Another week means another Around The Verse episode and a look at how many issues they have left before Star Citizen’s alpha 3.0 is put into the public test realm. Even though they had 23 issues to fix last week, they managed to knock out a few of the major blockers but also encountered a host of new problems, bringing the must-fix issues to a near-lateral value of 25.

The start of Around of Verse highlights the issues in the Burn Down segment, where one of the most notorious bug the team had to deal with was a bug that crashed to desktop anytime you would use the afterburner.

You can check out the video below.

Another issue they ran into was the shopping section filter being bugged. This bug made it where the graphics scroll and items in the commodity kiosk – along with the drop down menu and grid – caused a lot of visual distortion to appear in the menus.

Thankfully the kiosk item menu bug was fixed as the Star Citizen QA team was talking about the issue with the rest with the team.

There were additional issues with the airlock system that also caused a bug that they weren’t able to pinpoint exactly because it happened to a tester in Evocati. Nevertheless, they did manage to track down the issue eventually, along with a few other blockers such as the asset bug, the kiosk bug, and the commodity bug, and get them all fixed.

After fixing some of the issues and discovering some new problems, they managed to bring the total issues down to 25.

So once they knock out those 25 issues they’ll be able to distribute alpha 3.0 to the backers in the public test realm.

The rest of the episode talked about how the art team had to recreate a lot of the old legacy armor in Star Citizen in order to match the old armor with the new mix-and-match armor setup.

This part of the development is probably the kind of thing that makes gamers cringe because informing the community that they had to recreate the armor assets means more money, more time, and more production time spent remaking assets instead of moving forward with new content.

One of the big worries that the community has is that there’s a lot of funds being put into remaking a lot of the same assets over and over again.

Hopefully they won’t have to remake any of the major assets… again.

On the upside, they have a standardized pipeline for creating character types, armor, and skins. This includes layered suits for the characters, such as the undersuits that can be customized for the player-character, and the armor that goes over the undersuits.

The customization features remind me a lot of Anarchy Online, in terms of versatility and variety. However, the benefit of Star Citizen is that the visuals look absolutely top notch, so there’s a mixture of art meets functionality.

All in all, if the team can continue to iterate and reduce the issues, as well as continue to advance and add new content, they could end up getting alpha 3.0 up and out to the public within the next two weeks.