As mentioned a few days ago, I wanted to follow up with development goals and progress for Q2 of 2015. We're just over 3 months into 2015, and during the course of implementation so far, many adjustments have been made to our targets. The first, obvious thing is that the list has expanded significantly. There are a lot of components necessary to release ground combat and it seems that a lot of systems that almost work currently will need significant improvement to provide for a fair global release of the feature. Chief among these is vision. The entire updated flowchart is shown below.

However, there are also many non-feature things that must be done, and the priority of several of these projects will increase. There are many bugs affecting inventory, for example, so Inventory X will be accelerated. We always try to at least keep up with bugs introduced by new features, but several other existing bugs (largely related to squads) unnecessarily complicate or make impossible important in game tasks. For Q2, we will try to wrap up a few more minor things related to combat (in particular, ionization, which I hope to announce in the next sync, as well as buffs and debuffs), but the primary focus will switch from features to (1) UI improvements and fixes, updating or replacing our most dysfunctional interfaces and (2) bug fixes tackling the most difficult issues that we have ignored for a while. There were two significant features released at the end of Q1, and it would be prudent to focus on cleaning up the results here before begining on another large change.

That said, we do expect to roll out new game content, although it will mostly take advantage of current features. The primary vehicle for this will be the in-game scripting language, and a lot of the work will be done by the NPC team to release in game quests and enhance the depth of the world within SWC. By slicing this off from the dev team's responsibility, we're able to involve more people in the process, resulting in better use of our volunteers' time.