Chris Roberts responds to QoL thread on Spectrum

Full text of the post:

Hi Terada,

I just wanted to thank you for your suggestions for QoL on Star Citizen.

Also your incredibly awesome flying and video capture skills - when ever I want to show someone the huge range of things you can do in Star Citizen your low flying or 100 player get together videos on YouTube are part of the links I share! When I started the journey on Star Citizen over ten years ago, I never imagined such dynamic and beautiful footage showing off both what the technology of Star Citizen can do and more importantly what players can do in the huge Sandbox we are building!

Back to your post, seeing tight, concise constructive feedback like this is super helpful - I also want you to know that I pay attention to the community's feedback as well as feedback by various Star Citizen Content Creators.

This year has been an especially difficult one in terms of stability and QoL due to the roll out of Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) in 3.18. The whole way we track and record state of the universe changed dramatically which also changed the way we handle the data in the backend in the cloud. Because of how we record state with PES we needed to switch to a different kind of backend database, so we moved from a SQL (relational) database to a Graph database. Unfortunately the Graph Database we selected, despite being one of the best rated ones and intended for Enterprise scale, has had major issues at load, causing the database to lock up and all the queries from the game servers to stall out. This happened on the 3.18 launch, where it took us a lot of effort to stabilize including some engineering on our side to lessen the load on the database. We thought we had this issue solved but the most recent version of the database software was a step backwards and we've had additional lock ups at load, which was what happened for periods on Wednesday just after we launched 3.20 and on Thursday, Friday and very briefly on Saturday. We rolled back to an older version and disabled some of the features last night that we suspect may be contributing to the instability (ironically we think the replication to mirror databases for full redundancy is a culprit to the database lock ups). This looks to have stabilized things. The backend database getting into a bad state manifests in multiple ways to infinitely spinning inventory windows, missing items and degraded game performance. We went with an off the shelf enterprise level database for stability and resilience as there is already a lot of new tech in Star Citizen - so its frustrating as the software that should be rock solid is the biggest offender in making the Star Citizen experience even more unreliable. We have the top engineers from the database company working on this, and we are also assessing other databases to switch to if the unreliability of the current solution continues.

One way or another we intend to have this solved in the very near term and the game coming back to 3.17.x stability levels.

We are also very focused on improving QoL - both annoying bugs that have been around for way too long and some things that we need to address to make the experience fun and welcoming. Your list is great in this respect as a lot of your suggestions are on our list too!

We did get some QoL fixes in 3.20 (like the QT HUD being lined up properly) but not nearly as much as the team or I would like. We will be working on knocking out bugs and improving QoL pretty continuously from here on out.

There is a lot of great tech and features that we are bringing into Star Citizen from Squadron 42 that will dramatically change the feel and polish of Star Citizen. For instance a lot of your suggestions in In Game Comfort and Readability have already been addressed by the changes we made for Squadron 42. The plan has always been to bring this work into Star Citizen, Squadron 42 was just a good way for us to focus and really polish the feel and usability without the pressure of maintaining functionality as we iterated on it for the always live environment of the PU. We've now hit an inflection point in Squadron 42's development that allows us to start bringing this work into Star Citizen in the near future.

I am very excited for Citizen Con, as we will be sharing a lot of these features and more. It will be great to be in front of a live crowd and spending time with the community in person. Its been four years since the last in person Citizen Con!

Interesting that the explanation for 3.20 performance is database. I wonder if SC is engineering things correctly or if it really is a scale problem.