August 23rd, 2022 Livestream

State of Dev: Where's Update 6?

https://youtu.be/Or4PvDOCofA

Topics

• Environment > Creatures
• Features > Multiplayer > Dedicated Servers
• Satisfactory Updates > Release Builds
• Satisfactory Updates > Released > Satisfactory Update 6
• Satisfactory Updates > State of Dev

Transcript

so the first thing I'm going to talk about today is about update six because a lot of people have been asking about it like what's what's the plan now you're back like what's gonna happen with update six when is it coming out in ea do we have a date, what's going on wait I need to update the agenda how do I do this again there we go, this is I think this is the most this is pretty much why I wanted to boot up the stream essentially just give some news, as to what's going on so we don't have a date no, we've got a couple of, things that we so well like before we can sort of decide on a date that we can publicly tell you guys it's not gonna be too too far off though, is, you know we just got back from vacation and you know people are sort of getting back into into the jam you know figuring out like what's going on what happened while we were gone because some people worked during vacations some people are taking the vacation now, so but now we're most of the studio is back now essentially and we're working on a couple of different things, some of us are working on well part of us already were working on you know stuff that weren't related to update six, and I talked about this in the first video I put out about everything six how you know this is a minor update or a tomorrow update or whatever you wanna call it is because you know most of the people who work in update six, oh sorry some people are working up to six some people are working other things that will take longer to do than you know in the general like interval between updates so this is why this update is a bit smaller scaled and you know some people now start moving over to the new stuff and some people are working on patching up update six and we are gonna start rolling out patches again soon-ish for on experimental we last patch we rolled out I think was in july something right that's a date, so hopefully next week we will start rolling out some fixes we've done a couple of fixes to creatures during while we were gone that will hopefully resolve some of the issues and, there's a couple of other things that we've been fixing and hopefully we'll have time to fix some of the more like long-term issues that we've had in the game that we've always wanted to fix and hopefully that will be iron out soon ish, so yeah but we don't know exactly when update ticks will be ready for ea because oh yeah this is what this is the thing I wanted to talk about too was that like yeah we're getting back into the groove right and, we have like a qa section believe it or not because they do have q a people working for us and they didn't start until this week so like everything that we've been working on for update six up until this point hasn't been like gone through the qa like testing and stuff like that like if you think the game is buggy when you play on experimental you have no idea like holy, it can get so much worse so, so we haven't been able to like test the the work that we've been doing you know up until this point, and, that's that's sort of the work that we're doing this week so so this week we can hopefully figure that out but also you know some of our qa leads and stuff are you know at conferences so they're also not here but hopefully next week we'll see some patches rolling in and then I think, one big thing for us is once we started rolling out like those patches and the fixes that we've done to to update six then we have a better understanding of like sort of where we stand with update 6 and what we have left to do for update 6 essentially and that will give us a better understanding of when we feel update 6 will be available on ea so, what what month is it now it's august right so my guess is sometime september, sometime hopefully not to say too late but you never know you know anything can happen it's january no it's not that's a lie so, so yeah sometimes I think that was what we said no maybe we didn't say anything like that before I think we just said like a couple of months, well I got a text from my dad what do you want, I think we said before vacation that like you know update six is is is a bit different compared to other updates this is an update that instead of sort of, you know it's a smaller update it's a more prolonged update because we're sort of we sort of released it before it was ready and before it was done, and it's still not fully finished, so we're still working on some of the major things that are tied into what we need to finish up with update 6 essentially the biggest one being creature ai and the like navigation system which apparently was a bigger undertaking than we anticipated even when because we had a bunch of issues where when we test stuff, internally we usually play the game into the editor when we test it apparently there was a bunch of bugs with how we packaged the game like when we compile it and put it into a binary and like upload it so like a lot of stuff we were testing when we were developing it, weren't present until you we put it like on on steam or epic and stuff like that so we were a bit surprised as that's like why certain issues rose and they were quite difficult to like nail down why they were happening because we couldn't like debug the build in the same way because when we were testing it everything was working and then but we were keep getting reports from people being like but it's not working like this thing isn't working with creatures and, apparently it had something to do with the something with how we packaged the game and, and stuff like that and the annoying thing was that it wasn't really like there wasn't any issues with like the ai, like code per se it had something to do with like the navigation system that's like under like underlying, so like the ai worked perfectly fine when we were testing it and and you know we were super super stoked and then when we put it out in the world it just didn't it didn't do what we wanted it to do so that that was a one of the like biggest setbacks that we've had with update sex essential and that's why it took a bit longer to, to get it out, and so another thing I also want to talk about while we're talking about creatures so the original plan when we were developing update six was that we wanted to sort of we want to sort of finish up like the creature overhaul that we were been working on, I talked about this in the video, but- I thought I'd just sort of revamp it a little bit so you guys you know it's been a while so maybe you don't remember and I just add a couple of things here so the idea was that we wanted to sort of do an overhaul of the creature the the creature ai and also like some aspects of like how you know certain creatures have different behavior in certain areas we wanted to make it so that when you're exploring the planet you know you some enemies wouldn't be necessarily more difficult but they would be different you know so you know