Dawntide

[Chinchilla]

I got past the char creation, but my FPS in the game is like between 5 - 12.  I could deal with 12 if it stayed consistent, but 5 is just terrible.  My computer is by no means high end and they obviously have some tweaking of the engine to do so my PC can run it better.  I know they will do engine tweaking as the game progresses (I run Fallen Earth perfectly fine and it has better graphics than this), but for now I will just keep trying to see how I do.

[LC]

I got out of the dog pile, and left town. My fps was up to 40+ as long as I looked away from the town.

[Sheepherder]

That many stuck players?

[Mrbloodworth]

Oh this is amateur hour at it's finest.  reboots and more.  There's a command /fixme which is supposed to move a character 10 ft in the air to get unstuck which in actuality puts the player down halfway in the ground.  There's a command /teleme which will move a player out of the initial dogpile, only to be stuck in the ground outside of the dogpile.  Supposedly there is jumping, but it does not seem to work for everyone.  I know when I hit space there is no reaction whatsoever.  I even checked keybindings and other options (which you have to log out to access).

These people should be ashamed of themselves.  This is more than just bad.  This is indicative of serious character flaws.  Like I-beat-my-wife bad.

Isn't this a beta? Its kinda hard for the indies out there to get the mass needed to find such issues, so crap you would not expect in an open beta of a AAA game is found in the beta of the low budget. I would never ever look at a low budget title with my AAA game beta eyes, its asking to much. The "QA" department is most likely the development team, not a farm of 30 paid employees. Looking at the website, the entire staff is remote.

Still though, it could be just bad.



^ Company logo ^

[Bzalthek]

It's Open Beta.  As in there was a stretch of beta after which they decided, 'ok, it's time for open beta'.

For that decision to be made, at the state it is in, screams of inbred retardation.  There's no excuse beyond incompetence and delusion.

I don't condemn a game/sandbox/whatever for bugs in beta.  I expect it.  I hunt those little fuckers down and send in my 5 page report in triplicate.  But this festering shit pile is a travesty.  Vanguard, even if you took into account twenty billion wasted dollars spent on it, was in better shape than this crap.  Hell, Wurm Online is WoW next to this shit.

[Mrbloodworth]

Eh, just trying to point out, this may be more users than they have ever had, I would cut the little guys a bit of slack.

[Bill]

I rarely do anything but lurk around these parts but I thought I'd chime in since I work for WAI.

The game is being developed by 16 people, 87.5% of whom are off-site. The budget is low, the graphics engine is a cow. It's honestly more of an open alpha, referring to it as beta has been a mistake, but it's too late to change that now. As you might imagine a low budget indy project going into open testing can be beneficial. We see no good reason to be anything but open in our development, we are honest about the project and it's limitations, ambitions and the challenges involved.

Performance will receive large improvements this coming week, the influx of people playing the game has indeed been a lot to handle, but we are optimizing quickly.

I hope you keep us on your collective radar. :)

[Mrbloodworth]

Hi bill, best of luck!

[LC]

I rarely do anything but lurk around these parts but I thought I'd chime in since I work for WAI.

The game is being developed by 16 people, 87.5% of whom are off-site. The budget is low, the graphics engine is a cow. It's honestly more of an open alpha, referring to it as beta has been a mistake, but it's too late to change that now. As you might imagine a low budget indy project going into open testing can be beneficial. We see no good reason to be anything but open in our development, we are honest about the project and it's limitations, ambitions and the challenges involved.

Performance will receive large improvements this coming week, the influx of people playing the game has indeed been a lot to handle, but we are optimizing quickly.

I hope you keep us on your collective radar. :)

At least you have something that's somewhat functional. That's more than some of your predecessors can claim.

I tried out mining last night, and the prospecting skill was an interesting addition. I was expecting some kind of amusing animation to accompany it, but only got a boring progress bar. Of course the combat has been the biggest let down so far. I've had more fun watching paint dry.

[Bill]

Animation is getting a bit of a revamp over the next couple of weeks.

I agree on the combat, it's not very much fun. 

[HaemishM]

Stuff about the company developing this.

None of what you said is an excuse for the poor performance discussed in this thread. Indie operations may not have the marketing budget, but they better damn well have the execution down. In fact, indies better have their execution down to a much better degree than mainstream titles or they will get placed on the shitpile with Darkfall and Mortal Online and never be thought of again.

[Bill]

Oh why did I bother to chime in?  

HaemishM ,

I understand your point and I agree with you, unfortunately with a (very) low budget project like Dawntide mistakes and bad choices are someitmes made along the way.

Having been with the team for around 7 months I have seen the game improve quite respectably over time and I am very positive about its future.

I am not attempting to make excuses, I merely want to add my perspective as a member of the team. I am, after all, only responsible for the website, in-game GUI and some other minor elements of the development.