Closed Beta characters saved or not for full release???

File types might also change(probably for optimization or something?) but planets would probably be the most changed

 

Versioning is always a big problem in software, but particularly with procedural generation. It also comes up in games that support 'replays', where a change in the game mechanics can completely invalidate old replays.

One way to provide world serialization stability is to keep around the generator code for each revision. You can include the version number in the seed, which keeps worlds forward compatible for 'all time' (or at least until our species dies out.) The downside to all this is that it adds complexity and makes for lots of ugly legacy code that never goes away. For a developer, it feels kinda like building a city on top of landfill; it looks pretty on the surface, but underneath you know that it still stinks down there and you really wish you could just clean it all out and keep the nice clean architecture up above.

That's one of the hardest things about making a public release. Once you have an established user base, it's a really huge deal to break compatibility, so your hands are largely tied unless you build up a sophisticated versioning scheme. Even then, the more versions that propagate, the more testing you need to do to make sure that old worlds remain compatible with the core mechanics. If new mechanics invalidate old worlds, suddenly you need to start versioning the mechanics, too. This creates a whole new set of testing nightmares, as you trend toward a combinatorial explosion of alternative configurations, where what should've been a one hour feature takes a whole week to add safely.

I for one am glad that the dev team still has the freedom to refactor and re-refactor the core until they're happy that it's a solid foundation on which to build awesome new content over the next few years. This game is truly awesome in its scope and it's still in its early childhood; I can't wait to see what it grows into.

 

It would be a shame to lose my first character. I always like to keep the first save of a game so I can go back and see how much my play style changes. But hey ho, it always gives us an excuse to use our imaginations even more!

 

The reason I stop playing Minecraft was that everytime there was an update with new biomes and other stuff I would have to create a new world to enjoy all this new stuff. I am really hoping something can be done about keeping the progress you make in the game while still being able to enjoy the new content... I know that the developers know best and if they choose not to keep all your game progress from beta to final and from update to update is because it is really complex to do. I just really wish it could be done! Its one of the things I give more importance to in this kind of game.. One game i remember that promised to never break your world is BlockStory, but it is probably not as complex as this one

 

I really like the sound of this, im not too fussed about losing a world but everything my toon has collected would be nice to keep safe, anyways this sounds like a cool idea I hope it makes it for the beta.

I meant to ask as well, when beta is finally released will we get regular updates as stuff is been fixed (if there is bugs) or will it be like "Here is the beta that's the only content/update you will get until release" ?

 

The challenge is that 'not breaking your world' and 'giving you access to all the new stuff' are in some ways opposite goals. If they add a feature that spawns cool new stuff on planets, you can't add that stuff to already existing planets without potentially breaking structures that you've created on those planets.

Of course, one advantage with Starbound is that we're not limited to a single planet. You can have your old planets with the 'older' features, but visiting a new planet, you can take advantage of the newer features. Since it's likely that there will be some incentive to visit lots of different planets, it will help to keep things fresh without requiring a 'new game' whenever cool new world-gen features are added.

That said, I could definitely see the possibility of world-breaking changes when making the transition from Beta to Release. The release boundary is the dev team's last good chance to get away with this kind of breaking change (people get a lot more upset if you do that post-release), so it'll be a matter of deciding if the benefits are worth it. I imagine they don't want to be making (many of) these kinds of breaking changes in the middle of beta, though, since that would be pretty disruptive to the testing process. The more they can stabilize now, though, the lower the risk of these kinds of breaking changes being necessary.

 

To me this looks like the ideal fórmula! It would be like they did in BlockStory: if they added a new biome or a new mob you will see it only when you go far enough in your world that the engine have to generate new information.

Here the worlds are one-biome worlds and i guess they are limited in size and fully generated once you visit them for the first time so it makes sense not to be able to see the most of the new features in it but if you can enjoy them when you visit a new planet that it is generated with the new version of the engine... then you can both keep your stuff and enjoy the new features! i really hope they go for something like this.

Yeah its totally understandable that you can't expect things not to be broken or to be totally estable when you are on beta. Even though, considering the amount of people who is gonna play this from the very beginning it would really be a nice plus if you can upgrade to the final version and keep all your "hard work" done while playing in beta.