Originally posted by sarteck:

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

To be quite frank, a year to get 2-3 new team members "up to speed" on what was previously the work of 5 people is probably... just about right.

Uh, no, not at all. I know you've mentioned having done coding since the mid-80's, but this is DEFINITELY not actual job experience. If it takes you a YEAR to contribute to the team, your team is crap or you are.

Don't forget that we're talking an indie team, here, not a triple-A megacorp. I wasn't trying to say that was typical, I was saying it could easily be the case.

You're right, though, a year is a long time... but I'm guessing the coding standards aren't exactly "maximally efficient", and there could be any number of other issues, such as not having a standardized workflow or toolchain, some people keeping "secret" code stashes, or any number of other... "less than completely professional" development practices.

We've already seen that the development process isn't anywhere near as efficient as it could be (even before adding more chefs to the kitchen), but some of us simply accept that as the completely reasonable down-side of buying into an indie Early-Access title. This is actually typical for studios being published by Coffee Stain, and often the "it'll release when it's finished" mentality results in a superior finished product...

... eventually.

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by sarteck:

Uh, no, not at all. I know you've mentioned having done coding since the mid-80's, but this is DEFINITELY not actual job experience. If it takes you a YEAR to contribute to the team, your team is crap or you are.

Don't forget that we're talking an indie team, here, not a triple-A megacorp. I wasn't trying to say that was typical, I was saying it could easily be the case.

Without dragging this out into a tirade with me whining about development time, I just have to point out that "indie" doesn't have to mean "a bunch of lazy bums that develop as a side hobby."

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

This is actually typical for studios being published by Coffee Stain, and often the "it'll release when it's finished" mentality results in a superior finished product...

... eventually.

If this is as you say typical of studios that Coffee Stain publishes, I'll know which EA projects not to bother with. The "superior finished project" of the Mistlands was less than overwhelming.

should be done by next week. If you just hire like 50k coders for 1 day, its all but done, maybe debug a little here and there, but that is the old school approach to finishing it up on time. Today you can just say "chat gpt, finish valheim for me" and it will be done by lunch thirty. They are just dragging it out to drum up sales.

Originally posted by sarteck:

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

This is actually typical for studios being published by Coffee Stain, and often the "it'll release when it's finished" mentality results in a superior finished product...

... eventually.

If this is as you say typical of studios that Coffee Stain publishes, I'll know which EA projects not to bother with. The "superior finished project" of the Mistlands was less than overwhelming.

"The Mistlands" is not the finished product, "Valheim" is... once it finally hits the 1.0 release.

Satisfactory is tons of fun, and highly polished... and yet is also still in EA after several years. Deep Rock Galactic, same story (although a bit newer than Valheim and Satisfactory).

If you'd like a list of stellar games that you're about to punk yourself out of because you can't be bothered being patient while the work is actually finished, here you go: https://www.coffeestainstudios.com/games/

Like I said, I'll take a hard pass.

Originally posted by sarteck:

Like I said, I'll take a hard pass.

Meh, whatever. You already own Valheim; shelve it for a year or two, see what it feels like when it's actually released.

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by sarteck:

Like I said, I'll take a hard pass.

Meh, whatever. You already own Valheim; shelve it for a year or two, see what it feels like when it's actually released.

I think you're not really understanding. I'm not raging at Valheim by any means, and I still play quite often. It's just extremely rare that I'll play base game because the developers aren't developing, while modders are.

What ever happened to the plan for small unique areas in Meadows and Black Forest?

I really think the amount of land mass for each biome should be similar. Even if the actual content in the biome is random. It really sucks to have like a mistlands spot that is 20 yards long. Plains seems to have a proper amount of land while mistlands in many places, not so much.

Originally posted by sarteck:

The new members were added like a year ago. If they're not up to speed, something is wrong.

It's an indie team, not a triple-A studio. Teething problems abound, and not just in "onboarding". The codebase is relatively large, and if you've ever worked in software dev, you know what kinds of spaghetti probably exist (and are probably labeled "// CORE FUNCTIONALITY - DO NOT TOUCH UNLESS YOU ARE BOB!!! //" in at least 4 places). To be quite frank, a year to get 2-3 new team members "up to speed" on what was previously the work of 5 people is probably... just about right. They should be mostly productive members at this point, with a semi-solid grasp of the codebase, as well as the programming styles of the other members ("This bit is camel-case, because John does it that way. The rest of us use Hungarian notation, except Harry likes to use snake case; try not to mess with Bill's modules too much, they're kinda black-box... but they usually do what they say on the tin, unless they're more than 6 months old, in which case ask first; there might be a better choice that's named something weird, like 'strawberry factory' or something").

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

Originally posted by sarteck:

The new members were added like a year ago. If they're not up to speed, something is wrong.

To be quite frank, a year to get 2-3 new team members "up to speed" on what was previously the work of 5 people is probably... just about right.

Uh, no, not at all. I know you've mentioned having done coding since the mid-80's, but this is DEFINITELY not actual job experience. If it takes you a YEAR to contribute to the team, your team is crap or you are.

Law of diminishing return sets in sooner or later. My opinion only, issue with Mistlands was making it seamlessly become part of the game, I feel they failed at that. It does not fit. Time was wasted pounding a square peg into a round hole.

Originally posted by umop-apisdn:

If you double the size of the crew building a house, you can double the speed the house is built... because constructing a house is a simple process with known parameters.

Doubling the size of a software development team will actually reduce productivity for a time, as the new members "get up to speed" with the codebase, learn internal conventions, etc... often interrupting the more senior staff with questions.

To be honest, a complete stall is likely to occur if you add too many new team members at once, later in production. Assuming you can avoid that, it can still take months just to get back to previous productivity levels, nevermind get "faster" at anything.

The new members were added like a year ago. If they're not up to speed, something is wrong.

If you double the size of the crew building a house, you can double the speed the house is built... because constructing a house is a simple process with known parameters.

Doubling the size of a software development team will actually reduce productivity for a time, as the new members "get up to speed" with the codebase, learn internal conventions, etc... often interrupting the more senior staff with questions.

To be honest, a complete stall is likely to occur if you add too many new team members at once, later in production. Assuming you can avoid that, it can still take months just to get back to previous productivity levels, nevermind get "faster" at anything.

I'd say so. Mistlands was originally going to be different from what it is now, so they went through redesigning the biome which most likely contributed to the time it took to make. Not to mention that it was a step up regarding things like enemy, dungeon and weapon design, as well as new mechanics like Eitr and the mist. They're definitely more experienced, and iirc, they were originally non-programmers, and there's a steep learning curve regarding that stuff. And also, they added many smaller content updates before mistlands, so they weren't 100% focused on the biome at the time. Looking at them now though, they have their eyes set on Ashlands, and maybe some small additions to the other biomes if we're lucky along the way.

Though i'm not too certain but there may also be an Ocean biome update ? Though i think it's ashlands, then deep north in queue first.