OpenMW featured on Niche Gamer

[Cramal]

New features and bug get added regulary.

So if you base your % of completude of either of them, it will not always increase.

Having a % of completude that decrease will be even less understandable for common people that current situation.

Furthermore, the % of implemented features is absolutely not linked with the remaining time as the time to implement a feature is absolutely not constant : some may only need 10s of minutes of coding, such other needs 10s of hours. If 99% of the features has been implemented in 99 months, it does not means at all that the game will be finished 1 month after

[SquireNed]

It's not tied to anything. It's a guesstimate. It's just for people who want to see "how is this doing?" and you tell them the layman's version.

[raevol]

I think we should really nail down the list of unimplemented features that are keeping us in Alpha. If we add more features to the list later that is totally fine, but at least coming up with a list to figure out where we are now would be a good place to start.

[Cramal]

In the 40 Features left to implement before reaching 1.0, 9 of them have been added less than 1 month ago.

There is no guarantee that others will not be added in the future.

Even this number cannot be used for a reliable way to guess the time before 1.0 release

[psi29a]

I think we should really nail down the list of unimplemented features that are keeping us in Alpha. If we add more features to the list later that is totally fine, but at least coming up with a list to figure out where we are now would be a good place to start.

Can we just get away from using alpha/beta?

Just say that shit works great now, more features to come. If you find bugs, let us know.

[raevol]

There is no guarantee that others will not be added in the future.

I didn't say there wouldn't be.

Can we just get away from using alpha/beta?

Just say that shit works great now, more features to come. If you find bugs, let us know.

That's great for us, but for the entire rest of the gaming community, that doesn't fly. If you really want to get away from "alpha/beta" then we should just toss the whole "1.0" idea out the window too.

The point here is that we are communicating with our users. I think we're feature-complete enough to call ourselves in "beta" now, but pedantry insists that we aren't, so so be it. But if we're going to piss and moan over every little detail, let's at least be transparent about those details by putting them up in a list, and checking them off as we get them done. If it takes a little extra effort to maintain that list because we split "blades of grass blowing in the wind" into four separate issues for each cardinal direction, at least our users will have that much insight into our process, instead of wondering why we've been sitting on 0.20s and 0.30s release numbers for years now even though we insist the project is "basically done".

Sorry if I'm a little crabby here, but I'm getting kind of sick of all this bike-shedding. I'm trying to make my contribution as our release manager, and as someone with experience in the real-world game industry, but if it's not wanted, I also know enough about open source to accept that this project is "complete" and I can move on to something else.

[psi29a]

If the goal is attract attention to the project and have people use it, then saying "alpha" is going to turn many "gamers" off, with the reply: "just let me know when it is done".

Would you say this is accurate in the gaming industry? Because it is what I'm hearing from people when I explain OpenMW; from family and friends to people in the community itself such as TR.

To paraphrase TR a little: We'll use OpenMW-CS when it is ready.

Now, define ready.

[raevol]

Would you say this is accurate in the gaming industry? Because it is what I'm hearing from people when I explain OpenMW.

Yes, 100% absolutely, hence: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3339

[psi29a]

Is it ready? Is it usable now? Can you play Morrowind on Linux and OSX?... yes you can and you can do that without even mentioning the word alpha.

Is it 'done'? No, it will get better!

How about this... OpenMW isn't Alpha Software!

Now that is an attention grabber.

[DestinedToDie]

Where´s the rush? We got time. If OpenMW is almost-almost finished, you could just wait the 2 or 4 months it takes to reach 1.0 instead of announcing a 95% complete 1.0 beta.