The weekend is just about here and most of the team is going to get some rest. I’ll be working on the AI since I’m currently the one slowing things up. I have lots of help on the AI this time (in terms of making functions for me) but I still have to do things with those functions.
As mentioned elsewhere, we’re running a bit ahead of schedule at present so it looks like Beta 3 is going to arrive sooner than originally anticipated.
That said, we plan to have weekly updates between now and Beta 3. The first beta update will mostly deal with the most egregious issues being reported.
Here are some of the things we’ve already found:
- Certain nVidia cards with newer graphics drivers (how’s that for a change?) are having lighting issues. If you turn off advanced lighting, that’ll fix it as a temporary workaround.
- There are a number of repeatable crash issues we’re already fixed internally that will go into the next public build.
- The multiplayer will continue to get love between now and beta 4.
- We are anxious to re-enable the sovereign and faction unit designs. Whether that’ll happen next week or not remains to be seen.
- Magic, Adventure, and Diplomacy are waiting on some assets from Random House (writing, descriptions, etc.) along with AI design to make use of the spells.
Here are some things to expect:
- Gameplay improvements will likely start occurring at an extremely rapid pace.
- Random Map work will start to really show up during the beta 2 cycle.
- General balance will rapidly improve during the beta 2 cycle.
- Stability should dramatically improve as we move through the beta 2 cycle.
Other things of note:
- Art assets and visual eye candy are being held back for release purposes. We don’t need “beta testing” of them and it allows the final game to be visually much nicer than what’s in the beta. Hence, the attack animations and sounds are intentionally gimped. The same is true of ground textures and other items.
Things we are concerned about:
- Memory use. If you run the game with a /w parameter, it’ll run in a window. We are looking for things that cause the game to run out of memory. There are some memory leaks in there that we’ll be looking to eliminate as quickly as possible.
Have a good weekend!
