Ook een bericht over de ervaringen in LIVE de afgelopen maanden. En uitleg over de bugs die meeste gebruikers tegenkwamen en wat de fix hiervoor is geweest.
Helaas geen fix voor de 50XX error.
Improving the Live Experience
Last month, we shared that we were changing the way we prioritize some of Star Citizen's most persistent problems. Today, we want to share an update on the progress we’ve made so far, the issues we’ve resolved, and the work that went into fixing them.
We’re focusing on the problems that have the biggest impact on your experience. Instead of looking at bugs one at a time, we’re stepping back and focusing on the parts of the game you rely on every time you play, grouping bugs by the system they break. Your ship should be where you expect it to be. Your inventory should load. Your missions should work. These are basic expectations, and we know that when they fail, it does not matter how impressive the rest of the game is. If you cannot get your ship, lose the gear you were carrying, or spend 15 minutes trying to get past a connection error, that is the experience you remember.
To keep focus on the player experience, we’ve handed ownership of identifying and prioritizing these issues to our Player Experience team. Alpha 4.10 has been the biggest application of this approach so far, and today we want to show you what that looks like.
Putting It Into Practice with Alpha 4.10
Our focus has been on the following core areas:
- AI
- Docking & Refuelling
- Economy & General Exploits
- First Hour Quality of Life
- Freight Elevators
- Hangars & ASOP
- Inventory
- Login & Connection Errors
- Quantum Travel & Starmap
- Ship Loss
Twice a week, QA, Production, Player Experience, and Community teams come together to look at the issues having the biggest impact on players. We weigh what we’re seeing internally against your Issue Council reports, looking at how often an issue is reported, how many players it affects, how long it’s been around, and how severely it impacts gameplay. We pull those factors together into what we call an “Impact Score,” which helps us decide what needs our attention most.
Your Issue Council reports play a significant role in that. In several cases, detailed reproduction steps, supporting information, and video evidence have helped us get from knowing something is broken to understanding why it’s broken - and that makes a huge difference for getting a fix.
With Alpha 4.10, we can start to see the results of that approach.
At the time of writing, Alpha 4.10 has reached 1,239 bug fixes submitted over its release cycle, compared with 295 in Alpha 4.9. Those numbers naturally vary depending on the size and scope of each patch, and 4.10 is a significantly larger release with more content, which means more issues to identify and resolve.
What matters more is the context here though. Of those fixes, 479 addressed bugs that were already present in Alpha 4.9 or earlier. That's a more useful measure of the progress we're making toward improving the existing Live experience, rather than simply counting issues discovered and fixed while developing new content.
We’ve also seen a significant improvement in client performance. Over the last few months, new content without corresponding performance improvements had contributed to a steady decline, with Instancing and Siege of Orison making that gap particularly apparent. That led to a coordinated effort across Engine, Physics, AI, Gameplay, Rendering, and Content to address some of the worst performance offenders.
Across all hardware configurations, measured in equally populated Landing Zones between Alpha 4.9 and Alpha 4.10, average client FPS has improved by 15.5%. Your next Lorville run should show a noticeable improvement!
Behind the Scenes: Alpha 4.10
One question we see after nearly every release is some version of: if you knew about these issues, why did you ship?
Fair question. The list of known issues is never zero, so deciding when a build is ready for Live means weighing what we can safely fix and verify, and whether the build in front of us is an improvement over the one you're playing today. We don't always get it right, especially considering that sometimes the full weight of the live environment is necessary to truly put things through their paces, but they're decisions we take seriously.
Later today, we'll publish a pilot for a potential series we're calling Inside CIG, taking you behind the scenes of Alpha 4.10 to show you what this process actually looks like. You'll sit in on our meetings, spend time with developers at their desks as they work through issues and content you're testing in the PTU, and see how testing, telemetry, and your feedback come together as we work toward a Live release.
A Closer Look at the Fixes
The goal of this initiative isn't simply to fix bugs quickly. We want those fixes to remain fixed. That means taking a more methodical approach to investigating the underlying causes of persistent issues rather than addressing only the symptoms you see.
Similar to the Transit Bugfix initiative, we've applied this mindset across several core game systems, with a focus on improving our ability to identify root causes, gather better diagnostic information, and validate that fixes continue to hold up in a Live gameplay enviroment.
Check de link voor meer info over de bugs:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/comm-link/Comm-links/21300-Improving-The-Live-Experience
What's Next?
Alpha 4.10 doesn't mean this work is finished. There are still issues we're working through, fixes already in progress, and problems that will only reveal themselves once 4.10 is being played at Live scale. This initiative is ongoing, and the priority list will continue to evolve as issues are resolved and new ones emerge.
You can also expect more hotfixes following the release as we continue tackling issues as they come up, with some scheduled for later this week. Our goal is to reach a point where these core systems are stable and reliable enough that you don't have to think about them or build your play session around avoiding them.
These systems should simply work.
Maintaining that focus also means making difficult prioritization decisions elsewhere. For the time being, we've deprioritized a number of other initiatives and feature work so we can maintain momentum on these core issues and give them the attention they deserve.
And we need your help to keep this moving. Issue Council reports and feedback across other platforms help us understand which problems are affecting the largest number of players and where our efforts can have the greatest impact. Detailed reproduction steps, videos, and supporting information make a huge difference in knowing a bug exists and actually understanding why it's happening. And if something we've marked as fixed isn't fixed for you, we need to hear that too.
Most importantly, thank you to everyone who has taken the time to report issues, share videos, provide reproduction steps, and help us track these problems down. We know some of you have been dealing with these issues for longer than you should have had to. Your feedback makes a massive difference to our teams, and it helps us make fixes that last.
There's more work to do, and we'll keep you updated as we do it.