Vernam7, I think you have distorted view on what a Beta is, the Beta(in particular early beta) is far from perfect, all a game needs to move from Alpha to Beta is having all the main features implemented, Beta is where you flesh out the content(units, balance and quality of life features) and start really pouring into Optimization and bug fixing near the end. Mike
no i don't think i am wrong on what beta is!(i am a software engineer) if we go back and see any major rts title in beta phase (SC, SC2, RedAlert3, Generals, War3 etc), the engine was like 90% done! the game was smooth, and frame rates or cpu loads were not crazy to the sky! in other words the game was very playable! i am not talking about features, units, balancing etc, or that i wish now to be able to run in on "low end systems".No. i clearly said about performance on high end systems, and in current alpha stage closing to beta i haven't seen the engine to the level where we can say "ok, works smooth with Some hiccups here and there from time to time!" on the contrary we have a lot of hiccups and sometimes it works smooth, most of my games at least are not playable neither i can enjoy them! which is worried in this phase. its one think to say that game uses 60% of cpu and at the end we will do the optimization to make it 30% and and other that the game is not even running smoothly most of the time! thats not just an "optimization", but sounds more like "refactoring!" in coding (to me at least) and its not good to happen in this stage! It means that the team will need more time! once again its only a concern out of love to the project, as i (among many) have "invest" in this money, time, and mostly HOPES for been the best RTS out there on some latest streams we heared that the team has hired latly a new engineer from Microsoft DirectX team to work on the engine. i hope he is actually re-factoring most of it and soon we will be able to see some drastic performance changes before we go to beta!
Those are "Publicity Betas", most of the work is already done(as you yourself said 90%) and they do a last Community 'outsourced' push for testing hardware and such, not to mention that 3 of the games listed are done by Blizzard, which are basically exceptions and it's unfair to directly compare them to a small developer like Uber Entertainment. This is something different, As the guys at Uber have said on many occasions, we bet builds within hours of them finalizing them in the office, and if you track the progress and performance over the last few months you'll note that there have been improvements in pretty much every build. Then I would say that the love as made you blind to the realities Uber has to deal with. Mike
Vernam, we've been pretty clear that we're using our internal definition of alpha and beta. If you are in software development, while most people may claim there are standards about what each term means, I've never found that to be the case. For us: Alpha means finishing the feature sets - we had a lot done before alpha started, but a lot we wanted to do with the community being actively involved, playing, providing feedback, etc. There is still quite a bit of engine development going on at this stage. Beta is bug fixing, polish, tuning and balancing, but also will still include some amount of feature work/iteration, etc. Less large scale engine work, but LOTS of tuning, adjustments and even as needed, additions. Game dev is all about iteration, this team and game even more so than most I've worked on. And so far, very much for the betterment of the project. While there are lots of polish and optimizations we know are needed, they are simply not the focus right now. Not because they're not important, but because they are premature.
@garat, thanks for your reply, i never said that you haven't done progress since we started together as a community in pre-alpha and alpha the past few months. hell no. you did amazing builds in really short time and you are keep doing great job so far, my only question is based on the "time frame" you made if this is looking good or not! maybe for Uber team the terms of beta and alpha are a bit "flexible" and may not match 100% the I.T standards (if there are any actually), but been able to enjoy a playable game, so that we can focus on other feedback, it's very important, and should not be considered "premature" imho. try to understand a user's feeling and how frustrating really is when he tries to test the new build (for example the nuke), but because the game engine lags so badly in performance he never makes it to that point, (gets bored of chopping FPS), and he has to try again and again to have a good stable and smooth game to the point he wants to test the new feature - unit. i hope you understand what i am trying to explain here.I feel We are still struggling with issues that should be probably have more priority than they do, get fixed, or improved or tuned or whatever, so that we can focus more on other aspects of the game. (how can i test naval units when i can't play with 15fps for example sometimes?!) but on the other hand i am thinking this is normal because as @knight said, "we are making the game With the the team together", i totally understand and respect that, but because i am used to the most standard terms of "beta" and "alpha" in my job at least, i was just worried for a bit there. i understand you still have to make all the basic big features first, even if they are unplayable, like orbital units, planets, skins, pathfinding, galactic war, etc etc, very important milestones and you are focusing atm on those. so..If you are saying guys everything is under control then there is no need for me to say otherwise. thanks again for your reply and for the time explaining us a bit more on what is going on behind the scenes at the moment and what the team considers "alpha" or "beta" and what are it's developing plans for those phases. really appreciated.
Whoa. That's a new one. I'd say exit out of steam entirely and try again. If not, wait a while. That is not a typical error, but looks like a network communication/authentication error in general, which is unlikely to be originating from our servers.
If restarting steam didn't fix it, make sure the date on your computer is correct. If it's wrong, your computer might think the ssl certificate is expired/invalid.
Bug Report: UI disfunction. Mouse Icon locked on a non pointer icon such as patrol or repair combined with escape and rest of keyboard non functional. Current fix, alt tab, close game, hope that on restart, one is able to rejoin the game. Repro as best I can remember: Build an Antinuke, have the antinuke platform built it's missle while having arial building units assisting the build and somehow select the antinuke platform and I think press patrol. When I get a solid repro, I'll repost. -E.
Hey, Is it only me, or did the last hotfix for the sandy bridge altered the performances of the game? Since that patch, rendering of the planet when entering a game takes time, I can see a few "blocks" drawn one after another (not the whole planet), and overall I feel the game slower. Anybody else feel it? Worth noting that I'm not using the graphical chipset that the hotfix was addressed to (I'm running a gfx 770).
I have had that issue several times since the last patch. The nuke/anti nuke is not in cause, imo, as I've encouter this bug after 1mn in a game once. Today, while "dead", my mouse locked also after some time, but half of the keyboard was okay (Esc, Enter, but nothing related to rendering like arrows).
Flexable, I have found the 'tile by tile' appearance of the new planet seems more common recently, particularly with larger planets.
Hi all, I'm getting a pa.exe error. Crashes the game and when I try to rejoin it does the pa.exe not working runtime error on landing / moving to game. DxDiag posted. Send help! Thx, -JimiSlew
I was able to repro.. I think 1 of the antinukes was being built as I clicked it. Had to restart the game to continue playing. -E.
Bug Report: Unexpected UI graph bars. It was a massive game where I had many satalites queued though I am unsure those were what was causing the artifacts around the sun. See Attached pic:
Wish there was a way for them to throw us an unstable build without poisoning the steam release and public servers.
You got this problem because you have 8GB RAM: Code: Memory: 8192MB RAM But you OS is 32-bit and OS can only use 3GB of 8GB: Code: Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.130708-1532) Available OS Memory: 3326MB RAM And for PA only something like 1.6-2GB available, game crash because it's out of memory. You need upgrade your Windows 7 to 64-bit version immediately, otherwise you can't use even half of RAM you have, it's just unused completely if 32-bit operation system used.
See the last few replies in this thread. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/still-do-not-know-what-im-playing.51349/
