I was wondering why was the call made to merge Star Marine and Arena Commander so early in the build? Could we have kept them separate and thus allowed updates to Arena Commander to continue while Star Marine was polished?asked by xTODMANx

This is a great question.

And it's a very difficult question to answer because there's a lot of facets involved in that decision. Ultimately that decision falls on Chris. Once facet of that decision is ease of development. If we kept the builds separate while we continued to work on Arena Commander... by the time we were getting ready to release Star Marine, we'd have to merge those builds back together again and that can cause all kinds of unknown problems and bugs. Because, as we iterate down the road, there are going to be unique developments in that particular build on Arena Commander that may not happen in Star Marine, so when we go to merge the builds all those bugs that we fixed in Arena Commander may either resurface in Star Marine or things that were going smoothly in Star Marine may cause bugs in Arena Commander. So, having them developed simultaneously in a seamless system makes it a lot easier. Things like changing the skeletons for the animations on the characters – having them unified is a good way of doing that. So, without going into a multihour long discussion about the logistics, probably one of the best ways to describe it is for developmental purposes of keeping things very similar to one another to avoid having bugs.

Yeah.

I hope that works for you.

It was directed at you.

Well, also just really quick if you go to the website, if you look at Chris Roberts' Star Marine and FPS update, it does give some information on the development of this. On why certain things have happened within development of Star Marine. So you may find some information relevant there as well. I highly recommend reading it – it's a very good writeup by Chris.