Its really good to see some regular development updates from Flavien again. It is something I have missed since his regular developer journal tailed off.
The aspiration he has stated is to write a daily update in the short term tailing off to an update every few days in the longer term. My feeling is that I’d be happy with just one or two updates a week, but I’ll take as many as is offered.
Regarding the Feb 1st update, I like the level of technical detail and I think the same is true for others, even non-technically orientated followers of the project enjoy hearing about the challenges that a developer faces, even if JSON doesn’t mean that much to them.
If anything this update was a little on the long side for a daily update.
If Flavian and Keith are serious about daily updates, I think a simple list of what people are working on today/worked on yesterday is sufficient, with maybe a more verbose summary of things at the end of the week. Or just a weekly summary, period. I think most people really just want to know that progress is being made, and what, if any, stumbling blocks have been encountered (because people love a story of triumph over adversity; also, people like to know why things are slow, and when things pick up speed again).
It was absolutely too long, but that’s because it was the first update. I needed the intro post, I needed the january summary to put into context what I will be speaking about in the coming days/weeks. The third post ( about yesterday ) is even a bit longer than what I am aiming at for the average report. Overall, these 3 posts took an hour to write.
Frankly, I’d be happy with a update twice a week, or even once every week. If you think that you can manage an update every day, good enough for me as long as you don’t spend more than a dozen of minutes on it But seeing how anxious some people were back before Christmas and hoping to get the Dev Access as a nice present, maybe the daily update is not an overkill
I like the quick progress report concept a lot. It’s a good form of constant feedback that shouldn’t be time-consuming and should also allow you a few moments to reflect on what it is you are doing.
As you mentioned, you want to try and stay away from stating time-lines. I whole-heartedly agree. I suggest only stating what the short term goal or task is and possibly give it some context with the long term goal that it supports (which is exactly what you stated you are doing with the first two posts, so keep it up)
I really like that you’ve started the reports as an ongoing thing! I think it will really help morale in the community, build enthusiasm as well as keeping people realistic about what is being achieved.
It is totally the right approach to not put yourself under too much pressure to make lengthy, detailed posts. Enjoy each one and know that we will lap it up! Good luck to you
Thanks for the thread Crayfish. Lots of info and very interesting > thanks Flavien. Am wondering though whether the present engine has been configured for DX12.
I’m sure that, as you continue writing these, the length and frequency will organically fall into a stable pattern. But we (well, I) do like hearing about the non-sexy stuff, gives a lot of context of the reality of game development. In fact this will be a good journal for us to come back to in the future. Retrospecting this will be very interesting so don’t be afraid to go deep into any subject as you see fit within the context of these quick updates.
I do agree that any topic you or anyone in the dev team feel should be presented in-depth is better served as a separate featured update on the website (and not in these reports).
I enjoyed today’s progress report @InovaeFlavien , thanks for the read. It’s nice to have some current details instead of listening to old interviews (again!) Looking forward to tomorrow’s blog…
I am wondering why you are rushing the most important core features of your system in that speed. Access Rights and authentication is nothing somebody implements in a few days. And if you do, the documentation is next to zero. From my experience this seems to be too fast for a good quality
After having played the prototype (subtle brag), I have faith that they know what theyre doing.
@inoX I disagree with your statement btw, access rights and authentication for some projects can be done in a day, if not hours, it all depends on the size and complexity.
Thanks Flavien again for the awesome progress report. It really helps us appreciate the hard work you and Keith are doing! But don’t forget to take a couple of days of a week - 5 reports a week is pretty awesome!!!
Vulkan integration, assuming it has been released, is tentatively scheduled for sometime this summer as long as development on the gameplay, tools, networking, payment processing, and website are moving along smoothly.
While the game runs on Win10 and Win10 supports D3D12 we are still using D3D11 at the moment. Porting to D3D12/Vulkan is non-trivial and will take a considerable amount of effort.
But seeing how anxious some people were back before Christmas and hoping to get the Dev Access as a nice present, maybe the daily update is not an overkill 
