Are you confirming grabby hands for any patch?
TL;DRThey aren't confirming grabby hands or anything else for any patch, saying EVA for 2.2 is only most likely and that development timelines are hard to predict until a decision day.
No, we're not confirming grabby hands for any patch.
We're not confirming anything for any patch. I think the closest we'll say is that it's most likely EVA for 2.2. But it's all going to come down to that one day in February where we sit down and we say, okay, here's everything that's done and ready for the patch, here's what's not, which includes EVA or not, X ship or not, Y ship or not, and we will let you know when we know, essentially. A lot of people on the forums are like, well, why don't you tell us what's coming? There are two reasons. One is that when it's not certain, people get mad. That has been a constant for all of time. And the second is that we don't know. We have 300 people working on 70 different things at once. Some will be in 2.2, 2.3, 2.4. So there's a specific day when we know more, and when that happens, we'll tell you guys.
It's not always easy to predict whether or not something like this is going to be done. Computer science is a very young discipline compared to almost everything else humanity has done for centuries. We haven't done this for even one century yet. So knowing exactly how long something is going to take when your discipline keeps changing every day is very, very difficult. It's not like bricklaying, it's not like farming; it just changes all the time.
Especially depending on what part of the game it is. Physicalized EVA is just such a huge... it's not a factory line. It's not a factory where you say, OK, it's going to take six days to do this. It involves a lot of experimentation, breaking things, getting it right. So while we say, OK, we want it done at this point, it's quite possible it will be done much later, or sometimes much earlier, like the procedural planets. For other things, such as ships, it's a little bit easier to predict. We've made five dogfighters now, so for the sixth one we can get a pretty good estimate. But even then, there are plenty of times when the artist hands it off to the designer and they're like, wait a minute, you need to redo this and this and this because they don't work. And that changes the timeline.
About the only time something is easy to predict in programming is if you've done the exact same thing before. But there's a lot in this game that no one has ever done before.
How do you predict how long it takes to do something that's never been done before, in a way that's never been done before, and present it in a way that's never been done before?