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So what's the bad news then?

TL;DRSome content will move from 3.4 to 3.5 because 3.3 ran late and merging from Game Dev would take weeks and risk missing the end-of-year release, so they will stay in the 3.3 branch.

Chris RobertsCEO / Game Director

Well, the bad news is some things are going to move out of 3.4 into 3.5. I think people understand or are aware of the fact that 3.3's been running late, so it's been putting a lot of pressure on 3.4, and the biggest knock-on, and this is probably not what's particularly apparent to people, is the fact that each one of our releases, when we make a 3.3 or a 3.2, comes from Game Dev, which is our main development stream. And so it tends to be both a combination of slightly unstable and also full of a whole bunch of content that you're not ready, or you don't want to put in the current release. Instead of excluding things, because we've got so many things, we include things and say, OK, we want these things in this release. And so it takes a lot of time, anywhere from, I think we've never done it shorter than two weeks, but it's more usually like four weeks, because we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of files. Game Dev itself is almost two terabytes of just the data set of Game Dev itself. And that's not just the archive stuff, that is the actual working set. So most people actually only have a small portion of it, depending on what area they're working on. So we have to make sure that the right ones are going across, and there's only the stuff that you need for 3.3, which then also takes time to stabilize. So if we go back, after we get 3.3, back to Game Dev, and then try to stabilize it and then also test it and get it out, everybody on the development side, and this was something that came up just this week, essentially have said it's going to put us at risk of releasing 3.4 by the end of this year. So we still want to be date driven when we can, when we're not waiting for some tech pillar. And so we made the hard decision to basically stay in the 3.3 branch, which will become 3.4 once 3.3 and 3.3.5 is out, and then move the bits of content and functionality across that we can easily from Game Dev. That means that we can't move everything that we were planning to have for 3.4, and some stuff is a bit of a bridge too far, so we're going to lose some.

Around the Verse›Pillar Talk·
Published on this date.9 Nov 2018