According to Chris Roberts, head of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), the studio is much closer to realizing the dream that many said was impossible…

It’s been 12 years since the announcement of Star Citizen, which turned into an over-funded MMO, and it’s still nowhere near release. The game is currently in Alpha 4.0. At the start of the new year, Roberts wrote a new letter stating that the theme of the year for the studio will be playability. According to him, many of us feel that if the current game had fewer bugs and problems, it could provide an unparalleled experience. Several approaches have been used in recent years, but it has been difficult to balance new features and technologies with improvements, often resulting in instability, degraded performance, and buggy gameplay.

Therefore, new feature development is separated from content creation and bug fixing. New features that need to be tested are given their own pilot channel and are not integrated into the game until they are approved. Roberts said that CIG has often gotten caught up in technology or feature work because it took longer than expected. Roberts then took a swipe at the big publishers, which is funny because the public has put so much money into the game that if anyone should be criticizing the other companies, it should be him…

Server meshing has already been implemented (in the Star Citizen 4.0 backend), resulting in a much denser universe and more stable performance, so Roberts says they are close to realizing their dream. Each planet, landing zone, and major station is on a different server, so the boundaries between servers are invisible, crashes and bugs can be isolated into small regions, and servers have fewer things to simulate. The number of players has also increased, as they can handle 500 players per server instead of 100. The Pyro star system (six planets, dozens of bases and outposts) was also added in 4.0.

Server networking is the last major technological hurdle before Star Citizen 1.0, Roberts said earlier. Once that is achieved, CIG says the features and content will be up to retail, commercial standards, and then they can take on new players, the game will be stable, and it will be mature enough to continue to engage the community, meaning it will no longer be in alpha or early access. But he said all that back in March.

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Source: PCGamer