Sharing a roadmap

[rob]

All the negative comments above are valid. Allow me to shed a little light on the situation regarding HLO...

Both starship support and party loot management are wholly dependent upon a solid foundation in the backend. In the same vein, a game as vast and complex as PF1 needs a race car engine under the hood - not a Toyota Corolla. Last August, I discovered that the backend code was atrocious, which amounted to a huge setback for us. I dismissed the employee that had been in charge of it, and two other employees were also lost due to the ramifications of this setback. More importantly to the subject of this thread, there was no way to even consider building those capabilities on the swampland we previously had in place.

I then proceeded to rewrite the backend. But we're talking about more than 100,000 lines of code doing some very complex tasks, so it was a significant undertaking. The first phase of that rewrite finally enabled Campaign Theater to be launched earlier this year. The second phase is nearing completion, which will provide the solid foundation we need. So all of those "big three" will become viable candidates for "what's next" after we complete the current wave of development.

There is no way that we'll be tackling all of them at once, since each of those will entail a hefty chunk of work. There are also other capabilities that will be quite valuable to a large number of users, so the candidate list is more than just those three. We'll have to prioritize them all and choose what to focus on next. But at least one of them should finally be in place this fall.

If you have strong preferences for what we should focus on next, please post them in the HLO Improvement Wishlist thread, which is stickied at the top.

[dacoobob]

Originally Posted by rob

All the negative comments above are valid. Allow me to shed a little light on the situation regarding HLO...

Both starship support and party loot management are wholly dependent upon a solid foundation in the backend. In the same vein, a game as vast and complex as PF1 needs a race car engine under the hood - not a Toyota Corolla. Last August, I discovered that the backend code was atrocious, which amounted to a huge setback for us. I dismissed the employee that had been in charge of it, and two other employees were also lost due to the ramifications of this setback. More importantly to the subject of this thread, there was no way to even consider building those capabilities on the swampland we previously had in place.

I then proceeded to rewrite the backend. But we're talking about more than 100,000 lines of code doing some very complex tasks, so it was a significant undertaking. The first phase of that rewrite finally enabled Campaign Theater to be launched earlier this year. The second phase is nearing completion, which will provide the solid foundation we need. So all of those "big three" will become viable candidates for "what's next" after we complete the current wave of development.

There is no way that we'll be tackling all of them at once, since each of those will entail a hefty chunk of work. There are also other capabilities that will be quite valuable to a large number of users, so the candidate list is more than just those three. We'll have to prioritize them all and choose what to focus on next. But at least one of them should finally be in place this fall.

If you have strong preferences for what we should focus on next, please post them in the HLO Improvement Wishlist thread, which is stickied at the top.

Thank you for this update and explanation, it helps a lot with my understanding of what's going on and boosts my hope for the future of HLO. A little bit of customer communication goes a long way : )