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I'm not familiar with internal stability. [What do you mean by it?]

TL;DRInternal stability means developers' own working builds; patches now come from a separate branch with almost no engine or tooling updates, so content teams lose less time to editor crashes, at the cost of features.

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

Well, so this one is a bit more subjective because we don't specifically have a score for it. But if I go back to last year, the way we would develop the game, and I don't want to go too deep in the discussion about source control and streams and all that stuff because that's just a rabbit hole. But in general, when we work, we have a mainstream where we work in. In the past, this was a melting pot of everything. So core technology, editor, tooling, audio teams, content teams, gameplay teams, art, everything in one stream. And the fallout from that is that you go a bit faster because you're building things. You're improving the tools as you're improving the gameplay, as you're improving everything. But the reality is we also had major internal stability issues, which is, imagine that you're an environment artist. You show up at work. You make your little coffee. You pull the morning build. You're like, all right, I'm ready to work on my ASD mission today. It's going to be super cool. Editor crash, right? And now, oh yeah, the team's already on it. We're fixing it. But you just lost two hours. And so we had major issues with this. And so when we started the year, actually, when we did the show, just after the show, I think we went and finished this new branching strategy where all of the patches this year have come out of the same stream that we call SC Patch. And this patch receives almost no technology update. It's basically us saying, we can do this content with no new engine tech. No editor update, no tooling update, nothing. Now, that's not to say we are not touching the engine. We've fixed bugs. We've improved stability. But we bring these things in with embedded green light, full verification, tooling check before they go in. And so it's really about moving all these checks beforehand so that we don't destabilize the content teams who are under the gun all the time to produce the stuff that they have to, and we don't want to slow them down. And so that's another reason for why the stability is better. It's because we are also not introducing massively breaking changes in the engine that we then need to debug at patch time, right? That's been a big helper on stability at the cost of features, right? That was the whole point of the year so far.

Star Citizen Live›Tech Talk w/ Benoit Beausejour·
Published on this date.11 Sep 2025