Rebas Kradd, on 04 May 2014 - 02:52 PM, said:
After reading a couple of your Reddit posts, I've got a couple more questions. Can you say more about the "Cryengine layer" that you often reference? It sounds like it accounts for a good 50% of the development delays. When did you guys start building it? Is it finished, or does it require integration for pretty much any in-game feature you build? Does it factor into CW? Where does it play its biggest role - stability, performance, front end, HSR?
Also, you implied that MWO has some kind of "no-crunch" policy, in that you run a very fluid feature pipeline rather than set a deadline in stone and then rush the dev team to meet it. This avoids the personnel burnout so common to dev houses, but I imagine it also leaves the community rather frustrated in that features get moved around a ton and people rarely know what's coming next and when, and where their favorite features vanished to (collisions, MASC, etc.). Is that a fair statement? Rather broadly asking, how often does stuff get moved around? What stuff ARE you willing to crunch on (F&F build? CW?) What decides the pecking order on the pipeline?
Hey Rebas,
Without extra context, it sounds like I might be talking about the engine itself. It's fair to say that bugs and other unexpected behaviours in the engine have cost us several months of development time.
Indeed PGI has implemented a no-crunch policy for MWO. Specific individuals and teams have, on many occasions, chosen to ignore that policy to hit specific deadlines. For example, the UI engineers were putting in weekends for the last month or two prior to UI 2 being shipped. The systems team had a similar push during the first 6 months of the project in order to hit friends and family.
Features can be moved or re-prioritized due to many factors. This includes feasibility, technical risk, and available resources among other reasons. Collisions and MASC were both back-burnered due to technical implementation issues.