On Monday we released the first “open beta” and promised you regular updates in terms of code and content. In today’s blog we would like to explain this process in more detail to give you more insight into this process and our plans to get from this open beta to the first stable release.

The implementation of the DX11 and VR engine obviously is a big project that touched many areas of the codebase and in terms of features we added everything we wanted to have in our first release. Once that was done, our focus shifted to performance and ensuring the code runs in a stable way on every system out there. At this point, no matter how many great testers you have, you discover that you can never test your code on all possible combinations of hardware and software. For that reason we decided to release an “open beta”.

Our strategy in the upcoming weeks will be to release small updates often. Whenever we fix an issue, we’ll quickly test it internally and push a new build, so you can confirm that it is indeed fixed. This way we might end up pushing one or more builds every day. On our forum we will keep a changelog as we publish those builds. To make it easier to report issues, we have added a “Contact Support” button to the Launcher (top right of the main window) and, for performance related issues, we added a feature that allows you to collect performance data in a file that you can send along with your report.

To enable the capture of performance data, please first press Ctrl+F to display the framerate information (which we’ve extended a bit). Then, as instructed on screen, press your Left-Shift+SPACE to start capturing data. After a little while, the capture will end and you get a file in your UserData\Log folder called PerfLog_DATETIME.txt which you can send to us along with your report. Then you can turn off the display by pressing Ctrl+F again.

In the mean time our content team is working hard on making more of the stock content available to you. Our plan here is to stick to roughly a weekly schedule for delivering updates. Those will be a bit bigger in size, and we will deliver them to both the stable DX9 build and the open beta simultaneously. Content updates will obviously also contain information about exactly what content gets updated.

Beta Labels Explained

If you’re currently running the open beta release, you are on “v1108-dx11-open-beta” and this is the label we will be regularly updating as we address more and more issues. If for some reason this build is not working for you at all, after reporting it, you can optionally switch to the “v1108-dx11-open-beta-last-stable” build, which will point to an older build. If that does not work, you can obviously choose to temporarily “opt-out” of the beta releases altogether and go back to the stable release until we release another update.

If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us on our forum or on Discord.