Developers discuss the persistent entity streaming (PES) rollout in 3.18, including cleanup rules, the character reset tool, and server stability. They also cover Salvage with the Vulture and Reclaimer, physicalized cargo, soft death, ballistics balancing, and racing.
TL;DRGuillaume jokes he doesn't know, then explains he helped build the Montreal team and, after managing a release, became director of development for all of Star Citizen across the studios.
G
GuillaumeDirector of Development
We don't know. Ben keeps asking and I never dare to answer him. No, so the development director... essentially I started with CIG and Turbulent when we started the game development team here in Montreal. So building that team and developing really inside the various teams that are now forming our development operations. And then through the course of this year, I had a discussion with Aaron and we started defining what more global role, let's say, I could take, and discussed it with Benoit and Marc Baudet and Todd and Aaron. We figured that the Director of Development for Star Citizen in its entirety would be... So I kind of dipped my toes with 3.18 and trying to manage the release of that release. And now, it was an interesting challenge and I saw where I could help. So we kind of officialized it to become director of development for all of Star Citizen and working with the various studios we have throughout the world.
TL;DRPersistent servers mean players now find a lived-in world with stacked items and left ships rather than a pristine one, and developers are learning how to adapt missions and gameplay to it.
I think in terms of the player experience, the major change is really that in 3.17, the servers recycle quite a bit. Either if it's a 30K crash or a simple restart, then the world comes back to fresh and vanilla. So AI get back into their position. Game world is all cleaned up. There's no more trash anywhere. And so I think the first player experience change there is that you start coming to servers that have been lived in, right? So things happen, like people stack stuff in areas, they left ships in areas you can find. And Salvage... I think Salvage being in the patch has been great because it showed the potential of that feature coupled with persistence. So I think that's the number one change, is that you no longer come to a pristine world. You come to a world that's lived in. And I think that's a defining element of our MMO, right? We're slowly turning more and more into what an MMO should be. And I think persistence is the number one thing. So that's how I think the player experience has changed and will continue to change as players get more creative about what they can do.
Yeah, I would agree with everything that Ben says and then add to it, even from a dev standpoint, we're learning what we should do, how we should change missions, how we should create gameplay or missions that would feed on some of the stuff that's been left around or cleaned up. So we're doing internal looks on it, but then I'm excited to see what players will do with how to break the game.
The first thing we know is that even on PTU, the engagement from people that have access currently has been great in finding ways to break the shards. So that's been the part of the development cycle, I think, that's been the most interesting for us anyway, once the technology was built, was to see it run and then seeing how... oh, now we have some zones that get hot because somebody dumped an entire C2 of boxes somewhere, and then, oh, we didn't plan for this loading mechanism to support it, right? So it's already fun, right, to see what can happen when the game world actually persists.
TL;DRThe speakers say PES is still new, but it should change missions, let players leave persistent items and ships in the world, enable salvage and tracking loops, and may lead art to ship clean and be dirtied up later.
Yeah, well, I think right now it's still so fresh and new that we were finishing off Task Force 3.18, and now that we're picking our head up from getting a lot of these live must-fixes done, now we're starting to look at, okay, how does this change missions? How can we create beacons? Clean up the world and everything. Now, Chris has been talking about this for a while, but now some of our dev teams can actually breathe and we can start working towards this. So whether it be creating bins that you can basically throw away and then that deletes items from the world, or even if a big event happens and then ships' wreckage are there, and now you can go and salvage that. I think those are some of the interesting things that will arise, but then I think it'll really change the way that we're doing missions mostly. For props guys, they're still going to be building the props the same way. It's not going to really change our art. I think it'll change our art... Right now, a lot of the things that we do in ships and we do with art is we basically bake it in, make it look lived in, and what we'll do I think in the future is basically clean that out, and so you'd be delivered a fresh ship and then you dirty it up, you make it look lived in, just like you would do if you just moved into an apartment or a house or something.
