Well, apart of this forum i also read other stuff related to Kerberos and SotS. You know, facebook, twitter and etc. I will quote one of Kerberos guys "...I found myself trapped in another city over night..." Uhm, i bet he's developing fixes there for unfinished game they released...in another city. At friday. There are other similar examples, i just won't quote them all. I still hope they are really working hard enough...silly me.
This is basically outside the useful boundaries of the discussion - I'm the guy that posts to Facebook and Twitter for Kerberos... and I'm the team member least integral to working on the game. I can't debug anything, I'm a producer - I can test, I can confirm, I can make small data tweaks. But I can also, and have to, take care of company business, which is what I was doing Friday. This is what is least helpful about Facebook and Twitter. As the primary talk-to-the crowd guy, I post about getting stuck over night in Seattle, as explanation for why social media went quiet for two days (which had people jumping to conclusions about whether the game was being worked on - it was), and that just leads to more people jumping to conclusions about whether the game is being worked on if one dude confesses to being in another city - it was/is. This is why Twitter and Facebook have a tenancy to turn into boring, plain yogurt PR feeds.
i've been thinking about it and i think the thing that most bugs me about the game is that one of the promises was that there would be a "completely new" race with a unique drive system, only it's seven ships, they belong to the Zuul faction (who i can't play at all well), and their new drive system is just a point-to-point drive no more interesting than the Tarka hyperdrive.
The Zuul minions run on their old rip-drive system from the first game. However, once they attract a Suul'ka, they have a psionically powered method of transport. Currently, it's got some wires hanging out and we're working to fix that up. But once final, you'll be better able to see the difference their "drive" system has from the other races. I think you'll be happy. And suitably appalled, when you find out how they can recharge that drive system.
Erm, have you tried to play a game? Sorry, but the CTDs are affecting almost everyone. Just go look at their technical support page and watch the threads grow by the hour.
Crashes the everyone gets are actually the easiest to debug, so when they show up, we pretty much stomp them by the next update. Crashes that not everyone gets are harder to track down, but we are working to winnow them out as best as we can, as fast as we can.
There's a lot of what-should-be-done, both here and on the Kerb forms. We try and talk through it with everyone as much as we can, but that only works up to the point where we actually have to work on the game. And it's made more difficult in that everyone tends to have a different idea of what should be tackled first. A few people here pointed out correctly that AI, while a very high priority with us, isn't the easiest to finish and really, will be a work in progress through this whole process, as everything that's ticking away in the game, the AI has to be set to tock with. If something isn't working properly, or is one of the systems we pulled temporarily, we can't do much with the AI regarding it until it is final. So, we will keep doing as we have been. Low hanging issues are just that - easy, and there's little reason not to take care of them now, even if they're related to something simpler or lower priority. As people in the wild continue to uncover issues we aren't seeing in the dev environment (eg the secondary sound bug, where after the big sound bug fix, some people are still having trouble with certain sound cards), we will work to address them as best as we can. And crashes will always be a priority. We're almost about half-way through the timeline we laid out to address the mess, the fast updates of the first week will be moving towards weekly to bi-weekly updates for the next few as we move away from the more pressing, immeadiate issues to larger, more complex systems, and we will also continue to try and keep everyone in the loop, but there are hundreds of you, you each have a different idea of what "in the loop means", and there are only a handful of us, and we still have to get work done, so up front I will apologize, as the process isn't going to be what some of you want, which is smooth as silk and immediate. But the process is still there and we're still working it.
Cheers,c
