FE 0.80 random notes

My heart just dropped when I saw the 0.80 and I was all set to switch to Windows and try this baby out

Anyway thanks for sharing, and aren't you a bit far away from your home city if the world still wants to murder you?

Is it just my eyes, or am I seeing differently-colored quest icons in the second screenshot?

Maybe active quests go White Icon. Would be nice visual feedback.

So... next week 0.80?

I am lobbying against a new public beta this week but it's Derek's call.

There are a few very key feedback items that we think should go in.

That said, I think the tactical battle AI will be sufficient by tomorrow for a public test. When that public test happens is anyone's guess.

I'm seeing the Govern button moved to the minimap as well.  I'm guessing top bar real estate was an issue?

While I understand your point, it seems like you keep pushing the next patch back further and further. It doesn't have to be perfect. The community would love even a small patch that fixed only the most broken things. You can always have another patch in a week or two.

Do what you have to do. I can keep myself busy modding. Maybe a little info about the strange Elemental Editor tags in the xml would tie us over for another week. 

If you're worried about people getting mad that their feedback items aren't in, just put up a changelog- plan to do this.  That satisfies folks.

I'm getting a little restless.  This may be against the point of the beta, but often the beta phases of your games are more fun then the release portions, when they reach a certain level of polish (like the GC2 expansions, and .76 of FE)   Giving us new toys every couple of weeks is fun.

It is a bit of an ordeal to make a public patch.  Read through the forums and you can see plenty of drama from people who think some flaw in the beta means the whole game is ruined which in turns creates a bit of a death spiral for feedback.

That's why I think we should focus on getting the game to a point where we're ready for the next evaluation.   

The beta feedback has been critical for (a) fixing bugs and (b) Opening our eyes to some design weaknesses.  The bug fixing part has reached the stage that crashes are extremely rare.  But the other feedback still is being incorporated. Once we get to a good place with that, I think we'll be ready to put something out there.

We're just trying to take our time here.

Brad - I've been sending crash emails to [email protected] under my account's email address with saves, dmps, and debugs. Early in the games it's consistently the error "Debug Message:  Saving Goodie Huts" and then it morphs into others such as "Out of sample handles", "WARNING: CoreRefCount Object 23AD63E0 is being destroyed but it still has 1 references", "Battle: Augus (ID:486) is attacking Mayriam (ID:505)", "ERROR: (CMapTextGraphic) Failed to create 3D font wrapper for CMapTextGraphic 'New Pariden'", and "ERROR: (CInitializeMapTextGraphicTask) Error when initializing a map text graphic instance."

Has anyone else got similar errors?  AlLanMandragoran is there a possibility that are hard disk errors or it's on its way out?  Other than those possiblities, I don't know what's causing your errors.

Well, you have to separate the good feedback from the bad feedback.  Also, you won't find out if your design fixes are fixes until you get something out to be broken again.  Some of the things I've been reading, I really feel like I want to make sure they're good ideas before spending more effort on them.  I've learned that "theory fighter" is really difficult when you don't have all the variables though.

Destiny's Gift - that relieves me a bit, it's a way to power up champs without fighting.  I worry about it making the take a stat from your sovereign to level up a champion spell UP though (then again, I never use that right now.)  I was worried about the new XP system for champions leading to various tricks/abuses.

First of, I agree, take your time. Nothing as bad as a bad patch. But you should realize that even a perfect "Beta" will attract loads of critiscim, and doom and gloom are common problems on any internet forum. Drama will come whether you like it or not. But you know this already right? And yes, reputation damage, E:WoM, yadda, bla... you've got a few enthousiasts here who want to play your game, even if it gives them a terrible disease, because they already have that other terrible disease, Fallen Enchantitis. I know I have

And best of all... its all your fault that I have it. Can I have another shot? Prettyplease?

Is it really a big worry if you release a new beta and you get slightly more than average criticisms?  After all, as Barrynor says, even a perfect Beta will get loads of criticism. =)  Release a changelog, give as the goals for this version, and allow us to check out the new fixes.  Do you realise, you might be even getting loads of criticism NOW for not having a new beta release after two weeks when the previous time between releases was 1 week then 1 day. ;-)  I don't think you will get loads more reputation damage, and did you count the idea that you may even get PRAISE for some good new improvements?  Not all feedback is bad feedback after all.

I won't be playing again until the beta patch. Some of the UI issues are making the game unenjoyable and I want the next release to be fresh so I'm taking a breather for now. I'm intrigued to try out the new changes but completely understand if you guys think it best to round off a few of the new corners before releasing. The problems with the game are annoying but understandable given the early public beta phase the game is in. Still think this is going to be one awesome game.

Tomorrow I'll be playing Crusader Kings 2 and then in a week's time I'll be playing Conquest of Elysium 3 so I've got a lot to keep me occupied anyway. Must say though, a new beta patch of FE would have me putting that as the number one gaming priority.

Keep up the good work guys.

I think I would agree with Das123. =)  But it would still be nice for us to know approximately where you at, with regards to bug fixes, other improvements, and work-in-progress stuff. =)  More dev journals or sneak peeks are always good!

More Youtube gameplay videos?

I'd love to keep Beta testing, but I feel at this point my bugs/suggestions have reached their limit. I'm ready for the next version to see how much feedback has been incorporated and hunt down those new bugs. Bring it on!

Well thanks for information but I'm still a friend of agile iterative development with frequent releases. If some people deduce from a beta that the game is broken it's their fault and you can always proof them wrong with a next release.

One of the main problems (imo) with infrequent releases is that if there is a change in their that gets bad feedback it is much harder to remove/undo it since from the introduction of the bug/feature maybe other features built on top of it etc...

Well I'll work and still wait for the next Beta

Could be I suppose although my rig's particular setup had nothing but problems with EWOM. The FE beta seems more stable than EWOM's beta but it still crashes too often, especially early game with the Goodie huts problem.

If I were to guess it's probably the fact I'm on Vista with an older ATI card.

We do have very regular builds.  We just don't make them available to the public.  Having endless "The game sucks! It takes 10 turns instead of 4 turns to build this means it's domed" is distracting.

There's a place for public beta and there's a place for private beta.  There's no point with another public beta until we've completed incorporating the changes already on our list.

I guess it would be better to let the players test the changes you have already incorporated to find bugs and give you gameplay feedback, because it would be easier to test a few changes instead of many changes and perhaps the early feedback would help you to make changes to the AI and gameplay that are more time consuming.

Destiny's Gift - I think the spell is a great idea, but increasing a RANDOM stat only encourages the player to load again if its the wrong stat. It would be better to pick one stat and the mana cost should be increased by 100 if the player picks the stat again.

I agree.  The BDT populations, Basement Dwelling Troglodytes, over react to such minor details that if Stardock released every build, the forums would be choked with complaint threads.  Shit, there were people still bitching about 0.75 build things when 0.77 had been out for a week.  And to be honest, there are plenty of people who, with the best intentions, have some god-awful ideas of how to improve the game.  Less beta builds out there means more time each of us has with each builds and a more accurate response.  Also it means less BDTs loading up old build saves into the new build, creating fucked things to happen and reporting them as bugs.  

And then there are those annoying modders that sit up at night thinking of new way to ruin the game. They don't even look for bugs, they are only interested in ripping the game apart piece by piece and then rebuilding it into the long awaited Space Marines turn based tactical.