I'm sorry, I can't be specific. Basically, I feel it would hurt the long-term future of the game to release it at this point, with certain features unfinished. But whether or not I manage to finish these things, you will be getting a release by the end of the year.
After releasing 3.8, I want to go back to a much more frequent release schedule, like it used to be before 3.6.28.0.
Wonderful news Deadcode.
Regarding roadmaps and expectations, etc, I'd like to link
this old team17 forum thread here to remind everyone that 4.0 as originally envisioned wasn't all that ambitious, compared to what it has become. It wasn't an impossibly daunting task. I had forgotten how simple it was supposed to be. All it consisted of was a new scheme format (based on replay files) allowing fiddler-like game options. Back when that forum post was made, it sounded like there was a clearly-defined path to achieving that scheme format. Reading the plans in that old thread vs the
4.0 feature idea/dump list is a day and night difference. The first thread inspires and excites me and sounds possible. Deadcode himself sounds excited and inspired. On the other hand I get demotivated about 2 seconds into reading the 4.0 dump list, which is basically a call to re-program the entire game from scratch. Plus all kinds of extra shit like ranks, real-time, live map editing. It is way too ambitious. And you can't really release small iterative updates when you're rewriting the whole game because nothing works until it's done. Therefore we haven't had updates in a long time, which you say is demotivating, and is something that as a chronic procrastinator myself I completely understand.
Please humour my SpaceX analogies here for a second. The ITS was announced in 2016. It was the 42-engine rocket that was going to take hundreds of people and hundreds of tonnes of cargo to Mars in a very short timeframe. It was by far the largest rocket anyone had ever planned or built. It had tons of groundbreaking tech planned for it such as the most powerful engine with most aggressive design (highest temps, pressures, etc) ever, instant reusability without refurbishment, legless landing right back into the launch mounts, and a huge massively-pressurized spherical liquid oxygen carbon fibre fuel tank, even though CF is porous and is eroded by LOX. Everyone was hugely inspired, but when engineers looked at the plans in detail they laughed. It was concluded by everyone that the budget, timeline, and features would have to be drastically changed. So this year, SpaceX announced their scaled down version, the BFR, which is 25% smaller, resulting in a ~50% payload loss. It keeps most of the original features but now sounds a lot more feasible, and this time is actually economically viable. By the time it's ready, further compromises, such as the legless landing, will probably have had to be made. But it will still fulfill its end goal of facilitating human colonization of Mars.
Elon Musk looks no weaker for making these concessions - in fact he seems more pragmatic and credible. His greatest skill is arguably his ability to have insane inspiring vision, but not to get married to his ideas. He is always able to revise or cancel plans that are impractical, without succumbing to the sunk-cost fallacy. Elon's philosophy equates to "shoot for the moon and (if there are setbacks) you'll land on the stars" which is directly opposed to the other common piece of wisdom "under-promise and over-deliver". And the opposite of that, what critics might stupidly say about Musk or DC+CS, "over-promising and under-delivering", isn't always a bad thing. It's just a common phrase that in English unfortunately carries negative connotations. I hope you can see why, even though I haven't explained my thoughts well, in cases like with WA and SpaceX, that second phrase is bullshit. The ends justify the means, or something vaguely like that. I'm not making this comparison in order to imply you made any promises.
Anyway, if major work hasn't started on 4.0 yet, I'd suggest ditching that god-awful plan/idea dump roadmap and just add what you can via simple hacks. Keep it simple. Nobody cares that much if the underlying code is beautiful or whether certain aspects are open-sourced, free-range or organic. You can see that with PX - the code sucks, it runs like shit, buggy as hell, but people still love it, because it allows new possibilities for an aging game. Certain things may never be possible, for example being able to resume from replays -- that's ok -- it was not even part of the original 4.0 plans. I obviously don't know what would or wouldn't be possible without rewriting things. However I remember a big argument against making hackish interim features is they would become redundant when code was rewritten.
I have zero doubt that you guys, Deadcode and Cybershadow, would have the talent to do everything in that list. I know for a fact Deadcode has a genius-level understanding of the WA code. We've all seen his long-winded explanations where he explains things down to 1/65536 of a pixel, and his replays where he flies sheeps through a 99.999% solid map or has moles doing unspeakable things. Then there's Silkworm, which you didn't even have the source code for, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Then with Cybershadow (whose work I'm less familiar with) HostingBuddy and WormNAT2 are the best things to happen to this game in many many years, and most likely the only reason it's still alive. But I also think that unless you remortgaged your houses and did this as full-time jobs, WA would already be dead by the time all that code was rewritten.
The simple passage of time itself is very demotivating. It creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Fundamentally you seemed demotivated because it has taken so long, and it has taken so long because you were demotivated. Without frequent updates, you lose the frequent motivation to continue. So I think returning to a more rapid release schedule is the best news I've heard about WA in years. It sounds like you guys are on the right track and I'm super excited for 3.8. Keep up the great work.
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