Last update : Jan 19th, 2018

Hello Citizens,

Our developers have completed the reintegration of everything from our 3.0.0 release branch back to our main development branch and resolved all the inevitable merge conflicts that usually arise. This allows our development team to focus on stability and optimization improvements in our main development branch. Teams are set to work on optimizations in various scrum teams, and we’ll be having an overarching direction and drive, with regular discussion and progress checks.

Apart from general gameplay and game code optimization focus, we will look into actor core, weapon, AI & mission as well as vehicle optimizations. Among other things, we aim to remove single frame idle animation from weapons and refactor the interaction system so it doesn’t require animation updates. We’ll also extend the entity component update scheduler to support additional update policies that go in tandem with specific needs on the game code side to make certain updates as fast as possible.

On the engine side, we’ve been working on a telemetry system to capture performance stats on a large scale and allow automated processing of the results. This new system will allows us to get a good grasp on the top issues on a daily basis without massive manual effort. Once this is done, we’ll return to the zone system optimizations (parallel updates) mentioned last year.

The network team continued with the range based update optimizations from last year and will then focus on bind culling (the next step in that series of tasks). This is going to be a bigger change, so it’s going to need help from the game code team to address resulting bugs.

On top of this, we’re adjusting our internal team structure to have smaller, more focused groups working closely together. These teams will be made up of developers from all disciplines that work together on a feature, rather than have disciplines work almost independently on their particular aspect of the feature, before bringing everything together. This should allow for a more streamlined and focused approach to feature development and enable us to hit our intended quarterly release schedule.

Head over to the launcher page and download the 3.0.0 patch to see the universe for yourself. You can also visit our Spectrum thread to leave your feedback.

See you in the ‘Verse (literally),

— The Star Citizen Team