Just some of what you’re waiting for.
Those waiting patiently for the v0.9 release of Star Citizen’s Arena Commander mode may be pleased to learn that final QA testing on a release candidate should take place tonight. That’s the general message put across in Chris Robert’s latest Star Citizen status update post, anyway.
After talking about cakes for a little bit (don’t worry, it’s metaphorically relevant,) Roberts writes that the “piping hot” v0.9 Arena Commander release should be in the eager hands of internal QA testers “later tonight.”
Constructing the release candidate build takes a fair amount of time. Eight hours, according to the status post. Plus additional time to run “a patch building process that compares the previous release’s files to the new release” to make sure Star Citizen players aren’t downloading the entire game for every single major update. Which, let’s face it, would be very tiresome.
Thanks to the location of QA teams in Manchester and Austin, the company says it can “effectively test through the night.”
In terms of what that means for a broad public release of v0.9 of Arena Commander, if all goes well it could (could) be out there very late on Thursday. Or Friday morning, probably depending on your time zone.
“By the time the teams in Austin and Santa Monica get into work on Thursday, we’ll know how that testing cycle went. Should everything work as expected, the build is then propagated to the public release channel.”
That’s by no means certain of course, as it relies on a whole series of development processes running smoothly and the QA teams signing off on the build. If a hiccup occurs, the process begins again with bug-crushing and the (eight hour plus) compiling of a new candidate release build. Still, it’s a nice, transparent update that gives a bit of insight into development and offers the suggestion of a nearby release.
