alanschu

I still find myself hesitant due to lack of full understanding of the teams and the people involved. I mean, I'm pretty much "blind all in" for Obsidian, though inXile at least had enough recognition that I had better assurances that a quality project would be released. The Kickstarter scene is still rather fresh, and given some of the changes that have occurred in some projects (some of which I think are still perfectly justified), I still find I need to have a lot of trust in the developer to actually deliver, even though I'm only one of those "epic preorder" kind of guys (i.e. around $20). I'll have to watch the videos over lunch!

Ehhhh, it is to report bugs. It's just many people (especially in a public beta) don't. For most, beta is nothing more than "ooo I get to play the game early!" If the game is rough around the edges, many people just tolerate it, or go "eh, not ready" and move on. Some of the more egregious issues will get filed (because if there's something widespread that prevents people from playing, people go "Hey I can't play!"). By hooking up telemetry, the development team is able to glean a lot about the way people play the game and so forth. Heat maps can exist to show where people are spending their time, where (and how) they are dying, and so forth. In that sense, if you have well thought out telemetry, you can get a lot of information from the people that are simply playing your beta, even if they don't report very much. It's easy to get all jacked and go "oh yeah I want to help make this game awesome." But it's actually a non-trivial amount of work, and some bug reports such as "This is broken" are so close to meaningless that it's another situation where the developers need to hook in so much extra to help make sense of that issue. Things like player location, which direction the camera is looking in, current plot state, etc. etc. to help make context. Is it something weird or random, or can we see that it's something specific and consistent across multiple playthroughs. For instance, on DA2 there was a weird shader bug that would occur on the PS3 (and only the PS3) that was causing us issues with passing certification. We were able to get it to consistently crash in one location, but looking closer at the bug sentry auto filer we had set up, we were able to discern that there was one thing specific in the background that had a chance of having bad data. so that one small thing could be anywhere on the screen and have it happen, and we were slowly able to isolate the potential entities, which then lead to a programmer investigating the potential culprits and finding the issue.

Effective beta testing is mostly making sure you have absurd amounts of telemetry hooked up, since you can pretty much count on the percentage of participants actually reporting meaningful issues to be very, very small.

Eh, Alpha/Beta access is not something I typically find interesting.... There are some game types I don't mind beta testing, but perhaps for obvious reasons doing the same for another Fantasy RPG is not exactly what I am hoping for

My point is more: "It's not like the IP was being actively used before Gearbox acquired it." It went for a relatively modest $1.35M and at least the Gearbox guy claims to be a fan. At that cost it certainly didn't seem to be a series that has much impetus to drive development IMO.

The shorter time scale does increase the likelihood of me contributing. Although the similar release schedule to Wasteland 2 may be countering it a little bit.

I quickly scoured the KS page but didn't see anything. What's the release date for this game? Fair, but a post about me ranting about the Codex isn't really productive to this thread.

Sure, but you have two options at this point: Continue wallowing at what could have been but likely will never happen despite one's protestations Accept that Gearbox is going to use the license (or not...) and in the event that the game is completely total crap, it's no different than where we would have been had the IP remained buried as it has been for so long. One of these lets you move on and even become receptive of the game, and the other turns you into a jaded person that will pick up the game just to spite it, NMA style (with Fallout 3).

Life and Death was good fun. Though I always struggled with doing the cut precisely enough to make the Surgeon General guy not berate me for making a crappy incision.

The way I always look at things like this: "it'd be no different than if the IP remained buried." Yeah, it's easy to look at what could have been if someone else had gotten it, but there's no guarantees that they'd actually put out anything good either, despite the best intentions.

Surgeon Simulator is great for laughs.

EDIT: Off topic, this thread isn't about the Codex.

In order for a physical copy of a game to be accepted on Steam, that company would need to make special arrangements in order to do so. Steam is under no obligation to validate purchases made somewhere else (nor should they be, in my opinion). It'd be different if you were validating it directly with Lucasarts, but alas that is not the case.

The first Mass Effect has MS as the publisher. Although today the distinction between BioWare and EA is non-existent. Of course BioWare uses EA money, given they are owned by EA.

Not to mention sex scenes that have been up and added into the series that weren't present in the books!

Thanks, I feel better now. I did feel bad about what I said, I'll spend some time on RPG Codex because I may have been premature about my view Ehhhhh, I avoid the Codex like the plague too, so I wouldn't feel too bad if it's not your cup of tea.

Dungeons of Dredmor. A really fun modern roguelike.

Someone like this post! Proof that Melkathi is a liar in bold! (Seems to have worked for me! >.> [this is my second edit even!])

Okay, so I find if you're a white space freak like myself, where I start finding most of the super bizarre behaviour is when quotes are nested. Here's an example from Post #9 (Firefox 19.0.2). It's easy to replicate these if you just quote post #9... First: Go to the tongue emoticon with your cursor: Hitting Enter doesn't actually put a carriage return. Not sure why. If I hold the "down arrow" on my keyboard, I get erratic and inconsistent movement of the text cursor in the text box. Second Go to the the line immediately after the emoticon Hit Enter Hit Backspace Third With the quoted block, put your text cursor before the quoted block. Keep hitting your down arrow I'd expect to be able to still reach every line, but it seems like it skips over indentation, which is boo-urns. Alternate way to see how this can get super frustrating, is to hit the enter key just before the "No solution for the weird deletion issues while in default mode tho..." line (to put it in its own quote block. Hit the down arrow (putting the text cursor just before the "No..." Hit the up arrow a few times to go the the previous block of text. Fourth Put your cursor between the following two lines: Start hitting enter, as though you wanted to create some white space between those two blocks of text (as if you wanted to respond to each part of the text, individually. Each carriage return ends up splitting the quote block, until eventually you're at the highest level quote block, which DOES seem to allow you to add whitespace. Look at this monstrosity I have created! ARGH Try hitting the X2 icon between quotes. Seems to force a half-space/space between multiple (separate) quotes. Why exactly I'm not sure, and how reliable it'll be for that purpose, I don't know. Yeah I've had it delete sentences and paragraphs, and sometimes not even in the paragraph I was on. Now this probably isn't your forum software so properly debugging it on your own might be problematic (i.e. impossible) depending on the software I guess. As a form of feedback, I would move quote manipulation to a button. You can easily add a new quote block with minimal issues with the quote button. Hit it, you get a nested quote block. Ultimately, because carriage returns lead to unpredicted behaviour, my recommendation would be for the carriage return to simply add a carriage return, and let the user cut into quote blocks with an "end quote" button. As it stands, I have a lot more flexibility in how I organize my quote blocks if I stick with the ubb like tagging, as so: Some carriage returns Lets wrap this up now Alternatively, have the forum software remove nested quotes (HFBoards does this, and frankly in 95% of the cases it's sufficient, especially if quotes automatically have links to the quoted post), as it seems like nested quotes are the primary issue. I wasn't able to get the delete key to cause any megabadness (it behaved as expected), though my ad-hoc test bed may not properly set up the situation that allows that to happen. Good luck though, Mr. Guildmaster. May the code force be with you!

Well I am feeling bored at the moment!.... Nested quote here too yo

Well, that certainly explains the low funding! >.> <.<

Picked up Eador: Masters of the Broken World pretty much completely on a whim as a friend at work told me about it.

This is actually quite old, but it made its rounds at the office and there was some guffawing

Yeah it happens here. It just seemed to be more prevalent when I was posting. It also helps that in posting here, I don't really post about Project Eternity. I remember seeing a lot of what it meant to be an Infinity Engine game as well. I don't really go over to the PE forums here anymore in large part because of that.