Backers have been waiting a long time for the Delta Patcher, which prevents people from having to download every asset of the game every time. But now that we have it, we've announced we're only doing four patches a year. Is that it? Is it four big content patches, or will there be smaller hotfixes?
TL;DRFour large quarterly patches are the plan, but smaller patches or hotfixes remain possible for things like new ships, and 3.1 will be branched from GameDev sometime in February.
The Delta Patcher, anyway: if you're just waiting for a live patch, then quite a bit will change between builds. But if you're Evocati or people going to the PTU, when you're downloading a new patch every day, it makes a massive difference. So I guess if you're only downloading it four times a year, it's probably not such a big deal, but the change was a massive deal for a lot of people doing that kind of stuff. But just because we're doing four large patches, which is the plan, it doesn't mean we won't do a smaller patch if we need to for a reason. We plan to get the patches in a good state, but it may be that we want a patch because we want to introduce some new ships or whatever it is. So what we're saying is, we're planning a quarterly patch. These will be nice, big changes. But that doesn't mean we're not going to say, well, actually, we might have to do a hotfix. Or, you know what, we've got some cool new content we can put in where the gameplay systems themselves won't change; it's just adding some content, because adding a ship, we keep it in the same branch.
And this is one of the discussions, the reason why it was important to get 3.0 out last year, because we'd been in the 3.0 branch for a long time. But our main development branch is actually GameDev. And so the longer you're out in 3.0 trying to get stuff working, you can't go back to GameDev. All the new optimization work, all the new tools, all the new content is sitting in GameDev. And so if you just stay on 3.0 all the time, then you can't get out. So we needed to get 3.0 out and get the feedback from that so we could go back to GameDev and take all the information from there. And then once we go back to GameDev, the next step is we take all these changes and fixes and branch for 3.1, which we'll do sometime in February. We've taken all the goodness and put it back in there. And then we polish and bug fix to get 3.1 out while the work on the other stuff continues in GameDev.