Utopia Developers’ Update 29th July
And here we go with this week’s blog from Brian and Sean!
Comments in the thread please
Hi All,
We hope you enjoyed the interview with Alliance Rankings last week. They sure had a lot of questions about leprechauns.
It’s been a week of intense bug fixing here, and we’ve made a lot of progress. As is normal for these things, we had lots of bugs to start with, and could resolve most of them easily enough. As you fix more and more of them, what you get left with are the harder ones, which take more time. Last week we have over 150 bugs files from the alpha test in our system… now we have just less than 30, but they are slightly tougher than average to solve.
Our hope is to get that bug count down into the single digits by the end of this week, and then invite in a lot more people from the pool of about 200 who registered their interest with us by email. That larger group is going to turn up many more bugs that a smaller group can’t, especially with respect to wars. Once we get the bug count down to single digits again while all 200 testers are playing, we’ll want to start to push it even harder, and will open it up for general access.
You can still take part in the Alpha testing by sending a mail to utopiadev@utopia-game.com with ALPHA in the subject line.
That’s all the news we have this week, so on to your questions.
Questions:
Scontan: Once the code is up and running smooth, what roles, if any will you, Sean n Brian, if any have in Omac/Utopia?
We’ll continue to work on future features of Utopia. We’ll also be responsible for changes between ages on the new code.
Scontan: Will there be changes for the restart? what might they be?
Yoda: What will be the changes for the new age?
raiman: Will there be changes to the races for the new “short” age?
Fate1316: What will the changes be, if any for the next age?
Roisin will be providing changes to the restart of WoL. These changes will announced on the forum.
Luth: And I still don’t see any schedule for ending Gen? can we get an idea there as well?
Luth: is it going to end in July as stated on the front page?
Luth: is it going to end in tandem with WoL? (in which case the changes to the front page are wrong)
Luth: is it still going to go on indefinitely?
Scontan: When do you guesstimate that the beta will go public?
raiman: And whats happening with the new code transition isn’t helping at all …. Will there be any relief from this soon? Or is further decay to be expected?
Stella: Is the 6 week plan truly realistic?
Stella: When will gen start over? are there no plans at all, or is gen waiting on the new code?
The short answer is that Genesis will end when we’re ready to move the new code into public beta. The Alpha testers have been making great strides finding bugs, and in the last ten days or so we’ve fixed the vast majority of them. We’ll be increasing the number of Alpha testers until we’ve used them all and the game is stable. We predict that this will take 2 - 2.5 weeks. Genesis will then be restarted on the new code and will be open to all.
Katt: am I wrong about the loss of delete posts?
You’re right about that Katt. We lost the ability to delete individual posts in a thread. This wasn’t intentional, just a feature that accidentally got lost along the way. We’ll add it our to-do list.
Ezzerland: Do you feel your changes to the in-game forums are beneficial to those whom use them? Your “don’t like it, don’t use it” attitude will not exactly be beneficial to anyone in utopia, period. It’s also significantly different from your answer in the interview regarding player suggestions. Don’t you think?
Fundamentally the in-game forum has not changed very much. We’ve added new features - text formatting and a monarch censor button. The text formatting at least should be beneficial to users. We’ve accidentally dropped the post deletion feature, but we intend to add it back. Our attitude since the AR interview hasn’t changed at all. We’re happy to listen to suggestions and take advice on board. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll agree with that advice or indeed heed it. In this case the censor button is an additional feature - not something to be getting overly worked up about.
Ezzerland: Would it not be more professional to say something like “We are working on the new code and will repeat WoL on the current code until after the beta has been completed on genesis. At that time we will move the server onto the new code, when it is ready to harbor the entire community.”
uhgmebashu: [had similar suggestion]
It certainly is easier not to be wrong if you say nothing at all. Hoewever, we’ve tried to keep the community as informed as possible and to be honest we doubt many people would have been happy about being kept in the dark about progress with the new code while there were few (if any) bugs being fixed in the old code.
raiman: There was talk of inactives being tradeable, is that happening anytime soon?
That’s not planned for the first release of the new code.