Fuck yeah. pledged!
I wanna be part of gaming history too
I wanna be part of gaming history too
which will likely drive mankind into new avenues of thought and spirituality.
I’ve been thinking it over.
I think all pledges $75 or above (“Pilgrim”) will get beta access on a monthly issue starting end of November and continuing through to April when the last polish is put on the game.
If you play it until you are sick of it you have nobody but yourself to blame. It will demonstrate continuous progress towards completion.
I have a lot to do in November to adapt everything for the new resolution and to see if we can eliminate all the serious “bugs” (not gameplay balance issues but real bugs) before the beta goes out to pledges.
These beta copies may be burned with your personalized details to detect leaks, I think I have a utility around that does this. Just warning you that the copy you get may be traceable so please don’t leak it to people who did not pledge. Taking screenshots will be okay and doing walkthroughs will be up to you.
This may not mean much to a lot of people but I have spent all weekend getting the build running solid in the Visual Studio 2010 C++ Compiler. This is a pretty major step forward because the general debugging, error trapping and trace facilities in VS2010 are lightyears ahead of the VC6 C++ compiler I have been using since 1999. The STL implementation is so much improved it isn’t even funny.
Shams and I are now sharing an integrated code base in SVN which makes certain we don’t break the build, don’t lose any source code and are continuously improving the build from one day to the next. This is the way adults run a software project and the funny thing is that I have known the right way to do it for 20 years. At work I have done it this way and at home I have pursued a different process, one which wasn’t very productive.
One of the big hurdles to compiling in VS2010 is that I had the author of Fastgraph warn me that the graphic libraries might not run correctly or reliably in anything above VS2005. For this reason I have had to stay with this fossil compiler for 12 years, for fear of not being able to compile Fastgraph. Turns out with a few compiler switches set correctly it runs fine, perhaps even better than it did before.
The upcoming demo is going to be very stable because of these changes and a lot of bugs are practically eliminating themselves now by simply being noticed instead of flying under the radar. The VS2010 compiler warns constantly about variables that have not been initialized, memory not released or pointers with bad values.
All of Shams fixes, all my fixes over the past couple of weeks and the fixes of this weekend are now consolidated in one build that is running really well.