We’re finishing up our work on Beta 4 for a release later this week.
Here are a few highlights:
#1 A general polish pass has been done across the board. Not quite to 1.0 but significantly better.
#2 Players will be able to access the Workshop’s Tile Editor
#3 PLayers will have access to the Workshop’s Map Editor
#4 The tactical battles have gotten a lot of polish
#5 There’s been a lot of love given to spell effects and sounds throughout the game
#6 The game will occasionally design units for you (for players who don’t like designing their own units).
#7 A MASSIVE pass on performance tuning. This same screen in Beta 3C would have been 11 FPS.
#8 MASSIVE pass on cloth map performance to make sure the game runs on Netbooks.
#9 The start of work on the tech trees to make them more challenging (This will be an ongoing thing).
#10 The Diplomacy system has gotten its first pass at the AI intelligently valuing things (this will be an ongoing thing to improve)
We have also done a massive pass at both stability and video card compatibility. Generally speaking, beta 4 shouldn’t crash on you during the course of a game. However, we are still working on loading games from within a game (there’s a lot of STUFF to deal with there) as well as loading saved games. It’s still far better than beta 3C but it’s not perfect yet.
We have also dramatically reduced the memory foot print but this is an area we will be making substantial improvements during the next week or so (post Beta 4).
When Beta 4 goes out, we’ll go into more depth on the things players can expect us to focus on in particular for the release version. Given that Beta 3C was only a week ago, I think the beta community will find Beta 4 a major relief (i.e. how much can change in a single week).
The stability of Beta 4 (our current internal beta of it) is equal to the day 0 version of Galactic Civilizations II and its performance significantly better than the release version of Galactic Civilizations II.
After Beta 4, our code tree gets separated into the version that will be polished, tweaked and bug fixed for the manufactured version (the version that hits stores on August 24) and then the version that will go towards the release (Day 0) version that will be available on August 24th.
As of today, the game is now sufficiently ahead of schedule that the Stardock team is no longer in “crunch mode”.
If you’re still playing Beta 3C, you should stop before it causes permanent damage (it’s pretty awful).
Our main focus going foward is polish polish polish polish polish (including AI, UI, Balance, Spell Work, Special Abilities in tactical battles, Tester requested tweaks, etc.).
Oh, btw, the campaign (which won’t be in the betas) is pretty damn cool and was 100% made with the mod tools and XML (i.e. you guys could make your own campaigns).
Cheers!
