Rekkon, on 27 November 2018 - 12:44 PM, said:
Even with the asset sharing, the Charger/Hatamoto pack is eight base variants compared to the normal six (or ten vs. seven if you are the art team). With the model differences, it is probably closer to a pack-and-a-half worth of work than a single mech pack. Then add putting on a big convention...
Variants don't add much to development time. They've shown in the past how they make the modular weapon systems and model the hardpoint combinations; and with their modular weapons' "dynamic geometry" makes that portion of the mech-making much easier. It's all done at once with every combination for every variant into one file/model. Adding variants, later on, that have hardpoints where none were before -or of a new kind (like the missile Urbie)- is the only way new/extra/additional development time is really added. Even that isn't hard, so much as it is just tedious, because apparently they have to remake/rebuild the whole file, again, with all of the new combos and camo schemes . . . which is why it's taking so long to get all the new weapon models onto the old mechs.
For Reference, see the image and discussion of the Dragon in this article:
https://mwomercs.com...une-july-august
I'll partly concede the convention, but that has virtually nothing to do with mech development teams. Even if they're putting together some kind of an art crunch for Mech Con, as I said before, those two mechs should have been almost completely done and ready by early November, in order to make QA deadlines before patch builds with the holidays and crunched patch schedule. After all, the December patch is only on the 11th; and they've said content for a patch needs to be finalized at least two full business weeks . . . not in art QA or anything like that . . . finalized for test builds, overall patch QA, and readied for release. That'd give them a reasonably solid month of art crunch time for Mech Con.
Mech Con 2018 planning started within a week after Mech Con 2017 ended . . . that's just how those things work. Most venues for conventions like that need to be reserved 6-9 months out, and discussions to set up those reservations started at least 2 months before the deadline. They're not crunched within the last few months, it's steady over most of the year. That really shouldn't be eating a lot of bandwidth unless they've got some kind of super-special-mega-announcement coming . . . and needed a lot of art work for it (in order to impact the Mech Art Team).
I still like to think they've got some big announcement(s) for Mech Con, but they're mostly crunching as hard as they can to get MW5 out the door as early in 2019 as possible. The pipe-dream would be an engine migration for MWO with serious gameplay updates, in order to make MWO match up with MW5's tech . . . but . . . yeah . . . pipe-dream.
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