New Letter from the Chairman dropped on December 30th. You can tell Chris Roberts is super-pumped about the game because that's the second Letter in 2022, whereas before he'd gone years without writing one.
Letter From the Chairman
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm ... e-ChairmanIt's huge and everyone should read all of it, plus it has cool images and an awesome video of the Corsair at the top, so I'll just quote a couple of highlights.
Chris Roberts wrote:A great example of our ability to take the long-term view and invest in research and development that most projects don’t have the time or ambition for is Persistent Entity Streaming (PES), which creates true lasting persistence for the Star Citizen universe; if you leave some equipment in a remote cave, shoot down a bounty over Daymar, manage to fend off some pirates around Yela – the results of your actions will persist – items, debris, ships, even dead bodies will all stay where they were left and still be there even if you log off and return a week later - assuming other players haven’t taken or cleaned up the results of your adventures!
To do this for a universe as big and detailed as Star Citizen, to have this apply to everything, not just player-owned items, for a MMO with millions of players is a major technical accomplishment – I am not aware of any other large-scale MMO that has tried to deliver this level of persistence.

Chris Roberts wrote:Our Daily Active Users (DAU) this year, i.e. unique players logging in each day, has grown 50% over last year, and is double what it was at the end of 2019. This year, we are also averaging over 240,000 Monthly Active Users, which is 33% higher than our average MAU from last year, with highs of over 400,000 during May with this year’s Invictus Launch Week.

Chris Roberts wrote:Looking Forward – The Road to Alpha 4.0
This coming year is going to be a huge one for Star Citizen, possibly its biggest one to date!
The first order of business is to continue to stabilize Alpha 3.18 so we can release to the Live servers in January, once the team is back from their well-earned Holiday break.
Then we will continue to “harden” PES, improving aspects and adding some additional quality of life features including the ability to choose which PES Shard you would like to join. The current game server / PES shard matchmaking tries to match you to the last PES shard you were in when you log back in or recover from a crash, but if that shard is full, it places you in a different one. But in the short term, before Server Meshing makes this not so necessary, we also want to give players the choice to wait in a queue for their preferred shard if it is full.
The next step will be to separate the Replication Layer (RL), the in-memory cache that remembers all dynamic objects’ state, from the Game Server and have scalable RL workers that communicate the state changes between the various game clients, servers, and the RL.
This is very important for Server Meshing, as universe state needs to be fully decoupled from server state. It will also make Star Citizen much more crash resilient on the client side as a server crash will no longer take down the RL as well, meaning that clients can stay connected while a new server takes over where the last one left off. It will also have the added benefit of having the view every client has of the universe around it be a little more fluid with less lag as the client’s update and refresh of object state will no longer be tied to the tick rate of the game server. This means players will see state changes from other remote clients and game servers as they happen at the rates the various clients and servers push them.
Once this happens, we’ll be able to have multiple game servers communicate with the RL (much like multiple game clients communicate right now with the RL) allowing Star Citizen to have multiple servers simulating the universe’s state, which we call Server Meshing (SM).
We will start with Static Server Meshing, where different servers are assigned to simulate different Entity Zones in a star system. Entity Zones, sometimes referred to as Local Grids, are separate simulation areas; the inside of a spaceship is a different Zone to the space around which the spaceship flies. A planet is a different Zone than the Star System Zone where all the planets and moons exist in, and a landing zone can also be a different Zone, nested inside the Planet Zone, nested in the Star System Zone.
At first, the servers will be bound to fixed Zones but we will quickly move to Dynamic Server Meshing V1, where we assign servers dynamically to Entity Zones, based on gameplay and simulation load. This will be a much more efficient use of the servers in the cloud, as you only need servers where the players are, whereas with Static SM you have servers assigned to Zones, even if there are no players there.
Dynamic Server Meshing V2 will take this dynamic assignment of servers one step further by subdividing Entity Zones into “simulation islands” (this is organizing the dynamic objects in one Zone / Local Grid into different groups, based on which objects can interact / collide with each other), allowing these islands to be distributed between servers to again help balance simulation load.
At this point we should be able to handle tens of thousands of players all playing in the same PES universe shard, bringing Star Citizen much closer to the ultimate goal of a huge living universe densely populated with players and AI.
Once we achieve Static Server Meshing, we can open the universe of Star Citizen to other star systems, starting with Pyro. By having authority pass from one server to another, you’ll be able to transition seamlessly (without the need to log out of game) between star systems.
We are aiming to put Static Server Meshing and Pyro into the hands of players in the fourth quarter of 2023. The large caveat with this goal is that complicated engineering work that involves a completely new paradigm, requires a host of new backend services, and technology is hard to estimate and schedule accurately as the issues and problems that can come up along the way are hard to foresee as no one has implemented this system before, and plans rarely survive contact with the users, especially at scale. This has been true for PES, as it is no secret that we were hoping to have Alpha 3.18 and PES release to Live by end of the year as opposed to just the PTU. Delays in finalizing 3.18 and PES impact the team’s ability to start on the next stage, and we still have the unknowns of how PES performs after months of heavy load, and people seeing exactly how much space junk they can leave around!
Beyond this, there are a host of other exciting features and content we have planned for 2023; Pyro with its assorted planets, moons, settlements, space stations and assorted factions and AI population being the headline, but we also will be rolling out the New Item Resource system in ships which replaces the old pipe system with a much more dynamic and scalable system to allow for truly emergent behavior (in fact elements of this new system can already be seen in 3.18 in the Salvage gameplay), Bounty Hunting with a full tracking system and the ability to actively restrain and transport both players and AI, Persistent Hangars with freight elevators allowing you to call up your stored inventory or place things into storage. Towards the end of the year, we should see some of the more Squadron 42 related work arrive in Star Citizen; more flexible player traversal, especially on ladders and ledges, a greatly improved interaction system, FPS scanning, the new Star Map, MFDs using the more performant and flexible building blocks UI system and much deeper combat AI. Now that the Gen 12 renderer is functioning in 3.18, the Graphics team will work on multi-threading improvements and optimizations for the renderer as well as hook up the Vulkan Graphics API to it, to unlock some of the performance gains that the Gen 12 renderer can provide.
There are numerous more things the Star Citizen team are working on for this coming year, but this letter is already long enough!

Chris Roberts wrote:The universe and how you interact with it is up to you; from exploring, to hauling, trading, mining, salvage, refueling, refining, bounty hunting, piracy, to being a hired gun to just sightseeing and being a social butterfly.
And that is just what we have now – in the future you’ll be able to farm or gather other resources, build, craft and sell. The universe of Star Citizen is a huge sandbox for everyone to play in and I couldn’t be more excited by what the future holds.
Star Citizen is more than just a game, it is an escape to another reality where anyone can pursue their imagination, not bound to a single playstyle or profession, where they can interact with other players that share in the same common dream.