As you're no doubt well aware of, major Cosmoteer updates have lately been very infrequent, in some cases going months between each one. Sometimes there are unavoidable reasons for this, such as my occasional teaching job, vacations, and various other life events getting in the way. But more than all of those combined, I think the problem is that these updates have been so BIG and ambitious with no deadline for release. There are a bunch of reasons why this is bad:
When so much time passes between updates, people lose interest and move on to other things. Some people may even think that Cosmoteer development has been abandoned altogether. (Which I assure you couldn't be farther from the truth!) This is obviously bad for the health of the community.
If you don't know when an update is coming, it's hard to get excited for its impending release. It's also hard to schedule time to play it, either by yourself or with others.
Having huge updates makes me, personally, very bad at prioritizing tasks. I find myself wanting to stuff all sorts of minor features in these huge updates, because what's one more feature!? This is bad because I end up spending my limited time on less-important things when I could be spending it on cooler new features.
These huge updates have also been bad for my self-motivation. Looking at the huge to-do list I have to get done for each update is honestly pretty dispiriting, it's like this big mountain I need to climb, which makes me less excited to work on Cosmoteer. This, I think more than anything, is the biggest reason why Cosmoteer development has been slow lately.
And so, I am genuinely excited to announce that these big, few-and-far-between updates are a thing of the past! From now on I will be releasing much smaller updates on a regular schedule, once every two weeks. That's a promise! I will try to include at least one significant feature in each update, such as a new weapon or part, multiplayer mode, game mechanic, or major user interface improvement. And if I have any extra time before I have to release the update, I'll use that to squeeze in those smaller quality-of-life improvements when I can.
The actual update schedule will be this:
- A new "stable" update will be released every other Friday sometime between 7am and 12noon my time (Pacific time USA), starting next week March 29. (And then again on April 12th, 26th, etc...)
- On the other Fridays when a stable update isn't being released, I will put out the release candidate for the next week's update. The first such release candidate, 0.14.7_rc1, will be posted TOMORROW, March 22, also between 7am and 12noon. Having one week between release candidate and stable release should give plenty of time to work out the bugs before the official stable update, and I may put out additional release candidates during the week as necessary.
My hope is that this new schedule will keep you all, the community, more excited and engaged, and that it will improve my own self-motivation and force me to better prioritize features, leading to faster Cosmoteer development in the long run.
There may be some (hopefully) rare occurrences when I have to break this schedule due to some circumstance such as a last-minute bug or some life event, but I promise I'll try to stick to this schedule as best as I can and that in general I will postpone unfinished features instead of delaying the whole update to fit more in it. If for some reason I have no choice but to delay an update, I'll try to let you know as far ahead of time as I can. (But I can't promise I won't get hit by a bus... Oof.)
I'm also not 100% sure that Friday mornings are the best time for me to post updates, so I reserve the right to change to a different schedule if it's not working out for some reason.
And lastly, a note about 0.14.7: I was originally planning to have more stuff in this update, most notably a rewritten CosmoServer to improve multiplayer latency. But since I'm now committing to releasing updates on a fixed schedule starting with 0.14.7, I've postponed those remaining features until later updates.
That's all for now!