An Update: Beta, October 29th, 2013

Hey all,

We know it's been a bit quiet on the forums of late, and that mostly stems from the fact that we are all heads down, working hard, making the game bigger, better, faster.

We're currently working on getting a build ready to send out to you all this week sometime that should fix a number of the currently known stability issues, along with a host of other changes. There's still a lot more coming.

A lot of the changes are on the back end, though hopefully will be noticeable to a lot of you. We've been working hard to optimize network utilization, client performance, client and server stability, and of course we are continuing to implement new features and iterate on existing ones.

We know it's been a bit since the last build, and it's why we try and make sure everyone understands when we state that it's not "a build every week". Often times that will be the case, sometimes, it'll be even faster. Quite often, especially as we move to launch and beyond, it may actually be slower as we work on bigger things that need more time to make ready for the masses.

We've also grown the team with a few extra people in recent weeks. Two new engineers working on engine features and a contract artist who is working on commanders.

This means we haven't necessarily been communicating as much on here as we would like. We're still reading, and responding when we can, and will of course continue to post as frequently as possible, but as I'm sure you all appreciate, we'd rather stay focused on finishing the game. If you have questions, or need clarifications on where we're at as of today, please post in this thread. There's been a ton of activity of late, so I wanted a single thread to field questions.

Cheers!
Marc

Gas Giants what about them?

[I'm playing devils advocate so don't take the question too seriously]

Wait, is this what neutrino was mentioning about the new UI overhaul?

Gas giants are still coming. There is a little engineering work to support them, but mostly it's visuals/content. The biggest chunk of work is probably new sliders in the planet editor to support the look and feel of them, which is a different set of variables than that of regular planets you can land on, rather than just orbit.

Maybe not just yet. I wouldn't expect more than stability updates etc in this patch.

Since they will likely be made bigger in systems I presume you guys have thought of ways to keep their resource consumption down. [Not a question , more of a statement]

Thanks for the reply.

I hope I can actually notice the stability. (I'm used to reading update feeds and the wiki version history. If you guys have one please tell me. I know on the planetary annihilation news feed they usually have them but it also has a lot of other things in it also. Does anyone know if they have a nice, organized version history page somewhere?)

Everything, including UI, is pretty iterative. Keep in mind, nothing is truly ever done, but simply gets to the point where we're happy with it for now. That doesn't mean it won't see additional iteration. UI is one that we know for a fact needs quite a bit of iteration, polish, and still has some missing features. There's been some great threads about UI in particular, and we've been following them pretty closely.

More detailed than this? https://forums.uberent.com/threads/build-tracking-thread-updated-when-it-is.51585/

Great. Wait, why did the word "Culverin" just pop into my head?

Yep. Right here - https://forums.uberent.com/threads/build-tracking-thread-updated-when-it-is.51585/unread

Oops. I was ninja'd

Garat, do I have high network latency or are you a ninja? This concerns me because my alerts popped up 10 seconds after that post?

Do you have like 20 fingers?

Garat, ty for the information we need it time to times.
Dont worry we dont mind the silence, we dont worry that no new patches with new stuffs.
We just want that you guys work in the best way possible, and also that uber also can have some fun with all the hard work.

Yon guys can stay without give us ower toys for 1 month ,and at the and iff the game is like we want,or like you guys thought on begin, its moore then enouth ,just keep eyes on us and in ower thoughts.
In some things we might be right too.

And iff we some times are desapointed by some things,its because we belive in this game.
Honastly i never saw a community being so active in a beta game.....
That means something.

The amont off new posts,day after day its really awsome.

Keep the good work.

Hi Garat, the game is in beta, and it's working mostly well (for the core) on Windows platform. On Linux, and Mac, this is currently a beta "alpha" game that crash randomly.
I know it's complicated to provide the same level of quality for all the platforms, when a new build is released, at the this moment of beta state.

Do you think you(r team) will be able to provide us soon, for the non-windows guys, a build that will permit us to post on the bug tracker, issues that are not related to crash or freeze, to improve the gameplay/UI or other things ?
Are you working on the gap of stability between Win and Nux ?

Deuf -

For mac, we'll be encouraging everyone to update the free 10.9 Mavericks version of OS/X. The primary reason being is that it brings more robust OpenGL 4.x support to the Mac OS. Anyone who runs 10.7 should be able to run 10.9, and since it's free, it will allow us to support some things that 2.x doesn't provide us access to.

Linux is trickier, as there are so many variants and drivers out there, but we're continuing to do what we can to provide a stable, fun experience that has been tested on at least a few of the major distros out there. But both OS/X and Linux are known that we need to spend more time on it, and we're currently trying to get more hardware throughout the office so more people can do periodic checks on Mac and Linux.

I'm really curious how much more the optimisations allow you to do once the game is released. Currently you need a pretty beefy PC to actually use the system editor or play on systems that contain more than 3 or 4 planets.

thanks for all the hard work ^_^ cant wait for the new build. I do have one question. Will the game be ready by December? Seems like there is still a lot of work to be done and release is approaching so was wondering...
Alfred

lol nvm my question has just been answered. thanks for the great game!

From my point of view game is much more stable on Linux than everywhere else. I'm never have multiple Coherent crashes, never have any texture-related problems or freezes. Also on Linux PA don't have such big UI bottleneck like all Windows users seen.

There is some problems with hotkeys happen sometimes, but it's nothing compared to problems some Mac or Windows users have. We on Linux at least able to understand why game crash while on Windows multiple people have crash on start and it's totally impossible to understand why it's happen.

There is known incompatibility with AMD proprietary drivers and Nvidia optimus, but those is not on Uber side (both problems of drivers) so I don't think they can fix them. This is sad, but devs can't improve poor quality of proprietary drivers.

So when will we get alliance team games instead of team armies? - edwood keeps pinching my ACU and fabbers as well as crashing my ecco.