Another week means another episode of Around The Verse. The episode is pretty lengthy but covers a lot of progress as far as quality assurance testing, bug fixing, and some of the other content games are expecting to see in alpha 3.0.

The episode starts with the burn down segment, where they picked up from where they left off last week with 94 must-fix issues before alpha 3.0 can be released. They had 62 criticals, 9 blockers, 21 high impact issues, and two other bugs that needed to be fixed. They talk about some of the issues that they ran into that they were able to fix rather easily or problems that they have been unable to fix rather easily.

For instance, a fog glitch was causing black artifacts to appear on the screen. It turns out that the renderer was attempting to divide by zero. So they had to run a debug and check to ensure that the fog was no longer being rendered based on a division of zero. You can check out the Around The Verse episode below.

Another critical bug they had to fix includes the function for seats randomly choosing to put players in turret or cockpit seats, so they had to add a separate check to make sure that the proper seats are being assigned to players whether they’re in the pilot’s chair or a turret.

They also ran into some problems with the oxygen system in some of the outposts on the moon where no oxygen is supposed to exist. There were gaps between the module doors causing players to lose oxygen moving between rooms of an outpost. Thanks to the Lumberyard custom module tool, they were able to fix the outpost oxygen problem.

They managed to bring down the must-fix issues to 76.

This means that have 76 issues need to be overcome before alpha 3.0 can be released to backers.

If they can continue to knock down the blockers at this rate, they’ll likely be ready to release alpha 3.0 by October 5th.

The rest of the video focuses on the updated and improved stamina system as well, along with how it works with the Mobiglas. The stamina effects are designed to give players feedback via screen effects, audio cues, and by being able to monitor the stats via the wrist device.

Every action consumes stamina. Walking up stairs takes more stamina than moving down steps. Running and sprinting takes a lot of stamina and will also greatly affect your aiming and recoil. Walking and moving slowly also consumes small amounts of stamina, but at a much slower rate. Also, minimal movements regenerates stamina quicker. So the more heavy movements you make the more stamina you consume and the longer it takes to regenerate.

Weapons and armor also play a big part in your stamina consumption. The heavier your weapons, the more stamina they consume while you move and run. The heavier your armor, the more stamina it consumes. So you’ll have to judge whether you want heavy armor to take more damage at the risk of maneuverability, or if you want to be light on your feet at the risk of being a glass bunny.

Another neat feature they talk about is how the audio drives the animation in Star Citizen when it comes to a character breathing. They injected the Maya data directly into Data Forge and utilized procedural injectors so that the heavier the breathing becomes for the player, the more you’ll see the character breathing in result of the audio. It’s pretty impressive stuff.

This system also works with the blackout and g-force system, so that everything that can happen to you while you’re standing can also happen in the cockpit.

They’re using a unified actor status system to make sure that it’s a smooth and overlapping process across all states of the player actor, whether they’re piloting a ship, driving a vehicle on the surface of the planet, or engaged in deathmatch against other players.

There are some cool features on the horizon for Star Citizen, but they’ll definitely need to knock out more of those blockers before backers get thoroughly excited about alpha 3.0. It’s a long and arduous process, so we’ll see how far along they are with fixing the game up when the next episode of Around The Verse pops up and we can find out exactly how far along they are with getting alpha 3.0 out to backers.