Folks probably want to know: if it's working once, and you just add something, why doesn't it work again?
TL;DRBuilds break because many people check in changes across interacting systems and ships, so a build system runs continuous integration, but only one QA tester exists and more QA is going to be added.
I mean, it's a ton of people all checking in stuff, so sometimes it stomps something, or sometimes you change a little thing not thinking it's going to affect this system over here, and it does. And you're just like, well, why did that happen? So everyone has to kind of work together: I'm working on this and you're working on that, and we have to make sure that we're all working on the same stuff together so that we're not stomping each other or checking in something that breaks everything. And so we have a build system that does a lot of continuous integration to make sure that whatever we check in doesn't just break everything. But we don't have a test system. So Justin is our only QA tester. Every time we make a new build, he's testing it. And there's a lot of stuff there that needs to be tested for one person.
And to be fair, I don't want fans out there to be part of our QA, but we are going to be adding a lot more QA.
A lot of the thing is that it's a linear process. You can't just take any element out of it without conceivably domino-effecting the whole thing. And we have a lot of people working on a lot of different things in a lot of different locations. So to coordinate all that and have everything come in at a single point is a huge amount of management. Especially the ships, because the ships involve everyone, all the way down: from the XML files, loading in the weapons and the swap-outs, to actually setting up the ship through engineering, and then art. Animations. So all that stuff is integrated in these ships. And so, again, if you find something that's messed up or there's a bug, then you fix it, and conceivably you've broken other things. It just happens that way. Things that you can't foresee happen because there's so many moving parts. It's like taking out a spark plug of your car. Well, conceivably, if you keep it that way, it's going to break your car. There's a lot of things that cascade down from that.