Release schedule

A bug-fix check-in that shouldn't have been in the stream made Idris ships incompatible with their saved copies, so game servers crashed on spawning them until Idris spawning was paused and the ships were manually fixed.

Beausejour says 4.8 involved constant firefighting, including two bad check-ins that broke persistence, though the overhauled entitlement system worked well, and Lind says extra protection against such check-ins is needed.

Huckaby says there is no "normal" schedule and it won't return to earlier levels, but with more feature work coming next year they should be able to do more shows.

The developer admits disappointment with the timing, blaming a difficult 3.24, old problematic systems, server meshing complexity and a detour for a networking system, but is happy the technology works and prioritizes stability over numbers.

The developer says "really close" didn't mean ready to go live, and the delay came from fragile ATC and transit systems, mission and networking bugs, design changes, and bundling too much into one patch.

Logging in and out of hangars is definitely going to be supported eventually, with more work on bed logging too, but it won't be supported when this pack's beds arrive.

Not everything has to wait for 4.0: the team hopes to release features piecemeal as they become production-ready, though integrating them into the multiplayer game is slow and involves many teams.

Upcoming ISC episodes include two ship-focused weeks during the ship event, then a look at the Preview Channel and Pyro Playground, then some not-yet-announced 3.22 content before year's end.

The new flight feature stays in Squadron 42 for now because bringing it to the PU means retuning every ship and component, multiplayer testing and finishing the UI, and it will likely be tested with Evocati before wider release.

Ship scheduling is a constant juggling act between long development times, a desire for regular releases across the yearly patches, and other teams' feature dates and priorities shifting, which makes schedules move.

They argue every release tier is a testing environment and that fixing all bugs wouldn't help, because ongoing feature work keeps creating new ones until features are complete.

Core gameplay features will now be built for and finished in Squadron 42 first, then handed to the Persistent Universe content teams later, so they arrive more polished.

Development work is unchanged or even increased; only the release timing changes, so features reach the Persistent Universe a quarter or more later, together with relevant content.

Ship priority has no single criterion: execs and production negotiate a yearly shortlist against staff availability, team strengths and event needs, with leftover time going to team choice, and plans can shift.

The Squadron 42 roadmap took long because teams wanted to validate and estimate remaining tasks bottom-up, complicated by tasks shared with Star Citizen, since the roadmap mirrors their internal task tracking.

Squadron 42 is on the downhill slope, with features targeted by end of the year, then optimization and polish, then beta, though estimates could slip; remaining technical risk is mostly object container streaming.

Chapter descriptions are left out to avoid spoilers; the roadmap has a feature section like the PU's plus chapters tracked through level stages from white box to polish.

The vehicle art director says the team is very busy with unannounced new and legacy ships, multi-crew item work and Squadron, with a focus on raising everything to a standard, and gives no dates.

The big change in 2.1 is a refactored, physics-based EVA that blends animation with ragdoll, rotates from the center of mass, uses physical thrusters, and fixes aim posing and old EVA bugs.

Chris Roberts explains that modules are released as rough pre-alpha pieces, which later combine into a functionally complete alpha and then a content-complete beta, rather than there being a single final beta test.

They are focused 100% on Star Citizen, plan frequent content updates and more Squadron 42-style story experiences for years afterward, and have no plans for non-Star Citizen projects.

They want to release Squadron 42, or part of it, before the Persistent Universe is finished, possibly episodically in polished batches of missions, though this thinking is still in process.