Roadmap Roundup

Hi everyone,

We’ve already seen very promising results in the overall playability and user experience in Star Citizen in Alpha 3.7 thanks to our recent transition to Staggered Development. While we still have a lot more to do, we plan on maintaining this newfound momentum and pushing for a greater breadth of quality of life changes/fixes in the patches to come. As we mentioned when we first made this development change, we knew there would be some changes to the Roadmap as we re-prioritized. This re-prioritization is still on-going, which you will notice in the Roadmap Roundups to come. Specifically, we’re in the process of doing some re-calibration in an effort to allocate proper resources to focus on quality of life changes in both 3.8 and 3.9. It’s time to squash some of those longstanding bugs and clean up overall the gameplay experience and playability, so that you can enjoy Star Citizen even more while we continue development.

Please note that we will look to add some new cards to the Roadmap in the near future to accurately represent some of the new quality of life work being focused on.

With that, let’s dive into this week’s roundup!

Notable Changes for November 1st, 2019

PU – New Babbage Landing Zone

The re-allocation of resources mentioned above resulted in a few changes to the New Babbage landing zone. This landing zone has now been split into two separate cards: exterior & interior. The first will come in Alpha 3.8 as planned, featuring all external structures of New Babbage. The second card will be included in Alpha 3.9, allowing us to give the interior the attention to detail it deserves, which will ultimately provide a great experience when landing and exploring the city. This change will not impact microTech or the various new biomes coming online with this new planet, which are still on track for Alpha 3.8.

PU – Prison Gameplay

We’ve made considerable progress on Prison Gameplay, with the associated gameplay activities, missions, and environments nearly complete. We will be adding the Prison Gameplay card to the Roadmap today which covers all the broad content & features contained within the Prison gameplay loop coming in 3.9. As we learn more from the development team, next week, the Prison Gameplay card will be broken into a variety of different cards that accurately represent the development work making this gameplay loop possible.

SQ42 – Flight: Mission Logic Additional Controls

We’ve made the decision to move this task to the second quarter of 2020 in order to re-allocate development resources to the following tasks:

• 3D Pathfinding
• Target Selection
• Various SQ42 improvements
• Some unannounced features (see you at CitizenCon.)

You can expect to see more updates on these following the conclusion of our current planning phase.

SQ42 – FPS: Stealth v3 & FPS: Realistic Firing v2

We’ve made the decision to move these tasks to the first and second quarter of 2020, respectively, due to the following tasks involving more feedback and iterations than originally expected:

• Weapon Types – Shotgun & Pistol
• Cover Usage
• Defend Area
• Server Meshing Support

SQ42 – FPS: Navigation v2

While development has been going very well on FPS: Navigation v2, to deliver on planet navigation and usage of airlocks/doors, we’ll require an additional quarter, therefore this task has been moved to the first quarter of 2020. You can expect to see more updates on the subject following the conclusion of our current planning phase.

SQ42 – Flight: Ace Pilot

In an effort to re-prioritize resources, we’ve made the decision to temporarily remove this card from the Public Roadmap  until we’ve concluded where it will land back in our timeline. Some of the priorities that this change will allow us to focus more on are:

• 3D Pathfinding
• QT Linking
• Various SQ42 improvements
• Target Selection
• Formations
• Player vs. Average AI
• Atmospheric Combat
• Some unannounced content… (see you at CitizenCon!)

Keep in mind that further prioritization sessions for AI will happen this quarter, so it is possible additional updates may follow.

PU – FPS: Cover Usage v1 & SQ42 – FPS: Cover Usage v2

Feedback and review for the following bulleted items have taken longer than expected, and because of that, FPS: Cover Usage v1 is now expected to come in following the cutoff date for the Alpha 3.8 release. Due to this, we have moved both v1 & v2 cards, with v1 now expected in Q1 and v2 expected in Q2.

• Weapon Types – Shotgun & Pistol
• Cover Usage
• Defend Area
• Server Meshing Support

PU – Flight AI: Improvements and Polishing & PU – FPS: Combat Improvements and Polishing

These cards reference crucial work that move us towards our completed flight & combat AI experiences. With the more-preliminary AI tasks mentioned above being a big focus, we’ll need to shift these two tasks to 4.0.

That’s all for this week’s Roundup – join the discussion on Spectrum