In the latest episode of Roadmap Roundup, Cloud Imperium Games confirmed that Replication Layer’s release in Alpha 3.23 has been locked in, taking a big step forward towards server meshing and smoother online experience.
With this update, the Replication Layer will be removed from game servers to run on its own set of servers, helping the game recover much faster in case of server crashes.
Back in 2023’s CitizenCon, a developer showcased how the Replication Layer works by running it on a smaller scale, where after a server crash all players remain in the Replication Layer servers until the game finds a new server to replace with the crashed one.
This is a huge achievement for both the developers and the community, as the Replication Layer will help to face the 30K error far less than before, which is one of the most-hated errors in the Star Citizen community, as it is known as the death of everything running on the persistence universe.
Prior to this, whenever a server used to crash in Star Citizen, all players were thrown back to the main many, facing a 30K error. This is used to wipe all unfinished missions, en-route cargos, and many other progressions. Although sometimes players could revive in their own ship in the same position without losing anything, it wasn’t an option for all players in all situations.
The Replication Layer, simply helps players to save their current state in another temporary server to avoid any progression loss, while the game in the background looks for a new server to add all players into.
Aside from the Replication Layer, Cloud Imperium Games also tagged the following features as Committed, which means they will arrive with Alpha 3.23:
- Distribution Centers
- Vulkan Graphics API Support
- Water Simulation & Rendering Improvements
- Volumetric Clouds Update
- Image Upscaling
One more change that was made to the Roadmap is related to the Grav Royale mode in Arena Commander. This mode was made available in the EPTU build earlier this week, along with the new Mirai Pulse grav-lev vehicles, but it didn’t take CIG long to remove it.
While some players assumed the removal was due to the launch of Mirai Pulse series before their official announcement, CIG revealed in today’s roadmap update that the developers have discovered a critical issue in the Grav Royale mode, which has resulted in its removal from the Alpha 3.23’s Release View until the problem is solved.
With the EPTU version of Alpha 3.23 being accessible to all the backers, the development team will receive more feedback on the upcoming content, helping them to find and fix the remaining bugs and issues in a shorter period, and release the new patch on live servers sooner rather than later.
