I appreciate that this is still a little early (Alpha drop being between 1st and 7th June) However I'd like to get a feel for the sorts of feedback that Uber would like from us during said phase. Appreciably nothing is DONE yet, nor will be during alpha (Hence alpha ) I'm just wondering how we can be most constructive in our feedback. FWIW the demoed versions I've seen in the live streams, whilst "not done", do look awesome.. I've no doubt huge fun awaits Well done all
Try it with a single video card, try it with two ATI cards and Crossfire on/off, try it with two Nvidia cards and SLI on/off. Click in strange places for no reason. Issue orders to units that are strange or make no sense. Try to build things where you can't. Try to clog a factory exit with units. Try to break things basically. And when you find a repeatable way to break the game tell them how to do it so they can do it too and fix it.
I vaguely remember this being discussed already, But where/how exactly are we reporting bugs/issues? I suggest creating another sub forum at the very least. A bug tracker would be nice. Though I can understand the hesitation at that given the mount of testers we are talking about. (Though in reality, not all that many of them would report bugs? Would they?)
The real issue isn't that people wouldn't report bugs. Its that they would not know how to report them in a way that is useful for the developers.
True but that is fairy addressable by using a form of some kind that asks a few questions. eg: What where you doing at the time? How many units where involved? What was the operation you where requesting? What where you expecting to happen? etc etc Also, if the bug is not a crash bug it might be an idea to have a reporting button in game with some text that gives the developers an overview of the state of the game (RAM usage, unit count, back end stats). Clicking the button would transfer said text into your clipboard and you simply paste it into the indicated space on the form. Having said all that, yes you will get some dud bugs that are just not workable. If that's the case, close the bug with something that will tell the user where they went wrong. Unfortunately educating people on how to report bugs is just part of the process.
This is probably why they've made Chrono Cam such a priority this early on. When we play the alpha, we're generating a recording of what exactly is happening in the game. If/when something screws up, they can just take a look at the recording of the game and sort it out themselves. My guess for what they'll need from the alpha people - just play.
Good point, that would make figuring out exactly what went wrong much easier if they are saving the logs. Though simply playing the game would only show them when it crashed, there will still need to be a report button to flag a certain time of gameplay with a notice of what went wrong. maybe the unit fell into a crevice... the lunar lander is stuck circling the moon forever... That kind of stuff would be hard to catch with filtering alone. ChronoCam + integrated bug reporting mated to replay would probably be an good way to do this. Considering the amount of people in the alpha, with the different experience ranges regarding bugs, it might be useful to have a rating system viewable to the devs only. Say it starts at 0, and for good reports increases, for bad reports decreases. It might make it more sortable if there end up being more reports than they can handle easily.
Yeah, because reviewing all of the games played by thousands of players sounds liek a piece of cake.[/sarcasm] Obviously Uber having all of the Replay Files makes things easier, but you still need to fill out a bug report and reproductions steps and all that. Mike
Early on it will be things like "Can you play the game at all or did it flame out?" During alpha expect us to be constantly patching and throwing in new features rapidly. Feedback about gameplay will be next to useless at this phase as we are still in the middle of building so much stuff. In fact that's part of the danger here because there are a variety of ways we could get derailed fixing stuff that's an artifact of how early the game is. There will be a way to report bugs but we'll also be having a lot of forum discussions to get into things in more detail. We also have a system for getting crash dumps from your machines automatically. Overall alpha is mostly about the simple stuff working.
Try to break everything. And break it again, in a different way. Every time you break something, or find that something isn't working as intended; write it the hell down! Work out precisely what you need to say to another person so they can re-create the exact same bug/thing that you found. Think of it like writing instructions on baking a cake; before you chuck your cake in the oven, you need to break a few eggs, and sift some flour. How much chocolate you need to add is important too. When you do this; shoot it towards Uber.
I swear, this is the thing that makes the difference between a good alpha/beta and a terrible one. It just makes everything so much quicker for both devs and players.
Neutrino, Do you have something in place that will check for an issue that happened during last time it was run? I am asking because sometime automatic submitter do not get called if the main program get terminated in a very strange way (I meant that in a good way). Looking forward to crashing and burn (Pun intend).
i hope some people realize that alpha means your not entitled to have it work with your hardware config. could be me for all i know
