How is CIG prioritising bug fixes etc... compared to further development?asked by Algared

This is an easy question for us. I actually just had this discussion with a few other producers, one of the things we have to look at is whatever given development time we have with internal deadlines, say we have a patch due out in a week, is it feasible or even wise to get all of these bugs fixed and sacrifice feature development. Do we want to take a developer off a feature to fix a bug? It depends in part on how big a problem it is, if it's a blocker, or prevents a player being able to play at all, then that'll take priority, but if its something that will ultimately be fixed in normal development, we'll not usually assign any time to it, because there's a good chance that down the line a re-design or change made in feature development might actually fix it without costing more developers time.

That's a great example I was talking about with Paul with regards to the Gladiator release recently. There are certain behaviours within the ship that are exposed in the production of multicrew that are supposed to be handled by the GOST system, like the position of turret seats when a player gets in or out etc, the same thing applies to the constellation etc. All of these issues are handled by GOST, but we get into a situation sometimes where things are broken with multiple people trying to access different parts of the ship, a seat might not reset or whatever. We have to fix that, BUT there are other funny issues where if you use something before another animation is finished that should be mutually exclusive, like maybe deploying a stairwell while closing a door that it goes through, that'll all get fixed by GOST in the long run, and doesn't affect the actual game experience.

Actually in the context of the Constellation, because we're in the middle of a redesign of the ship, it doesn't make sense to do anything about those bugs, because they might not be present in the new version of the ships. As producers this is what we manage, we might close those bugs or shuffle them off to later versions to check if they exist then.