This is what Maintenance Mode must be like :(

My guess is that its either going to be like previous Elite titles in that its missions (like the tutorials) joined into a campaign, or FD will fully rely on the BGS to provide some context, abandoning any long term direction. Both approaches cut FDs ongoing commitment to lore in the long term and make EDs overheads less.
It really depends on how you define lore. For me Thargoids attacking stations and retreating is part of the lore / becomes the lore. I guess that story isn't over yet.
 
It really depends on how you define lore. For me Thargoids attacking stations and retreating is part of the lore / becomes the lore. I guess that story isn't over yet.

The problem with that then is all Tier 1 characters almost freeze, and any person who comes up in IIs is simply a random name. Nothing really means anything and it all becomes a bit random.
 
That job advertisement seems to imply development is blocked by broken builds at least or it has at least once.

That’s usually a process / coordination / communication issue, not a technical one :)
 
That job advertisement seems to imply development is blocked by broken builds at least or it has at least once.

That’s usually a process / coordination / communication issue, not a technical one :)
It's clearer why new updates are breaking the game without apparent QA intervention before release, such as the Arx Event:

"successful candidate will innovate and improve our existing automated testing and build procedures to support these projects ..."

"Yep, the Arx update has passed the automatic test .... so it's good to go."
Nobody human actually tried the game as a player first.

Perhaps the applicant for the job should just like playing Elite Dangerous.
 
It's clearer why new updates are breaking the game without apparent QA intervention before release, such as the Arx Event:

"successful candidate will innovate and improve our existing automated testing and build procedures to support these projects ..."

"Yep, the Arx update has passed the automatic test .... so it's good to go."
Nobody human actually tried the game as a player first.

Perhaps the applicant for the job should just like playing Elite Dangerous.
You really shouldn't talk about things where you have no clue. Not a good look.
 
Perhaps the applicant for the job should just like playing Elite Dangerous.

That's an amazing point, yes i think that would help. Given how niche elite is, its probably really hard to hire people for that have a real passion for it. All the current cm's heard of job first and found the game later from their honest admission it seems. It makes sense why the truck simulator people put job advertisements up in the community news now, thought that was strange when i saw it. Sometimes you need more than professionalism to make gold, and if theres problems in the culture you're doomed before you even start.

Guess that makes sense finally why banks, aircraft, the military etc have regulation defining software quality and process requirements. Can you imagine frontier building the software for an actual fsd? :p
 
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EDs lore has been sort of retconned (its why I split ED into eras- Brookes was the first, and established a lot of core concepts that were dropped) and now stopped. By lore I mean Tier 1 character progression, galactic goings on, general information that builds a world.

Brookes... Michael Brookes who wrote some books,
my local bookseller never had,
I suppose they could
have been good,
or they could have been bad.

That guy? Yeah, never read or heard of either until these forums.

I was kind of hoping this sort of stuff would occupy portions of the Codex so we'd have some idea about the history and nature of the galaxy we occupy, but it turns out most of the stuff you'd really want to know is found at Tourist Beacons scattered around the galaxy, or crashed on planets you either find by accident or by following some very obscure hints and clues to track down - and if that's how they teach history in the 34th century, fear the 35th.
 
"successful candidate will innovate and improve our existing automated testing and build procedures to support these projects ..."

"Yep, the Arx update has passed the automatic test .... so it's good to go."
Nobody human actually tried the game as a player first.

That's a fairly, no offense, stupid comment. If you think there is any MMO or open-world game that doesn't use internal automated testing you are clueless. If you think that means no human tested it 'manually' you're equally clueless.
 
That's an amazing point, yes i think that would help. Given how niche elite is, its probably really hard to hire people for that have a real passion for it. All the current cm's heard of job first and found the game later from their honest admission it seems. It makes sense why the truck simulator people put job advertisements up in the community news now, thought that was strange when i saw it. Sometimes you need more than professionalism to make gold, and if theres problems in the culture you're doomed before you even start.

Guess that makes sense finally why banks, aircraft, the military etc have regulation defining software quality and process requirements. Can you imagine frontier building the software for an actual fsd? :p

Actually yes. Would it surprise you to know the same company that makes the really cheap cookware sets the handles fall off of also makes the Hellfire missile casings that are fired from Predator Drones? Or the company that makes the semi-shoddy software in certain automobile computer navigation systems also develops and maintains the targeting software for the Trident nuclear MIRV ICBM missiles?

So yeah, I can imagine it.
 
That's an amazing point, yes i think that would help.

It wouldn't. You want devs that get accurate and to-the-point input and directives, work eight hours per day on their task, go home and do something else. To get a real in-depth look you need hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of experience. To get that much playtime plus work full-time on the game effectively means only people with no live outside of this game can apply. You don't want such a person as a colleague. The solution is for FD to communicate with people who understand the game thoroughly, not get devs that have that level of experience.

Guess that makes sense finally why banks, aircraft, the military etc have regulation defining software quality and process requirements. Can you imagine frontier building the software for an actual fsd? :p

Companies set quality requirements per product, not per company. Their annual reports demonstrate they are mostly correct when determining the requirements for ED.
 
You don't want such a person as a colleague. The solution is for FD to communicate with people who understand the game thoroughly, not get devs that have that level of experience.

Yes you do! If you are like them yourself it becomes a labour of love. And the pub is never on your computer so that handles that. But yes to compensate for not being a user of your own product definitely diligence can be applied. Ps you can tell immediately when software is made for the author or when software is to a requirements document. At least i can get feel for it after all these years.
 
The solution is for FD to communicate with people who understand the game thoroughly, [...]

Who might those people be? It's not us. We all think we know something, understand something, act and talk like we know everything - we don't. Sure, we can make some pretty good guesses, but there's still plenty about the game we don't know, don't understand. There are many parts of much bigger pictures we simply cannot see until they're shown to us, and they can't be shown to us until they're developed.

Certainly though, it can only benefit development to take input from us - just don't take us at our word, because we're talking out of our bums most of the time.
 
Yes you do! If you are like them yourself it becomes a labour of love. And the pub is never on your computer so that handles that. But yes to compensate for not being a user of your own product definitely diligence can be applied. Ps you can tell immediately when software is made for the author or when software is to a requirements document. At least i can get feel for it after all these years.

Software is pretty much never made 'for the author', especially games. For some reason devs don't really enjoy spending thousands of hours on a product, only to go home and spend more. You get a matrix effect, where you dont play the game but instead 'see the code'. 'Labour of love' and 'I make the game I want to play' are slogans only kids, drunks and the gullible fall for.
 
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