[WarInEur] CWIE beta testers - make sure your systems are free of spyware!

[Chuck Sutherland]

I have found at times that this can cause lockups and appear to be a game acting up. So keep those test machines clean!

Just FYI!

I use Ad Aware and Spybot on my pc's.
Chuck
________________________________
From: warineur-bounces at mailman.halisp.net [mailto:warineur-bounces at mailman.halisp.net] On Behalf Of sgminfo
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 11:13 AM
To: warineur at mailman.halisp.net
Subject: [WarInEur] CWIE beta testers

Latest version is up and running to download ...

Current iteration is 0.978


(In indirect answer to the relevent proddings from other  interested parties)

We are getting through rechecking lots of minor code tidying up...so bug fixes are more the norm than major rwrites of sections, if that can give you an impression of how far from release we are.

'Minor' code issues tend to be things like,
a control button does not appear where it should, on demand,
in in some obscure combinations this or that does not perform the way it is expected to.

In playtesting unexplained lockups and crashes are not now appearing, and the code tends tobe pretty stable,considering the complexity of the task.

What is taking the time , as always, are the number of iterations of actual games in progress, each with differing combinations of options and 'features'
Some are being tested in closed loops,
others are being tested in live gaming mode
others again are being run in live internet pbem modes

If you remember the golden days down in New York, playtesting was where most of the grief was, nearly always messing up productions schedules, and always, because it was near the end of the production process, robbed off time by delays elsewhere in the system. You will remember the battles to get things sorted at the late stage, that had been glossed over at earlier stages. Well we are not quite in that degree of chaos!!!

The code could be shipped tomorrow, but one risks the blank cheque of bugs no one has come across yet, and those which are unforseen in unusual circumstances...

i.e. Recent testing revealed a bug where when one country threw all its forces against a member of the alliance, and all his forces left his home country, in a victorious rampage, the game, strictly interpreting the rules, worked out that since there were no friendly units left in its home country, it must have been overrun, and decided to surrender...

As you will appreciate, odd quirks like this remind us of the fallability of design, in a complicated environment, and make the issues raised in thefilm "2001" over the programming of the Hal 9000 model supercomputer all to easy to follow...simple, innoculous cross combinations of factors causing seemingly unfathomable behaviour.


Testing for these is both massively time consuming, and a huge consumer of personnel resources.

But bearing that in mind, you will all appreciate, that we must be near the end of the tunnel, but still, if you are 'road testing' in the dark, the pothole you may hit, and where and when, is impossible to predict. When a number of games have run through without a showstopping glitch, you canbe certain that we are ready.

Bearing in mind how long an iteration takes to play through,
You will understand what makes progress neither predictable,nor linear.

However, one can say we are not far from the end of the gestation process...

-|steve|-
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