent entity streaming (PES), which leads us to this week’s Inside Star Citizen video that talks about progress on PES and ultimately the arrival of true persistence to the Persistent Universe.
The video is basically a full in-house interview with Turbulent Studios’ chief technical officer Benoit Beausejour, who discusses how PES has come along since Chris Roberts’ address that talked up the feature. According to him, PES is now in a dev build state (as opposed to an experimental one) and the primary focus is putting out all the numerous fires and squashing the cavalcade of bugs that are arising – he calls the effort “stabilization” – while another team gets the operational pieces broken up to be brought into a cloud server that players will be able to access.
As for when this is coming out, Beausejour is extremely nervous to pin down any launch window, but he does say that the team’s full focus is on getting PES into the test server. “It’s a straight line to deployment,” he says in the video. “The only thing that matters right now is to make sure that the technology can run in the cloud properly and […] making sure it works at scale.” Beausjour does mention alpha 3.18 at one point in the discussion but doesn’t outright confirm that PES tech will be ready by that point.
