Page 1 of 1

Beta Builds

PostPosted: October 3rd, 2006, 10:41 pm
by SLoB
Cliff you've mentioned a few times about the beta builds but yet there's nothing in this part of the forum yet ;)
how frequently are the builds and when do you propose to distribute them?
to a set beta list for immediate builds with the occasional stable build being put out here for everyone to check or?

PostPosted: October 4th, 2006, 4:22 am
by Nightbreed
Damn it SLoB, you had us thinking there was a beta here :P j/k

I think with all the suggestions coming, it's going to be a while for a beta. Cliff seems to be thourough ( <-- forgive that if it's spelled wrong :twisted: ) so he's probably going to release a final/beta lol

PostPosted: October 4th, 2006, 5:17 am
by SLoB
hehe not sorry to get your hopes up Nightbreed heheh ;)

but i was just wondering wot the score was with the betas as Cliff has mentioned them numerous times now but yet there is no beta info about
I think Xion will take off pretty quick amongst the community thru the lack of code it needs to get a skin up and working, Cliff has his work cut out for the future with this powerful little engine and the stuff it could have put into it :)

PostPosted: October 4th, 2006, 7:24 am
by Cliff Cawley
So this morning I checked the forum and saw that I had released a Beta Build...wait a second...when did I do that?!?

Seriously though, I work on Xion when I can in my spare time. If I worked on it all day every day you would have had a build by now, but unfortunately that won't pay the bills ;)

I was preparing to release something soonish, but you guys keep coming up with more work for me to do, so its pushing it back a little bit each time! :P

I want the Beta builds to be stable and almost ready for release. I also want them to include as many fixes as possible so that I don't end up making a new Beta everytime I add a feature/fix. As I'm sure you can imagine, it would be a pain for yourselves to always have to download new builds every day or so.

Saying that, would you prefer me to release more or less often? Do you mind if a Beta build is broken is some places but has new things added, or would you prefer for me to take the time and make sure that everything is playing nicely (and potentially take a little longer between new beta builds)?

Let me know what you would all like me to do.

I may end up moving this topic to General so that other users don't get the wrong idea :)

Cliff :)

PostPosted: October 4th, 2006, 9:38 am
by SLoB
well put it this way Cliff
if its a longer wait inbetween releases then potentially any current bugs dont get fixed for a while, so you have that old triangle of quality, time, resource to manage ;)
of course if there was an important immediate fix needed for a bug that slipped through the cracks i'm sure you'd do a release
altho i'm not proposing you release buggy software, quality over quantity imo ;)

PostPosted: October 4th, 2006, 4:13 pm
by pickle
Beta software is meant to be released broken. That's why it's not gold ;)

I think it would be better to release betas more often, so we can get a chance to test the heck out of whatever incremental step you provide. I'm sure if you release a beta & let us know what the new features are, we can test it in a day or two. That way you don't have to worry about 100 new features, any of which may contain a bug.