sort of some of the different areas in the planet would be more intended for like end game and you know some areas we've been saying like oh maybe you don't want to go back here until you get the cena basher or maybe you want to go back and when you have like nobles and stuff like that because the behavior changes things up, and the goal was to sort of wrap everything into a neat package when it came to that in update six and finish it up but since we ran into these like issues that we didn't like really anticipate when it came to the ai and the navigation system, you know that kind of work got prolonged and then we also had you know- I mentioned this in the video but we have an idea to introduce at least one new creature that we haven't teased until now I know people like where's the crab where's the big crab and like that's coming but that's later that's that's a that's a different case here that I'm not talking about here, we have at least one more creature that we haven't unveiled yet and that creature we felt like, we kind of we kind of want to finish it up a bit more before we actually unveil it because it is kind of cool, so so we decided to like push that a little bit so what you sort of got in update six was sort of like maybe half or two thirds of what we wanted to put out in update six originally, you know that's sort of the nature of game dev I guess that you know you plan for one thing and another thing happens essentially so, so that's sort of the state of things and we've sort of decided you know originally we thought that we were gonna keep working on on on that stuff in our rental and then we were hoping we'd be able to finish that up so that like oh cool we finished that up and and then we package it and then put it on e8 right on early access branch so, but unfortunately we feel like it's a bit too much work and we feel like if we do pursue like pursue that path then we're gonna keep update six in like experimental state for way too long we feel like than what it's worth you know people are already kind of like where's update six like I can't see it on ea and I don't wanna play the buggy version and so we're feeling like maybe we should do sort of like a thing where we we wrap up what we have right now and you know patch it up and make it more stable and then we'll push that at the early access and then we'll keep working on that stuff later down the line and we'll see how it goes with if we do you know like if we keep like pushing that stuff on our on experimental and you know post update 6 sort of updates or if we like feel that we're working on stuff working on stuff and then like oh maybe this is like a new update or maybe we should do an update seven with the stuff that we have left, or something like that or do a you know a people refer if they people call like update 6.5 which you know this the the little nerd in me the little nerd that cares so much about semantic versioning is like that's wrong because that's not how you that's not how semantic versioning but the the yeah the the entail like it's, it's the add-on on update six if you will or whatever, that could be a thing right so so you know maybe we'll keep working on update six even though it's out you know on early access we'll still keep adding on to that update or maybe it'll be a later update we don't know at this point, we'll keep you guys in the loop as what we decide because we still sort of need to at least put out the updates that we have right now that we were working on up until this point for update six so we can get sort of an estimate like how we're actually doing, project wise so that that is essentially the big deal for update 6 right now hopefully that made sense, because I feel like I rambled blah blah blah yeah update 6 final final final final final exactly, so so tldr, everything we planned to do with creatures we didn't manage to fully finish it and we feel like if we're gonna finish it then update 6 is going to be very prolonged so we feel like it's better to sort of wrap up what we have right now put out update 6 on early access and then keep working on it and see how it goes see what we do, to be decided what we do you know with the stuff that's left, that we wanted to put up for up to six essentially and, and hopefully soon hopefully next week might be the week after we'll we'll start doing that we'll start rolling out patches again on experimental and see how it goes but before we do that we all we are doing our currently we're doing our internal qa to make sure that it's like worth putting it out on the experimental branch because sometimes there are some you know so obvious issues with the game that it's not like really worth it for us to put it down on experimental sometimes well like the biggest thing for us to put on experimental is really to like catch all the weird cases and like you know there's so many of you there's thousands thousands of you and there's only like so many of us on the team so even if we spend like weeks testing something just putting out on experimental for like a weekend you guys will still catch more things but we we just want to make sure that like we're at least not putting out like a way to broken version of the game which has happened sometimes and sometimes we've had to do a rollback because we feel like it's not even worth waiting for the next patch in those cases, so, so yeah that's that's essentially the tldr, but I cannot touch a little bit of that I actually I'm gonna boot up paint here because I think I think I want to clarify something that I think- I didn't communicate well enough during the update six, the update six, like we call it teaser season but it's not really teasing season this time because we told everything about it they say but like the period from when we announced up to six and what will be to like when we actually release it, and it was something that I feel like I didn't communicate well enough so let me see this is completely I haven't, planned for this actually so I need to figure out what do I do here, I can probably add a thing here in the scene window capture and we'll capture paint ah cool dude this is so stupid and then we'll put this here right and then let's zoom in a little bit just a little bit cool all right cool and then we switched that scene all right cool muted shut up, okay so one thing that I really want to clarify here is is sort of what's been going on in the studio in like more the macro sort of sense because we've only been talking about like update six and what you know what's going on sex what are we working up to six blah blah blah blah but the thing that I think many people didn't realize is that you know the people have been working up that six is not the entire studio like the the- I don't know how many per se but like it's it's been there's there's many tracks going at the same time so that's what I want to try and clarify here exactly you know how that is over like overlaid right so, how does this work again cool I want a thick I want a thicker thicker line right so okay up until this point essentially how we've been working is we have our like, production we'll just do prod production line and then we have our world team

