Roberts Space Industries recently updated the release schedule for Star Citizen’s alpha 3.0 release. While Cloud Imperium Games have been working around the clock to finish up and get all of the necessary components in place for alpha 3.0, there are still some things that need to be ironed out before the major milestone release can be issued out to the public. Hence, the alpha has been pushed to a tentative September 8th, 2017 release window.
Over on the RSI website they released a schedule to give gamers a heads-up about what’s complete, what’s not, what’s nearly complete and what needs more polishing before it goes live.
There are a couple of release schedules that detail how far along they were with certain features for alpha 3.0, revealing that on a gameplay front things like repair and restock system adjustment persistence has been completed back on June 16th, 2017. Inventory system game enginering support, however, only just finished its completion milestone on July 28th, and it’s likely that further testing will take place before signing off on it completely.
Insurance was completed on June 27th, while item 2.0 ship conversion wrapped up on July 3rd. As indicated below, most of the other more complex systems, such as the pick up and carry, which required several months of development, finished up either in late June or early July.
Other big milestones the multiple studios have been working on come in the form of the PTU: The persistent universe.
The moon was finished a long time ago back in early spring, which is kind of funny, but the surface outposts lighting modules didn’t wrap up until June 30th. Inhabited direct ships also wrapped up on June 30th. Surface outposts were finished way back on June 2nd, and base derelict ships and debris fields were wrapped up on May 26th and June 16th, respectively.
So what’s the hold up on the PTU front? Basically Delamar/Levski and mission givers. These two mammoth undertakings, which drastically add to the depth and layers of taking and completing tasks across the galaxy – as well as venturing to the surface of the planet and exploring – have come close to actually being finished, with the Delamar/Levski feature having its development concluded on July 28th, just last Friday. However, they still need a bit of testing before final release and the mission given component was delayed slightly and won’t be finished until August 11th.
The entity owner manager is another slight hold up from alpha 3.0 releasing, as it won’t be ready until August 11th.
The character customization was finished back on July 25th but the vehicle customizer app won’t be ready until August 9th. The comms system UI has also been delayed from July 25th to August 16th, almost an entire month.
It’s interesting that some of the stuff you would have expected to be the bigger hold up (i.e., planetary surface optimization, and procedural generation) wasn’t quite as big of a problem as things like the mission givers and system UI. Interesting.
There were some issues with the render to texture feature, though, and it’s scheduled to wrap up development on August 10th.
There’s a lot of logistics involved with creating something the scale of Star Citizen. If the alpha 3.0 actually releases on September 8th it would be quite an impressive feat. Of course, this means that it won’t be releasing anytime before GamesCom or during GamesCom.
