Now that Star Citizen alpha 3.0 is up and out for backers in the “Evocati” test phase, things have been moving along a little bit further and faster when it comes to addressing bugs and reaping feedback sowed by backers.

This latest episode for Around The Verse talks about how the bugs and blockers are still coming in hot and heavy, but things are going by a lot faster thanks to the new delta patcher, which allows CIG to distribute patches through the pipeline in incremental binaries or in small packets as opposed to distributing updates through 20GB worth of data.

In addition to the delta patcher they’re also dealing with the optimization for small pockets of players, including monitoring 24-players per server and attempting to scale down on the amount of entities that are being updated and collated through the server. One of the issues they encountered was that there were 500 entities being updated per tick with only 24 players on the server, so that’s one of the issues they’re trying to fix during the Evocatic alpha phase.

A couple of other smaller issues also popped up that they need to fix, and once they get all the must-fix issues done they’ll be able to get a public version of alpha 3.0 up and out to all of the backers.

<

As of the the current episode of Around The Verse, Cloud Imperium Games have 23 must-fix issues to address before alpha 3.0 can make its way to the public, but expect those issues to fluctuate over the next two weeks as they continue to distribute daily updates for the Evocati users.

The rest of the video talks about the cockpits in the game, and how they’ve updated the cockpit views, the cockpit panels, and the cockpit joystick.

Directional hit-detection has also been implemented, so the characters react and move when getting hit to match the direction that the ship is being hit from.

There are six degrees of axis hit detection, and these animations are overlaid with the game’s cockpit interactions. This all ties into the procedural inverse-kinematics that allow characters to conveniently reach and grab at the cockpit controls, press buttons, and grab the joysticks.

The video also talks about cockpit damage, with your cockpit smoking or catching fire at times. They wanted to keep the damage effects limited so it didn’t become too obstructive to the gameplay experience. Players will receive a lot of visual feedback based on UI information as well as cockpit lights that will let you know if you’re about to blow more than a gasket.

You can keep track of the development for Star Citizen by visiting the official website.