Online Technology
In Montreal, the Live Tools team completed various improvements to the internal tools that keep Star Citizen’s operations and development running smoothly. There was a major focus on Hex, the team’s player investigation and support platform. The team is currently working on a full visual and UX overhaul, named Hex v4.0 that established a new design system to guide all future development. Moreover, the team are adding powerful new capabilities for support staff.
The team then spent time stabilizing Panic Switch, a recently launched tool for managing live service incidents, fixing editing bugs, improving the dashboard experience, and migrating configuration data.
Regarding Bootstrap, the tool that helps developers run local environments, the team finished user research interviews and journey mapping. They’re currently moving into the technical design phase for a full client revamp. Work also continued on error reporting, with the team improving crash report reliability and enriching the data captured with each report, including stream context, badge information, and severity levels.
Alongside these improvements, the whole team contributed to ongoing maintenance across Hex, Bootstrap, and error reporting, resolving dozens of standalone bugs and smaller requests. The team also completed work to unblock the Editor team by delivering key Jira integration features for error reporting.
“As spring is slowly dressing the trees, the Live Tools team is positioned to continue driving meaningful improvements to the tools that support Star Citizen’s development and live operations.” Live Tools Team
In April, the Online Services Team (OST) completed work on Lazy Inventory Creation and Inventory ID Enforcement. These make the game’s item and inventory systems more reliable for players.
The social features pipeline advanced, with Chat actively in development alongside other features such as Friends, Online Presence, and Party Viewer all queued up as upcoming deliverables.
As usual, the team continued to provide ongoing support for Mission System 1.0, addressing design requests around instanced operations, per-cycle item limits, and contract advertisement behaviors in instanced environments.
Work on a Global Database Sharding Service was completed. This behind-the-scenes improvement is aimed at making the game’s infrastructure more scalable as the player population grows. The team engaged closely with QA to build a new tracking dashboard for long-term persistence bugs, thus improving visibility and response speed for the live game. Early design and discovery work also began on the Crafting and Refining systems. Across all these efforts, OST remained focused on stability, player experience, and preparing the systems that will power Star Citizen in the future.
The Network team progressed with a system to manage how players’ persistent in-game data, such as inventory and progression, is updated and preserved across different versions and patches. This ensures that nothing is lost when the game evolves.
A significant round of improvements to Server Meshing was merged into the main game build. These updates replace older components with newer, more capable versions that are better equipped to handle the demands of a dynamically connected universe.
On the live game front, the team tracked down the causes of an out-of-memory crash affecting the replication layer’s Hybrid service. A hotfix was deployed and stability improved, though the team is keeping a close eye on the situation.
Work is also ongoing to resolve a client disconnection error that some players have been experiencing.
