This affair must have caught Liam at a bad time, fretting over the echos of the many Valiant kills permeating the comms. When my Valiant appeared on radar, Liam knew he was dead before he was dead.
The Liam Lorenzo Affair
Community Tipster DigThat
Found this little song and dance on the RSI website in the Community Spotlight.
6 TIPS that will make your Experience 23.7% more ENJOYABLE.
Additional tip: When drinking a fluid, if you press and hold the LMB at the beginning, you can gulp down the whole bottle or can nonstop.
JT SAFE?
I remember those foolish calls coming in over comms. I found it hard to believe that such naive chatter emanated from the mouth of anyone savvy enough to find Jump Town, yet alone profit from such knowledge. Just knowing how to get to JT back then made you a prized companion, JT wasn’t on any map. And it was a fair bit harder to find JT than it was to do blind jumps to GrimHex prior to its inclusion in our star maps.
If there was one thing you quickly learned about JT, it was that you never announced you were heading that way. If you decided to hit JT, it was best that it be a surprise. What most realized far to late that JT was like a casino, the house always wins. But unlike your favorite casino, JT was different on each visit which is why it was so much fun.
It should come as no surprise that the best way to approach JT for the solo privateer was in a Cutlass. Without dedicated protection you needed to be able to safely scout the area and get in and do your business quickly. Quantities of widow were always limited, waiting around to fill a large hull was very risky.
Truth be told, the JT run wasn’t that profitable. The markup for widow was huge, if you could wait out the limited demand for the product. It could take hours to offload a Starfarer and you could count on constant pad ramming assaults from campers at GrimHex.
Still, this place in the wild, wild west in a game that has yet to be released, was EPIC.
The wipe of patch 3.15
Tier 1 of my network upgrade with OpenWRT appears complete, my comings and goings online should now be nearly invisible! Disabling what MSI claims to be a LAN Manager completed the updates. And voila – no more 16008!
Just in time too, as a new patch from CIG was all ready to go. I had an old CCU to an Aurora LN, so I thought starting out in the new patch with its DB wipe (all the goodies you acquired over the past year – poof – gone), along with the new yet to be completed inventory system, that going back to basics seems like a good idea. My first million – all using the Aurora LN.
With a quick upgrade of the LN’s power plant using a spare regulus I had laying around my hangar, I quickly found a flight suit and headed to the Lorville hangar bays.
Coolest Ship Ever
CIG has outdone themselves with the latest announcement of new ships. And no, I am not talking about the 400i.
This ship ties everything together for the savvy freelancer who prefers to work alone or with very small groups of trusted friends. With the new inventory systems coming online it will be critical for marshaling your forces beyond your home base. Up top the Liberator can carry 3 ships, mostly all of the single seaters. Inside you can fit almost any of the ground vehicles including the ballista and the tonk. Plenty of cargo space to boot.
I didn’t have to think long before adding this beauty to my hangars.
The SHARD Factor
Truth be told, patch 3.14 ranks right there along with the original 3.0 patch. While 3.0 was less than playable and failed to live up to the hype surrounding its release(CIG failed to acknowledge that much of the game play code would need refactoring), patch 3.14 is unplayable due to a rash of ERROR(s)- CIG services(Code 16008). Truth be told, even CIG doesn’t fully understand this issue. After reviewing the RSI Roadmap for clues it would appear the root cause of these issues is the removal of account login in services from the main Dedicated Game Servers (DGS) to the network code in preparation for server meshing.
As described during this year’s CITIZENCON, the concept of a SHARD is being implemented.
The Shard Manager functionality is responsible for creating a shard in the EntityGraph database, ensuring it is “seeded” with an initial population of entities, communicating with matchmaking so that players can join a shard, and talking to provisioning services so that a Hybrid and Dedicated Game Servers (DGS) can be assigned to a shard.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/teams
In anyone’s book, this is an extensive and critical update and it is understandable that this uprooting of account login procedures and refactoring to implementing a “SHARD” is consuming quite a bit of time. Not only is populating a new database time consuming, but I suspect that the account login procedures were not thread safe, and difficulties have arisen as to the best way to deal with event signals that never occur. Better them than me.
The 3.15 PTU exhibits the same issue, but the problem has been greatly reduced. In 3.14 I was lucky to login about 5% of the time, now I seem to get lucky with 25% of my attempted logins.
