NOTE: Only people that have experience with development in teams might know what I’m talking about in this post, if you don’t know anything about development, it might be hard to understand what’s being said here and some of this is also speculations based on things that have been seen within the game’s files, also note that I’m missing some pieces here so don’t take this theory for granted.
Well, to start things off I would like to make a reference to the “version.txt” file which can be found in your Halo Infinite installation’s directory, this file contains a lot of information such as the game’s version and what branch of the game’s source it’s from.
This particular file, at least in the previous versions/seasons told me that the game’s project was named “Olympus”, in this case, the project is the game itself but in a source code management software/service which is very likely to be a fork or a customized version of GitLab and git that 343 industries uses, as I mentioned earlier, the project was previously called “Olympus”, but then with the Winter Update, the project’s name was changed to “Shiva” which meant that the game’s source code was moved somewhere else in 343’s development servers, now let’s get to why this game doesn’t get many updates.
The previous update (I can’t really remember which version it was but I think it was the first season and the 2nd season update that had the same project name or just the version.txt file untouched) had a specific branch name which I think was the same as the project’s name but the winter’s update is different, the project name is “Shiva” and the branch is “HIFLTA”, last version didn’t have that branch but I can’t remember exactly what it was, the thing is, 343 seems to be working on various branches of the game’s source, all of them trying to fix some things in the game and others trying to add things to the game, the reason why this could be a problem is because, as we know, the engine is hard to work with and it’s hard to get content out and it could be even harder with this type of workstyle where people just try to work on their own branches and when the time to push out an update comes, they have to merge all the changes from those branches into the one that’s going to be pushed as an update to both Steam, Xbox, etc.
Merging source code from different branches for a program/game that you’re working on, doesn’t tend to work out the best, specially when there are conflicting changes in the source files, which can lead to some errors in the source which then have to be changed or fixed manually by 343 themselves.
Thanks to that, the updates take longer to get pushed out and sometimes they have to cut down on the changes that were made to the source, which means getting rid of the changes and additions in order to get the source back to a stable state and be able to use it to push an update out to the public.
If you guys have any thoughts on this, I’d like to know, so share them if you’d like.