"By my read..."
I don't think you really read it or understand development if you did.
He says they're doing some play testing while waiting for assets before work can resume. That doesn't mean that anything is complete.
Even if it did mean what it doesn't mean, feature complete is FAR from release complete. We have a good long wait to go if Alex keeps doing things right. I hope he does, and I don't think there's any indication that he's going to veer toward sloppy. I do worry that alpha access was granted far too early, and that giving these alpha builds the kind of spit shine that allows this kind of extremely early and frequent release structure may be bogging the process down. In fact, I really don't see how it couldn't have a huge impact on development time especially for a one man studio. I'm also concerned that the community might burn out before the game is even released! I mean, it's looking like probably another 8 months to a year for the full design scope discussed--at least.
I don't mind the wait because I avoid doing much more than tinkering about with new releases.
Gee, thanks for being an insulting ass while you're at it. I especially like the way you belittled my reading comprehension.
In any case I went over his message again, just to see if I had made some error in my assessment. Now, to be fair, there are limits to my knowledge and this shapes the conclusions I can make, and more importantly the inferences I'm likely to draw,
but my assessment has not changed. If Alex's word choice was quite deliberate, and given the content of the past few pages there is no reason to believe otherwise, then at the very least 0.6
is feature complete. Hell, how else are we supposed to interpret
this?
"So what happens is before a
release there's a period where I've stopped adding features, and switch to playtesting while waiting on some assets (which, incidentally, is the phase 0.6a is in
now.)" (Emphasis Mine)
This sentence is
explicitly descriptive of Starsectors current state. 0.6
IS Ceti Alpha Fi-- uh... feature complete. Yeah, that's what I meant. Moreover, this is not the only indication of this in that post.
Consider for a moment how he put it in the prior paragraph: "First of all, 0.6a hasn't been in a releasable state - even as an "unstable build" - until very recently, just because some critical UI elements weren't in place." Now obviously this is indicating that things aren't stable
yet, however it is a very odd way of putting it if, as you assert, these features are not sufficient for a release candidate. There are certainly other wordings he could have used to indicate the completion of a critical element of the code base, but which would not raise hopes unduly, if it were not. And yet... well, that's what he typed. It is also quite consistent with his prior messages for the several pages, best summed up by this one liner:
It's pretty soon, guys 
Seriously, he's been bombarding us with messages that the release is near -- probably not in a few days, but probably less than a month -- I'm not sure why you feel the need to be derogatory.
And Alex beat me to the punch, ehehehe.
Guess that means Ah Ween.
E: Alright, maybe I should have held back on the wall o' text. But frankly, after typing out a defense of my reasoning, at length, it kinda felt like waste not to post it.
