Star Citizen Progress Report August 2020

Alpha 3.10 brings very few major features since the last progress report. The biggest changes have been an overhaul of the Flight Model and revisions to some of the legacy systems such as ship HUDs.

Additionally, patches have been increasingly more delayed and content has been very thin.

Project Progress Velocity seems at the current time to be "Excruciatingly slow". This is further corroborated by the community sentiment.

Playable but with stuttering and crashes. In the previous report it was mentioned that crashes were less frequent but during the previous months the stability has deteriorated significantly. Stability leaves much to be desired and playing can be a frustrating experience if trying to increase credits.

Character motion is still pending improvement.

Game and server crashes can lead  to lost progress.

The game is still very much for testers. People looking to play can have limited fun but the experience can be very frustrating.

3/5

Player counts are still 50 players per server. Far from anything that can be considered an MMO. This shows the infancy of the Alpha still.

This is probably the area of the project with the least progress.

1/5

The economy feels faked. Alpha 3.10 brought player to player money transferring but also some updates that seem to have made earning in game credits (aUEC) harder.

It is possible to make some progress and during 3.9 some players were able to accumulate 100s of millions of aUEC. Without cargo transferring, refining, ship selling, unique items and more the economy still feels like a test-bed shell.

Read more about the Star Citizen in game economy.

2/5

Alpha 3.10 brings with it a new flight model as well as signed distance fields and changes to atmospheric flight.

In the last report it was mentioned in this category that the flight model was in the final phase of polish, however, the latest iteration of the flight model seems like a side-step more than polishing. The new model itself will again require many months of tweaking which still might not be enough to finish it. More on this in the "suggestions" section below.

3/5

Dogfighting in Alpha 3.10 has changed significantly with the introduction of the new flight model. The new dogfighting seems slow, clunky and less about flight skill and more about ship and component knowledge. There is also new targeting methodology which seems like a step in the right direction.

Pips seem more accurate and there seems to be less jitter. Desync is still bad enough to ruin much of the combat experience.

3/5

FPS combat has not changed with Alpha 3.10. Character models still warp and suffer from desync and hitbox issues.

3/5

This section offers some suggestions for CIG during the development of Star Citizen Alpha. These suggestions could be useless and might be completely out of touch with what is being worked on. They are a collection of ideas regarding the current state of Star Citizen Alpha that could help with the development or hinder it. They are provided as rough ideas that the author of this article would like to see tried.

Given the current lack of community enthusiasm and engagement about the flight model this article will make a suggestion for CIG.

Release a realistic flight model and then tune it with community support

Rather than try to provide the community with a "finished" flight model it might be a good idea to try a fully realistic model first and then fine-tune it with the help of the community.

The Star Citizen engine is already capable of providing realism and CIG have a very strong community. The idea for this suggestion would be to:

• Announce that a realistic flight model will be tested with the intention of using community feedback to make combat fun
• Work with the community with the clear vision for what the final non-BVR combat should be
• Dial in the realistic flight model with community feedback until it is fun

Many players will always wonder what Star Citizen with realistic physics would have been. Star Citizen Alpha seems like the perfect time to let the community at least try this for a few months.

This could help solve the issue of trying to release a final flight model only to later discover some of the fundamentals cannot be tweaked / fixed without a complete overhaul. Trying the realism-first approach could be a better approach.

Star Citizen suffers from a lot of griefers and trolls, many of which prefer to destroy ships outside of Port Olisar rather than carry out legit piracy - because it doesn't exist in game yet.

Even though there are severe limitations with adding to the Star Citizen universe without additional backed technology, it should be very simple with the current technology to add player territories and factions. All the game would need is a few of these "open pvp high resource" areas that would reduce griefing and provide for much more fun than what is currently available.

Example - PVP Outpost:

• Make it so that one of the outposts is weapons-free and highly profitable. Add several profitable terminals. Spawn in-game missions that award reputation and credits to bring more players to the hot zone
• Allow ground vehicle spawning so players can test combined arms (Air to Air, Air to Ground, Ground to Air)
• This could be the start of actual bombing (make bombers useful)
• Ground based player controlled turrets

While this seems like an overlap with the upcoming Theaters of War it would be quite a different (and simpler) experience..

This would make fighting over territory a thing during Alpha.

The same example above could be done with an area in space, say in an asteroid field, like a very small pvp grim-hex which would just have very basic installations on an asteroid.

The list of 104 features used to track "progress" in this report are listed at the Star Citizen Completion Features Percentage Page. This is a highly simplified list of features out of thousands of technical, art and gameplay features that the game(s) will end up having. 104 features were chosen as a simplified average set of gameplay features that the author guesses are plausibly required in the final games to be considered "complete".

The data is gathered as objectively as possible and is non-promotional in nature. This information is purely speculative based on personal criteria. Opinion can and should vary. It is provided for free and actually costs time and money to maintain.