April 13th, 2021 Livestream

State of Dev: Early Access branch and the Experimental branch

https://youtube.com/embed/cF3QleeEiJo?autoplay=1&start=827&end=1075

Topics

• Satisfactory Updates > Release Builds
• Satisfactory Updates > Released > Satisfactory Update 4
• Satisfactory Updates > State of Dev

Transcript

to some state of dev, and what's going on what's gonna happen with the update yada yada so if you've been playing on the experimental branch all this time, then I mean it's not gonna be anything new in the game per se you've already tried out the cool things we haven't updated early access branch for a long time for I think three months or something like that I'm gonna explain why, the first reason is because if you didn't know we have an extra experimental branch maybe I should preface this as well we have a we have a early access branch and we have the experimental branch right the experimental branch is for us to to it's like a public test beta branch kind of where we put out stuff that, we want to test in the wild and like we think it's stable enough to put out there but we need some feedback and this is both in terms of like bugs and issues but also feedback on the game and like opinions you guys have on like recipes or you know quality of life features that are in the game, so the experimental branch serves a very important purpose for us in in terms of that it really helps us make the game as stable as it can be and as enjoyable as it can be for the people that you know want to wait until it's it's on the stable branch of the of the game of the yeah so when the first update that we did on experimental since the divergence sort of between the two is the engine upgrade which is we've upgraded the version of unreal engine that we're using from four I think we operate from 422 to 425., and that is a quite significant change because that means that a lot of stuff changed in like the engine so the rendering pipeline I believe changed a lot and a lot of stuff with the replication stuff with the networking and such, and a bunch of other things with with the game, and the reason why we did that is because it gives us a little bit more tools it gives us the latest version of a real engine well it was at the time then they upgraded again so now it's 426 we don't have that yet but yeah so it gives us a lot of tools it also improved a lot of issues in the engine that will improve it for for satisfactory we are kind of lucky in the sense that a lot of, things that epic have put into fortnite has helped satisfactory a lot because they kind of need similar things so like the networking solution they made for fortnite is really good for satisfactory, so there's just a bunch of kind of technical things, that doesn't necessarily translate into like new features for you guys but it translates to new features for us so it's really good for us to upgrade the game to the latest engine version but that introduces issues because we've modified the unreal engine, a little bit to suit our needs kind of and that means that we need to like kind of merge those changes and fix those conflicts with the underlying code for it so that takes a long time but also it can introduce very weird bugs that haven't existed yet and that's exactly what happened and that's exactly why I put it in an experimental branch because then we can kind of catch these issues and fix them as we're going and we were hoping to get like a stable enough version from the engine upgrade before we started rolling out the next couple of updates but we didn't feel like it was good enough to put on early access so we kind of, hey jace is in chat hey jase, go back to vacation what are you doing you're not supposed to be here go away no I'm just kidding I love you man, what was I talking about yeah so so we we didn't get it stable enough until we started rolling out update four on experimental so, if you remember we didn't put the engine upgrade on early access before we put update four on experimental a little bit unfortunate but it'd be like you do so we've been working so we put, update 4 on early act on experimental breadth this is confusing, and then we've been working on that up until today, one thing that also made it into in