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Devnote Tuesday: Slow News Day I

SQUAD

By SQUAD
in KSP1 The Daily Kerbal

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Majorjim!

Majorjim!

Posted
Posted

"Marco (Samssonart)

These last few weeks I’ve been learning my way around the new Unity GUI system, it’s awesome, it’s very flexible, modular and more efficient than anything we’ve tried before, this alone will mean a performance boost for KSP."

This excites me!

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smjjames

smjjames

Posted
Posted

Summer is generally a transition period, so maybe they're just undergoing transition?

How come Alex is leaving? To do other projects maybe?

Ive heard that SQUAD has a high turnover rate and I know of at least one former dev (NovaSilisko) who's still around on the forums, so... I dunno where I'm going with this sentence.

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softweir

softweir

Posted
Posted

It happens at a lot of dev companies:- staff who join up "fresh" to the field gain experience, do the work, earn their stripes and then move on. Some companies have higher turnover than others, but it can be a real pain for companies that, for instance, offer high-class training! Part of the reason is that in any company there is a limited potential for in-house promotion. Some companies offer better chances at promotion, others are worse. Regardless: some people will want to go up a step, and find they have to move on to do so. Small companies in particular tend to lose staff who joined with an ambition to start their own businesses, whereas the huge companies tend to attract people who prefer to be cogs in a machine.

The difference between Squad and Valve or any other huge company is that the big guys don't advertise staff turnover, except in that you see job vacancies - and you never know if a vacancy is due to turnover or expansion. (Board members are an exception, because that stuff gets reported in the business news, if only we could be bothered to watch out for it.)

This is an ideal time for a change of staff at Squad: V1.x is out and the huge crunch is over, and any new staff will be able to learn the ropes in the more relaxed atmosphere at the start a fresh development phase.

Get used to this: Squad will always have turnover, and we can expect to see a lot more faces coming and going over the years, each one bringing their own special talents and viewpoints to the team. It's all for the good, in the long run!

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Vanamonde

Vanamonde

Posted
Posted
Team members keep leaving, I dont expect any work to continue after the U5 update at this rate.

Team members keep joining, too. And people have been predicting that it's the end of the game's development ever since I've been here, which is going on 3 years.

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RAINCRAFTER

RAINCRAFTER

Posted
Posted (edited)
The team is shrinking fast :(

Good luck on future endeavors Alex.

Exactly what I was thinking, good luck.

Man, the dev notes are so small with 2 people leaving in the last two dev notes (MAYBE because 1.0) and 3 people going on a vacation. (They deserved it!)

Well, good luck tiny dev team. Godspeed to you!

EDIT:

Team members keep joining, too. And people have been predicting that it's the end of the game's development ever since I've been here, which is going on 3 years.

I actually don't think KSP will die for a few years, but now I at least think the multiplayer update won't be coming out as fast as even 1.0. The smaller dev team will definitely cripple the game, but I think it will truly die when it shrinks to just Harv. (I don't see any devs joining, at least on the dev notes!)

Edited by RAINCRAFTER
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Robotengineer

Robotengineer

Posted
Posted
using roman numeral 1 in the title but no phantom menace joke? I expect more from you squad.

'Alex!' just doesn't have the same ring as 'Quigon!'. I expect for KSP to take the minecraft release cycle, where the dev cycle just keeps getting slower and slower.

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tkw

tkw

Posted
Posted
'Alex!' just doesn't have the same ring as 'Quigon!'. I expect for KSP to take the minecraft release cycle, where the dev cycle just keeps getting slower and slower.

and slower ;.;

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basic.syntax

basic.syntax

Posted
Posted

Maxmaps has responded to some Devnote comments, over on Reddit.

chicknblender

(Warning: mini-rant) Seven days ago, 1.0.3 was "days" away; now it's weeks. I've been avoiding high-complexity missions on the notion that a rebalancing fix is right around the corner.

Maxmaps

We had a pretty large discussion on balance and our goals and that meant we had to hold it back. We weren't happy with the result and strong enough arguments were presented to get way more feedback on it.

KuuLightwing

I would like if KSP team did not shrink down a member each week. Thanks.

Good luck anyways, Alex.

Maxmaps

Alex and Roy are following projects of their own. We wish them our absolute best, it's never fun seeing people go but it's not our nature to discourage people from trying their own thing.

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NoMrBond

NoMrBond

Posted
Posted
just hire Netera, Porkjet and Roverdude permanatly to replace the gone devs

They might be able to contract in Porkjet for more modelling stuff since they've just graduated (if they haven't landed a job yet), but Nertea and RoverDude already have full time jobs.

It depends what they need though, maybe they need an audio engineer for a while, or a programmer, HLSL coder, heirarchy rigger, who knows

I guess we'll find out when Maxmaps puts up the want add

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Lord Aurelius

Lord Aurelius

Posted
Posted

Hmm, reddit gets dev responses, the official forum gets nothing (again). Would be nice if the devs put half as much time into the forum as they did into reddit and twitter...

Anyways, on the devnotes, sad to see another dev go, but I totally understand that if your heart isn't in a project anymore, sometimes you just have to move on to something new (especially if it's a great new opportunity). At least that's the impression I got on why he's leaving.

It looks like Max is up to his wheeling and dealing again. I haven't been too terribly impressed by what has come out of previous partnerships (especially the Eucl3d one), hopefully it will actually be something more interesting this time.

I'm a little disappointed with how 1.0.3 is being handled. The memory leak is quite annoying, and it sounds like they have a fix already, but now they've decided to throw a whole balance pass in there as well. Don't get me wrong, the game definitely needs a full balance pass, but the memory leak also needs to be fixed ASAP and doesn't have to be bundled with everything else. I guess Squad is a little gun-shy after 1.0.2 and is being extra cautious.

Hopefully Max can find some good candidates to replace those who have moved on. A job advertisement here on the official forum would be a good place to start.

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NovaSilisko

NovaSilisko

Posted
Posted

The number of team members going does concern me. Most of the veterans are gone by now, and the new members seem to join only for a relatively short time before leaving. I wish them luck.

How many employees total are currently at squad, anyway? KSP or otherwise?

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desepticon

desepticon

Posted
Posted
Is there any word on whether this update will bring a definite fix to the unplayability on Macs?

This. I've had to install KSP on my (shudder) windows partition to get this game to work past 10 minutes. Sooooo unstable on OS X.

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steve_v

steve_v

Posted
Posted (edited)
Obviously the game is just going to be one giant unplayable mess in the next update. :P

For those on OSX it probably will be. Wait, no, for many it already is.

Bugfixes please! Who cares about the "reballance", fix the bugs and performance problems first.

Edited by steve_v
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