On the public roadmap we see improvements, updates and reworks for ships. What's the difference between these three, and are there more than three? For example, what does 'Merlin improvements' mean?
TL;DRRework means a full ground-up rebuild, while improvements and updates keep the core geometry and touch up things like materials, LODs and cockpit UI; small ongoing quality-of-life changes usually aren't put on the roadmap.
I would say there's really only two, and it's just different people saying the same thing. So rework is a complete ground-up rework of the ship. Nothing remains of it. Improvements or updates is like what we're doing with the Merlin. So that core geometry stays the same. We're just perhaps redoing the materials to modern standards. We're updating the LODs. The big thing with the Merlin is just redoing the interior of the cockpit to match the metrics we have for UI now. So it had bespoke UI before, but it was very small compared to what we had deemed as our minimum screen space for UI. So that's been adjusted to fill that. And really that's just an update or improvement. It's not a rework, because only a tiny part of the ship has had a complete rework. The rest has just had a touch-up.
And oftentimes we've been going through and doing minor improvements to ships for ship components and stuff, just making sure that they have the appropriate spaces, adding doors.
Yeah, we don't tend to put them on the roadmap, those ongoing quality-of-life changes. If an artist is spending a considerable amount of time on it, then it goes on the roadmap.