

As many of you already know, Release 3 is scheduled to launch next Thursday, February 20, at 10:30 am. The big new thing with R3 is multiplayer mode, which is a giant leap forward in technological complexity over single-player mode. We need some advance help to test our servers and are asking all our Developer (and above) members to help us out. Here’s the message Chris Spears posted on the Dev+ forum:

Hello Dev Plus people! We’re calling on you for another test before the test session! Actually, we might do two or three of these over the next week so don’t panic if you miss this one. We’ve been testing multiplayer on our internal servers and feel like we have things to a mostly stable state but we’re are a small lot and blind to our own flaws. We’ve tested the servers with 2 dozen people on single maps but we’re trying to sanity test how many people to enable per map for Release 3 next week.

We would like for the Dev Plus guys and gals to patch up and join us for “Lunch with SotA Bunch”. Friday, 2 – 3PM CST, we will open up the Live servers for 1 hour to do a limited load test. For tomorrow’s test we’ll cap the max players per map at 64 to see how well things work. We’ll be watching server load, data rates, and client performance during the test. If things go poorly, we should have data to fix the problem before the next test session. If things go better than expected, we’ll probably Turn the max per map up a bit and try again another day! Keep in mind, this build only has the most minimal of optimizations. Things will only get better and better with each build.

For those who haven’t installed it yet, you can get the client here: http://goo.gl/KVYzpF

And patch up early and often! We’ll probably release the latest patch around 2 hours before the test. We’ll try to get it out earlier but no matter how much planning we do, we always seem to come right down to the wire on releases.

Known issues for this build that we would love repro steps for:

Occasionally other players will be invisible to you

Sometimes dialogs will lose their borders

Sometimes you can get into a “locked” state while chatting where you can’t move

First people to post repro steps for any of those will get a gold star from me personally!

Oh, and since I know some of you will ask, yes, Richard will be in game and NO, you won’t be able to kill him…

Enjoy!

Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears

[Join the conversation over in the forums]