Seriously what happened Rocket?

[Max Railgrave 78]

Some programmers like to super stabilize everything from the get-go. Others like to sandbox it up, see how their players react to different stimuli and concepts that are added.

Rocket seems to be taking the latter approach. Notch (of Minecraft) took the same road.

Minecraft, when it was in alpha, broke nearly every update. People raged. A LOT. Hell, I was one of them. Then, when it stabilized later, we rejoiced. It took a long time, but it was stabilized. Adding features first and stabilizing later is just a different way of looking at coding. If Rocket thinks he can stabilize it afterwards, then he can. If that alone was good enough for Notch (and look how FSCKING POPULAR Minecraft is!) it's good enough for DayZ.

In a few years of development, when DayZ is in or past Beta, few will be those who desire the first Alpha releases of DayZ. They're always free to create their own zombie game, at any rate.

[Tigerr13 1]

If the mod had stayed where it was four weeks ago, I can guarantee that nobody would be playing it now. - Rocket

Agreed, it was getting stale and the bean wars was not favourable to any degree.

[aragos 1]

Good points all Max.

Alpha means that. This isn't a finished, complete game. It is a mod of a game, in fact. Consequently, you are going to have issues where the mod doesn't exactly work with the core game (I'm sure you guys with more modding experience than I have can attest to how hard it is sometimes).

Games don't come, like the goddess Athena, fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. They take time, money and effort to get to a workable stage. Sadly, too many game companies push products out the door in order to make quarterly profits, et al. The result is a lot of the crap games we've all had to put up with over the past 5 years--buggy, crashes, missing adverstised features, poor multiplayer, and so on.

You have two options, really. First you can push it out the door. Let's be totally honest here. This is probably the best Alpha I've seen...ever. Most Alpha's (full disclosure, I've been a pre-Alpha, Alpha and Beta tester) are basically non-functional garbage. Graphics glitches, crashes, hell even BSOD's thanks to crappy code. All part of the fixing process. Good companies fix it in testing and then sell it.

Option 2 is you get a "finished product" that is in rotten shape on release, pushed to gold before it was ready, and which pisses off the community and kills sales. We've all seen it and lived it--all the hype and excitement for a game that you can't get loaded on your PC or has a rotten AI or crashes every 5 minutes.

IMHO, I prefer the 'bug squashing' alpha we are in now over a 'lookie at the kewl newest thing hipster. Buy it!' crap piece of game that gives you 4 hours of play for $70 (umm...Fable 3 anyone?)

[earion 3]

As I said' date=' there is no such thing as a standard release lifecycle. In different projects, alpha will have different meanings.

[/quote']

You say this, yet you seem to rail and foam against the precise definition DayZ is attempting to implement. Everyone gets their own except DayZ has to fit yours? Or am I missing something?

Yes, you just missed the fact that I am not railing and foaming. I'm no English native speaker, I learn to write while reading this forums : this might just be the reason my tone seems unadequate :D )

What I want, is merely giving an example of another conception of the word "alpha".

I don't say it is the most adequate for DayZ, it is just food for thought based on the intuition that having 200 000 alpha testers in the current state of the alpha is unrealistic, and that the feature -> bugfix -> feature cycle would be a better approach. Rocket thread about the infected detection not working as intended because it is now fixed, has confirmed my intuition.

While my company makes money developping the product, it is an open source and free software. Our alpha testers are the community as well. We just decided releasing buggy software to a large user base was not productive because we were flooded by people complaints. This was unusable, and people were leaving. So nobody was helping us anymore building the product we could reasonably provide to customers that would pay support for it. And as an FOSS project we can't hire alpha-testers, we take advantage of the community just for that.

What we really intended by releasing alphas was :

1/ More thorough bug detection, additionnaly, on a large scale

2/ Opinions and discussion about new feature and how they were implemented.

In my case, which is not DayZ, even internal QA is utterly pissed at me when I hand them a build that contains a blocking bug that prevent them from running past the first point of a testing scenario that may contain 50. I'm pissed as well, because we both lost time.

[Virfortis 111]

crap piece of game that gives you 4 hours of play for $70 (umm...Fable 3 anyone?)

I'll see your Fable 3 and raise you a Deus Ex: Invisible War.

[Rilenz 0]

I can see Robersdee's point although the rage is'nt called for at all with it only being in alpha as we cant expect it to be polished. I was directed to this game by friends and love it, brilliant idea, but the new patch is a bit of a backward turn in terms of gameplay for me, you HAVE to be very very VERY lucky to spawn somewhere near the spawn of some kind of weapon, otherwise you simply have no chance to get anywhere without having a trail of zombies chasing us down, I managed to survive for a good half hour today but only because i found a hatchet round the corner, the 6 tries after that, i spawned and almost immediately had to go on the run every time from zombies being aggroed from a football field away, at the very least we should be spawning with an element of defense against these buffed senses super olympic sprinting carcasses, hatchet or a gun and a mag and 1 bandage is all that's needed to get us on our way, at the moment it's been made far too hard and now bordering on being unplayable (for me anyway) whereas before the patch it was pretty cool, you could fend the initial zombies off giving you time to find things to help you carry on, I will keep having a go in its current state but it is'nt really that enjoyable anymore having to esc-respawn only a few mins in because death is the only outcome you can see when you have nothing of use to stay alive, yes we want it to be hardcore hard but we also want to be able to play it :)

this is constructive criticism, forum trolls need not reply :P

---

EDIT: I showed my sister it today cos she loves zombie films and games and she asked me "why are the zombies sprinting?" she has a valid point, they should start to move faster when they see or smell your arse but sprint like gold medalists? again just criticism!

