I think doing release candidates is probably a good idea for everyone’s sake. There are a lot of levels I would like to work more on, and I’ll have a good deal of free time over the next couple of weeks, but I kind of suspect that I’m not going to have time to get to everything. Even if I spend
most of my free time working on
Eternal, and even if I spend about a day per level, there are
several levels that I still plan massive overhauls to. And I’m going to be working at least some of that time, so I won’t have all day every day to work on things.
I suspect “Babylon X” and “The Incredible Hulk” from that list will take probably two days each: one to redo the geometry and texturing, another to redo the items (that’s going to be very tedious). And that might actually be a bit optimistic, because texturing is time-consuming; they might each be three-day projects.
I’ve already done about half the work for “Third Rock” on that list, but I suspect the other half will take another day.
“Run, Coward!” is basically done; I think it’s to a point where no one’s perfectly happy with it but no one hates it.
“Killing the Giants as They Sleep” might be a quick fix, but if the scripting doesn’t work, it could be another all-day project.
The failure dreams hopefully won’t take as long, though I noticed the third one was far more difficult on TC now than it was when I last played it. I think we might’ve increased the Banshee spawn rate somewhere along the line, so we should probably set that back a bit, and the Banshees themselves seemed to have more powerful attacks.
“Burning Down the Corporation” is another one that will probably take at least a day and maybe two; that’s a
lot of monsters to replace.
“Second to Last…” could be another project that takes a day or two, depending upon how much we decide to change it.
I’m not sure how much work is left for “S’pht’ia”; I honestly haven’t even had time to look at it. Might do that tonight.
Since then we’ve also decided to revamp the northwestern secret from “Deep into the Grotto”. That could also take awhile.
I’m also going to be honest: there are a lot of levels in chapter 4 that I’ve barely looked at. I’ve played them enough to ensure they can be vidded, but I haven’t really looked at aspects like platforms and ambient sounds at all.
I’d honestly like to be able to devote a decent amount of time to each level, making sure monster & item impassable polygons are placed where they need to be; making sure bouncy walls are fixed where possible; making sure all the ambient sounds work elegantly; things like that. I kind of doubt there’ll be time to do that for every level before the end of the year.
I did
some of the ambient sound/platform stuff (though not
all of it) for most of the first three chapters and chapter 5, but there are several levels in chapter 4 where I haven’t done
any of it. The main reason for this is, of course, that everyone agreed that chapter 5 was the worst when we started work on
Eternal, so I’ve poured by far the most time into it. But as a result, I’ve done very little work on anything from “The Incredible Hulk” to “Genie in a Bottle”.
And there are some other weird bugs. I noted above a
weird motion glitch that traps the player in “Deja Vu All Over Again”. I
just discovered that last week. And the Compiler in that area still doesn’t activate. Who knows how many weird glitches like that are still undiscovered?
And there’s also the matter of multiplayer, which has barely been tested at all. We discovered in testing that the HUD plugin is completely broken in multiplayer games. That’s major, and we only noticed it a few days ago.
It’s also
extremely difficult to get games to sync up correctly. If people don’t have the exact same map file, games go out of sync. This is due to the implementation of Lua scripts in TEXT resource 128. If people don’t have the map file, they don’t get the Lua script for each level. As a result, they don’t have the extra starting weapons, and they can’t use ammo picked up from enemies. A few other things such as music also don’t work, though music is critical. According to the A1 documentation, this could be fixed by moving the Lua script into each individual map’s directory. So “00 The Far Side of Nowhere” should contain “The Far Side of Nowhere.lua”, “01 Deja Vu All Over Again” should contain “Deja Vu All Over Again.lua”, and so on. The downside here is of course that there will need to be 52 Lua files, each of which will need to be updated each time there is a change to the script, though I understand there are programs that can distribute those changes directly. I don’t know why the A1 developers decided to implement Lua this way; it’s dumb.
An additional possible culprit in addition to the Lua (which was definitely causing at least some of the problems) is the new shapes and plug-ins. I haven’t had time to look at how big the changes were in some of those cases, but if people don’t have those installed correctly, that might also lead to other desync issues. (Another reason I favour a beta 6 release.)
And of course, there’s also the possibility of game-breaking bugs like the one I found in “My Kingdom Pfhor a Horse” earlier this year that, just because we haven’t had time to adequately test cooperative games yet, haven’t been discovered yet. Who knows what other issues this severe are present in multiplayer games? This is basically an entire branch of gameplay that hasn’t been tested at all.
There are really only three weeks left until the end of the year. That’s not a lot of time. In addition to implementing all these changes, we’ll have to do more testing to make sure everything functions properly. There are a lot of things that we simply won’t have time to test.
I think delaying the final release until sometime next year is probably going to be the best idea. It might not necessarily need to be the
end of the year, but it would be good to have at least a few days to test each level properly. This will also give me more time to figure out scripting issues like the HUD thing and the media fog for levels that have more than one media type.
The other thing is that by letting everything sit back a bit more, I can take a breather and have more time to sit back and really evaluate things. Sometimes I find it’s more difficult to have an objective opinion of things when I’ve recently worked on them. Part of what’s helped me with
Chronicles is that most of those levels are more than ten years old, so I’m less emotionally attached to my old gameplay decisions; if something doesn’t work, I’m more willing to go back and change it.
I also suspect that this may also have been a partial cause of that argument a couple weeks ago over “Run, Coward” – I suspect we were all too attached to various changes we’d made to let go of them. Of course, the impending end of the semester for some of us probably didn’t help either. I suspect I probably overreacted, and I kind of doubt I was the only one.
Anyway I think moving the final release back will help on several different fronts. Being able to thoroughly test one level each week might probably make the game a lot better, particularly if we devote most of that testing to multiplayer mode. We can play normally; we can try to break the game; we can disobey the AIs’ orders; we can do things that only a player who hadn’t read the terminal would try; we can try to do things no rational player would think to do; we can try to complete the levels as quickly as possible; we can try to take as much time as possible. There are a lot of different ways to test gameplay, and it’s probably not possible to get to all of them over a shorter schedule.
Great job on the updates, BTW, Lia. The new lo-res textures actually look good! It’s the first time I thought those Human textures looked at all decent. The Skitters seem really fun, though I’ve really only played a few speedruns of a few of those levels since they were implemented. But they don’t seem overpowered or anything, and they
look really cool.
But yeah, I also vote for putting out a beta 6 release as soon as possible. There have been so many changes since beta 5 that it’s probably worth going ahead and publishing one last beta before we go to RCs.