A ton of info in this post, and it’s far too long to include everything in a single post, so I’ll just include the intro here. The whole thing is worth a read as they do a deep dive on the issues and bug fixes and what was causing them.
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.
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So… They are offloading the software issues away from the software engineers and having the customer support folks work on it.
Is that what I just read?
Not really, the whole article is worth a read. Here’s the next section (and there’s a lot more after that):
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!
