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And right now we're using it for graphics stuff. How's that going?

TL;DRThe current tech preview carries all mainstream-stream changes, including many months of graphics and Vulkan work, editor upgrades and the StarScript mission tooling, and would become the new baseline once testing passes.

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

Yeah. So this tech preview that we're bringing in is more than that, actually, behind the scenes, right? This is literally, I told you about SC Patch. So all the patches this year have been coming from SC Patch. The tech preview contains all changes that we've brought to our mainstream. This is where the engine development happens. This is also where we bring back some technology from Squadron 42 into Star Citizen. And we are moving all of this together up to SC Patch. So this will now become, when we're happy with all the testing that we got through on this, and it checks all the green lights, the new baseline from which we build patches. Right now, this includes about eight to nine months of graphics changes, right, which have not seen the public yet. And so a lot of Vulkan changes, obviously, to the great pleasure of our great Ali Brown, who really wants us to finalize this merge so that we can bring these to players. And there's some great stuff in there. So a lot of Vulkan optimization, Vulkan changes, but also, in a way, a way for us to test all of these changes that we've been doing to the core engine rendering outside of the lab. Because we have a graphics lab internally that we test on. But there's never anything like shipping it to players and having all the different kinds of hardware and configs and settings and driver versions that we need. The majority of the stuff in this tech preview is player-facing, but there's a ton of back-end tooling that comes with that. A major update to the editor with some new material addition systems and light group systems that are in dire need of coming in, and major upgrades to our scripting system that powers missions, which the mission teams, Elliot and his team, are like, when is it going to be done?

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

Now, to be clear on the mission tooling there, this is part of Mission 2.0. It's a prerequisite, but it's not the Mission 2.0 system. That's a much larger endeavor that we're still on. But this time it's tooling. So if some players are tech savvy here, it's basically a visual scripting system that we're upgrading massively, which I think we demoed years ago at this point, but it was called Subsumption at the time, and it's now called StarScript. And so the StarScript system is basically taking the tooling that the teams are using now and making it much more reliable, robust, with syntax checking, error checking, validation, auto layout, stuff like that, that the teams really need to build more quality missions.

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