I wasn't going to respond to this thread, little time, much work. However, I do think something needs to be said.
I'm going to be honest; I haven't read most of the responses here, I've read a few snippets. That being said, it doesn't change my message.
Basically, we've made a massive mistake. There's no doubt in our minds that this wasn't acceptable. Yes, it's alpha, but at the same time, this is why we implemented the backup feature. Unfortunately, that feature doesn't work on Steam, the launcher backs up before updating. As Steam auto-updates, this feature is practically useless (at least for Steam users). While we will never be able to prevent issues from escaping development, even large issues, we should always have something to fall back on (backups). For a large portion of our users, that didn't work. We've known it hasn't worked (as intended) for months now; we knew we were dancing around a fire. We should've fixed it immediately, that was our fault.
This incident has put no doubt in my mind and the rest of Schine, that not only do we need to ensure our backup features are working as intended, but also, our development is working in a way that minimises these sorts of issues. The conclusion is that we don't think we can push development to conform to our 2 week release schedule. It's not enough time for development; it's not enough time for testing, and in the end, we spend at least a few days of the next development cycle hotfixing for the last. Development ends up either postponing release dates or rushing to meet them. In both cases, there's never enough time for us to test. We're working on changing this procedure at the moment, and in all likelihood, 2 week release schedules will cease to continue.
We're a small studio, understaffed and under-funded. Our current release methods are not realistic; the evidence is right in this thread.
In a separate point, we have issues with getting people to test the game. Our testing team is already community-based, our bug report site is already open to the public. Anyone is free to test development builds and make reports. What we can look into, and what we are looking into, is making sure the process is as easy as possible.
However, testing is an incredibly difficult and tedious task. It's hard to find a professional game tester that's been in it for more than 1 year. Those guys get paid to do it; it's no wonder our volunteers burn out within weeks. At the same time, we're not a AAA studio; we can't afford to have a dedicated testing team. So we do primarily rely on community reports and volunteer testers. Unfortunately, in the last few months,
Lancake (who is doing this all in his free time) has been bearing the brunt of that work. One person is not enough. We've always had issues with convincing people to test development builds, we've had issues with recruiting new volunteer testers, we've always had issues with retaining them. We don't have a large enough community pool to draw from, those willing to test the game (actually do the hard, boring and unsatisfying work) are few and far between. Out of those who do give it a go, an even smaller fraction stick around.
We've run calls for more people to get involved in testing, we've made changes to our reporting site to make it easier. It's never enough, and it's something we think about often. We're looking into ways we can gain more activity in testing, some server owners have offered to do tests for us (most of whom are already involved in our testing/support projects).
We might run another recruitment drive. The way to get involved today is to test the game and report bugs now. Whether that be on release or dev branch, the guide for reporting is located here:
Create Bug Task . We may also write a document about what it takes to be an effective and useful tester. It takes quite a bit of skill and patience to be able to locate issues. What might seem glaringly obvious to the end user, might be incredibly hard to reproduce. It's frustrating work, best of luck to all those want to give it a go, and thanks to our current and former testers for all the work they've put in.
T2094 Fleets loosing docked entities