The good news is that FM is looking sweet, we haven’t seen ship performance at this level since prior to the 3.0 patch. 3.15 promises to add back in differences in shield performance(A,B,C,D) and hopefully stealth game play.
For now, I have taken my light sabers out of storage awaiting CIGs completion of the necessary refactors on their way to server meshing.
Org Review – SHRED
SMUGGLE, HIJACK, RANSOM, EXTORTION AND DEATH (SHRED) is a smaller right-wing org with less than 100 members with a goal of becoming pirates whose preferred game loop is interdiction with the intent to demand ransom under threat of death. Of course, this org wouldn’t be the first or the last to lay claim to this game loop, a game loop unlikely to generate anything other than salt.
Their past game play amounts to seeding salt in the verse by hanging out at various ports and insulting nearby players to goad them into a fight, they will attack regardless. Usually they fly a Hammerhead.
The biggest problem with the org, other than they haven’t been flying much as of late, is their discord channel. Laced with gay insults and science denying right wingers reciting decades old GOP talking points, these folks believe anything that is not an “alternative fact” is propaganda and are quick to call anyone based in the real world a commie, or worse. Unfortunately these vocal wanna be libertarians do not understand that conservatism, at its heart contains no populism and furthermore these folks are unlikely to fly. If you are a devote right winger, this org may be for you. For the rest of us:
PTU 3.14.0
After over 10 days of sheer agony over Code 16008 I finally logged last night. Not much to buy at Orison yet, and the climb out of the atmosphere was over an excruciating 750Km! Must be a bug.
This issue is caused by an incorrect obstruction radius around Crusader. This will be resolved in the next PTU release (most likely after the weekend) to place it closer to 150km instead of 750km above the planet. For now leaving atmosphere when at Orison may take much longer than intended. This may also make spline jumps to Orison impossible for now.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.14.0n PTU.7666961 Patch Notes
My previous brief initial test of the new Power Triangle feature suffered from a bad keyboard mapping, the default bindings do not match previous settings or the keymap! Thus I was powering up my shields, not my weapons and left scratching my head as to why shit wasn’t working. That’s free flight test mode for you and a quite prudent step, the key bindings have changed significantly, so imports may be problematic. A key bind wipe is helpful from time to time.
So WOW, the light fighters are kicken ass! They handle well enough to forgo wasting boost allowing increased weapons power with an occasional shield boost if you get hit. Was having trouble in the hornet, fricken aurora’s were taking me out with missiles. Will need to revist the medium fighters.
So yeah, CIG is getting closer! And yeah, this to will change.
For the latest update on this patch.
Wave PTU 3.14.0
CIG seems to have throttled access to the PTU for at least this wave 1 volunteer. I did get an early chance to tour Orison, an expanse much to large to navigate on foot. I am not sure what the static about shuttles on Orison was about (glimpsed on one of Lando’s shows a week or two back), but yeah, there were shuttles. Did I say the place was HUGE?
Accessing the PTU is spotty at best as various backend services are being outfitted with the Steaming Entity Graph objects or are being used to gate traffic until the DB upgrade is complete. The SEGs were formally known as icache. The store’s structure seems to be largely complete wrt to this patch, but I suspect much data has yet to be transferred. Checks of the various components reveals that some components may not differentiate themselves much if at all. Some on Spectrum have posited work scheduled for 3.15 may be being moved forward and tested.
Let’s just say that it is not likely that CIG would be experimenting with 3.15 features while 3.14 remains languishing in the PTU. Far more likely is that loading up the SEG requires far more data than originally anticipated, it is a DB after all! Equally likely, there are 3.15 core features needed now and CIG is correctly biting the bullet and is spending the time to get the Steaming Entity Graph objects completely integrated into thousands of entities that now comprise the game.
As of this update, backend server login servers are up and running while character generation is not. It is also unlikely that the ship refactoring for the “capacitor” update is complete. My initial bounty run featured TTK times are bit too long for my liking. AC and SM also spawn your toon in a vacuum and thus neither is playable at this time.
Looks like a big push to get SQ42 released is on for next year as Sandi and Chris announce they are moving to England next year to be with the SQ42 team.
Quantum, Quasar, and Virtual AI
The long anticipated update to Quantum, the Universe Simulation, the brain child of Tony Zurovec, Directory of Persistent Universe was released today. We first got an introduction to this system during last year’s CitizenCon. Tony brings us up to date and Tony’s choice of metaphors from Quantum Physics is becoming clear. Enjoy!
Tony’s big brain…