I think there's another thing too that we're slowly discovering. I mean, you can imagine this is going to happen, but until you have it in your hands... You're right on the mission side, that's going to change a lot, because just as a player, your approach to a specific mission will be able to change. Let me throw an example. You have a mission to go somewhere, you could prepare for that mission by hiding a ship in a cave nearby and then that allows you to escape, or things like that. This is not something that would be possible before because you most likely would lose the ship because it would get cleaned up by the vehicle manager. Whereas now you can actually leave stuff in the game world to help you in your mission, right? So whether it's supplies or whatever in preparation for it, or a PvP event, same kind of thing, right? But also I think what we don't grasp just yet as far as an effect on the design teams is the fact that you get free persistence on items would allow gameplay loops that are built just by an object existing. Currently, if I add an item to a player ship, it's not necessarily going to persist because it gets cleaned up, recycled, whatever. But now that it persists, you could actually imagine gameplay loops where you attach a beacon marker on a ship and that stays with it until it's found, right? Allowing you to track the ship. And that's just free because you get persistence of all entities, and even in shards, right? So you find a ship abandoned in the game world, but it has a tracker on it, but you don't have the tool to find it. So all of that stuff will sort of come naturally and influence, I think, mission design, prop design and stuff, and modulate how we build the game world. I really see all these discoveries will show up once we actually release it to more players. And we'll realize that there are some things that we planned that would be difficult to build or would require engineering and systems to be built, that might just be almost done already. So I think that's going to be the effect ultimately. I'm hoping for it.
G
GuillaumeDirector of Development
I think the cool thing about it, having played it a little bit, is it increases kind of a density of content and the element of surprise when you go to a location to do a mission, but then you're going to stumble on something else. Maybe there's this wreck to salvage or something. And it's really interesting because it's essentially not only free content, but it's content that grounds you in the reality of this game and kind of tells a story by itself. And it's not a story that was curated by us at all. It was a story, like you said, Jared, created by the players crashing around the track, or these type of stories. So I think it adds a layer of depth to that universe that is super interesting.
TL;DRA density manager limits how many items of a given class can exist within a radius, and once the upper threshold is hit it removes the excess, which should be the oldest ones.
So we have, I don't know what Chris Bolte calls it, but it's basically cleanup entities and it's... Yeah, the density manager. Density manager, so thank you. But it basically regulates the density of a certain item, and it's per class, whether it be weapons or cargo or armor or so on and so forth. It's basically per class in a certain radius. So that radius could be five meters, that radius could be 30 meters. It really depends on how many are there. And then once it hits that upper threshold, then things will start being cleaned up and removed, but it won't go past... Meaning, let's say, like Ben was talking about, where somebody drops a C2 of cargo in an area, well, it might be that only 20 cargo boxes can be there. Well, it's going to clean up everything except for those 20 cargo boxes. And then from there, if somebody throws in another one, then again, it will remove one, and then it will just leave. And it should be removing the oldest one.
True, true. And in fact, we just had this discussion basically with... we've got some Montreal programmers, so we just had that discussion about them working on it and basically cleaning up the entity class, or allowing players to clean it up. Now it could be used for garbage, but at the same time it could be an incinerator, it could be some other function. So it'll be a generic entity that will clean stuff up and remove stuff from the world, but it'll allow us to use it in multiple different ways.
TL;DRStability keeps improving and server fixes take priority, but the Daymar Rally's stable servers were partly luck, partly younger servers and a single zone, and 3.18.1 and further patches will still be needed.
I can tell you from my perspective, we're still always striving for as much stability as we possibly can, but obviously 3.17.5 shows you that these are point patches on top of 3.17. So the amount of stabilization that has gone into that... With us going to Wave 1, I think it was December 22nd, to now, we've increased our stability score that we track, whether that be on server or client side. And we continue to do that, and we have a certain bar that we want to hit. But I think even now, we'll need a 3.18.1 and others just to really kind of work out all the kinks. But go ahead, Ben.
