Just a little poke to ask if the next patch will take much longer time.
Thanks for asking! So, here's basically where we are right now:
1. The first two waves (out of five) for the pivot are done.
2. That said, things don't "feel right" in the gameplay/balance department yet, mainly to do with seeding and some things like FRD and whatnot.
3. So with that in mind, and early feedback from Badger as well, Keith has been going in and playing some AIWC, then playing some AIW2, noting differences, and making changes.
4. Working on #3 above delays wave three of the pivot, necessarily, but we all agree that it's better to have "smaller and fun" than "all the stuff but not fun yet."
5. We don't have any overall schedule changes in terms of when we plan to go to Early Access (July) or when we plan to hit 1.0 (October), and all the pivots parts are still something we plan to have pre-1.0. However, about half of the content from waves 3-5 of the pivot are things we plan to push to during EA so that we can focus on polish instead pre-EA.
6. How exactly much longer it will take Keith on #3 above is not exactly certain at this point, since it is basically an iterative "fix and then review" process and gets at "feel" rather than something concrete. You might think "just do it exactly the same as before" and that's that, but things like the galaxy seeding rules and AI threading are different enough that it's like translating from English to Japanese.
If you don't know much about Japanese, basically it has a lot of ways to express complex emotions and thoughts that are hard or impossible to describe in English. AIWC is English in this analogy, so basically I'm saying that even though the translation is possible to do directly, a Japanese speaker would be pretty unenthused by a direct English "port" of some poem. It wouldn't seem very poetic by Japanese standards, and would lose a lot of what makes Japanese awesome. That's kind of what we run into porting AIWC to AIW2, mostly in the area of map seeding and AI.
The split from single-threaded to multithreaded is one of those big areas, for instance. In a single-threaded environment, everything happens in an order you can count on. In a multithreaded environment, things happen in some sort of crazy unknowable and inconsistent order, but you still need to come up with the same results every time, deterministically, so that desyncs don't happen in multiplayer. We have that working, and have for well over a year and a half now, but it makes the translation from AIWC to AIW2 slightly interpretive in terms of how it's done.
My understanding is that we're getting there, but I'm not sure how long it will be exactly before we're ready to show that off to you as the next version of the game. It might be 1-2 more weeks, but after that we should start having multiple-a-week releases again.
7. One reason that the release notes have been so static is that I've been on vacation for the last week. It was long-planned and already paid for, and time off was good. I don't like to announce my vacations on the internet in advance, though, for privacy/security reasons. Anyway, now I'm back to get working on art and UI and all that again, though, on my end. Plenty needs to be done there before we hit EA, too.
---
That long response probably tells you both more and less than what you wanted to know.
