Beta Testers!

[Leman Russ]

Yeah, can't wait for betas! Where is my Beta! Its March
*begins to cry*

Anyway, Can't wait for the Beta!

[kneecaps]

Yeah, can't wait for betas! Where is my Beta! Its March
*begins to cry*

Anyway, Can't wait for the Beta!

Realistically speaking I think its probably a bit too late for a public beta of any scale since the product is due for release in April.

Only leaves at worst, less than a month, or in the best case most of two months to organise a beta.

There woul not seem to be enough time for distributing the product to testers, allowing for some play testing, collatingbug reports and actually fixing bugs and implementing any changes. Before any final release there would need to be another solid test of the release candidate produced after the beta. Seems like too much to get done in the next two months.

Still, it would be great if there is a public beta.

[xander]

Yeah, can't wait for betas! Where is my Beta! Its March
*begins to cry*

Anyway, Can't wait for the Beta! :P

Realistically speaking I think its probably a bit too late for a public beta of any scale since the product is due for release in April.

Only leaves at worst, less than a month, or in the best case most of two months to organise a beta.

There woul not seem to be enough time for distributing the product to testers, allowing for some play testing, collatingbug reports and actually fixing bugs and implementing any changes. Before any final release there would need to be another solid test of the release candidate produced after the beta. Seems like too much to get done in the next two months.

Still, it would be great if there is a public beta.

You must be new here. IV is pretty notorious for not meeting deadlines. Polish and quality are more important than deadlines. Also, given the nature of Defcon (from what we have seen), I wouldn't be suprised if beta testing only took a month or two. If they have been playing it and testing it fairly constantly for the last several months, I am certain that they have most of the show stoppers ironed out. Beta testing would probably consist mainly of tweaking, and hardware compatibilty testing. However, I am just talking out of my ass -- I am sure that we shall all be enlightened at some point.

xander

[Lord_Doskias]

your ass can talk! interesting
IV damn well better have a beta. no game is complete until the betas are complete. and so therefore, my logic dictates that defcon will not be complete until the betas are over, and so we must have a beta!

[Gravitron]

Freeloader natives are getting restless...

[kneecaps]

What development company is not notorious for breaking deadlines?

Well simply rejig what I said. If a public beta were to be distributed tomorrow, that would leave roughly two months to complete a satisfatory period of beta testing and to incorporate any required changes to the code. Who knows how long such code modifications may take since at this point in time its impossible to know what will need changing.

Say best case changes/bugfixes needed from the beta test take a few days to fix. A release candidate will then need some extensive playtesting.

So logically given time constraints I would say, April release, no beta. Later than April release, potentially a beta.

[Babylon5]

Sorted. I've got admin privelages again

Thanks for the help

[SS25_Launcher]

yep

[Phrage]

So many people are gonna join this forum purely to beta test as they think it "r0x0rz!!1" to do so. Is there gonna be any prevention of freeloaders? How did they choose the beta testers for Darwinia?

[Lord_Doskias]

i think IV picked active members of the community with a wide spread of hardware to begin with, and then added more people randomly at every few releases or so
but maybe not, i seem to recall a few people becoming testers who had never posted or only posted once, so we shall see

[Gravitron]

Hmm, I wonder how exactly, if at all, one can update their system specs at the IV DB, assuming there even is one such in existance.

[Rkiver]

There is a link in the Darwinia forums regarding testing of their latest Darwinia Patch, you can update your information in there. Also once the beta is accounced there will be a link about it to submit your data. Long time community members tend to be picked over newbies, at least in general, but that could change this time around.

[kryptic]

I bet they'll use a similar system to Darwinia's beta.

[Darksun]

Long time community members tend to be picked over newbies, at least in general, but that could change this time around.

Well, for Darwinia they picked a largish number of tech testers, and then selected some full game testers based on the people who gave good bug reports and stuff

[Lord_Doskias]

hehe, the introversion database
IVsoft Mainframe, containing 100 gq of user data