Tell everybody who you are, what you do for Star Citizen, and what happened [with the cargo, personal hangar and freight elevator update being pulled from the initial Alpha 3.23 release].

So starting with the easy questions. My name is Chad McKinney. I'm a senior lead gameplay engineer currently in the Los Angeles studio, mainly focused on Star Citizen. So I'm part of the core gameplay group. I have a kind of sub team in that group called CGP7, but we mainly focus on what I would say are the features that make Star Citizen unique. So the big MMO style gameplay features. Cargo is certainly one of the big ones, one of the big careers, right? So our team is really focused on those features. And certainly over the last several years, that's been a really big focus for us. So any of the big cargo stuff that you've seen coming out over that time, physicalized cargo, Hull C, all this stuff has been my team's main focus. But we've worked on a lot of other stuff throughout the years.

But yeah, so what happened with cargo? Well, the first thing is, hey, I don't know that there's anyone that's more personally invested in seeing this through than I am. So it was disappointing to come to the conclusion that we did need to pull it from 3.23 or push it into a point patch. But it was the right call. And there's a lot of factors that went into that. Just to kind of get into it, the first thing is that it's a really, really big... I don't even think you can call it a single feature set. It's like a whole change of the way that the game works from top to bottom in many different aspects. So whenever we started concerted development on this last year, we come up with a certain schedule. And at the end of the day, if you look at where we're heading, while it is disappointing to see it slip, we're really close, actually. It's kind of like throwing a dart at a target a mile away. We are a bit off. We missed the target, but we're not so far off. It's not going to be six months from now or anything like this. It's a bit disappointing that it missed the release, but we are really close.

The first thing is it's big and it's hard to estimate and quite pin down all the unknowns and everything and make sure that your dates are exact by the time the actual date comes up. So we're a little bit off on that part. But there's also just been a lot of things that have happened during that time. Some of the stuff towards the end that have really informed that decision making are the fact that there's still some feature work that needs to be finished out. There's some iteration that we're still doing on certain aspects, or that we did on certain aspects of the design once we got things up and going. In particular, the freight elevator kiosk UI and the item bank UI. Once we played with them a bit, we realized we needed to update them and change them to make them a better experience. And then on top of that, in particular, the hangar instancing, ASOP and transit kind of flow graph there about going from all these different stages of gameplay had some stability problems. And it's the kind of thing that I really felt strongly that we can't go live with that being not really stable, because if we do and it ends up being a problem, the game essentially becomes unplayable for the players. So it's not like if we went out with salvage and maybe there's some issue with salvage, or if we're going out with mining or the rocks sometimes crash your client. That is really unfortunate. That affects a small subset of people. This is the kind of thing where the game could literally just be unplayable.

You can no longer summon your spaceships. You can no longer load your spaceships. It's a pretty heavy thing.

So in comparison, ever since 3.18, we've been a lot more cognizant of what kind of risk we want to take on whenever we're going into the release. So whenever we were coming up on 3.23, we were really aware of how big this was and also really aware of the current state of 3.23 without all of that feature work. And because 3.23 was already needing some more time to be focused on to stabilize and improve performance, we didn't want to just rush this in and then take something we already spent a certain amount of time hardening on 3.23 and then just destabilize it all again and probably just reset our whole release pipeline there, but also then taking on all the new risk for the cargo work. But we are in a child stream of the release stream. So that means that we're ready to go. Anytime we want to, we can just pull the trigger and release it. We're right there. So it's not like it's stuck away in some development stream that's still in a bunker somewhere. We're really close. It's going through certain steps of the release phase already. It's just, we weren't ready. We didn't want to integrate it because of the risk and already the state of 3.23 itself. But on top of that, to be completely honest, this feature has been around, like I said, for quite some time. And there's been a lot of things that have happened just kind of outside the feature that have also contributed to it. So as people are probably aware, there's been some team restructuring, personnel changes, changes to our vision and direction that have, in particular, I think, impacted the team supporting on this feature set. So it's made it a challenge at times to stay focused on it and not be affected by all that, people changing, bringing people on board and getting them up to speed about the whole project and everything. So it's been a whole journey, but we're really close. It is disappointing to put in this much effort that we've put into it and then miss it. But I felt like it was the right call.

We don't want that to happen again. Is this me sitting here saying that it's never going to happen again? No, I'm not going to sit here and say something will never happen. But everybody here is working very hard to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And decisions like this one are one of the things that have to be done in order to ensure that from time to time. So it is still 3.23.x. Whether that's 3.23.1 or 3.23.2, it's too early to say. Whether that's before Invictus, at Invictus, slightly after Invictus, it's too early to say. But yeah, like Chad said, it's all there. It's all still in the branch. It's basically when everything else is stabilized and secure and in a place that we're happy with, then it's like, okay, now let's introduce this new thing here and see how that affects things and fix those things. Because, Chad made another great point, this is literally your ability to summon and access your spaceship. It's a fundamental change to the way everything moves in the Persistent Universe. So it is not a small feature, but 3.23 has a whole bunch of other features. We're currently 13, 14 episodes into this season. It's normally 10 episodes. We've got a bunch more coming. It's a huge, huge patch even without this. So we'll get all that stuff in, stabilize all that stuff, and then turn our attention back to this.