Well, yeah, so for Daymar, there's definitely been updates in 3.17 that have helped in the latest patch, because server fixes and server improvements always take priority, right? 30K is the enemy, right? But we all know that servers, as they age, their FPS go down depending on how many entities they have to simulate. And so interestingly, for the Daymar Rally this year, the servers were very stable. So there's a bit of luck involved, but there's also a lot of work that has been ongoing to support these kinds of events, right, that help stability. And so I'd say it's a combination of both, right? Probably younger servers that were also involved in it. So that sort of shows, we always try to improve on that. Also, being in a single zone is sort of a better performance profile on the servers because they have less entities to load. If all the streaming bubbles from players are in the same area, there's a bit of a gain there. I'm not saying it's major, but there's a bit of a gain. So that does help also. It's a combination of things.
TL;DRThe full character reset tool becomes a faster repair tool that only replaces a broken playing avatar and leaves inventory and ships alone, while customer service keeps the option of a full reset.
So you guys are familiar with the character reset tool, which is available for players in 3.17. It's like a panic button, basically, and allows you to basically reset your entire character account to be pristine. Obviously the hard money purchases are restored. Some elements of this that are part of long-term persistence will stay, but effectively your in-game database, your inventories, your ships, your character, all get destroyed and they're rebuilt. Now, historically, that tool was needed because there was a lot of problems with the game stability on the back-end side. And a lot of players would get into situations. I mean, we've seen every single case: head attached to a mining laser, missing eyes, missing mobiGlas, which has been a bug that's been plaguing us for a while. And so the character reset tool that's available for players has always been sort of the "oh shit, I need to restore this." Unfortunately, as every time you provide a tool like this, there's been performance issues linked to that tool because it has to do a lot of heavy lifting to reset your account. It's a lot of inventory items to move and restore. And so often in the past couple of years, we've had to stop resets in order to fix a back-end problem or performance issue related to that, because too many people were resetting, for example. And so as we were looking at PES, one of the major changes in the back end is that it's a lot more transactional. And so data corruption issues, we're hoping... I'm not saying there's not going to be problems, but we're hoping that at least in its design, these kinds of issues are going to be very much less frequent. And we also did not want to repeat the problem of the past, which was to allow a full reset, which is too costly in terms of recreation of items and transferring of items. But the game's still in development, so we want to provide players with a way to keep playing. That was always the objective, even with the original reset: we want to get you back to playing the game. One of the side effects of the original reset is also that, as everybody knows, people have been using the reset tool for other purposes. For example, mass moving of items back to a start location to consolidate their inventories. Things like that. And so the back-end cost of these moves is gigantic overall. And so we can't support them anymore. And so that came about: still, in case an account is no longer able to play, we need a way to be able to reset, to keep the person playing. And we looked at all the different kinds of issues that could happen for that, the main one being missing items on the playing avatar. So if you don't have a mobiGlas, you don't have eyes, you don't have a head, your character can't really play the game functionally. And so we devised a new tool. So basically, the character reset tool that you have now will become a character repair tool. And the main difference is that it will no longer restore or destroy your game inventories and your ships; it will only repair your playing avatar. And so the goal is really to get you back in game and playing with everything intact, right? So the repair tool should also be a lot faster because it doesn't have to do all this heavy lifting of moving stuff and recreating entities and whatever. It really needs to find your playing character wherever it is. Let's say you're stuck in a rock and you can't get out of there, and even if you force die, you respawn at the rock. I don't know how that could happen, but I've seen worse bugs. Well, when you repair, we're going to basically search and destroy your playing avatar and then give you a new avatar at your starting location that's going to be brand new. Now, there's some caveats to that. Obviously, we don't want to allow you to be able to bypass prison status and crime status when you do that. So there's a couple of things that will carry over. But we're hoping that this will be a much faster, much more enjoyable tool to keep playing. And the other side effect is that there are... now, Todd's not going to like me, but I'm going to say it anyway... there are some ship bugs that have not been fixed because you could just reset, right? And so by changing the reset into a repair that will only repair your playing character, we want to make sure that we can prioritize fixing ship bugs where ships become unrepairable or unflyable or things like that, so that these bugs can be surfaced and then our development director can come in and prioritize these issues, because they affect players on the live systems, and we can't have the argument that, oh, we'll just get them to reset. So that's a bit of why the change is there. So that's the long story short for the character repair versus reset. Now, customer service will still have the option to do a reset, right? But those will be a bit more destructive: restore an account, a playing character, to a full pristine state. So that's the gist of it. I hope I'm not forgetting parts.
