So... good interview. Excellent work,
Gmodism and thank you
schema for participating.
Little disappointed that it's going to be another year or two until we see the new universe, but it is what it is I suppose. I had suspected that the new planets were proving a major challenge to implement in a performance-friendly way.
Hearing the timeline and what it involves, I wish now more than ever that the game had been forked two years ago into a beta of what was (to be bugfixed and made whole over time) and a new-gen pre-pre-alpha that was the current game with entirely new systems, entirely new universe, and a timeline appropriate to an entirely new game engine project. I would probably play both, but what was, was good. Maybe what is will get to that point in a couple more years, but 3 years of downtime for a game is a lot. Particularly since there's no officially forked legacy edition with bugfix support that might allow for community play.
I'm not sure, Robin, why you seem to feel that forking the development would somehow be selling out or not fully investing in the engine you're building since you would have been able to move on with development
exactly as you have with just a short (3-6 month) break to firm up the version before forking. It's your game and I'm not criticizing, but I do still struggle to understand why this wasn't done. 2.0 was first introduced as a power code overhaul, but ended up being a complete overhaul of power, auxiliary systems, weapons, armor, shields, thrust, mining, and really
everything... and won't be finalized until literally everything else that hasn't been re-worked (i.e. the universe, planets, the whole system in which play occurs) gets an overhaul as well. It's so far beyond a simple re-code of the power system that the initial proposal comes off a bit absurd in retrospect. The point right before the 2.0 power overhaul wasn't amazing, but with a few months (not 3+ years) of tinkering, the broken systems like fleets and shipyards where proof-of-concept had already been done could have been set right, and a bit more bugfixing would have made it a complete game.
