Game only 19% done?

[Excellent]

Call me a math geek but since KSP is version 0.19 dosent that mean its only 19% done?

I have been looking at their blog posts and they have been stating that the game is nearing completion even though its not even 20% done

Is there some kinda weird way game makers number their games or am I right?

(P.S I made my account in October so I uber lucky)

[comham]

In software terms, version numbers are arbitrary and not a fraction. It's just "version 0.19.1", it's not 19% done, nor is it the nineteenth version. It just serves to differentiate it from version 0.18.

[Banbite]

By your logic the earlier version like 0.9 would be 90% done.

Version number =/= percentage

[EndlessWaves]

Yeah, as Comham says it's just to differentiate versions. It's traditional to have version 1.0 as the release version (although some games like World of Tanks don't bother) but it's rare for version numbering to smoothly go up and meet it as it gets ready for release.

[zekes]

haha funny way of looking at it...

[Zephram Kerman]

And then there's Firefox.

[tommygunyeah]

The version numbering is just showing an updated version from that last, the work which goes into that release could be tiny or massive but the version number is likely only to go up 0.1 or 0.01

I don't think there is much telling on how far the game is through completion, that depends on how the dev team have planned for the future, I'm sure as they use the Scrum style of management that they have a lot of tasks already laid out in their backlog but still add to that backlog from time to time.

[Felsmak]

Fortunately, no. The game would take several years to complete if they were actually counting to 1.

[Luxmaster-CZ]

its 19.1, so maybe its 191 % done..

Jeez..

[Ruedii]

Software development goes in several stages. The first stage is reaching a feature complete stage, then you have to get rid of all the remaining bugs and polish up the design for final release (and eliminate bugs created in the process of polishing it up.) In it's current state, KSP still is not feature complete.

Generally once a piece of software is feature complete, major release version go a lot faster. I'm not sure if you followed the Mozilla project, and how they went from a release every 6-12 months to a release every month when they went from alpha state to beta state. This is generally the case with all software. There are of course a lot of minor revisions in the development branch when a piece of software isn't feature complete, but they tend not to be released for public use because new features mean new bugs, and thus they require testing first

All 0.19 means is that there have been 19 major releases.

Edited April 20, 2013 by Ruedii
add more details.

[katateochi]

There are different conventions but in most cases don't even try to see it as a decimal number;

One good convention which a lot of people follow is well documented here http://semver.org/

basically the numbers are MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH

- Major version X (X.y.z | X > 0) MUST be incremented if any backwards incompatible changes are introduced to the public API.

- Minor version Y (x.Y.z | x > 0) MUST be incremented if new, backwards compatible functionality is introduced to the public API

- Patch version Z (x.y.Z | x > 0) MUST be incremented if only backwards compatible bug fixes are introduced.

but I don't think Squad is following that convention, they like many developers are prob. following their own in house system.

[nats]

I think the only thing that reflects the amount of development this game has got to come is the fact its being labelled as still being in Alpha stage which means its not yet 'feature complete'. When it moves to Beta it will be considered 'feature complete', but still with bugs to sort. Then it will move to Release Candidate (ready for release) and finally Gold (being released).

Version numbers mean diddly squat.