Yeah. For subscriber items specifically, there's a lot of ongoing discussions about how to treat them more as an entitlement you can sort of restore, right? But that design is still ongoing, of course, and then we'll iterate on that reset. But for now, the main objective we have with the reset tool is really to get you to keep playing the game in case you're stuck.
TL;DRThe speakers say they saw emergent player stories, like one Vulture stripping another, and an unexpected PTU quirk where players met their persisting old character after a reset, and expect more surprises.
Well, I think you see some of it, but it's... you talk about it a lot, but then actually seeing it in action, that's the part that becomes a little bit more interesting. And I think it's the "oh, we can exploit that now," and like Ben was talking about before, I think there's going to be a lot of things that we'll see and then we're like, oh, okay, let's try this, let's try that. I think it'll be all right. Do we want to prioritize those over existing features that we're working on or something like that? But I think it'll just fall out from this coming in and then us learning to live with it for a little bit and then adjusting priorities from there.
G
GuillaumeDirector of Development
I kind of always expected to have a lot of different things happening with the PES and the new features we develop, but actually seeing them happen and seeing those little stories happening... I remember seeing a Reddit post where there was a guy in his Vulture that was AFK, and then another Vulture arrived and started stripping the Vulture of all its materials, and you kind of wonder what the AFK player's face is going to be when he comes back and his Vulture is actually completely stripped, almost like on cinder blocks, you know? So those are all kind of interesting stories that we've seen happening, and we knew they were possible, but you don't really realize you could do that before you see that Reddit post, right?
I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg already. There's some great stuff going on on PTU now, but I just think the surprises are going to keep coming. For me, some of the ones we've had during development was, of course, having to adjust the game systems to a bit of persistence. We had a discussion a little bit... Todd reminded me of this one, where the character... we have a test for character reset/repair. But the thing is, we didn't clean up the previous player, because right now we don't need to do anything, right? The game server that has it will remove that player and it's gone. And so there's just a normal recycling that happens. But with PES, your previous guy is persisting, right? And so we need to find it to remove it. And so when we got to the first couple of waves and players were using the account recopy on PTU, they would come back in game and be faced with themselves. Which was a bit uncanny and interesting, but I think that was a funny one for me, just them finding themselves. "I did the reset while I was at this location," and then boom, they would find themselves.
TL;DRWave 2 is still planned but waits on infrastructure fixes (a new shard-loading method, per-server data pipelines called shard isolation, and a new insurance system); it is close but not today.
Well, so a couple of things, right? So just so you guys know, when we decide to go to another wave, there has to be a sort of a gain, because we want to keep your attention when we're testing on the Public Test Universe. When we add these big waves, that adds a lot more players to the system. We want to make sure that we have all the changes that we want on the infrastructure so that we get as much data as possible for these big pushes. And there's a series of tech changes that have been necessary that showed up during the Christmas break, which to be honest was very beneficial, because we let servers and shards run during the break and we discovered a lot of issues, like shards growing out of size, that breaks the loading process, prevents that shard from being loaded again. And that has a lot of impact on the infrastructure that Ahmed is running in the cloud. And so basically we've been looking at these issues and we've devised solutions for them, but we want to make sure they're in place before we hit Wave 2. So there's two of them. One is the method we use to reload a shard in the current mechanism was prone to break if we had hot zones. Hot zones are basically one area, one very specific area, with a large amount of entities. So we discovered an issue with the way we were loading. And so we have a new streaming system there that will basically fetch results from the persistence database and basically send them as we go instead of buffering them, which was causing an issue. And the second big issue is that in our original design for PES, we were shooting for one large data pipeline per game environment, right? So every game server would be submitting their messages to this very large queue and just process that for persistence. Now that we've seen what players do and we've seen how the game servers are submitting their updates, there's issues with, I'll say, noisy neighbor. So one shard, one server is creating a lot of updates for something, and then that will affect another shard. And so we've seen these ripple effects go on. And so we wanted to solve that before we went to Wave 2, which is a feature we called shard isolation, which is basically each server has its own data pipeline. And they all operate sort of independently to persist to their shard. And there's no crossover between them. And so that feature is pretty much done now. So we're about to run the test and stuff and then move it up to PTU so that we can see the effect. And that will open the gates for Wave 2, basically.
