Quote:
Originally Posted by dacoobob
Yet another new game system to support, but still no Campaign Theater? No starship tools for SF? No player-to-player interaction? Really??
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I understand your frustration here. Trust me, no one is more disappointed that this stuff is taking as long as it is than we are internally. I want to clear up some misconceptions here:
Campaign Theater is being actively worked on. See my reply in the
Campaign Theater thread regarding our progress there.
Player-to-player interaction requires campaign support to implement, as it builds on top of it.
In order for us to do Starship support well, we need campaign support as a foundation. If we were a bigger team, we could build a "throwaway" version of Starships pre-campaigns, and then rewrite it with campaign/player interaction support. But we're not a big team, and we need to spend our effort wisely.
So the chain of dependencies is something like this: Campaigns -> Player Interaction -> Starships. This unfortunately puts Starships out farther, but that's the reality of the situation.
Another aspect to this is our personnel and their areas expertise. Roughly speaking, we have datafile authors (DFAs) and developers, and they do different jobs and have different skillsets. Putting out a new game like SR6 is very roughly 80% DFA work and 20% dev work. Adding a feature like Campaigns or player interaction is 80%+ dev work. Focusing everyone 100% on one of those projects wastes a lot of our productivity, as one group or another would be "twiddling their thumbs" a lot of the time (metaphorically speaking).
In some ways it's like the video game industry. You've got developers vs artists, level designers, etc. So a game might release an update with new levels or items, even if there are still lots of bugs or core game issues that aren't addressed. This is because both "teams" (technical and non-technical) are working on what they are best at to improve the overall experience. The dev team puts out their updates when they have their things ready, and the design team puts out their updates when
they have things ready.