what do the depots mean? can you give me an explanation like I'm a 5yr old? lol. I'm interested on what goes on behind the scenes and would like to kinda know what I'm looking at
I should have said builds rather than depots, but in any case -- on that steamdb page under branches, there are *a ton* of different items with different Build ID's. You can think of each of those as "versions" of the game that have been created and uploaded to steam, although not necessarily publicly.
A little down from the top you can see the "public" build; that's the build that anyone would download right now from Steam if they installed the game today. Build ID's are issued sequentially by steam (I think -- please someone correct me if I'm wrong) when items are uploaded, so any of those builds listed with a higher number (or more easily to identify, newer date) are "newer" versions of the game.
Important to note here though that just because the build is "newer" doesn't mean it's better, or public. Each build gets an ID so that when they pass it to their QA folks for testing, or to Paradox devs for review, or ____ (insert use case here), they all know they're talking about the same "version" of the game when they give feedback. You can see an example of this in the list, where the "public" build has the same build ID as "pdx_test" and "modding_incoming". Of course, we don't know exactly what those names correspond to because they're not publicly available, but I'd hazard to guess that "pdx_test" is the name given to builds that are sent off to Paradox for testing, and maybe the modding one is given to select modders in advance to do a bit of troubleshooting before the build goes public.
Since "public" is listed higher in the list, we know it was released more recently than those two.
However, we also know that all of the builds above "public" have been uploaded to steam for whatever purpose
even more recently, which is a good indicator that (even if not necessarily soon), the Colossal Order devs have the game in some kind of modified state that they're sending out to others for various reasons.
co_test is probably their in-house version, and qloc_main is (I'm guessing) a version that they share with their QA and Localization people. I do see that their "development" and "staging" builds have newer build ID's but are "older" / updated longer ago, which I assume means that the "development" and "staging" builds are the "actively being worked on" builds. I feel good assuming this because even if they do have a build that's getting QC'ed presently, they'd still be plugging away at updating the game. The "last updated" time for "development" will probably update at the end of the week or so different as devs merge all of their work, but again -- I don't know for sure.
Here's hoping that this is a 5-year-old friendly explanation! I work with devs (not CO), but I am not myself a dev, so I'm only familiar with all this in passing.
