WhiteZero

PAX Panel video will be out tomorrow morning https://twitter.com/hugh_jeremy/status/509139673784913920

At this point I think he's just staunchly entrenched in a pissing contest with Accolyte. Basically Doomlord think that he (we?) should be the equivalent of low-level internal testers; rather than the paying customers who get preview builds and get to leave feedback on that we are. Maybe Doomlord has the qualifications to be an internal tester, but the vast majority of the 2.5M+ players are not and would be crazy to try and sort through the feedback submitted by that many people if we got tons of broken internal builds. I'd think that most of the issues with internal builds don't need millions of people to test and bug test, because those issues will be readily apparent. He keeps harping on the canteen fallowever glitch, would could have been caused by any number of things outside of canteen specific code (such as an associated animation script), I assume there are lot of dependencies for these kinds of things.

I think you're still way over estimating what DayZ internal QA does. Obviously they aren't like QA for a retail game where they make sure every aspect of the game is functioning properly. E.G. with the canteen fallover bug, clearly QA isn't there to test every little specific thing like Drink All specifically from the Canteen. They're there to ensure that builds are actually long-term playable/testable for us.

Yeah I thought they basically said "We'll hand over the Mod to the community" way back. If that still hasn't happened, it should. Although maybe thats why we have so many DayZ spinoff mods available. Isn't the source available?

There is no point in trying to define a game soley as "PvE" or "PvP" or "PvZ" when all these elements come together to make the full experience. Zombies are part of the Environment, the Environment pushes Player interaction, Player interaction may (often) result in combat.

Yeah, he seems to have gotten sick of all the ridiculous posts people make in /r/dayz sometimes. But I still see him commenting on Development more there than anywhere

Seems to depend on the Staff member. Dean and Eugen still seem to mostly post on Reddit

This might not be the time or place to ask this, but I feel compelled: Is the plan to enter Beta before all the new engine modules are in place? I recall Dean saying on a Sacriel stream that the new renderer wouldn't be available until next year.

Thanks for the reply, Hicks. I'm interested that you say we're 11 months into a 3 year development cycle. Is that 3 years total for Full Release? I'm wondering if that got pushed up at some point? The BI Company Brochure said "DayZ is expected to reach beta at the end of 2014," that was as of May 2014.

Except it's not such a binary choice. Just because Alpha patches go through a modicum of QA testing to make sure everyone doesn't CTD at boot doesn't mean the "It's Alpha" doesn't hold any water. "True Alpha" is a completely contrived definition, since the developers choose how to define their development milestones, and clearly players such as yourself deem to have their own definition as well. Define it however you like for your own amusement, but we all click "I Agree" to that disclaimer when we boot up the game. Thats not to say the developers have no accountability for the state of the game, but I'd say we're reasonably within the purview of that disclaimer. We are indeed more "alpha players" than "alpha testers," because "testers" are all expected to provide proper feedback on a regular basis, while there is not requirement or even serious expectation that the majority of DayZ Early Access players will give proper feedback. You could even go as far as to only define a proper "tester" as someone who is on the BI Staff and whose job is indeed "Tester." That doesn't preclude the "Alpha" tag from having its full weight. EDIT: Case in point, even Exp patches aren't released if there is a major client crash present. QA is necessary to make sure our test builds are actually testable.

Yeah there needs to be a more "realtime" issue tracker that is more accessible than the Feedback Tracker. There is however the DevTracker where you can easily read up on what the devs are saying across social media.

Your logic seems to be that because something hasn't been fully addressed in a public patch that they are not working on it? Thats a very flawed assumption. As I've pointed out elsewhere around here, Eugen has confirmed several times on Reddit (One, Two) that the issues with zombies are multi-facted and are indeed being addressed, if not already fixed internally. This generally seems to be something too many people misunderstand: Just because something isn't included in a patch does not mean it's something that the developers aren't actively working on.

