A New Beta Philosophy?

[jman2050]

Right now, we tend to release betas sort of as milestones. Different representations of the developmental progress of the program. How about we try something different.

Instead of releasing milestone betas like we have been with tons of new features, why don't we release betas incrementally? Heck, I'll go as far as releasing builds directly derived from our SVN builds. Each new build will be released in short periods of time, instead of having to wait long periods between betas. Furthermore, it'll allow everyone to quickly verify the destruction of quaranteed bugs, and to catch new ones when they occur to avoid them being too tightly integrated into the program.

What do you all think of this? Should we release betas in this fashion from now on? It'll make quest building more difficult, and intensifies the risk of quest or save file corruption, but I think it'll result in much faster progress.

[blue_knight]

I'd recommend having major builds, which are deemed to be pretty safe and compatible with previous major builds. Then you have incremental builds which are basically the completely unsafe builds. So you still have your milestones which are important for organizing progress and having goals to meet but then you have the incremental builds for pure beta-testing and "feature preview". Example major builds - 16c0, 16d0; Incremental builds between would then be 16c1, 16c2, 16c3, etc. Does this make sense to you?

[Petoe]

I'd recommend having major builds, which are deemed to be pretty safe and compatible with previous major builds. Then you have incremental builds which are basically the completely unsafe builds. So you still have your milestones which are important for organizing progress and having goals to meet but then you have the incremental builds for pure beta-testing and "feature preview". Example major builds - 16c0, 16d0; Incremental builds between would then be 16c1, 16c2, 16c3, etc. Does this make sense to you?

Agreed.

[jman2050]

It would mostly be semantics at this point. The issue isn't with what they're called, but how often they're released

[blue_knight]

The difference would be having major builds where extra effort was taken to ensure stability, compatibility and completeness (relative to the features in that release and not 2.5 of course). On the other hand incremental builds can be "experimental" and may break saves or compatibility or maybe be less tested for stability. If you think of a game company, its the difference between an external milestone (that a publisher would see) and an internal milestone - most likely a buggy development snapshot but it still must be internally tested and new and/or experimental or partially complete features are introduced and tested. Do you know what I mean?

[Nicholas Steel]

if they release only relatively safe builds then there may be bugs that are very hard to fix due to them being buried and/or tied to multiple parts in the code... thus early detection is needed... so i say release them more frequently.

[Freedom]

History as I see it.
The b10b was a pretty solid build
b11 not as good
b12 A, B, C, and D were all trash and as a result I closed ZC and didn't touch it for two months
After that Christmas was coming up, so I thought a stable release was planned, so when I started again it was with the b15, and again the build wasn't as good as 10b, it had a lot more stuff, sure, but almost none of it seemed to work right.

b16 even worse

b16b slightly better but still a lot of bugs with these "new" features, and subscreen crashes from hell.

b16c, can't even walk one screen in the player without crashing and in that short distance noticed Links walk is all screwed up as well.

So.... I guess it doesn't matter if we get 1 beta a month or 10 since the likelyhood of one ever being stable seems pretty remote at this time.

I've decided tonight on a LONG vacation from Zelda Classic, because to be honest all it ever does is piss me off anymore.
Every time a new beta comes out I have to go back and fix dozens of things in my quest that I thought I was done with, and I'm just spinning my wheels.

I'm turning agnostic.... SHOW me a solid release, and then I'll start using it again.

It's been fun, and thanks for your efforts guys, but it's become nothing but frustating to me.

[blue_knight]

Franpa, maybe I wasn't clear enough but I was actually agreeing with having builds more often, in the form of "incremental" builds. What I was saying is that there would still be relatively safe, stable and complete builds at regular intervals. Think of it as "big milestones", kind of like what we have now and then "mini-milestones" in-between. Like some software companies release "daily builds" internally so content creators can start using testing/learning new features and get quick-fixes but still have "milestones" in which some portion of the program is complete, stable and bug-free as possible. I believe that you still need big milestones to not only mark progress but to have specific overall program goals. Is this more clear?

[Nicholas Steel]

yep.

[DarkFlameWolf]

major stable beta milestones with smaller unstable releases inbetween. Sounds good to me.