Yeah, we're getting close. It's a good thing. I mean, this will give us a lot more resilience, too, over the growth of the shards, which grow substantially larger than even the game designers had planned, which is good. That just means the feature is functional.
There's also some other gameplay side effects that we've been looking at. One of them is related to the way insurance works. As far as the players are concerned, it works the same way. But the way the back end was implementing restoring a ship was sort of reliant on the previous technology's way of keeping ships that are destroyed, which we no longer do; when the ship is destroyed, we have to clean it up. And so there's a new insurance system, which is good news because that's also future-proof. But it's the same functionality; for you guys it works the same way.
And then on the game side, we're just going through and fixing stuff still and making sure that when we go Wave 2, Wave 3, it's as solid as possible. But that's what we're doing from our standpoint.
TL;DRThe extra time made 3.18 a much bigger patch with continued server and stability fixes, PES-related tech work, and new content such as the racetracks, but no new feature work after the end of December.
Basically, end of December, there's no new feature work or anything like that. But obviously, if you're talking about from the September aspect, then yes, everything else just keeps on going into 3.18. So it is a much bigger patch than what it would normally be. And then obviously, really the only kind of new tech development stuff is the stuff that Benoit was just talking about, just to make sure that the PES functions the way that we need it to function.
We always hotfix and try to... usually the way it goes is, like Ben said, the first thing that comes in and is fixed is server crashes, because that affects everybody. And then from there, it's client stability and client crashes that are fixed. And then from there, it's a lot of the gameplay features.
G
GuillaumeDirector of Development
It's not only fixes, but there's also entire pieces of content, like the racetracks were actually developed after September, when 3.18 should have been released, right? So that was another gigantic thing that was added.
TL;DRThere was a deliberate push across several teams on racing, combining new missions and tracks, and shared technology with Arena Commander, though features like multiple laps and rolling starts are still missing.
Yeah, but I think the initiative was on multiple different facets, whether it be Arena Commander or even in Persistent Universe. Whether that be Tony or myself, we all have different ideas of what it needed to be. And then Tony's team worked on what was considered basically the mission behind it. And then the content teams worked on developing the actual racetracks, so some of that in Montreal, some of that in Germany and the UK. And then from there, it was things that we kind of considered low-hanging fruit and things that were interesting for the content developers to work on. And then there's the AC side, which I think you'll delve more into. But again, there was some shared technology that we wanted to take a look at in the future, and we have a lot of similarities as far as the way that we want to do things. Then I think also Sean and Duncan and that team also want to be able to make sure that they take stuff from the PU and be able to use it in other stuff as well.
Also with the time trials, stuff that MFT has been working on, that actually makes those racetracks more than just "here's an area." Now there's the actual things that mark the times and stuff.
Yeah, it's a mission. But again, for this, we'll take what the initial aspect was and then be able to grow it. It's still missing some features that I would be looking for, whether that be multiple laps or being able to have rolling starts versus only starting from an area. So there's some fundamental things that we still want that we can just do shared development between Arena Commander and ourselves.
TL;DRThe team is very happy with salvage for a first installation, and the speakers say combining it with PES opens many possibilities, such as salvaging abandoned ships and battle wrecks.
I think our team is extremely happy with where it's at, especially for the first installation. I'm very proud of what they've been able to do, and I think they're excited about it as well, and seeing the reaction that players are getting. Seeing some of the tactics that they're building, like if they want to go take out an Idris, what kind of ships do they need, and then how many Vultures do they need versus how many Reclaimers do they need, and the thought process behind, all right, how am I going to earn as much money per hour by doing this? And then some of the multi-crew gameplay that's also been coming out of that, whether it be the turrets or in the back and how they operate, pulling out the cargo boxes and everything.
