I never get where this they finish mid December and don't back till February comes from. It is insane. They work the normal hours certainly in UK and LA at least. And for the other years they have often done hotfix patches over the xmas break. It is asinine viewpoint.
@jonneymendoza not sure when you last looked at the roadmap but they already work in feature teams and have done for years, including locations. In fact if you go to teams and locations all those elements noted such as acidic caves, asteroid facilities etc are made up of multiple devs from different requirements. They have spoken about this in previous SCL and ISC as well when they published the updated progress tracker and stated it isn't showing all the feature team but just the owner currently.
They do not have devs that are bouncing between features like you are saying
(EDIT: with any upstream and almost all downstream) with lighting as example, they have imbedded members for that for ships because there are enough ships in various stages in the pipeline for them to be on those tasks till complete,
(EDIT: however they have downstream lighting devs whom do move from feature to feature more, however this is generally still aimed at completing something such as asteroid facilities or the caves but they may bounce between them, see explanation below). Again this has been discussed on SCL where team members have discussed being imbedded with team X or Y. That isn't to say a dev will remain there forever, they may move teams as features are complete. They are assigned tasks and work with a team directly. There are some that are downstream to that process and sound is one of them. These downstream teams still work on a directive and a goal such as say sounds at acidic caves or sounds at asteroid facilities but they are one centralised team due to the nature of the work. Imbedding them directly makes no sense when downstream because you are waiting on significant elements first. If you left a sound person imbedded they would be waiting 3 months for art, tech, AI, etc all to be finished.
There are teams that are more general like the planetary team (about 20 of them) where they are building planets and assets and tech to do so but then require other teams for their content to be created to go on top, mission systems, lighting, sound because you need the foundation built first before they can work on those locations so there is no good having someone assigned until the asset is at a certain level of completion for them to even start their work.
So yes there is lighting team on ships, Pyro POI, planets etc. They are still assigned to each of those tasks as a devs rather than say a working week, day 1 I do ships, day 2 I do Pyro POI etc. They are blocked out and thus in a feature team for that quarter or two etc as needed. They may be assigned X number of tasks for things like Pyro POI and then come off that feature till they can do their next batch of tasks because they are as noted downstream and waiting on other teams to do their work, so they are assigned for a week or two weeks or whatever with other tasks, otherwise what are you paying them to do whilst they wait?
It quite parallel to my work. I have a large project I am modelling the structure for in London, it is 5 blocks and there is a huge list of tasks that I have up till xmas to get out the preliminary set of design schematics and such, this is my feature that I am on team for then. However I am awaiting other teams, Architect, M&E, Civils etc to complete their tasks. In the week that I am awaiting this info I am assigned other tasks to complete for a smaller feature that can slot into those gaps of my larger feature. Sometimes those overrun, sometimes they finish early, sometimes priorities change etc. But when we receive updates from the other teams on the major/primary feature assigned then my workflow moves back across. This is very much the majority of downstream developers such as sound and lighting compared to upstream that build out core assets. For instance on a project generally the Architect is the upstream developer then and almost everyone else is downstream to an extent although of course at different parts of the development process we become upstream also where there is a back and forth between teams. Audio and Lighting generally never become upstream in the same way.
Edit: Clarified elements above a little
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