Sounds good to me as well.
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Sounds good to me as well.
This means that fewer people can actually develop quests in these due to their intentions of being tested, rather than used as building tools.
This is both good and bad.
That means that people can no longer complain that you can't build a quest in it. Nobody was ever really SUPPOSED to be building a full fledged official quest in them, but they did it anyway, and complained all to high hell over and over again because of it. However, on the other side of the coin, you've got people who were actually able to report bug after bug because they WERE trying to build a major quest in them, and in doing so, were actually able to find all these bugs through using the program the way it was intended.
I'm starting to think we should really get moving on making that official, ever-changing "test quest" that tests out literally 110% of ZC's features, one after another after another after another. No plot, no combat, ... just pitting feature after feature to the player and seeing what happens. Test out combinations of items onto combos, combos onto combos, and items onto flags, and flags with other flags. Everything we can think of.
At the moment, I'm not really sure what to think. I'm still not really sure what you meant by "Incremental," really. The imagery comes to mind of a building not with a shoddy fourth wall, but with no fourth wall at all.
I agree with the increment/milestone idea. And ShadowTiger brings up some good points. I know that my building of my quest has found me a couple bugs.
Freedom, the best way to build a quest now is in the mostly stable 2.10, or else, if you really want, the totally stable 1.90. Mind you, I'm still making my quest in a beta, but all I do is map-work and a few other things, which is enough to occupy me until 2.5(My quest is huge). I leave things that are likely to be buggy(such as cut-scenes) to 2.5
I really don't care either way, but as long as it gets out a stable version quicker, I'm for it. It might be nice to get to see some of the new features you tease us about (jman) that much quicker
I like having betas often, but I don't like main betas coming out like hotcakes so that you have to change all of your settings often to accommodate. A new main beta every 3 weeks is good, and I've associated that betas with even numbers are more stable than odd numbered ones. So odds should be the "experimental betas" and evens should be stable betas.
I say make beta 17 or 16d as stable as you can to make everyone happy for the time being. Then do the smaller unstable releases in between. That way, people that want to continue working on their quests can do so on the beta 17 or beta 16d. And the unstable ones sounds good because I will do my part to crack down on the bugs. This sounds good, because a lot of people want to see a stable release and with these more releases, they would find bugs quicker. I just hope that the beta bug forum can get up to date with the bugs that are fixed and not fixed.
When beta 16 first came out, I looked around and couldn't see the forest for all the trees. There were so many bugs staring me in the face that I really wondered why you needed our help "refining" it, since it most of the new features didn't work. It's pretty hard figuring out some features without a help file when we didn't help program them, so it's 10 times more frustrating when the features are unpredictably buggy to boot.
I know that beta testing means unstable versions, but I'm afraid that if they become even more unstable, casual beta testers aren't going to want to bother with anything until a stable release.
ShadowTiger made some really good points. You may lose a few useful testers if you make the beta versions even less capable of working with actual quest material. Like it or not, many of the people who work with quests and scripts in between stable releases actually take a risk in order to do creative projects, which are a more accurate rendition of what ZC should ultimately be capable of. I daresay we might not have an amazing script that plays Pong in ZC if it had become impossible in a beta released later that week.
I'd suggest we give out incremental betas regularly (once a week or more) so those interested in bugtesting can do it to full effect, and report new bugs/fixed bugs as fast as possible. Then we could give out more stable betas, say, once a month for those interested in playing/questmaking.
This is of course all a bit academic until we actually have a stable beta to work from, but after that I'd be all for incremental betas.
I don't agree with this. I'm treading in shallow water as it stands by downloading new versions of ZC every month, but every week and my parents would hate me as we'd get a virus or something (we have a bad history of downloading things)
So please for the love of keeping Limzo with you (I know you all love me on the inside *gets shot* *gets shot* *gets shot*) do not do this!