To all this "we're not truly testers" jazz: Yeah, maybe we're not. At least not the front-line testers. You don't release a totally un QA'ed update to over 2.5 million people. If they did, we'd have even more ridiculous "the game is broken" complains in the community. I'm glad they have internal QA to make sure we still have something playable on the Exp/Stable branch. Do you really want to be playing with an unfinished replacement renderer right now? Something that very few players could give the proper technical feedback on to the developers. Not me. Simply reporting issues on the Feedback tracker is "participating in the development cycle," as bug-chasing is part of development, plus all the metrics gathered. They never told you you'd be participating in the design process. However, I've seen several developers respond to suggestions with a "thats a great idea" attitude. At the end of the day, the DayZ team are the actual professional developers and designers, so I'm glad that not every bit of repugnant feedback that comes from the community is actually considered. I think the actual constructive feedback is considered, however. In the Week of August 25th Status Report, Hicks did say that they are planning to be more transparent about the development process with us, which is great. Aside from the occasional Twitter or Reddit post I don't think we get quite enough insight into what they're doing behind the scenes, though the weekly Status Report is a great step forward with that.

So because something isn't done now, that means they are purposefully being slow with their work? That makes no sense. Major things take a long time to finish.

Really living up to that "Live Test & Support Lead" title. ;)

Thats fine. But I don't think a day or two with Dean and Hicks being gone is going to cause the development machine to break down.

Eh? Teams are not like a gear mechanism. People are capable of operating just fine on their own. For example, where I work, I maybe see my boss once a week.

Hicks is Sicks https://twitter.com/ctorchia/status/507947446925017088

Guys, semantics arguments don't really add to the conversation. Obviously its a game, it's something you can play right now, it's just not a finished game.

Anger and let-down expectations can get the better of anyone. I think having the proper expectations is key to sticking with an Early Access game like this. We all pretty much deal with the same problems. But it's those of us that have the insight to see the probable future that can easily shrug off those negative experiences. If you ever get mad at a game in development like this, take a breather, maybe stop playing for a few weeks or a couple months, whatever you need.

Helicopter Hunter is my current title, my username is WhiteZero. :) Yes, I've provided words, the words of the developers. We've seen various results from them in this time, from 64-bit servers, to navmesh, physics and ragdoll, etc. The thing is, these are relatively small implementations that don't take nearly as many manhours as the changes that are still coming down the pipe. And 9 months is nothing in terms of engine development. "Then honestly, can you really believe they will have been working on the core since January 2013" Yes, because you're otherwise calling them lairs and I have no reason to believe the team is being willfully dishonest with us. Shit happens during development, you set milestone dates/goals and un-forseen complications can popup that throw that off. I've seen enough games built from the ground-up to witness this. I remember Natural Selection 2 was quite the long-haul when they made an engine from scratch, that took 4 years.

The core server and engine components are being constantly worked on. Like I've pointed out several times, there are dedicated teams for this work. Do you want the texture artists, modelers, sound engineers, gameplay scripters, etc to stop what their doing until the core is totally bugfixed and optimized? Because that makes no sense whatsoever. As Eugen has said when asked about the status of these core modules: It. Takes. Time. And content production should not stop during that time.

You have to consider that this is Bohemia Interactive, they've made their own engines before, why would they outsource the engine when they can make it purpose built? It might take more time, but it better support the team's vision.

Correct, you need constructive feedback. It's just a pity most of the "feedback" I see on DayZ is complaining about the same known issues or calling the Devs lazy. Maybe 20% of the feedback I see is constructive.

I guess you've overlooked this part of the forum? http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/forum/138-devtracker/ But yes, communication from the team is very important, and I want more of it too! As Hicks said in the last Status Report: "Starting in September, several new initiatives to increase transparency and accessibility into the development process will be rolled out, including the dev team twitch stream schedule located on devhub.dayz.com. (twitch.tv/dayz)." I expect to see this fulfilled soon, now that they're back from PAX.