We understand the frustration with the much longer delay in getting this feature out than originally planned, and we absolutely share that frustration. As a very small team, we are always juggling many projects with differing priorities, and the priority level placed on any one project is dictated by many factors out of our direct control.

That being said, let's talk a little bit about where we are now!

We previously shared how we were retooling our approach to release management, because much of the delay around Sinespace Worlds is attributable to a feature-focused release strategy. This meant that Feature A came before Feature B, period, and Feature B just had to wait until Feature A was released before it got its turn. This simplified our release management, and simplicity helps with a small team by minimizing branch management overhead on the codebase. The downside of that strategy is... Sinespace Worlds was #3 in the release gate at the start of the year, and #1 (released a couple months ago) took a lot longer than we expected.

Release #2 just went out this week, and it is enormous! It may not feel that way up front, because there's no big single headline feature in #2. #2 is what we call the 'bucket release', it's actually catching up on over 500 bug fixes, tweaks, smaller feature requests (including new Lua APIs!), and underlying infrastructure changes necessary for upcoming features (including Worlds! You might notice changes on Curator, for example). This is stuff that has been piling up, and we needed to clear it. Unfortunately when it comes to testing, quantity can be very time consuming, as every individual bug fix needs to be validated for release at multiple levels.

So what does that mean? It means we're caught up, basically! The big huge blocking releases are flushed out of the pipeline now. That means we can follow through with the other half of what we have discussed with you previously in Community Hour chats, which is "let's not allow this to happen again." We're switching from a linear feature release strategy to an interval-based release strategy, where each release is defined by whatever happens to be ready at the time we want to do a release, rather than waiting for a specific feature.

This complicates the management a bit from our side, but we feel it is worth it to avoid delays like this going forward. Individual features are still bound to take longer to develop than expected, especially complex features, but we don't want an unfinished feature to block a finished feature from going out in the future.

So this brings me to the "bad" news, please bear with me on this to the end! Sinespace Worlds is not the "next" release. We understand that's not what everyone is hoping to hear, because this sounds like yet another delay. We hear you! The truth is that it is merely a semantic difference due to the aforementioned release strategy change. Uncoupling features from releases!

The "next" release was set to be another large release that included two big features that we previously talked about: a main UI overhaul/cleanup and Sinespace Worlds. Both would have needed to be fully tested before release, meaning that a release with two big features would take twice as long to get through QA. By splitting this big release into two smaller, more focused releases, it means the UI cleanup can go out when it is finished instead of...like before...being stuck waiting for Worlds to also finish going through QA.

These features are both development complete already, but our very small and dedicated QA team can only check off so many tickets at a time. The total time to test and release these features remains the same as it was when they were combined, it just means they can now be released when each individual feature is ready rather than following the old pattern of 'everything has to go together.' 

We're also aware of the recent viral videos about Sinespace and have been keenly watching the reaction both inside and out. We, as always, hope that some of the newly curious decide to stay and build here, and we always strive to make ourselves available for questions and concerns about the past, present, and future of Sinespace.