[KaeSlick 0]

Odd...I haven't had any issues surviving or finding any gear with the new update. I actually have a harder time surviving against snipers than anything. Don't even know why people are bitching and crying so much about not having a gun when you spawn.

If you are having issues I suggest you go on a populated server, it'll be easier to forage.

[earion 3]

Good points all Max.

Yes' date=' and thank you all for the constructive replies.

Alpha means that. This isn't a finished, complete game. [...] Too many game companies push products out the door [...] The result is a lot of the crap games [...] -buggy, crashes, missing adverstised features, poor multiplayer, and so on.

ArmA II was not a crappy game, but it was (is ?) buggy, crashed a lot, and so on.

You have two options' date=' really. First you can push it out the door. Let's be totally honest here. This is probably the best Alpha I've seen...ever. [...']

Totally agreed. I cannot even beginning to tell how sometime, this alpha looks like some other fully released product, which is a problem for some people as they now have some expectations that are not in the scope of the projects current status.

IMHO' date=' I prefer the 'bug squashing' alpha we are in now [...']

Well, bug squashing is inevitable during alpha. What I say is that the more complex your system is, the more bugs you will get. And DayZ is no simple system, particularly because of the whole cross-server-persistent characters on a large scale. Because of this scale among other things, in-house black-box/white-box testing surely can't prevent all bugs from slipping to mass-community testing. Now, it is one more reason to work on early detection of those bugs that are unrelated to the scalability aspects.

Some programmers like to super stabilize everything from the get-go. Others like to sandbox it up' date=' see how their players react to different stimuli and concepts that are added.

[/quote']

What I say is that the 1st approach can be more productive, and that there is a difference between 'feature stable' (which thanks God is not gonna happen in DayZ alpha) and 'stable' as in 'avoid blocking bugs during feature addition/tweaking'. Let's say, 2 years ago, I had the same workflow as the latter you describe : add features like crazy, hand it to testers, debug.

The test driven development approach I have now - write tests, add features, run tests, debug, hand it to testers, debug is just longer in terms of words, as I and my team are now faster to add feature. I was very reluctant to adopt this approach, as I think it would be a waste of time and ideas, and was a bit forced into it : now I'll never turn back.

Rocket seems to be taking the latter approach. Notch (of Minecraft) took the same road.

Minecraft' date=' when it was in alpha, broke nearly every update. People raged. A LOT. Hell, I was one of them.

[/quote']

Interesting. Wasn't attracted by minecraft at all, so I can tell, but maybe the MineCraft community raged in a more meaningful and mature fashion than here ? Really, I don't know, wasn't there. So in a few words, would you mind saying how you feel the two communities are comparable, and what the major differences are ?

When BIS splinters and assigns an entire team to DayZ and starts to funnel some of the incredible revenue that DayZ has generated for them into the product (as one could argue they rightly should)' date=' then we can start demanding a professional-quality Alpha release cycle.

[/quote']

Just throwing money and people alone will not necessarily help.Add more stuff in a mess, you'll get a bigger mess. The way I see it, if a small team can begin to design efficient core processes, it will only be easier to add people to the team and take advantage of the additional funding.

That being said, even if I didn't agree with you on everything, I really liked your replies here, much more interesting that the "it's an alpha shut the fuck up you n00b" stuff I see here.

[Max Railgrave 78]

Can't really make a comparison for you, 3rwww1. The Minecraft community raged pretty damn hard though. There are people today who say that Notch "can't code." Whether or not that is the case, I don't know (I haven't looked at his code).

Either way, Rocket seems to care passionately for his mod and his vision. He'll stabilize it.

[Solid.nl 2]

The main problem is having so many people playing it at this time...

People simply cannot handle having something in one patch then having it taken away again.

and what rwww says is true that right now because its basically a open alpha you could expect some form of stable releases.. However its still a alpha and some company's might do it differently but a company most of the time has more funding to back them up and other assets to help them out. Rocket does not really have any of this so give the guy some slack, we all want this mod to succeed so why not play it under the impression that its not done and if you find something that ain't working report it and don't be a dick about it.

Even if rocket were to extensively test every update he puts out.... There are going to be flaws in it. Especially when working alone or in small team, even the big software developers make mistakes because of oversights.

To me alpha stage is about trying things out see if part of code work, if some features would make the game better or maybe even worse. This can mean that in order to learn something you have to break something first even if this is unintentional.

[walrus2517 27]

Based on the pending features and fixes in 1.7.1.5 I imagine today is the day all the folks who in the past 48 hours swore they'd never play this mod again come back and start singing its praises.

Of course, Rocket will make a change next week and they'll all threaten to ragequit again.

[earion 3]

Can't really make a comparison for you' date=' 3rwww1. The Minecraft community raged pretty damn hard though. There are people today who say that Notch "can't code." Whether or not that is the case, I don't know (I haven't looked at his code).

[/quote']

Ahahahah :) Well it seems he actually has a frigging large piece of code running that I couldn't even begin to write. I wonder how many people saying that actually had the chance at all to really have a look at the code... So whether or not I/they would actually throw up looking at his code is another question, but totally irrelevant.

That being said, irrelevant as it is, the point raised by these guys at least looks a bit more educated than all the "fuck u rocket ur piss of sheet" stuff people post here all day long.

[Black Ice 0]

just one question from me...

like the hatchet, will the hunting knife also be available to use as a weapon?

[DangerosoDavo 0]

precisely' date=' hence why the analogy works. Dayz belongs to the players now, like it or not.

[/quote']

No It does not.