Giving a complete status update is pretty insane at this point. However, I'm going to attempt to post a few of the things we've been working on and who is doing the work. Some of this will be gibberish unless you are a coder. A lot of the work we are doing now is paying off technical debt in preparation for release so it doesn't show up as new features to the user. One way of thinking about this is the iceberg metaphor. You guys only see the part sticking up above the water.
Our focus in the last few weeks has really been to try and get the number of bugs and crashes lower. We basically took a week away from development to try and improve the overall quality of the game.
Going forward we are going to try and do better with communication on the state of the game. Expect more announcements on this soon.
Individual updates:
Sorian - Mike's main focus is continuing to work on the AI. However, in the past week he stepped in to work on metal spot and start spot placement. That stuff is ready to go and should be in the next update.
Steve - Steve works on the graphics engine. At this point it's a lot of performance work. In the last week he has been re-writing our HAL and our effects interface. This all falls under the paying off technical debt column. There is still a ton of stuff to come down the pipe on graphics.
Chris H. - Chris has spent most of his time on the project working on getting our spec system to work properly between client and server. Mostly internal stuff. This week he has been pushing on the file system changes needed for the new launcher and modding stuff.
Brian F. - Brian has been working on lowering memory consumption and network optimization. On the memory side this has consisted of trying to reduce the poly counts and/or merge polys resulting from the csg process. He has also put some work into re-factoring how projectile curves work. Both of these are in progress.
David J. - David (who wrote the system editor) has been working on the alliance UI stuff. This is for doing in-game alliances, transfering units and resources etc.
Bruce L. - Bruce has been working on adding new units into the game. This is on a separate branch and won't see the light of day for a bit. He also runs our internal playtests and does game balance (which we haven't changed a lot lately as the priority is feature work).
WJ - primarily has been fixing and refactoring UI code. His next big task is the in-game notification system. Passwords for lobbys...
Howard - Howard has been mixing the orchestral score. Still a TON of work to do on that. No ETA yet.
Kevin - Kevin has continued his work on the server scripting system. Even though the server looks the same as it did it's now completely controlled through script including the lobby. This means he reimplemented a bunch of stuff that was already working (it's taken most of a month of time for him to do this). This is longer term feature work that needed to get done.
Nick - Nick has implemented a few game features (target leading+bomber runs) but his primary task has been implementing area commands and tasks. This is a rather large feature that he already has a few weeks into. Not sure when it will show up but it's going to be great when it's ready.
Forrest - has been doing a ton of technical debt behind the scenes work on the history system and fixing bugs. See his article on his blog for details about the history system. His main game task at the moment is the teleporter system. Some of this work will be re-used for the unit cannon.
Ryan - Ryan has been working on the orbital mechanics (things like getting good preview paths during the game). However, the big task at the moment is re-writing the camera to eliminate the weird schism we have with celestial view. This won't be in this patch but is looking real good and is one my personal biggest complaints about the game.
Elijah - He is our main pathfinding guy. Lately it's been all about fixing bugs and getting the units to properly navigate on more complex geometry (like the metal planet). Medium term he's implementing a formation system for the game.
Bob - Has been working on a new launcher for the game. This one runs properly on mac/linux/PC and is a complete re-write of our current launcher.
Adam - Has been working on twitch.tv integration
Art Team - more units, more terrain stuff, custom commanders, more UI work
Galactic War - this is currently underway and we have a whole other team working on it. More info as it starts to come online. The first goal is a single player galactic war with multiplayer coming later.
Overall we are pushing forward HARD on multiple fronts. I'm going to talk about some more specific areas of concern in a separate post (like orbital). This likely won't happen today as the rest of my schedule is full well into the evening today.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/game-status-brain-dump.54188/