[Music]

right so production line is everyone working on like updates for the game so for update four and five you know we're working on, this includes everything so it's like pre-production of the update, what are we gonna make for the updates, how much you know estimating estimates of like how much work is that and that involves the entire like well not the entire because as you see there's another branch here but for the most part the most, like production team essentially so so it's artists it's programmers it's the producers it's you know me and jase as well to certain degree so so so that's sort of what's happening there right and then we have the world branch which is our level design team so it's like hannah for the most part but there's also other people involved here, and at certain points we decide okay cool now we need to merge in the world part into the production line so you know at a certain point in time I mean not a thick line you know so at a certain point in time we decide all right let's take everything that's on the world branch and move it over to the production branch right, and that's essentially what happened in update 5 with northern forest and that's what happened, with this update with the spire coast right but and here there's always a but okay, let me move this down so what's oh actually actually no it's easy if I do it this way, so but but during let me actually make a little mark here which one is it okay so so let's say that this, so professional I could have planned this ahead but I kind of decided like five minutes before the stream started like no I'm gonna explain this actually because I wanna okay so I'm gonna keep drawing the lines here this is we're moving towards working in the game yeah yeah yeah very cool all right so here's update five okay update up date number five right at this point in time we had had merged world into production and you know the the other thing too is like production also goes live right so it's a separate branch because you have the live branch as well but let's let's just keep it simple for now so so this is people are working on update and then we merge everything over right at this point in time is when we decided that, when we're working on stuff for the updates and we're working on the game and we're taking like a step back sort of like if we're going to finish the game for 1.0 what do we need to do to actually finish it because it felt like we were constantly moving the goal post as to like what a finished version of satisfactory would look like so we kind of took a step back here and thought to ourselves like what do we need to do to actually accomplish 1.0 and one thing that we realized is that we've up into this point we've only worked on features for the game that we can finish within the time frame right so let me go back here so like this is update four four and you know we don't really have any like set time frames or anything like that you know and and we're hopefully we're kind of obvious about that since we never know when we're doing things you know people you know in the best of worlds we would put out updates all the time but you know it takes time so so up to this point we always thought like okay what can we create in between here right in this time span in this rough time span this isn't like, this isn't the decide like six months how much can we produce in six months this is just like a rough like in between right and and then we list like oh we can make this we can make this we can make this and we can make this right and then we're cool which ones do we want to do and then we pick like we're gonna do this one we're gonna do this one I'm gonna do this one for this next update awesome let's work on that cool fantastic and then sometimes we prototype it and then we realize that was a bad idea let's scrap that and work on something else on the list right but one thing we kind of realized was that for if we want to finish the game and we want to reach 1.0 at some point, we can't keep doing that because the one so there's a bunch of tech depth if something is is a term where you know if we want to finish something for the next update we can't make take like our full time and finishing like a system we have to sort of just make it work for the next update and then we'll come back to it and fix it you know for 1.0 which isn't really a good way to do it, so what we sort of decided was that or realized if anything is that we have to sort of commit to things that take longer to produce than what it takes to, work on in between the updates so at this moment this is the this is the crucial moment where suddenly a new branch appeared right and this is the I don't know what I'll call this production too 2.0

