The Staggered Development extra time fallacy

Printimus

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Look I respect your opinion, you can have weekly updates if you want the speed of progress is not about the number of updates but the content. I could get into all the wrong dates given for release but all that does is feed frustration. I will not spend anymore on this game if others want to that's up to them.
^ I'm glad we can keep it calm and collective here. Too many feelings get hurt because people want to take these debates too seriously. Let us continue to keep it civil, ladies and gentlemen! :o7:
 

Bambooza

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Firstly, it's commendable that CIG is trying different things to improve the development process.

However, staggered development is not a magical incantation that turns 30,000 man-hours into 60,000 man-hours, which might be the idea you'd get reading through Staggered Development FAQ:

What it actually means, is each person working on a feature has a longer period to do so, but their workload is doubled. That is, you got exactly as much time to complete the same work as before.

It in on itself does nothing to solve CIGs signature move of over committing each cycle. That is, as long as they remain too optimistic with their velocity estimates for each update cycle, underestimate the amount of work needed and over promise, they will continue to underdeliver patches, the patches will be late, there will be x.x.1 and x.x.2 feature patches outside of the regular cycle, etc. If anything, I'd say 6-month cycles make it harder to estimate the work than 3-month cycles.

Now, it is possible that staggering the development helps CIG to optimize the resource usage, which is the only way you can get more results out of the same resources, but I wouldn't jump on the staggered development hype train just yet.

This is all correct. The one thing that staggered development attempts to fix is the amount of time you get to work on a feature. I know personaly when smashing bugs in service packs 3 months is fine. But when implementing new features having more time available to work out the issues is always a good thing. Of course, you can also spend far too long polishing and handling every edge case that has a very low probability of occurring instead of moving on and implementing new features. So there is a degree of trade-off. The other aspect is that some features require a lot of background coding to be completed before they can be visibly seen in the game. Where future iterations on the feature have huge impact on the player population the first iteration which required far more effort is underwhelming to the players due to it back ending services and engine modifications. If anyone's ever watched a house being constructed has seen stages of the house that seems to drag on for weeks and months then suddenly the house seems to transform overnight especially when it goes from framing to sheetrock. The same happens with code with 4 months spent on parts of the code that is needed but has no user interface and so is never seen. Then spend the last 2 months flushing out the user experience and tweaks to make it special.


CIGs biggest problem is that they have a fundamentally flawed development model.

What should have been a relatively simple exercise in developing a minimum viable product - Proc gen universe, hand crafted hero zones, RNG missions, and then add game play systems and ships over time as people play, focusing on ONE gameplay system at a time and one ship at a time, instead has become a huge mess of absolutely nothing getting done because there is still EVERYTHING to do, and people are spread too thin.


There is absolutely no focus on getting an actual functioning game out the door, for people to get stuck into.

The biggest issue with this is you often box yourself into a corner with game features as you do not have the engine to support anything else. Its the reason why Star Citizen is so far behind schedule was that they picked an engine which would have worked well for the initial concept and in fact would have worked will with your suggestion. But it does not work well with the current scope of the MMO SC has become. So a lot of the initial work ended up being scrapped and a lot of time has been in reworking the game engine to work with the new vision. It honestly wasn't until 3.0 that we started to see the true game potential for ourselves and its still hamstrung by needing server side object container streaming and server mesh.
 

at-2500

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I wanted to offer a more intuitive explanation as to how staggered development might help reducing the developer workload. Imagine star citizen was a house. A house with only 1 storey needs 3 months to be built, and a 2 storey house can be build in 6 months. The 3 month release cycle however means developers need to have a finished product, so what they need to do is build a 1 storey house complete with roof and everything in the first three months and then use the following three months to remove the roof, construct the second floor and rebuild the roof. Staggered development removes the need for constructing and removing that temporary roof.
 

NaffNaffBobFace

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NaffNaffBobFace

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What is your unhealthy fascination with our mum's? Is it because your wife is still banning you?
I didn't even know Mrs 'BobFace was a mod here?! 😳 Haven't been banned yet though.
 

NaffNaffBobFace

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As tempting as it is to turn this into a creepy “show us yer mum” thread...
Only at TEST could we go from the benefits and drawbacks of staggered development to threatening to show each other our mums.

Randomness, for the GLORY of TEST!
 
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