Is the time and effort required to come up with temporary solutions that allow us backers to play each patch at this early stage interfering with the development of the long-term solutions the game needs?

I think for me, interference may be a bit of a strong word there. I'd say in a lot of game development, you've got times at which you might need a short-term solution, medium-term solution, long-term solution. Obviously, with a game like this, we're always aiming to try and get the best long-term solutions in, work towards doing things properly. We're not a game where we can really take shortcuts. We have to look at what is going to work beyond the next patch. But with us releasing every few months, then to get builds release-ready, we are at times going to have to look at addressing issues in certain ways that may not be relevant in a year or two's time. So for me, it's kind of just part and parcel of what we do. It's not new to us as engineers. And even if we weren't doing the patches every few months and releasing them to the public, we still need short-term solutions at times to, for example, allow design and other departments to actually get on with their work. You don't just start with very close to finished product in a cycle of game development. There's a lot of prototyping and trying stuff out and changing things around a little bit until you come up with a good mix of things that actually works well. So yeah, for me, it's just part and parcel of what we have to do.

Yeah, I think that affects just about every aspect of Star Citizen's development, not just performance optimization. We are always building the first iteration of something and then wrapping it up in a form that can actually go out to people, and then building the next iteration and building the next iteration. Like with 3.1, we're putting out the first version of our character customizer. It is not the fully featured version that we want with the DNA morphing and everything, but it is part and parcel of how we've chosen to develop Star Citizen, which is live and out in front of everybody. You're working towards a long-term goal, but you're also working towards these short-term goals and having to package everything up in as nice a bow as you can to give to people every couple months.