Part 2:

• Status update on some of the major issues and common questions:
  • Login issues and being stuck at position 1 - they’re still investigating, authorization call during matchmaking (selecting server/shard) sometimes takes minutes to close.
  • Increased load times - they’re still investigating, it seems to be related to the game waiting for an entity without authority waiting to get it (it can happen when server reboots after crash).
  • Restarting the game or trying to change shards is something CIG haven’t included in their testing before. Doing so helped them find a lot of issues with the player spawning/authorization process.
  • Shard locks can happen when your character doesn’t get stowed before your next login and the shard it’s assigned to is no longer available. Most of the time this gets fixed automatically after a while.
  • Elevators and trams (the transit system) are a very old feature. As it is the streaming system destroys and recreates the carriages (elevators, trams) if there’s no one in the vicinity. This system requires fundamental changes how these things work to prevent losing orders (“go to x”) and allow “self-healing” (fixing the state while recreating the carriage).
    They’re are also making fixes to the current system until the rewrite is complete.
  • Benoit is responsible for ships getting destroyed when stowing (it was caused by his back-end fix, they weren’t actually destroyed just couldn’t be called back).
  • One of the issues with ship calling into the hangar happens due to elevator being moved by code while the ship is moved through physics (causes “the flapping”). They’re still deciding which way to go (move both through code or physics).
  • There’s a possibility right now that when leaving the station before your ship is stowed it’ll get stowed alongside the hangar instead of on its own. This can lead to a situation when ATC doesn’t recognize the ship as being on the pad when trying to leave the hangar on another shard.
  • They made a fix to how the hangar queues are managed. It should help with long wait times or short availability times to leave/enter.
  • Hangars being assigned incorrectly - seems like there is a possibility of player having hangars of multiple size in the same location which should not happen. This can lead to the system being unable to select one to assign to the player. They’re still investigating.
  • Vehicles exploding after being clipped by the hangar elevator happen due to a cleanup system trying to resolve a collision error. This should only happen for long abandoned vehicles in the future.
  • Inventory and item persistence issues - also caused by a cleanup system/item setup. Items flagged for cleanup and didn’t lose the flag after pick up which lead to the system removing them on next trigger.
    There was also an issue where inventory caching (for UI) wouldn’t update properly in some locations so they revamping the system to improve on that (items are actually stored, it’s just a display issue).
  • They aren’t really happy with the current Long Time Persistence system due to how it deals with item and ship storing which leads to items disappearing between patches. They’re creating a new system to split permanent and runtime data of items/ships. They are also patching the current system in the mean time to resolve some of the issues.
  • Unique item recovery is prioritized this year. “The talk has stopped and the work has started.”
    There will be a short, medium and long term solutions - this topic will be discussed next week on the show.
  • Aggressive ship de-spawning - cleanup system should keep the passenger count even if players aren’t piloting to prevent this from happening. There are couple reasons why this happens, some should be solved other still need to be fixed.
  • They pretty much completely reworked the mission system for 4.0. Initially they focused on just making it work with Server Meshing, next they reworked how markers work (in general, i.e. party, mission etc.). The remaining work for missions and the main reason all the old issues still persist is reworking how the missions are built (mission team has to use tools that aren’t updated for SM).
    They started engineering work to rethink how missions are made to improve and automate the tools.
  • Quantum Travel issues have multiple causes.
    One of them has to do with the fact that each ship component consists of smaller entities (responsible for health, power etc.) and sometimes some of these disappear/break from Quantum Drive when moving between shards, leaving people stranded or with inconsistent fuel levels.
  • Prison is actually a mission (and an old one at that). There was a bug which broke the missions logic leading to desync of the mission state and making the escape/legal exit impossible. They have a fix which should prevent the issue from happening again (as long as the elevator works).
  • They’re still identifying the reason for the long delay of mineables rendering but they know where to look.
  • Shared missions paying full rewards to all people in the part was technically a bug. Rich Tyrer did confirm however that this is the direction of how they wants this system to work so they will implement something similar in the future.
  • They’re still investigating the issues between Vulkan renderer and Nvidia drivers but they think it has to do with Nvidia’s new vulkan drivers.
  • Issue Council is important even if players don’t feel like it matters much. They want to rework the duplication system to limit similar issues.
    They don’t think there is an issue with malicious dupe marking to farm rewards but they promise to look into it to confirm.
  • Error popups (the ones with error codes) have not bee touched in ages but will be updated. They want to display more information whenever an error happens in the future.
  • The black screen during preview happened because a fix to a bug consisted of fading to black and hiding the UI (which included the error popups).
• “I want players to know we know about the state of the game. (…) We’re gonna work our ass of to get this game stable and solid, and to be the game we want to be. It’s about time we do that change.”