We just released 2.6, which has a lot of improvements to the game. We've already noticed that Pirate Swarm is performing much better than it did in the past. What are some of the improvements that you're most proud of for 2.6?

Performance is one of those things that you've got to claw back every millisecond you can. It's everywhere and everyone has to pitch in on it. A big thing is on the asset front. I keep saying for a long time, artists have been able to kind of run renegade in the engine. Basically, nobody watching what they were doing. And then all of a sudden, we come in behind. We're like, why are we running at 10 frames a second? And then you actually open up the ship and you take a look, and the polycount's over the top. Or there's invisible meshes behind walls. There's so many times that we've come in and then found somebody was just going off the reservation, so to speak. But I'm pretty proud of the team for being able to get all that stuff together.

Actually, a pretty fun thing that got done for 2.6, and it's not something that I'm necessarily proud of, but I'm proud we're finally here, is that we're zeroed out on all the asset errors. When the assets get sent through the build process, we output a whole ton of errors that happen with them. There's things like, hey, your LOD 3 is actually higher poly than your LOD 0. You might not want to do that. Things like this. To give you an idea of where things were at about two years ago, and Tyler, you might remember this too, he remembered me coming into the studio and going... This is live, right? So I probably shouldn't say exactly what I had said, but it was a pretty exciting day. We were sitting around 16,000 of these errors. And we had to bug them all up.

I do recall this. They're like, okay, so all these errors, we can do them in chunks, right? So we can do them by theme or whatever. But there were still hundreds and hundreds of Jiras that had to be written, and it was a very tedious process. And there's a name of a tool in profile builds.

Error parser. I've made that all, well, actually, Paul helped me make that all automated as well. And we put that into a big report for QA now. It's on a super nice Excel sheet too.

Is it much smaller now?

What, the error count? Well, it's zero for 2.6, which is amazing. To go from 16,000 errors down to zero across all the assets is a pretty nice thing. And again, it's kind of funny to say because it's like, yeah, we were shipping out the stuff and there was asset errors all over it. But again, you never really ship in a perfect state.

Well, not in a project like this where we're releasing individual modules as they come online.

Yeah, well, I say it all the time. We're developing stuff faster than we can test it, is the thing. The reality of the situation is that there's new features, new assets, new models, new characters, whatever, all coming online much, much faster than we can test it. And that way, super happy to have the Evocati, the PTU testing, because that's when we get the real good visibility. It's a huge pool of users that are less judgmental, let's say, than the public would be.

Well, to modify that a little bit: every Star Citizen at every stage, whether it's the Evocati or the PTU or the Live Alpha, is a testing environment.

Yes, of course. Everybody is helping us test. And that's why it's still in Alpha. We're still making features like crazy.