[Laughter]

this is so good looking, branch right, this is get yeah this is getting nature so so what they're working on is not limited to the time frame that it takes for us to to, make an update right so when update 6 hits update six update six you know, world branch merges into production and this is the thing that goes live whoa here it goes live whoa look at it go oh my god it's of control, but this branch this bad boy here just keeps chucking on working on stuff you know, making making making things, making cool stuff that you guys haven't seen yet and working towards the 1.0 release so so, the idea is that when something is finished here right let me just erase this again god damn it more more lines don't have enough lines so the idea is right that when something it it might not be like everything here because in contrast to the world branch because the work branch really is like we're taking everything and pushing it over to the production line but when you know something part like we cherry pick right when something cool in production 2.0 is done that goes into production or the live branch or whatever and that might be I don't know and it might be the case actually that this is for 1.0 you know all right so so that's that's, hopefully that made sense my very beautiful, diagram and everything,

[Music]

but, yeah so that's so what I wanted the main thing that I want to emphasize right here is like you know while we've been working in update six which is this period right here right this is this is the time frame since update five and since update six you guys have only seen this right there's been this going on as well okay, so yeah and that that is like the main reason why this update is smaller is because you've only seen this right and I don't want to like play it up as like oh there's so much more you guys haven't seen oh my god it's it's not like that really it's it's more about like how there's there's more com going on and there's, there's stuff going on in this branch specifically that's tied into like the 1.0 release that you won't see until 1.0 such as like store related stuff and, well yeah mainly story related stuff but like stuff that we don't want to put out before 1.0 because we feel like what is the point you know because like story elements for instance, regardless of how how much the story actually plays an effect in the game you know, we don't really see a point in like putting that out iteratively, we'd rather just put it out in one go and you guys can experience the story as in one go rather than just like do it in bits and pieces, so yeah hopefully that made sense I should probably I should probably explain that in a youtube video, and maybe not do it in paint because this was really like the heat of the moment, but hopefully hopefully that made sense and hopefully you guys know and- I kind of mentioned this just in the first video, so yeah there we go paint made everything better for sure pain skills acceptable oh my god I finally made it so, so yeah cool oh wait wait wait we actually have one more thing one more branch let me go back to this I forgot about it somebody reminded me we also have a branch called teddy servers right that's also running in in parallel with all these and that one works similar so it goes from production to that branch right so for update 5 that's well that's actually when we made that but for update 6 for instance like it we take stuff from rip from from the production branch and move it into the dedicated service essentially and this one, yeah runs in parallel so it's not part of like necessarily the regular production line and it's also this is also experimental warning experimental okay you're on your own okay let's until we we get to a point where we feel like this is actually a pretty good now, important to note because there's a lot of issues that happen only on dedicated servers and it's hard for the like the rest of the team expensive that's what it is, it's it's there's a bunch of stuff happening just on dedicated servers that you know the rest of the team can't really like look into it's more for the people working on dedicated servers looking to and that makes it that production like development on that branch is slower and you know sometimes the people are working on dedicated servers have to jump over to like update 6 related stuff or the update that we're working on because time frame or like we need to put stuff out or there's something related to what they've been working on essentially so yes experimental so yes priorities exactly so so so there you have it, did any of that make sense regarding update six when is update six coming out you guys this is on the test you all failed nope okay no yeah no that's the good answer tomorrow no okay you weren't paying attention I don't know I just got here god damn it

[Music]

21st century maybe we'll see yeah sometime in the future that's that's, that's for sure spanish tomorrow I can't believe I studied spanish for four years and I barely know how to say anything I can't even like I can't say anything it's so funny so yeah tldr if you just joined, updates we're working on on patching up update six and releasing it on ea hopefully we'll be able to have it ready sometime in the next month hopefully fingers crossed maybe it depends a little bit of how the next round of like experimental patches go which we're releasing soon-ish next week maybe

[Music]

so yeah another month we haven't been working on it for like almost a month and a half well, it's like half of the team went on vacation early but it is what it is but no one's pl this is a dead game anyways no one's playing it so why would anybody want well would anyone miss anything update 6 related yeah we weren't working we were just looking we're just staring we were just on twitter all day long just staring on stuff whoops that's not what I wanted to do let's turn off my light instead all right that's that's, that's the key takeaway I'm I stalled this is the longest state of dev I think we've ever had, the biggest state of stall so yeah