ALPHA ROLLOUT STATUS

As everyone knows we are starting a staged alpha rollout soon.

We had been thinking that we would send out a significant number of keys this weekend but we've been making a lot of last minute changes which are destabilizing the build. At this point we feel it would be counter productive to send out keys until the build is more stable. Currently this is looking like early next week.

The rollout itself is going to be prioritized based on backer order and preorder sequence number. Please don't be concerned about where you are in this order because almost all of the alpha keys are going to hit fairly quickly, you won't be waiting long. Everyone who has preordered or backed at an alpha level will get the game before our rollout on Steam.

In some ways I'm absolutely astounded at how quickly we've built what we have so far. I've never seen an RTS game built from scratch come together this quickly. However, there is still an immense amount of work to do before this game is ready for a real commercial release.

So what to expect?

- instability, performance issues, crashes and general bad behavior
- very limited number of game modes and options
- client only, you can only play on our servers
- limited to one planet with air/land/sea with a subset of units working correctly
- essentially hardcoded to a single map at the moment (this will change quickly)
- music is all synth
- very early balance that hasn't been tested much
- not much in the way of cool online features like stat tracking, replays etc.
- bugs galore in everything from pathing, to building stuff, to combat to recon etc.

Once the alpha is rolled out the rest of the project is going to be developed more in the public eye. It's fairly easy for us to push builds at this point so we'll be updating the game a ton during alpha. It probably won't be on set schedule so some days may see multiple updates and other days won't see any.

Remember that it's still early. Feedback on the actual gameplay is not going to be all that useful until the game is more complete. Early on we should be concentrating on bugs related to crashes and other technical issues. Make no mistake, this is not a finished game and normally would not be released at this point in any form. You guys are only getting to play this because you backed it and you own it.

I want to personally thank every person that has supported us. This game would literally not exist without everyone's contributions.

\o/

Edit: btw, don't forget to put a "How to fill a bug report" on the forum, and give us some kind of bugzilla access

I AM SO EXCITED I DON'T EVEN...

You guys are just the best! I can't even express how glad I am that you are making this game happen and letting us be such a great part of the development.

I wish more game devs were like Uber Ent.

Can't be said enough. Looking forward to Alpha.

looking forth to it, just amazing how the development is going on this.

He, I don't mind crashing client if it helps find the cause of the crash

Sounds cool. Never really participated in an alpha like this before, so this will definitely be different than what I have experienced otherwise.

How about the NDA for the Alpha? Will we be not allowed to put stuff up until beta, or do we have the go-ahead starting after the roll-out?

I'm leaving for a month-long trip tomorrow, and missing this is going to be the only downside of it..I'll look forward to catching up to everyone in a month though!

Thank you for the update. This isn't the news a lot of us were hoping for today, but it is good to know.

Don't you worry. I will play your hours for you.

Hopefully, the large, diverse group of alpha 'testers' will help bring the game together quicker and better than a small internal group would.

Agree, we need some place to search/report bugs.

THE WEEKEND CAN'T BE OVER SOON ENOUGH AND IT HASN'T EVEN STARTED.

For those asking about NDA we aren't going to NDA the alpha once we start rolling it out. We didn't feel there was much point in being restrictive with information because information wants to be free.

Well i would Thing a Bugtracker like this: http://feedback.arma3.com/my_view_page.php from Bohemia ist the best way to do it. it should be puplic but only Backer have "Write acces" !

We are working on some bugtracking stuff. Won't be that fancy though.

It is time.

I absolutely love how open and amazing the uber ent. developers are! You guys are awesome and I cant say it enough! Cant wait to help out with testing this game!

*Cracks Neck*
I'm ready.....

I CAN NOT WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love the way uber net is giving backers a big part of game development :!:

One thing I should mention is that the game needs a REALLY fast machine right now to get a good frame rate. We still have a ton of optimization to do (and it's in progress).