A Possible Alternative to Keep People Up-to-Date on Progress of 2.2 (and Others)

[Aeradom]

I know you guys get pestered a lot on the whole "so when is 2.2" coming out. And I certainly understand why you don't want to give a hard and fast date for many reasons (stress, time constraints, hitting issues you don't expect, delays, etc). Still, I, and I'm sure many others would like to know about how things are progressing just to get an idea of what's left to be done and what's being worked on. With that in mind, I might have a solution if you all are interested.

I came upon this website when I was looking to buy Subnautica. To keep fans of the game in the look of what's being worked on and where they are at in the development process, they use a site called "Trello". Basically, it lets you setup your own categories and then list what's being worked on, what's still to be done, and what's being pushed back to 2.3. Even if it isn't made public, I still think internally it might be good to have to keep things organized (assuming you don't already, which you probably do so nevermind). In any event, this would allow people to get an idea of how close 2.2 is to actually come out. You can even have estimated dates for certain particular parts of the projects (such as going back through the GC or fixing models X) if that was your thing. Again though, I understand not wanting to put updates you may not be able to make.

Here's the link to Subnautica's Trello to give you an idea of how it works:

https://trello.com/b/yxoJrFgP/subnautica-development

It's cool if you don't think this is for you guys, just something I saw and thought I'd pass along.

[Corey]

We have internal spreadsheets and usergroups we use to track progress on the mod, but that includes speculative content several releases down the line and tons of things which ultimately will get cut or never started. Doing any sort of public-facing version of it would require setting up a separate tracker (whether Trello or another google doc) entirely independent of any dev tools we actually use, and then everyone on the team updating it with what they're working on, which ultimately gets pretty tedious- it's hard enough to get everyone to just work on stuff, and lots is spur-of-the-moment, or long term projects which would then sit there on the thing and look like it's not actually being done. A lot of that kind of stuff ends up obscuring more than it reveals for people not directly involved in doing it. We've done progress overview threads before, but they always fail to stay up-to-date because it ends up being almost as much work to keep them so as to just work on the mod. With 2.2 for the last year, for those who are particularly interested in specific progress being made or how everything looks now as compared to a previous point, there's also my preview videos where I go into pretty extensive details on it.

[Aeradom]

We have internal spreadsheets and usergroups we use to track progress on the mod, but that includes speculative content several releases down the line and tons of things which ultimately will get cut or never started. Doing any sort of public-facing version of it would require setting up a separate tracker (whether Trello or another google doc) entirely independent of any dev tools we actually use, and then everyone on the team updating it with what they're working on, which ultimately gets pretty tedious- it's hard enough to get everyone to just work on stuff, and lots is spur-of-the-moment, or long term projects which would then sit there on the thing and look like it's not actually being done. A lot of that kind of stuff ends up obscuring more than it reveals for people not directly involved in doing it. We've done progress overview threads before, but they always fail to stay up-to-date because it ends up being almost as much work to keep them so as to just work on the mod. With 2.2 for the last year, for those who are particularly interested in specific progress being made or how everything looks now as compared to a previous point, there's also my preview videos where I go into pretty extensive details on it.

It does sound like that's something that you are doing anyway to a certain extent. For me and others, I think the biggest ... Frustration is too harsh a word, more curiosity... is that we get fairly regular updates on what's going on but without a gauge of what's left, we don't really know how close to release it is. Not that it's a big deal to me; I don't mind waiting for you guys to get it to a point that you are ready to put it out and it does sound like it should be fairly soon (I guess dependent on your definition of soon though). The last thing I want to do is make things more tedious for you guys so if it's not doable then I certainly understand. I just saw it with the Subnautica development and thought it might be a compromise and that way you'd have something simple to point to the next time someone asks for a release date or when it will be done.

So yeah, sorry to bother you with this then.

[Mr.Puerto]

It does sound like that's something that you are doing anyway to a certain extent. For me and others, I think the biggest ... Frustration is too harsh a word, more curiosity... is that we get fairly regular updates on what's going on but without a gauge of what's left, we don't really know how close to release it is. Not that it's a big deal to me; I don't mind waiting for you guys to get it to a point that you are ready to put it out and it does sound like it should be fairly soon (I guess dependent on your definition of soon though). The last thing I want to do is make things more tedious for you guys so if it's not doable then I certainly understand. I just saw it with the Subnautica development and thought it might be a compromise and that way you'd have something simple to point to the next time someone asks for a release date or when it will be done.

So yeah, sorry to bother you with this then.

Its great that you have such an interest with the development of 2.2! However please keep in mind, the team has about the same idea of how close the version is to release as you do. While they do know some of what is left; they do not know how long its going to take to create these things, or if something IRL pops up how much time that'll take and finally how long the testing process will take or if they get any new ideas they want to implement into the mod. So when you see someone say its out when its out, that's because no one knows what type of time frame we're looking at. So to sum it up the "simple thing to point to" is the statement we don't know but it'll be out when its out.

[Corey]

For me and others, I think the biggest ... Frustration is too harsh a word, more curiosity... is that we get fairly regular updates on what's going on but without a gauge of what's left, we don't really know how close to release it is.

That's what the last third of this news post specifically talked about: http://thrawnsrevenge.com/forums/index.php?topic=6931.0

That's essentially as specific as we can get, because knowing more than what's in the post is pretty much impossible for us. Some stuff may be added, some stuff may be taken away, some stuff we would like to do but don't have speciically planned may get done, a dev may get a sudden urge to do something else which then gets included- everything changes all the time, especially when we're in the phases where it's about polishing.