Testing before 1.0.0

[TorbenC]

What would be kind of cool is if, as our "testing", we all hopped on IRC and had a weekend of non-stop playthrough. Beer encouraged!

Totally!

[taknamay]

It's just better to have a beta first. Using release in place of a beta is just bad PR waiting to happen. If someone says "this sucks, it's so buggy" then we should be able to tell them "it's still beta" and not "it's new."

[Tarius]

What would be kind of cool is if, as our "testing", we all hopped on IRC and had a weekend of non-stop playthrough. Beer encouraged!

I would be up for this. I run alot of mods.

[psi29a]

I never argued against testing.

Bugs are bugs and shouldn't ever be forgiving at any point in the development cycle. This idea that 'beta' means "please don't hurt us" is just a marketing tool for pre-sales. What "beta" really means varies wildly enough that some software stays in beta is in use for years in production environments. I honestly think we should keep on what we are doing because we are open-source project, the code has always been out there, along with the binaries... this alpha, beta, release loses its meaning.

My point was: If Morrowind 1.0 was good enough, then that is our target.

Again... no one is arguing against testing. We should be doing more testing now, not later. If you want a beta for PR reasons, go ahead.

FYI: I work in the software industry. We do not have alphas or betas, we just have release cycles similar to OpenMW that include new features and bug-fixes.

[raevol]

Again... no one is arguing against testing. We should be doing more testing now, not later.

<3 <3

I think you're right that there's a lot of mis-communication here. But I think the concern that we are raising is that we want to see some sort of concerted effort given to testing and bug smashing before we publicize the "1.0 release". We've been talking about the big one point oh for a long time, and there's a lot of excitement surrounding it. I think everyone is also chomping at the bit for that moment when, even though the code and binaries and development releases have been completely public all along, we finally say "here it is world! enjoy!"

And to that point, those of us asking for a "beta" or a "testing period" or whatever you want to call it, just want to make sure we don't kick the 1.0 release out the door as soon as the last code for "feature complete" hits the repository. We just want a little bit of a grace period to make sure there aren't any embarrassing showstoppers in that big release.

Does that sound reasonable? Let's not get pedantic about terminology or semantics, this is just a logistics question.

[psi29a]

Fair enough... how about we keep on like we are but when we reach "feature complete" we should let the world know to come test. We keep iterating our version numbers each month like we've been doing. Call them betas if you want.

We'll just have to draw a line the sand that says, we've fixed most the bugs found in these later releases and the only things left are optimizations and new-features above those of original Morrowind.

I just agree with zini about the version 0.99999 nonesense... i like keeping to our current scheme.

[TorbenC]

I just agree with zini about the version 0.99999 nonesense... i like keeping to our current scheme.

He he, that was a completely hypothetical example.

[sirherrbatka]

Topic splited.

[Tarius]

Again... no one is arguing against testing. We should be doing more testing now, not later. If you want a beta for PR reasons, go ahead.

I think of the things that has stopped this is that you could only do limited stuff because of the unfinished state of things. Once its mostly finished to where a majority of mods and everything else can be played, I think interest will pick up by quite a bit. The other thing is lack of optimization; OpenMW is a resource hog compared to MW which is one of the reasons I havent ventured around the game much with it; I will either need to wait, or get a new computer.

I think once combat is mostly done(which shouldnt be that far off) is a good point you could declare beta or something like that. At that point, you should be able to do much of the stuff in the game.

[raevol]

Topic splited.

Thanks... hahaha.

We keep iterating our version numbers each month like we've been doing. Call them betas if you want. ... I just agree with zini about the version 0.99999 nonesense... i like keeping to our current scheme.

Oh, I totally agree with this. No reason to change the version number until 1.0.

FYI: I work in the software industry. We do not have alphas or betas, we just have release cycles similar to OpenMW that include new features and bug-fixes.

Do you work in the game industry? My experience was from a big (one of the biggest) console developers, and they definitely had pre-alpha/alpha/beta/release nomeclature. I also worked at a small PC game studio, and they also followed that scheme. It was really important, because part of the release cycle was a point where they declared "No more features! no more content!" and that's where you hit beta and only fixed bugs until the public release.

EDIT: Misquoted Tarius