What in the world is going on with "Experimental" status?

[spacefiddle]

I know y'all are incredibly busy with K2, and that's important to me too , but... the long silence and lack of info leaves me no other option but to come out and ask: what the hey?

Current "Experimental" has been so for bloody ages. And since then I hear all kinds of conflicting info about reverting back to the Stable branch - it will break everything, it'll be fine, mods will be trashed forever, nuclear war will be instigated. I don't know who or what to believe. I do know I have mods that need updating and users who've been very patient with me, for which I am grateful; but I don't know the best way to update them.

I have no idea why "Experimental" has been languishing for so long in its current state. I know what small teams are like. I work freelance. I also know that no matter what else is going on, communication is vital. In pretty much everything.

Can I revert to stable, and upgrade my mods, and not break users' games?
Will "Experimental" graduate to Stable before K2 launches? What could the reason for not declaring it OK after all this time be...?
Is it safe to advise users to move to Experimental, keep the mods updated on that branch, and not endanger anyone's savegame? (You know, no more than the disclaimer on the tin says to, of course).

I've been waiting for literally years now to see where this goes, and I don't feel right about making people wait any longer. I don't have the most users in the world, but that shouldn't really be what's important.

[Shidan]

I'm not really sure what you've been waiting "years" for, the last time experimental was pushed to stable was December last year, and there have been very few updates since then, none of which really affect the game since they were purely FCS and localization updates.

Can I revert to stable, and upgrade my mods, and not break users' games?

Yes, this one is always doable. If your version is the current stable version, any mods you make or update will work fine on that version, and almost certainly any version higher than it as well at this point (when the game was getting major content updates that would not have been true always, but it's extremely unlikely for any update to break a mod at this point).


Mods you make on the current experimental version (1.0.59) should also be compatible with 1.0.55 as well though. The FCS updates since that version were just tools to make managing the data easier, not anything that actually changes how the data is saved or used, so the stable version works fine with mods made in the current experimental version.


Any issues with making experimental versions mods that were breaking on stable versions were fixed back in December when the old experimental version was pushed to stable. Posts you have found referring to these issues were from those updates, and are no longer relevant. They had to do with a very specific change to how the data structuring for mods was working, and a bug that was accidentally introduced that stable had not yet received a fix for.

[spacefiddle]

Ok, thank you. The lack of clear communication was frustrating. In its absence, I have been getting info from a number of sources who, let's say it nicely as possible, are very sure of themselves and can sound quite convincing as well as insinuate that they have direct comms with the devs, which may not be quite as true as they represent and let's leave it at that.

Thank you for the fast and complete clarification.

[Hatsune_Neko]

very few have direct contact with the Devs
If the information doesnt come directly from them, or me and Shidan, I wouldn't trust the source.
Even then, me and Shidan are not part of the information loop in most cases.

But yes, the lack of communication has been brought up with them for years, so don't feel bad, we been dealing with it for a very long time as well.