Star Citizen received a huge patch last week, one that added new enemy ships to the Arena Commander mode and made many fixes to its network code. The rubber banding issue’s been solved for multiplayer deathmatches and Roberts Space Industries’ reckon they’ve made gret strides for eliminating it in the final, larger, persistent game.
Most importantly, though, there are now flushable toilets.
One of the modes in Arena Commander lets you fight in a combat simulation against AI ships. Patch 12.5 adds a new ship type for the enemy Vanduul to pilot against you. This will spice up single player a tad but the real changes come in the form of multiplayer updates.
One of the focuses of this patch was taking feedback from the community and balancing the ships for dogfighting. “With top to bottom changes of virtually every tweak-able value on every ship and item what we’ve ended up with is the most balanced multiplayer dogfighting that we’ve had to date,” writes associate producer Travis Day.
With the release of the Arena Commander update only a small portion of backers had access to PvP but that number’s been steadily increasing since launch. “The increased community participation exposed many weaknesses in our nascent backend and matchmaking systems that did not manifest until we reached much higher numbers of concurrent players,” Day explains. “For patch 12.5 we’ve diagnosed and addressed most every problem that the increase in players had exposed. For players this means that you will connect successfully to a match much more often, experience far fewer random disconnects, and in the event you are disconnected you will be able to rejoin the match much more readily. On top of this we’ve also better stabilized the game servers and resolved most all of the known crashes.”
One of the key issues to come out from the Star Citizen alpha is a rubber banding problem. In multiplayer matches each player’s position, rotation, and velocity wasn’t being correctly communicated to each player’s game. In this update RSI say that they’ve “significantly reduced the occurrence of the divergence and also implemented systems to correct it much more quickly and seamlessly.” The problem’s not been solved but greatly improved.
The studio have also “identified areas in which we could further improve synchronization for future iterations of Arena Commander and eventually the Persistent Universe. These future changes include dead reckoning to increase the visual quality of ship movement while simultaneously reducing the amount of data sent to the game clients, along with adding time synchronization to allow the client to display the current game state sent from the server more accurately.”
Of course, the most exciting update in this patch is the newly added flushable toilets.
Here’s a rundown of the patch’s key changes:
Additions/Improvements
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Added subscriber jukebox
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Adding visual and auditory feedback for incoming fire and weapon impacts
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Missile sounds polished and improved
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Additional shield sounds added (power down, power up, taking damage)
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Added new Vanduul ship designated [REDACTED] by UEE Naval Command
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Added Victory/Defeat/Draw messages on end of round scoreboard
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Added voice over announcement to denote which team has won the round
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Added additional Hornet top bar warning lights
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Freelancer bunk beds can now be used
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Freelancer bathroom and toilet can now be used
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Revised for Aurora interior to increase fidelity
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Added Aurora warning indicator lights
Networking Improvements/Fixes
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Fixed issues that resulted in being kicked back to hangar during match load
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Positional correction fixes to reduce rubberbanding
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Failed connection attempts to HubServer will now timeout after 10 seconds
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Removed socket disconnections due to login timeouts
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Networked physics is now independent of framerate
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Reduced server load caused by console logging
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Creation of http interface to capture server statistics
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Fixed players not connecting to matchmaker
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Added a handshake system to guarantee the correct initialization of servers
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Server-to-server connection improvements
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Adjusted ship network packet priorities
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Fix for disconnections while in the hangar
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Reworked network correction to use network sync’d packets and direct physics pushes instead of IFCSsystem
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Greatly reduced hitching and performance issues associated with players joining or exiting a match
Fixes
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Mantis cannons no longer takes damage without overheating
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Player can no longer zone into a match standing in the cockpit
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Helmet is no longer invisible
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Fixed 300i landing gear placement
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Fixed rare crash when loading into Vanduul Swarm
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Fixed crash when receiving connection error
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Fixed crash caused by players spawning on top of each other at beginning of map
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CPU optimizations to improve client performance
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Gatling gun audio stops when no longer firing
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Destroying an asteroid no longer counts as a final kill
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Energy bolts now scale properly when fired to the side
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Winning music no longer plays at match end for losing team. You get nothing, you lose, good day sir.
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Fixed ships in holotable no longer showing hologram model
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Notifications, points, scoreboard and timer should now be shown in third person
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Player movement prevented when interacting with helmet stand
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Friendly killed audio no longer plays Hostile Eliminated, Target Destroyed or Enemy down
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Removed use icon on ladder
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Correct game mode descriptions added in Arena Commander UI
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Adjusted bloom of objects on radar
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Projectiles scale properly when firing in decoupled mode
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Particle emitters now properly destroy themselves, reducing lag
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Ship Energy system optimizations
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Fix for sound velocity/speed being calculated incorrectly if its position is changed multiple times per frame.
I had a terrible time with the initial Star Citizen launch but these patches show RSI are rapidly solving the issues I came across.