Beta Ramblings

As you eagle-eyed chaps may well have noticed, we're aiming to have the mod in a beta state very soon (August 2006). I thought I'd clear up a few things in this dev journal. The beta will not be open. Why? Well, we have a dev team that is 20+ odd strong, and we just need some further gamers to add to this so we can make sure the basics are right, people aren't crashing, we've not made any ridiculous oversights and, most importantly, we're not getting 1000 people all reporting the same bugs many times over. It makes more sense from our point of view, both in terms of distribution and practicality, to make the beta closed to begin with. Please do not email us or ask on the forums for beta testing slots. We will be making an announcement or asking people directly. Will we be making people sign NDAs like other mods? Uh, I doubt it. We'll probably just say "hey man, you're a beta tester and we'd prefer it if you didn't go posting stuff, thanks" and then hope that will suffice.

Once things are a bit more refined and polished, then we'll likely open things up somewhat. By open up, I mean either expand the closed beta to a bigger number of people, or just change things so that it's an open beta and anyone can participate. This stage will also likely see the introduction of some gamers with no TF experience so we can see how the TF outsider fares. How long will this take? It's hard to say. Most of us haven't done this sort of thing before, so this is a learning experience and the curve is fairly steep. Some features may not make the (initial) beta, but will definitely will be making an appearance in future revisions.

The major things we've yet to work out are who gets in on the beta and how we're going to distribute it. We've got some ideas on this, but we've yet to decide for sure.

Mapping Ramblings

I've been working hard on shoring up push and we almost released some screens for the last media release, but I wasn't happy with a few things so we held it back for a bit. The cap point is nearly done and I'm just doing a final detail pass in addition to tweaking the fog / skybox at the moment. The spawn rooms are in etc. The hardest thing I had to do, which was quite some feat, was connect up the roofing. In push, like hunted, the whole map is one continuous area. Each building connects to the next area and the map continues instead of being like separate, isolated arenas. This was a total and utter pain in the arse to implement as it means careful visibility management (praise be to hint brushes) and lots of func detailing etc.

Framerates are high and I'm very satisfied with the overall build quality. I'm going to finish up in the next few days and then turn my attention back to bases. Ideally I'd have finished this a week or so ago, but I always tend to find that hammering the last few nails in takes the longest :P