Internal Alpha vs Our Alpha
FuzionMonkey
Join Date: 2005-05-04 Member: 50889Members
Join Date: 2005-05-04 Member: 50889Members
When we paid for alpha access, I was sort of expecting the raw, unpolished alpha builds that you guys see internally. I understand that doing a release through Steam is very time consuming, so why not just allow us to download builds off SVN/Git or whatever revision control system you guys are using.
Anybody who paid for the alpha should not have expected it to be playable, but at least I thought we would be able to test and fool around with things.
Maybe you guys don't want a flood of bug reports and complaints, but I don't really think thats enough of a reason of why we can't just play "The Real" alpha.
I'm sure you guys put a lot of effort into keeping us updated, but you really wouldn't need to do that so much if you merely let us access the internal alpha builds. Just look at what NS2HD is doing, he's practically doing all the media exposition stuff for you.
If its so much effort to do a release on Steam, why bother at all? Just save that for the beta when things will be more stable and the game will reach a wider audience.
Anybody who paid for the alpha should not have expected it to be playable, but at least I thought we would be able to test and fool around with things.
Maybe you guys don't want a flood of bug reports and complaints, but I don't really think thats enough of a reason of why we can't just play "The Real" alpha.
I'm sure you guys put a lot of effort into keeping us updated, but you really wouldn't need to do that so much if you merely let us access the internal alpha builds. Just look at what NS2HD is doing, he's practically doing all the media exposition stuff for you.
If its so much effort to do a release on Steam, why bother at all? Just save that for the beta when things will be more stable and the game will reach a wider audience.
Comments
UWE won't release raw internal builds, because the alpha is basically public. They might be afraid to scare off potential customers otherwise.
I don't know how much time goes into a Steam release, but it can't be too much. If I recall right, the last update was playable just a couple hours after they announced the upload on the Twitter feed.
Plus, I don't think SVN/Git is suited for distribution to a wider (non-programmer) audience. Most NS2 players probably don't even know what that is.
UWE won't release raw internal builds, because the alpha is basically public. They might be afraid to scare off potential customers otherwise.
I don't know how much time goes into a Steam release, but it can't be too much. If I recall right, the last update was playable just a couple hours after they announced the upload on the Twitter feed.
Plus, I don't think SVN/Git is suited for distribution to a wider (non-programmer) audience. Most NS2 players probably don't even know what that is.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Lol a steam release doesn't consist of just uploading. They have to build a release for steam. Uploading it is the easy part. Now I don't know how much actually goes into that but I can assure you it is more than just pressing the upload button.
I would like to see more testing going on as well. I didn't expect the alpha to be very playable anyways but I can completely understand why they would want to get it playable first before the next patch. They can get bad publicity from all the people who wanted it playable and are complaining. And yeah of course testability will ramp up if its playable. I don't mind the wait since there is still going to be a ton of bug hunting and testing. Getting it playable is only the start.
UWE won't release raw internal builds, because the alpha is basically public. They might be afraid to scare off potential customers otherwise.
I don't know how much time goes into a Steam release, but it can't be too much. If I recall right, the last update was playable just a couple hours after they announced the upload on the Twitter feed.
Plus, I don't think SVN/Git is suited for distribution to a wider (non-programmer) audience. Most NS2 players probably don't even know what that is.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I know SVN isn't suited for a wide audience. That is why its an alpha. Its not supposed to be polished and its not supposed to be fun to play. If anything it will just keep people who expect it to be a full game from being involved.
The combined result of too many people whining about the alpha playability, and the fact that releasing on steam is an ordeal in and of itself, is that we don't really get to see progress.
The alpha is restricted to people who bought the SE.
By releasing the alpha through steam you are pretty much guaranteeing that only those who pre-ordered the SE can play the alpha.
If you would not release through steam you would have to either build your own authentication service or rely on database authentication to restrict access to the alpha. This however would only restrict them on a file level. With steam in place you are guaranteeing that there is only 1 person per alpha key online. And seeing that most people do not share their steam account info easily with strangers its even better. Sure I might let my brother play on my account, but I will certainly not give some random dude my NS2 key because it might result not only in my loosing NS2 but my whole steam account.
The drawback is that you have to create special builds for every release and that those build have to be signed off by valve.
<!--quoteo(post=1802108:date=Oct 20 2010, 12:39 PM:name=Tacota)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Tacota @ Oct 20 2010, 12:39 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1802108"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Lol a steam release doesn't consist of just uploading. They have to build a release for steam.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Building is part of any release, with or without Steam.
<!--quoteo(post=1802122:date=Oct 20 2010, 03:25 PM:name=FuzionMonkey)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (FuzionMonkey @ Oct 20 2010, 03:25 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1802122"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I know SVN isn't suited for a wide audience. That is why its an alpha. Its not supposed to be polished and its not supposed to be fun to play. If anything it will just keep people who expect it to be a full game from being involved.
The combined result of too many people whining about the alpha playability, and the fact that releasing on steam is an ordeal in and of itself, is that we don't really get to see progress.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Don't forget that we are not regular alpha testers. We paid for alpha access and many people just want to play around a bit. Excluding people is not what UWE wants.
Check Cory's post around here. The reason we don't see progress is, that they don't want to release a new version before the lag and fps issues are fixed to some extent.
