The newest Around The Verse episode covering Star Citizen and the team’s progress moving toward the PTU release of alpha 3.0. They managed to bring down the must-fix issues to 20, but they’re hoping to bring that down even further so that alpha 3.0 goes out as soon as possible.

The episode starts with the Burn Down, so that gamers and backers get an idea as to what the blockers are that are preventing the team from getting alpha 3.0 out as quickly as possible. You can check out the video below.

One of the biggest issues they ran into last week was a disconnect error… disconnect error 3007. It took a really long time for them to find the bug and eventually get the issue solved since it’s been a lingering issue for the last three weeks.

The disconnect crash is one of those critical issues that needs to be resolved before alpha 3.0 can go out to the public.

They’ve also had to improve the optimization for 24-players per shard and reducing the overhead of the entity updates in the instance. They’re still working toward stabilizing at least 30fps, but at the moment they’re about 63% of the way there.

The other major issue they’ve encountered – or rather, keep encountering – was the shop inventory system that wouldn’t spawn any item in the shop. The JavaScript object notation parser was turning certain data points into floating point numbers and this was causing the kiosks to read all the shop inventory data points as ‘0’. Essentially this would mean that all kiosks would read the data that they had no inventory, even when they did. So they had to fix the JSON parser causing the floating points to bug out the kiosks.

They have 16 issues still remaining that must be fixed before they can release Star Citizen’s alpha 3.0 into the wider public test environment.

The last half of the Around The Verse episode covers the Marine legacy armor and the redesigns that they had to go through in order to adjust the designs of the armor to match the modular setup for the new armor system.

The model artists and concept artists had to work together to create armor sets that were based around “zones” so that they could avoid clipping while also making sure that all the armor sets shared affinity with the new modularity setup.

They explain that after they did the high-poly models they would then move into the asset phase of development, which would require more refinement of the mesh for the rigging procedure.

It’s also pretty interesting how they explain that instead of making a single mesh for some parts, the rigging team suggested to the modelers to break apart the pieces to prevent the armor from stretching like rubber during movement. Their suggestion was “If it looks like it moves separately, break it apart”. So the modelers broke the pieces down so that the riggers could individually rig each armor part.

One of the things that’s also discussed is how they developed a new sub-layer blend material so that they can use the equivalent of a micro-diffused map for the texture assets, which means that the more you zoom in the fidelity of the assets are retained.

The new Light, Medium and Heavy Marine legacy armor redesigns will not make the cut in alpha 3.0, neither in Evocati nor in the PTU release. However the team wants to gun for getting the armor sets out as soon as possible.