This is simply what I understand beta release to require. I might be missing part of the picture and I might simply be mistaken, so please do not take this as gospel. - Omni ​



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1. What still needs to be done before beta release? Please try to refrain from calling something a spoiler. Use code names if you have to, but we would appreciate a little perspective. ​



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Quite a bit. We need to gear up tier 2 and tier 3 story quests, flesh out quests in general, party mechanics. Lots of stuff. The roadmap has much of this information already. We want the universe to feel "lived in" much more than it currently does. I mean, some things that seem simple still need adding, like, "configurable keys." Or even, "gui for more options." Just a million little things to actually bring the game to a shippable level of polish, and turn it from a bunch of systems into an actual game that you can have fun playing.

2. Has the number of things needing to be done before beta changed at all in the past few months, and if so, how and why?​

Not really. It's always been a pretty long drudge. ​



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3. How stable do you think the game needs to be in regards to crashes and bugs at beta release?​

Crash stability isn't really what I am worried about. I'm more worried about world generation stability. I don't want to have situations where we invalidate save files more often than absolutely necessary. Not having a public release gives us the freedom to invalidate save files on a whim if it will make the game better. And we do so very regularly. ​

I'm worried about data/time loss. There's nothing more frustrating than losing progress because of a crash bug. I don't really care if the game crashes if you can pick up right where you left off, but if you lose progression, that's really horrible, and it's caused me to ragequit otherwise wonderful games. ​



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4. Why does the release date estimate for beta and final keep changing?​

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. ​

Here are a few good examples: ​

Starting off with the new action bar mechanics. I honestly expected it to be an afternoon project. Instead, it took me like an entire freaking week to hammer out and touched 4 different layers of code (/client, /core, /game, /frontend), and it went through 5 different iterations. And caused me to create 12x12 matrices to figure out proper behavior. ​

Other things that took me far longer than expected. I rewrote much of the Gui code a few months back. Now we're using what amounts to a primitive toolkit, complete with arbitrary encapsulation, extensibility, etc. It operates like a subset of Qt, and it's completely data driven. That took me nearly a month. But it was required for things like scroll areas and such that the old Gui simply was simply not powerful enough to handle. ​

It took me a day or two to begin porting our 7 or 8 separate implementations of a progress bar over to the one progress bar implementation to rule the world, one that you can actually put in JSON and configure (modders rejoice). Now we only have like 5 or 6 separate implementations, which I'm going to pare down as I touch nearby code. ​

I mean that's just Gui stuff. There's a lot of little things. Sometimes things that look to be finished wind up having problems. For instance, the action bar changes I mentioned wound up breaking the matter manipulator, because (and this took me hours and hours of agonizing debugging to uncover) the item was being double initialized and it was trying to read the location of the wrong hand. Making the beam start from the center of the player rather than from the end of the hand. This is a bug that was always there, but it was only exposed by the action bar changes. ​



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5. What was the point in having the i49 "world premiere" be a Yogscast event as opposed to having you guys show off the games' fundamental feature such as procedural world generation?​

Because love them or hate them, Yogscast has fans that don't know Starbound. It was very good exposure for us. I mean, we already have days worth of live stream footage of devs just playing around in the game showing off things like procedural world generation. ​



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6. Do you feel that feature creep is a non-issue or has possibly led to delays?​

Our feature list hasn't really gotten much bigger. ​



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7. What constitutes a game-breaking bug, in your opinion​

Anything crash that causes time investment loss. ​



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8. Do you believe releasing a beta as-is would be faster at finding and squashing bugs than a beta released upon "feature completion"​

We're not waiting on feature completion as far as I'm aware. I'm pretty sure we're just going to get the first 3 tiers going. ​



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9. How do you feel about games that allow for a sort of alpha-release testing?​

If it works for them, great. I don't think it will work for us though. There's really two things that will keep a person playing this game, and keep excitement up about it. The ability to build worlds, and the ability to play story. Currently, we only have the first, and that's hampered by the aforementioned constant invalidation of save files because of serialization differences. ​