And to further add to this point... /thread
Aye problem solved if they don't bother to hide such unfinished features :P
And to further add to this point... /thread<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
But we were told that we'd be getting a patch every week. Yeah, people probably won't be satisfied with that, but at least we'd be getting what we were promised.
UW is waiting for that magic patch to be ready that will fix everything and satisfy everyone, but that's never going to happen. It's an alpha, there will always be another major issue on the horizon that needs to be sorted out. First it was latency, now it's framerate, and when that's fixed people will find something else to complain about. Personally I think it was a bad idea to release an alpha at all, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so you might as well give the people what you promised them.
UW is waiting for that magic patch to be ready that will fix everything and satisfy everyone, but that's never going to happen. It's an alpha, there will always be another major issue on the horizon that needs to be sorted out. First it was latency, now it's framerate, and when that's fixed people will find something else to complain about. Personally I think it was a bad idea to release an alpha at all, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, so you might as well give the people what you promised them.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I wasn't aware they promised weekly updates to the alpha.
Maybe they just want to get more of the game assets out there more than anything else atm. You could spend months getting everything perfect with what you have. But then you realize you have to add the rest someday.
Of course, its just the way you worded it. Sounded like you were saying a release takes as long as it takes to upload.
Prehaps its simply easier for the team to work on a debug version of the game (as run from an IDE) than to build a release version each time they playtest internally ( a version that runs off its own EXE ).
sounds like mehomgbbq to me
qftmft
<ul><li> Our internal builds are full of things that we're not ready to show to the public yet: unfinished maps, art assets, unoptimised code, as well as experimental features that we haven't decided whether or not to include.</li><li> Even though it's an alpha, some quality control is necessary when you're dealing with a large number of paying customers. You can't expect the majority of them to understand quite how much things change over the course of game development.</li><li> The development build is updated quite often - sometimes several times a day. Getting that out to 15,000-odd people would be a technical nightmare; it would be hard for players to keep track of changes and hard for us to follow their feedback. It'd be a pretty messy situation.</li><li> Giving that number of people access to our version control system would be taking things way too far. We want to give people a clear look at our development process but we also need space in which to actually develop. In fact, with the way we have things set up, I don't think there's a way we could give that to people without giving them at least some way of tampering with the build. We don't want that.</li></ul>
I realise waiting for this next patch can be frustrating, but I don't think things would be improved (for us or for the players) by giving access to dev builds. Given that we're holding up the next patch to make the game playable for everyone, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot by giving them access to raw, untested development builds of the game. We wanted to update the game more frequently, and we hope to go back to that after this next big patch is released.
Glad to see that we might be seeing something soon, I've been looking now and then over the past couple of months... When people were saying that alpha/beta/RC test phase was only going to be 2-3 months, I just laughed.
I'm being patient and theres plenty else to do, I'd almost be happy to simply wait for the final build. I don't want to wait that long though.
I would have no problem with this, provided I could filter the servers listed to only show the release that I am using.
That said, if you thought it was absolutely necessary that certain features be stripped out, I'd hope that you could set up a list of files to be automatically left out when the weekly build is made. It gets a bit trickier when you have experimental features in code, but there are ways of automatically stripping out code (based on e.g. "EXPERIMENTAL" tags) that are fairly straight forward.
I would have no problem with this, provided I could filter the servers listed to only show the release that I am using.
That said, if you thought it was absolutely necessary that certain features be stripped out, I'd hope that you could set up a list of files to be automatically left out when the weekly build is made. It gets a bit trickier when you have experimental features in code, but there are ways of automatically stripping out code (based on e.g. "EXPERIMENTAL" tags) that are fairly straight forward.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Thank god we have a technical expert here to tell us how to get the alpha builds working. Keep up the good work man!
It means the other whiny masses that are 10x as large don't have more to gripe about.
Well I can honestly tell you I won't be paying 20 dollars for access to an alpha build again. I don't really see how I am getting a return on that investment. I played TFC way more then I played the original NS. So... what enjoyment am I getting for extra bucks that I am spending?
What enjoyment are you getting for the extra money? None! So deal with it. You have alpha access, not a magic pass to happy fun fun joy land. The game will be fun when it comes out, and maybe in the later stages of beta when it's more balanced. Alpha is a time when everything is broken except the stuff that's missing, and the best thing that can happen is that it doesn't damage your computer at all.
You paid for the Collector's Edition. Unless I'm wrong, no other game has ever released an alpha with their collector's edition. You got early access (which you are whining about because you don't like how the game plays in this early state that you paid for), you got beta access, you got black armor, and you got to support to NS2 developers. If you were under the mistaken impression that you were also going to get a bunch of fun stuff to do before there's a game to play, well, sorry. If alpha testing were fun then the game would be done and they'd just release it instead of doing more alpha testing.
You paid for the Collector's Edition. Unless I'm wrong, no other game has ever released an alpha with their collector's edition. You got early access (which you are whining about because you don't like how the game plays in this early state that you paid for), you got beta access, you got black armor, and you got to support to NS2 developers. If you were under the mistaken impression that you were also going to get a bunch of fun stuff to do before there's a game to play, well, sorry. If alpha testing were fun then the game would be done and they'd just release it instead of doing more alpha testing.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Can I have a ticket to happy fun fun joy land then TC?