I'll be updating this as I watch but I'll stick to the main points. If you want a full picture just watch the archive.
Partial TL;DW:
- "Monthly" patches with fixes and new content (in quotation because they aim for 9-10 actual releases this year).
- Less frequent feature releases, longer testing on a separate channel.
- "Inside Star Citizen" and "Star Citizen Live" will be released together on Thursdays.
- New regular "Behind the Ship" series alternating with one of the above (depending on the topic of the week).
- The decision to release 4.0 when it did came to be because CIG couldn't get enough players on the PTU servers.
- This release allowed them to compare the loads between 3.24 and 4.0 servers.
- Before 4.0 release stuff:
- They were finishing 4.0 features until October, upon merging this work and running Server Meshing in Pyro they were met with major issues with the systems.
- "There was a new change in the engine were we tried do optimize some of the way we deal with streaming radius (...) the way we compound and aggregate objects would inflate the bounds of things and the new locations in Pyro would have radius of several thousand kilometers so every client in Pyro ended up loading a very large part of the environment. (...) Upwards of 15-20Mb per client per message."
- During this testing they also established the player count for launch of 4.0 (500 players per shard soft cap, 600 hard cap).
- Lots of network optimization.
- They had to modify the teleport API for Server Meshing (used for teleporting players when they die for example).
- They didn't managed to finish the culling of instanced interiors (the cause of seeing and hearing other people instanced hangars).
- They mobilized all engineers to focus on the optimization before release. Came up with a special initiative to cut through red tape and push for improvements.
- The initial target for this process was to stabilize server performance between 15-20FPS and prevent it from going below 10.
- Some of the physics issues fixed during this process:
- Resolving collision bugs persisting in the database.
- Destroying AA turrets "collapsed" them instead of removing, then added new ones on top of those, compounding the issue.
- Between 3.24 and 4.0.1 teams fixed 2900 bugs (3300 tasks).
- More resources (devs, including seniors) committed for fixes rather than new features.
- Increasing bug fixing quotas for teams.
- They want to improve observability of issues (some systems like ATC don't report issues as much as the newer ones).
- They're (re?)establishing resource budgets (CPU, GPU etc.) for all teams.
- They try to assign bug fixes and changes to a system to their original creators, that said it's not always possible and they want keep things balanced as to not keep someone purely on bug fixing for years.
- They'll try to stick to the promise of releasing only the stuff that's actually ready for release. Both Jared and Benoit acknowledged this didn't really pan out in the past.
- They were feature focused developer until now, changing to less flashiness and more bug fixing is a scary prospect for the whole company (especially marketing).
- Seniors will be assigned the most important, difficult and time consuming fixes more often (they used to keep them strictly on working on the major new features).
- Dev split between Star Citizen and Squadron 42 is flexible for the most part. Some fixes to one project obviously improve both as well.
- Squadron 42 development has a pretty aggressive pace as the want to finish the game this year and be truly ready for 2026 release.
- They try to minimize ping-ponging people between the projects, swaps should happen after finishing milestones.
- Neither 4.0.1 nor upcoming 4.0.2 will be a silver bullet patch. Improvements will happen as the year progresses.
- 4.0.1 improved a lot on the infrastructural level but there was a bunch of regression on the player facing side.
- They know a lot of this was said before and the real worth of these promises will depend on the results.
- They'll try to reduce the risk but there will be times this year when they try something new which may break things.
- They are talking about a scheduled maintenance window when they could deploy fixes more regularly and do maintenance.
Edit: added notes for hour 2.
Edit 2: Better split for the whole thing.