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10. Why is releasing a demo much like the one Yogscast and those at i49 considered not feasible? Some people feel as if the given reasons were not adequate, so perhaps an expanded explanation of your reasoning would be more accepted.​

The i49/Yogcast demo had a game breaking bug in it that was discovered 5 minutes before we started the demo. It only shows up using certain build options, but those are the build options we're going to have to use for the beta. It has to do with strong authentication being turned off, and then a user leaving a multiplayer session. ​

In Linux it works fine, because I wrote the code and tested it on Linux while flying to i49, because I needed to bypass mandatory authentication to work without internet on the plane.* ​

In Windows it crashes the server, corrupts the world file, and kicks everyone off without saving their character file. ​

Needless to say, if you felt a ball of extreme stress just to the left of Molly off camera during the stream, that was me. Also bart was incredibly stressed too. ​

Additionally, there's some sort of memory leak or resource leak in the Windows build of the server, because the resource usage just goes up and up, it was fine for an hour, but much more and I was getting really nervous. ​

Finally, tier 1 is only partially finished, we're using a boss that's probably not even going to be the tier 1 boss. There's no side quests, nothing outside of the main tutorial line of quests. We don't have serialization stability. Party mechanics are only accessible via chat commands, as are much of everything else. The state the game is in is kinda cool to kick around in for about an hour. But it really isn't ready to be released to the general public. ​



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11. Increased forum-based interaction is something people would like to see. Would this detract too much from development time to be possible?​

I try. I really do. ​



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12. Is the "Beta 2013, release... sometime after that" statement considered the correct current response?​

As far as I'm aware. ​



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13. How many "tiers" of gameplay should we expect to be in a beta? Are we going to have all 10 (11 with post-game), or will some of the later tiers be added at a later time?​

Latest murmurings I've heard are 3 for beta. Once we get everything situated the way we want it with regards to world generations, etc. And then we'll release tiers as we complete them? Not really sure what the plan is there. ​



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14. Some users believe that sacrificing a few daily updates per week might be worth creating a larger, more in-depth "Big Friday Update" (or whatever you might consider calling such a thing), which would have a recurring list of things (spoilers left intact, codenames where necessary) that have the weekly progress for each item/items that were worked on summarized. Would this be something you would consider doing?​

It's rather difficult to just find the time to do the update every day, to be honest. I mean, you can ask for more. I'm not going to say you're ungrateful for asking or anything, but please just a bit of perspective, we're already doing daily updates, which is far above and beyond nearly every other video game development firm that I'm aware of. ​



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15. We feel as if a few important things were gleaned over that people may have been looking forward to, but have not been addressed. Such things include the Q&A thread, a trailer [[I believe this was addressed somewhere with "We would like such a trailer to more accurately represent the finished product", so this may come with the Beta]], the roadmap, and the inclusion of Hylotl lore.​

We've been kinda letting some things float because we've been running on crazy push mode for quite a while now. I'm terribly sorry. I haven't forgotten about the Q&A thread, or the trailer, or the roadmap, or the lore. It's just been pushed as "not as important as beta release." I'm sure you can agree. ​



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16. Have any community suggestions made their way into the game thus far? A list of things that you guys have adopted/plan on adopting during/after Beta would go a long way to booster morale for many community members.​

A few. One example that comes to mind is the flavor text for the matter manipulator, which was suggested by a redditor. "Manipulates anything that matters." I don't know of a master list of these things though. ​



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17. Gameplay suggestion: Medpacks should only be useable when you are missing health. Otherwise, if you have a medpack in hand, you should be able to patch up another player or pet. (This might be better placed in the mechanics suggestion thread currently ongoing)​



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Yeah, this is important. Healing items are actually rather new in the grand scheme of things. Being a problem that is both easy to solve and self-contained, we let it sit for a long while as low hanging fruit. As a result we haven't fixed some of the usability problems with them yet.



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18. Please tell me you aren't talking about DRM that requires an internet connection to play the game.​



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