Should we expect updates before the Unity port?

[Fleet]

Its been a few days with no updates. I think living on the bleeding beta-edge and getting frequent updates has reset my tolerance clock. I feel like its been ages since the last beta update. Its been 5 days. And not even business days at that. Too much time on my hands (on break from school).

So, while the focus is on Unity, should I expect less bugfix/content updates? Or am I being entirely too hypercritical about the release schedule and minor fluctuations?

[Lancefighter]

i dont think any recent bugreports have been even commented on, so I'm guessing pretty much everything is on hold until the unity port is in a releasable stage..

[Spikey00]

Five days!?  That is so long, haha! 

Oh, you won't be waiting until October -- that's when we'll be releasing the final, 100% working, official version.  The betas hopefully will be by mid-September at the latest, if not sooner.  But there are a lot of factors that would affect that one way or the other, and these are going to be really rough and half-baked betas for a while, to be installed separately from the main beta chain.

[x4000]

A big part of the drop in release frequncy has been first the weekend, and second the fact that my wife and I have had a number of false alarms with regard to our son being born. There is an update queued up for release today with the backlog of that stuff.

That said, yes, while the unity port is going on there won't be vey many releases at all.  Critical bugs will be fixed, but mostly that's it because trying to do two separate code lines at once gets really slow and complex. At this stage our goal is to get the unity port out and in public beta within a few weeks. Then it will be easier to double the last of the bugfixes and balance tweaks for both CoN and the unit port in a month after the port is out in beta. That way both get enough time in the fixing/balance arena before the next official, etc.

The timing is good because I'm largely going to be out on paternity leave for three weeks starting anytime from tomorrow to a week and a half from now.

So, no new features or significant updates for a few weeks, but the goal of the last few weeks was to have enough queued up that everyone would still have loads to do. And then once the unity port isn't sucking up all the development time, there are still a number of other things I'd like to get in place before 4.0 officially releases; but we just hit the point on Monday where there was no sense putting off the porting any longer while we worked on that sort of thing.

Hope that makes sense!

EDIT: And for those looking for more info, here's a bunch: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/08/ai-war-prerelease-3189-porting-to-unity.html

[Spikey00]

(We shall see you when you get back, good luck!)

[Vinraith]

By happy coincidence, brilliant planning, or (as I suspect) a combination of the two, the game's in a pretty good spot for a pause in updates at the moment anyway. Congratulations and good luck with the small fry, Chris, and I hope the Unity port goes smoothly as well.

[x4000]

Many thanks, guys -- you're right, it's a combination of planning and luck.  Luck in the sense that I didn't know quite when the hard-stop end date would be (and I still don't), but the goal was certainly for it to work out somewhere along these lines.

[x4000]

This topic is great, I went on and stickied it.  The new version is out now, and in my narrative comments I was already planning on elaborating a bit more on this before Fleet even asked, but this makes a good Q&A/etc thread, anyway.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I haven't made a single change since I started the Unity port, because:
1) We want to get through the phase where the Unity version is non-release-able as soon as is reasonable, so any time spent on anything else prolongs that.
2) Any change has to be propogated to both versions, or you'll see a rash of "reversions" when we switch to the Unity line for public releases, and even if we're pretty diligent about making the change in both places it's likely that any significant change would have a separate list of bugs caused, etc.

So basically my intent is to not make any not-required-by-the-port changes until we can get a public Unity prerelease out there.  In practice that probably won't work since there's bound to be at least one critical showstopper-for-some-case-somewhere and we're still as committed as ever to fixing those, and there are some small changes (balance numbers, etc) that I can change enough ease that I'll probably go ahead and do some of those.  But yea, major crackdown on changes until the Unity version is through the tunnel

Or am I being entirely too hypercritical about the release schedule and minor fluctuations?

Well, there are certainly aspects of the recent development efforts that deserve (and benefit from) criticism, but in all honesty I don't think our release schedule is one of them  I have never seen a game with this combination of frequency and magnitude of updates; if you know of any I would like to know so I can check it out

[LintMan]

Having that first baby - such an exciting and scary time!  The births of my kids were some of the best most memorable days of my life.  Best wishes to you and your wife!

[x4000]

Having that first baby - such an exciting and scary time!  The births of my kids were some of the best most memorable days of my life.  Best wishes to you and your wife!

Many thanks!  Definitely both of those, exciting and scary, as you say.  I think I'll be a lot more at ease once he's actually born, and this stupid waiting game period is done with.  Plus, we just can't wait to see him!  Anyway, thanks very much.

[x4000]

And for those looking for more info, here's a bunch: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/08/ai-war-prerelease-3189-porting-to-unity.html

[x4000]

Or am I being entirely too hypercritical about the release schedule and minor fluctuations?

Well, there are certainly aspects of the recent development efforts that deserve (and benefit from) criticism, but in all honesty I don't think our release schedule is one of them  I have never seen a game with this combination of frequency and magnitude of updates; if you know of any I would like to know so I can check it out

That made me laugh.  But: agreed.

[Shardz]

Hey, absolutely no complaints from me at all as it's been a while since we (the players) had an opportunity to catch up and hang on a single version number for any length of time. There have been so many incredible changes over the past 6 months (or longer) that I feel like I'm learning the game all over again.  

Hang in there with the personal stuff and don't get too bogged down with the projects...I don't think any of us are going anywhere any time soon and can wait for updates. Honestly, I expected a lot from AI Wars when I bought into the core game, but I had no idea there would be *this* much stuff added in such a short time and I could use a little digestion time. It's like screaming for lobster when you have a mouthful of steak already...but I digress.

Good luck with the Stork and nice work on the full package so far!    

[x4000]

It's like screaming for lobster when you have a mouthful of steak already...but I digress.

Good luck with the Stork and nice work on the full package so far!    

Love that analogy, that's great.

Many thanks for the support, and the well wishes!

And with that... I'm off to catch up on some more sleep.  I know I'll need it soon!