will it be feature complete? will the ai work? are all the planet types in? orbital systems? stretch goals? i ask because normally a beta is a bug squashing phase, but its not always the case, i don't really follow the forums and alpha news and was curious what sort of state i should expect the game to be in in the next couple days when it releases for beta?
I'm presuming you're asking about the start of beta. It will be mostly feature complete, with a whole lot of polishing to be done. AI will be present but not finished. Judging by progress it might be building land units now. Only the gas planet hasn't been added yet. Maybe it will be ready for or just after beta. A fair bit more of the orbital content will be added. Galactic War and Orchestral score will probably be added mid-late beta.
Main features probably, with a few 'secondary' features yet to be added Not fully. This is being worked on. Not yet, but might be in the beta release considering the crunching over the last few weeks Almost certainly. Lots of tweaks though, I'd imagine. Not all. Galactic War, for example. And the full orchestral soundtrack. EDIT: Sorry, I didn't see you'd already posted, Zaphod.
Maybe you should list what you EXPECT as well, because half the time things can mean 2 different things to 2 different people. But something perticular I want to touch on; The End of a Beta is usually where bug squashing is the MAIN focus, and given that prior to Kickstarter and such Most "Beta's" what were available(like BF3's) were nothing more than the final Beta build release to teh public as a Demo but really just called a 'Beta'. The thing is for big games Beta is a really huge phase and can take months and months to work through for some games so when you get these short 2 week 'publicity' Betas it's skewed and not representative of the whole process. Like saying that PA will be, for the most part, Feature Complete isn't completely accurate, rather all/most of the Core Features important to gameplay will have been implemented in some form, but it doesn't mean it might not change between now and release(or Post-release) but at the same time there are a lot of smaller features that I like to call 'Quality of life' Features, things like area commands, most lobby stuff ect ect that will come throughout the course of the Beta. Mike
Alpha = Feature implementation, Beta = Bug fixing and polishing. Battlefield use beta`s for balancing and server stability tweaks. Mostly all companies will use the terms alpha and beta for their own use anyway.
I'm assuming you mean 'offline' play here because we already have the option of playing against an incomplete AI with no other human payers? Mike
well according to their own concept art, we're no where near all the planet biomes yet, we're still missing at around 5 to their own concept shots here : http://planetaryannihilation.tumblr.com/image/47197159855
Not really, there's 2 types of tropical in there and the gas planet but the rest are earth biomes - mountains, desert, ice.
I was gonna mention that there is a difference between Biomes and Planet Types. It's not a clear distinction mind you, it will still be possible to have a planet that is 1005 Ice Biome, but on other "near-earth" planets you might only have Ice Biomes near the poles. Mike
well, is it possible to get a confirmation on whether or not they will be planets of their own? I know the montains I can barely get on the earth biome as it is, and I think ZaphodX might be getting confused about the desert biomes on earth planets as well, its sand biome, there is no desert biomes on any of the current planet times, or that I've been able to get anyway.
tried that, doesn't give me any deserts... though I did get mountains on a tropical though finally...
