Factorio Release Cycle

[aober93]

I would rather not release an alpha state of whatever is being developed. If you were a dev you would know that.

[Stevetrov]

I would rather not release an alpha state of whatever is being developed. If you were a dev you would know that.

I never suggested that they should release features that aren't finished. Rather that they should release features more regularly when they are ready.

From a dev point of view, if they release something next month that the developer finished working on 3 months ago, it's going to be a lot harder for that developer to fix any bugs that maybe found by the community.

As someone else pointed out, moddersmneed to be considered, as too many changed to the moding interface can be problematic.

[ssilk]

I think one important point is the modding.

Being a little modder myself I would say, the current state since 2 month is like so:
Modder: "I would like to make big changes on my mod, but it makes not so much sense, cause in 0.15 some of that functionality is in the API and I would need to remove it then. So I wait better (and improve stability of my mod.)"
Devs: "We would like to release more often, but every new feature brings in new API changes, that breaks mods, so let's make better some big brakes instead of many small."

And some experience/thought from a software developer being myself: we had in a project some time where we released 3-4 times a week. But the really odd bugs - those that where seldom and not reproduceable or happened only in production environment - had been found, when there was a time where we didn't release for a month (there where some reasons for that). Cause the stability of the system gave the users the knowledge, that this must be now a "real bug". And us the insight, that there must be really something wrong, cause we didn't change anything.