Epic Airship to Airship Combat
So that wraps up our 3rd closed beta weekend! We hope that everyone had a wonderful time. Again, we thank everyone for participating and helping us weed out bugs. As usual, we had a lot but we’re now incredibly focused and actually have a bit more time to fix and improve things overall. We’re very excited about the possibilities that await us during the 4th beta weekend coming in about three weeks time.
Check out some screenshots from this weekend!
More after the jump…
The game server is down – we’ll be bringing it back up tomorrow morning.
See you on the flip side.
Okay here goes the details for this weekend’s beta testing.
Servers are expected to be up at approximately 12pm EST on Friday May 25th and will go back down at about 11:59m EST on Monday May 28th. We’ve decided to extend this weekend’s beta due to the fact that it’s a public holiday on Monday (Memorial day) and many of you have told us that y’all will be out of town during the weekend.
More after the jump…
So there concludes another successful closed beta weekend. First off with a huge thank you to all our players who spent the time playing through another rough build and submitting your bugs and suggestions on Get Satisfaction. If you still have more to report, please feel free to do so—we just won’t be looking at it as often right now 😛
More information after the jump…
While many of you have been swinging pipe wrenches at engines and balloons, I’ve been swinging my own wrench at our server code.
Another patch was applied about 5:30 PM EST. This is a server-only patch; you will not see any download through Steam.
This is primarily to continue improving matchmaking; it also attempts to address some of the unexpected disconnects we’ve been getting reports of.
One change that you may notice in particular: the matchmaking system will favor assigning gunners and engineers to matches that have not yet started over matches that are in progress.
Your feedback and patience as we work this stuff out has been awesome. Report any further bugs (or requests) to our GetSatisfaction tracker and we’ll keep squashing ’em.
We applied a patch to the beta servers about 5:30 PM, to fix some issues that were both nasty and (thankfully) pretty easy to fix. Fixes include:
– AI crew can no longer leave guns pointing upward and impossible to use (we like to call that one NaN gun!)
– Addressed frequent snap-to-origin while moving around the ship
– Joining as gunner or engineer no longer takes you to a match that has already finished.
– The engineer’s pipe wrench could fail to rebuild a component properly; this has been fixed.
If you encounter further issues, post about them here: http://getsatisfaction.com/musegames
Patch will be made sometime soon to fix some small issues.
Things that won’t make it this weekend
Unfortunately, invite/join friend doesn’t work. Normally you would do this through the steam overlay but because we had to overhaul our lobby system, we just don’t have the time to put this functionality back. It sucks but that’s just how things worked out in the end. Kind of really sucky, actually.
Check our Twitter and/or Facebook for latest updates.
Congrats to everyone who is in this weekend! Here is a rough summary of what to expect.
Servers go up on May 11th at 12PM EST and go down again at May 13th at 11:59pm. We’ll do our best to keep them running and also make any patches in there are performance issues like last time. Ultimately, servers should only be down for maybe 30 minutes if patches are made.
The most important thing is that Mac builds are ready this week. We’re crossing our fingers hoping they don’t explode again.
Info after the break…
Many of you are probably wondering what I’m doing with weapons balancing right now. Some guns, ahem, were seriously overpowered while others were just piles of steaming buns.
The graph to the left is data we collected from the first beta. I believe it’s every time the gun was fired or engaged, that’s why we get into the 1000’s range. Either way, the Small Howitzer has been tweaked accordingly.
Okay here it is. The following are various changes we’re going to implement in the next closed beta weekend based on the various feedback and bugs we saw.
Interface & Matchmaking