It looks great. I mean, Salvage, to be honest, I think combining PES with Salvage is a super big win, because the opportunities are endless at this point, right? Abandon a ship, and then somebody else just finds it and it's like, ah, interesting.
Or even some of the event stuff, because the ships should stay there, or any sort of battles that happen, those ships should be there and then you can just come along and make some money.
For me also, you're talking about battles, but we could even use player battles to populate a piece of the world where it's like, oh, we want space debris from a battle. Well, let's just make one. Let's make a battle. And then that's it, you got your debris. All these opportunities will start to gel really well. I think adding game loops like Salvage is just one of the many things that will jive with this really well.
It is. I mean, it has been, but again, Chris has been talking about it for quite a while. And for our team, it was just, all right, we've got some sort of resource and then we can spawn different items. So it is foundational. It is stuff that we want to build on. It's just there's one or two other priorities that we need to knock out first, and then we will be moving on to that in the future. More crafting stuff.
Well, I think a lot. It makes piracy a lot more interesting, because before you would go and blow up a ship and then maybe you would have some cargo and eject it at what we consider 1/8 SCU. And then now you can actually go there and it should be one to one. And then also, we've always wanted ways to not have the ship completely blow up when you're taking it down. So obviously with soft death, this allows you to basically take it down enough and then be able to still have some of your items survive or some of that cargo survive. So that's, I think, some of the main things that it's been focusing towards.
TL;DRThe speakers acknowledge that pinned players need ways to free themselves and say ship tractor beams are being worked on, while praising soft death for opening new gameplay loops.
Yeah, there's some interesting gameplay that happens from there. Obviously we'll still need to look at ways of freeing yourself and all of that. In some cases, this is what would happen in real life. We will be working on ship tractor beams and those types of things. Then you could have somebody pull you out and flip you over.
G
GuillaumeDirector of Development
To me, soft death unlocks so many possibilities, because it essentially takes what used to be the finality of a gameplay loop (ship blows up, nothing else happens, and then you move on to something else) and opens up new options, new gameplay. It's the start of a new gameplay loop of trying to either board the ship or get the cargo. It was so fun to see the players discovering gameplay around that feature. New stories, man. It's all player stories.
Maybe, but I think the criminals are going to do what they want to do. And so then the question is, are you a good Samaritan? Are you willing to... We always want to create opportunities for players, and then how they decide to use them, it's really going to be up to them how we meld them. Obviously, in the future for service beacons, we do want to have star ratings or those types of things. So you can start seeing, okay, somebody's got a two on that.
That was one of the oldest things. Chris was talking about that back in like 2013, 2014. The ability to rate player mission givers and have like a Yelp score for people.
They should. They should. It's basically, we don't try to wipe very often for the player stats or the wallet or anything like that. We want to make sure that the players start reaching some of what we consider mid-game, end-game aspects. So all of that stuff should act the way it was before.
Well, it was more that there were changes to basically the ballistics and the lasers or energy weapons and how those work with the armors and shields. So it's that the ballistics will be able to pass through the shields, with some damage that's sloughed off from there, and then it's supposed to be that the ballistics basically chew through the armor quicker. So we've done some tuning and then we will do a little bit more rebalance associated with that. We're not to the final stage where we're going to have the physicalized damage, which was the end goal for this, and making sure that the armor feels the way that the armor should. But this is a step in the direction.
Probably. We noticed that also with PES, we're actually having better server frame rate as well. And then we also did some accuracy adjustments on the AI, so they might be tuned up a little bit. So between the improved server frame rate and the improved ballistics, there might be some balancing and tuning that will happen in basically Wave 2, Wave 3, Wave 4, but basically there should be some improved gameplay associated with them.
Yes, there's a change to it. But again, the main thing was that when we were in Evocati, we were starting to see some of these issues. And basically, like Ben was saying, there were different things that became very evident that we needed to adjust and fix. So we did some changes to bed logout, and then the goal is to, again, go back to the way it used to be. But right now, in order for us to get out... well, not necessarily on time, but for us to get out and get done with this, we needed to be able to kind of strip down and not develop so many features at once.
TL;DRWrecks from big events like XenoThreat should persist so players can clean them up afterwards, though some hiccups are expected, and only the final Idris wreck would remain after the first phase.
