Omni Reply to Community Questions

Good read. I hope you don't hurry beta because community demands it. It's not like we are really going to ask refunds.. are we? Patience my young padawans. Beta was promised 2013, there's still many months left.

And yeah sticky sounds good.

 

Out of curiosity, why invalidating save files be that bad in beta? It IS a bug fixing phase, not an 'get the game early' so its to be expected the games would reset quite often during that time. (At least the betas I have participated in, would at least update once a week to fix random bugs and add some fixes and features and thus invalidate the previous world. We got that was part of the deal, those that did not liked it, waited until release proper)

 

Moved to FAQ and sticked.

 

To test many of the tier 2 and 3 items, one may be required to play for 5+ hours. Having to do it all in one sitting, may become difficult. So the ability to save and continue later does indeed help when testing things.

 

While I do agree with you that I don't want them to rush it, I do believe they aren't rushing it, at the point of release I believe they plan to have most game mechanics worked out and the first three tiers as well, and at that point they will probably be adding a tier a day (or at least frequently enough to keep the community on their toes).

 

I just hope there is a bug tracking system in place when they do release beta. Mojang for example was relying on people editing a community wiki for a long time which was a horrible idea (and not productive at all). I do know that the Starbound devs use Github... so I'm guessing that they'll just add a public repo like Valve did with steam-for-linux.

 

I was thinking they'd either do that or just create a new sub-forum for starbound. Or if they are really feeling up for it they might even create their on bug report form that is in the perfect format they need to solve bugs.

 

So is it likely that they are aiming for keeping save files between updates? I was pretty curious if we would lose all of our progress with each major update. It's not really a huge deal if we will lose save data, but I would probably stay away from settling down and creating really elaborate bases until the game was more save stable.

 

As with Minecraft updates, I would assume it depends on what in the game is changed between updates.

 

I agree that it will probably depends between updates, but my understanding is all *new* content (not *fixed* content) will just add to the universe, not reset the universe. (ie. if they add in a new type of planet biome, planets with that biome will suddenly appear but no existing planets will change to that biome type.) But, I would not be surprised at all if all beta saves were lost on full release.

 

Yeah, I was hoping it might work similarly to MC, where you don't lose save data, but seeds (planets in this case) may generate differently once more content is added.

I image you're probably right about resetting with the full release. I think it will probably be refreshing to restart, at that point though, depending on how long the beta runs and how many hours individuals have logged.

In all honesty, I don't plan on focusing on building right away in SB anyhoo. I imagine most of my time during the beta (depending on the length of course) will be devoted to learning the game, exploring, and researching/taming various creatures. I know people love to build, but I think many SB players will want to start off exploring rather than settling. I could be wrong, of course, because I know how much people love to build.

 

Sounds like it is going to be a long time before release. And they may have to rush it for 2013.

 

are we seriosuly calling ourselves dark knights now? i thought we were gonna reserve that for the really whiny guys

 

I personally would be happy with weekly updates instead of dailies. The dailies just seem rushed, and I'd rather they devote their time to developing instead of community interacting. That's what the community managers are for.

 

Wait... 5+ hours? Really? Huh. The Yogscast took about an hour to get through tier 1... They did have help with the placed distress beacon, and they had strength in numbers (though slapstick shenanigans kind of negated the advantage), but still: tier 1 doesn't take that long to go through.

...which means the upper tiers will actually have a lot of content. I just assumed that they would simply add better weapons and equipment as you defeat each boss. This is great!

...but I still have no idea what's going on. Apparently I completely misunderstood the idea of tiers. Anyone care to enlighten me?

 

the yogcast demo intentionally had a lot of content lopped out of it, boxes with gear strewn about to speed up their already short progression requirement, and a myriad of other things.

If they weren't too busy goofing around breaking tents and whatnot it is likely they could have finished the demo content incredibly quick.

 

Well I'll try to explain it.

Tiers are essentially starbound tech levels, with each tier focusing on a new element of gameplay. There's going to be 10 tiers (11 if you count superhigh X tier which was mentioned) and each has their own items, weapons, blocks, furniture, bosses, dungeons and other stuff.

But unfortunately, it doesn't mean that upper tiers will have 5x more content than the first one. The first tier was rushed, and when they mention it taking 5+ hours to test, they mean to test, not to play. a given tier could take 3 hours or so, but have 9 hours testing for it to be bug free.

 

I'm glad Omni stepped in the answer after Tiy refused to. In all honesty, Omni is the only person keeping my hope up for this game. Stay based, Omni.

 

Thank you for the reply Omni. I know it can be difficult to take the time out of a busy day to do things like this, but it does keep our hopes up that the game is coming along, we appreciate you and the other devs, and the hard work you're all doing. Seriously everyone at Chucklefish, keep up the good work, and I look forward to losing a few hundred hours of my life to this game.

 

lol what a funny post