Star Citizen | 10 From the Community - Technology in Focus
r/StarCitizen's Discord news bot published a decent summary:
Q: What is being done to prevent feature/fx regressions?
A: It is being tackled in 3 main ways. Root cause analysis, test plan expansion, and increasing validation tools and methods. Route cause analysis finds the core issue causing problems so it doesn’t come back. Expanding the test plan improves the list of QA tasks so that a better product goes out. Finally, increasing validation tools and methods makes sure that potential issues can be found and stress tested easier.
Q: What’s the holdup with ripping out the rest of scaleform [flash] and finally converting entirely to building blocks?
A: Star Citizen is a majority building blocks now but the comm link app, and vehicle manager are the two big remaining scaleform assets. Both have their replacements currently being worked on.
Q: Why don't we have an option to hold out an object for another player to take directly from our hands?
A: It is technically possible but poses issues with how two players would interact smoothly together, and potential unfair security/theft. It is a design question for down the line.
Q: Is the development of social tools progressing?
A: Social tools are progressing but slower than the team would like. Backend systems are progressing on schedule. However, the big work is implementing player facing things like the new social app, and the massive amount of new ui required. VOIP and FOIP improvements are being worked on each patch incrementally. The new chat widget will also allow you to chat while downed and respawning. Overall social tools are progressing well.
Q:LAMP! What keeps you from implementing LAMP to all ships?
A: LAMP is easy to implement on ships like fighters because their moving canopies are part of the ship’s exterior. That makes applying the submaterial on the inside that makes LAMP work much easier. Ships with static glass, it is very hard to find just the glass in the code to apply LAMP, but a better method is needed that won’t require reworking tons of ships. There are plans for this work, but it needs time in the schedule to get done. They want LAMP on every ship including ground vehicles
Q: Are we still going to be able to bring up ground vehicles in the freight elevator at some point?”
A: Absolutely. First, ground vehicles need their insurance backend working on freight terminals, and to be decoupled from the ASOP so you can just do everything in the one terminal. Freight elevators also need to be fixed up so it’s not just adding another feature onto an unreliable system.
The Anvil Auxilia also made a cameo during this question
Q: Desync issues?
A: The recent physics netcode improvements are a big step towards fixing this. The big desync writeup post, which Jared remarks as being 45 pages long, is nearly done and will explain a lot of issues and their causes. More tech previews for improvements and synchronization like we had for physics are coming. Hopefully more of these improvements will be rolled out.
Q: Why can’t we delete or sell in-game earned ships?
It’s a design question primarily, but is possible tech wise now. 4.8 added a new entitlement system that tracks in-game purchases and things like insurance. The prior system only tracked pledges and other items you had on the RSI website.The tech is ready for future buying and selling systems when they come along.
Q: NPC AI… why are they still behaving like before server meshing?
A: Server performance and issues often still drag down NPC performance. AI behaviors are being improved, but the amount of “budget” given to each AI can be unbalanced, especially in areas like Siege of Orison. AI pathing and planning has been worked on a lot to improve behaviors.Star Citizen only has 3 NPC “roles” at the moment that dictate how they fight, but many more roles are now available to be implemented and change how NPCs fight. A greater variety of AI behavior and archetypes will mean less AI are needed for the same job.
Q: Is there any intention to rework ground vehicles and give them more TLC?
A: Currently ground vehicles use one of three physics rigs. All ground vehicles are going to be updated to the best and most modern rig. Driving is also going to be more gamified and have improved collisions. Planettech V5 enhances terrain physics and surface smoothness which will make even the outdated physics rigs feel better to drive until they’re updated. Ground vehicles will all be brought under one setup and then that setup continuously improved.
![[Epic] *Bad Cheese*, retro cartoon horror](https://cdn1.epicgames.com/spt-assets/6cbb0e3805c4436bafd028cafff48307/bad-cheese-16hj0.png)