MONDAY, AUGUST 31
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
On Bootstrap, the tool developers use to set up their local work environments, the team completed the client revamp implementation roadmap, finalizing the delivery phasing and producing mock-ups of the new interface. This closes out last month’s design phase and clears the way to begin rebuilding the client.
For Error Reporting, the crash-processing pipeline was updated to clean up leftover files after each run for better reliability.
Finally, attention was given to the broader crash pipeline and post-launch polish for Panic Switch, the live incident management tool.
August saw the R&D team working on planet atmosphere, including making improvements to the overcast skylight. Improvements to cloud injection into the atmosphere continued too.
However, the bulk of the team’s work went into the temporal render mode. As part of this, the handling of dynamic objects was improved to reduce trails when moving through clouds. Motion-based confidence was replaced with a new coherence metric, which gives much better convergence and stability at little or no motion, and also helps to deal with evolving clouds, camera cuts, and dynamic objects in general without special-case handling. The history clamp was also improved, and in combination with a guide mask, now largely resolves transmittance halos at ridges.
A number of performance and memory improvements were made as well. The history helper texture was reduced to 25% by compressing and quantizing its attributes. Noise LOD computation was optimized, and shape and erosion noise now receive individual LODs. The temporal upsampler was optimized to reduce register pressure, and various transmittance profile improvements and fixes were made.
Several items remain in progress: folding opaque scene visibility into the upsampler’s filter kernel and neighborhood clamp BBox hull setup, and the cloud injection work and VGPR reductions for the spatio-temporal upsampler.
Throughout August, the Technical Animation team focused on the systems that make characters look and move convincingly, including faces, deformation, cloth, and creatures. Much of this work is foundational, improving the underlying tech that every character in the 'verse relies on rather than any single asset.
For character faces and DNA heads, the team continued the expression and polish work that brings the PU’s growing cast of faces to life, running detailed passes across a batch of DNA heads and correcting alignment issues that had crept in between the artists’ Maya scenes and what players actually see in-game. A new set of eye textures was integrated into the live Star Citizen branch, alongside an updated base head. Improvements were also made to how facial regions blend together, laying groundwork for more varied and natural-looking characters.
Significant progress was made on the RBF system, which drives how skin, muscle, and clothing deform as characters move. The team solved a tricky issue where jaw movement was incorrectly pulling on collars, streamlined how deformation data is exported so multiple setups can share a single asset, and pushed the system out across the core Star Citizen skeletons. Tool improvements requested directly by Tech Art also landed.
The StarCloth toolset gained per-vertex control over how strongly cloth is pulled toward the body, giving artists far finer authority over how capes, coats, and loose garments behave. Support for unified skins was added, along with automatic health checks that catch broken cloth setups before they reach the game.
Weakspot implementation on the apex sand valakkar moved into review, and new creature variants began playtesting.
(This Topic relates to the Discord conversation here)
The Bar Citizen World Tour continued with a stop in Denver, Colorado, and a Gamescom meetup in Cologne, Germany. Behind the scenes, the Community team also continued preparing for upcoming events.
Alongside these, the team maintained the regular publishing schedule, including This Week in Star Citizen, bi-weekly Roadmap Updates and Roundups, the Monthly Report, and Arena Commander schedule updates, while coordinating feedback across multiple development teams to ensure community voices reached the appropriate channels.
Work continued in August on generating mission text for the huge number of missions that will be arriving with Nyx I. This consisted of not only a swath of contracts being offered by the various factions of the UEE, but new Local Contracts, where someone who lives at the settlement you’re visiting is looking for help.
Additionally, an upcoming event required Narrative support for the overall lore that players will experience, along with text for the suite of missions and rewards that will come with it. Every patch also sees dozens of new items, weapons, and rewards, which all need text that the Narrative team generates, along with detailed reviews of ships in development to help ensure that the signage and decals are lore-appropriate.
August also saw the release of a new issue of the Subscriber magazine, Jump Point, which features a brand-new narrative story about Nyx I.
Last month, the Online Services team focused on improving the reliability of missions and contracts, specifically the system that generates jobs and delivery tasks. The devs worked through a bug where accepting a mission that another player had just started could get them stuck. The fix will show a clear message and automatically refresh the list instead of leaving players in a broken state. A technical issue was also addressed where missions tied to instanced areas (like certain locales or private spaces) weren’t properly ‘cleaned up’ after players left, which was creating unnecessary buildup behind the scenes.
Furthermore, Online Services worked on various improvements for Instancing. They also cleaned up the side effect of a previous bug that had mistakenly granted some players extra Wikelo-related items, which involved running data cleanup passes to correct it while being careful not to disrupt normal gameplay in the process.
Looking ahead, Online Services began scoping two new internal tools to help support staff resolve player account issues more efficiently. Both ideas are still in early planning and design.
In August, the Live Tools team pushed Hex 4.0 toward release and moved the Bootstrap client revamp from planning into development.
The busiest area remained Hex 4.0, the team’s internal platform for player support and operations staff, where most of the month went into pre-release work. The team brought the player support Arbiter toolset directly into the platform, replacing the external browser extensions staff previously relied on, and reworked the sanction and discipline workflow around it. Some manual steps in tracking recurring issues were also automated.
A round of interaction and UX polish was also completed, including reworked tab behavior and quick-view routing, clearer sanction and page header controls, responsive account grids, a new feedback button, a past suspensions view, and a fix for a critical gateway crash when querying entitlements. Attention then turned to closing out the remaining feature parity and pre-release UX work to get Hex 4.0 release-ready, with post-release improvements already being scoped. Alongside this, progress continued on Citadel, the service behind Hex’s data access.
-# This chart provides a visual representation of ships and vehicles mentioned in monthly reports, Inside Star Citizen episodes, and official CIG communications. It is updated as needed to reflect new information and serves as a rough guide to each ship’s progress through the development pipeline. While some ships may be missing or shift positions over time, we strive to keep the chart as accurate as possible based on the official information available.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 7
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11
Push through the front lines and take charge of the battlefield with the Streamline bundle, featuring a white base with bold red highlights and metallic silver accents. Includes the Kilgore & Poole Monde heavy armor, Klaus & Werner Demeco laser LMG, and paint for the RSI Aurora Mk II.
The Monde heavy armor provides combat-ready protection against intense attacks, while the Demeco light machine gun delivers a high rate of laser fire at short to mid-range.
The Streamline Bundle will be delivered in Alpha 4.10.1
Implementing Orison Relief Support, where players contribute to Orison’s recovery efforts through a variety of missions spanning resource gathering, crafting, hauling, and combat. This will be released in an upcoming 4.10.x patch.
This card has been set to Committed.
This update has been adjusted to Q4 2026 to give our teams more time to focus on Alpha 4.10.x and 4.11 to further improve the live experience.
This card has been updated with a new image.
This card has been updated with a new image.
Hello everyone,
Today, we are releasing the RSI Launcher 2.17.0
In this version, we’re introducing improvement to the download process to reduce Launcher errors on Download.
Now each download phase will be run in their own subprocess to ensure that a crash does not kill the application.
A retry mechanism has been implemented for network errors.
We also reworked how the Launcher Error Code are organized to better understand what errors are encountered to be able to be more specific in our support of the community.
You can find an updated list of Launcher Errors at the bottom of the thread
Sabre EX - QD Sabre variant
Quote: And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.