Well, I think we know that some of the stuff... let's say there's a big battle with XenoThreat, those wrecks should persist and they should be there. So it'll allow people to go and clean up that battle afterwards. I think Luke was mentioning something where there was some frame rate and some possible stalls that happened when somebody crashed a Reclaimer right next to Jumptown, and therefore that's when the cleanup should have happened and so on and so forth. I think there's going to be some hiccups, but I think the main thing should be that something happened here, and then it's up to you to either figure out, oh, I was part of that battle, or, oh, they had a battle here, and there's basically some remnants of it.
Well, I think basically the Starfarer stuff gets cleaned up after phase one. So it will be really like the Idris at the end. If that gets destroyed, then yeah, you should have that destroyed Idris out there.
TL;DRCargo is meant to get different box sizes plus modifiers like volatile or frozen, salvage is next moving to the munching aspect, and racing is to grow through a mission verb, events and new tracks.
So with cargo, obviously, the first thing that we need to do is we need to be able to have different cargo sizes. So first and foremost, that's needed for the Hull C and other major ships, basically making sure that when we put stuff in the cargo bay or on ships, it puts the right cargo on there. So in this case, 32 SCU for the Hull C. So that's one of the first things. And then from there, it would be some of the smaller cargo, whether it be the 1/8 SCU fitting on the cargo grid as well. So there's those aspects that we'll be working towards with cargo. And then there's other modifiers on top of that, whether that be volatile or frozen or time, so on and so forth. So there's those elements that we can make and make them feel a lot more interesting. Like you've got to go take 40 hearts over to somebody and you've got a certain period of time, and the box is frozen and you've got to keep it under a certain temperature, so on and so forth. Then for salvage, there's obviously the hull scraping, but then there's the munching aspect and getting that working. And so that's one of the main things that the EU PU team will be moving on to very, very soon, is getting that munching aspect working. And then for racing, the way that we're trying to work through this is that we'll introduce a mission, and what we consider that is kind of a mission verb that basically our content teams can exploit. And then from there, it will be us taking things and making events out of them. And then it's also from a content side being able to create new tracks and everything else, because this is something that Louis and I are looking at from a high-level perspective: how do tracks work in Stanton? How do tracks work in Pyro, Nyx, so on and so forth? So illegal tracks or street racing, and how does that feel compared to what would be the Murray Cup side? And how do you build reputation with those events and all of that? And how do we unlock? And then it's also how many per...
TL;DRThey would do it again, though with some decisions changed; they call it a very difficult release but say it was worth it, and they are applying its lessons to server meshing.
I think because Guillaume didn't go through 3.0... 3.0 was a slog. But what came out at the end of it, I think, was something special. And obviously, we've built on that since then. So I think, again, with this, this is a slog. But what we've talked about in the beginning, we've learned a lot of things of, oh, no, we shouldn't have done that, or, oh, we should change this, or no, we did this really, really well. So there'll be production changes, development changes on this, but I think for this, it's just a means to an end. 3.0, it's not necessarily like a birth, but 3.0 was a little bit of teenage years, early teenage years. This is later teenage years. We're going through this growing process and going through these changes. So it's just how do we learn and how do we deal with it?
G
GuillaumeDirector of Development
I wasn't there for 3.0, but for 3.18, I can say I've been in difficult situations and shipped difficult AAA games and whatnot. And I can say that the amount of complexity this release demonstrated and the amount of effort that the team had to put through was one of the more difficult ones I've seen in my career. I know it's been a while and the players are all waiting patiently. The silver lining in all this is that it's going to be worth it. Everything we're seeing from the players who are actually interacting with 3.18, it unlocks a whole lot of new gameplay situations. And I sincerely believe that in the future, in three, four, five years from now, we're going to see the release of 3.18 as an inflection point in Star Citizen's reality and what it delivered to the players. So it's been very difficult, and we would 100% do some things differently. And we're actually right now looking at server meshing and figuring out how we're changing some things and making sure that some of the errors from the past are not happening. So we're actually taking this into account, but it's definitely worth it.