Testing before 1.0.0

[psi29a]

You miss-quoted tarius, he didn't say that.

I work in another industry. We have to guarantee against data-loss to governments and corporations. They do not want "beta" software... sadly, nothing in life is bug-free so I consider all software to be "beta" quality. Maybe I'm just cynical.

We work in an iterative nature, reacting to their needs and our desires to position our product. We SCRUM which when done right is awesome. I've been in this industry (non-gaming) for 8 years now and the only time alpha/beta came up was when marketing and sales was trying to drum up buzz about a few features that they wanted to sell that wasn't up to our engineering standards yet.

I'm not saying it is 'right' or better... just that I don't see the world the same way as some of you. Software to me is always evolving and getting better (mostly) with every iteration. Alpha/beta/release, at least to me, is something out of text-books from the 70/80s.

[raevol]

Thanks, fixed the quote.

I'm not saying it is 'right' or better... just that I don't see the world the same way as some of you. Software to me is always evolving and getting better (mostly) with every iteration. Alpha/beta/release, at least to me, is something out of text-books from the 70/80s.

Generally I think open source software is served better by your iterative model. High profile, large scale game projects on the other hand are not. Our audience is not people who are going to use our software, whatever the quality is. Our audience is people who will walk away from, and give bad publicity to our project if something they perceive should not be very buggy (an official release) is, in fact, very buggy.

By your model, you should be arguing that we never have a "1.0" release, and never have a big public announcement when we reach "feature complete".

[Tarius]

You miss-quoted tarius, he didn't say that.

I work in another industry. We have to guarantee against data-loss to governments and corporations. They do not want "beta" software... sadly, nothing in life is bug-free so I consider all software to be "beta" quality. Maybe I'm just cynical.

Actually, I always thought of a beta as like the final stretch of testing before some sort of wide spread release. The terms get thrown around alot today though so I dont think they really have a narrow definition, just something thats almost done(relatively speaking).

[psi29a]

By your model, you should be arguing that we never have a "1.0" release, and never have a big public announcement when we reach "feature complete".

Huh... we make a big public announcement with every new release.

You're close though, that is why I say that 1.0 is feature complete and on par with Morrowind since that was the target all along. That was the goal that Zini explicitly set for the project. I never said that we should release with show-stopping/critical or even major bug because you're right in that it would turn off. We should be playable from beginning to end, support at least the most popular mods and things like TR and Zini's Ultima project (which is even better than Morrowind). We should at least get the majority of the bug backlog cleared out.

Since this is an opensource project and not a "make as fast as possible then do nothing more with it" game from a corporation, then we can afford to play fast and loose. I have a bit more faith in our users to understand that we do give a damn and that we will fix issues that come up instead of ignoring them like most companies.

Side note: A former boss of mine was the president of a IncaGold USA. He would always share his war stories of the game industry circa 1998~2001. Sadly he swore to never work in that industry again. He still plays games though.

[Zedd]

We should be playable from beginning to end, support at least the most popular mods and things like TR and Zini's Ultima project (which is even better than Morrowind).

Didn't know about Zini's Ultima project, quite an impressive side road to get a better engine for the project, or am I mistaking the chronology of things?

[Zini]

Nope. You are correct. I joined the OpenMW because we needed a better engine for U9: Redemption.

[raevol]

I never said that we should release with show-stopping/critical or even major bug because you're right in that it would turn off. We should be playable from beginning to end, support at least the most popular mods and things like TR and Zini's Ultima project (which is even better than Morrowind). We should at least get the majority of the bug backlog cleared out.

Well I'm glad that we now completely agree? How did that happen?

Nope. You are correct. I joined the OpenMW because we needed a better engine for U9: Redemption.

An ulterior motive all along! Fortunately one that completely benefits everyone...

[sirherrbatka]

The fact that zini is so much interested in modding OpenMW is a really good news for whole community for sure.

[Zedd]

Nope. You are correct. I joined the OpenMW because we needed a better engine for U9: Redemption.

How motivated can you be , restarting work on an engine implementation that would take at least several years (if everything went right, which is certainly not always the case)! I mean, this side project is bigger or at least as big as the original one... respect.
Also, how do you finance your life, it seems you're working full-time on these non-profit projects.
This is very off topic and way to straight-forward, I've just been wondering about this for a long time, you can ignore these questions though .

[Zini]

Lol, not working full time on any non-profit stuff. Redemption is pretty much on hold for me (other team members are still working on it). For now I have shifted all of my spare time to OpenMW. In the larger scale of things it actually doesn't consume that much time. I'll manage with what time I can make available (not having much in term of other time consuming hobbies and also having completely given up on TV a while back helps a lot though).