Good session tonight. Fairly spread out, but a long and productive one. Real life takes its toll on my testers in college about this time of year as they start having their first exams. (No, this does not mean I need more testers). As with all things, real life is a priority, especially when that real life part could impact the rest of said life. Had a new couple of new betas the past few days that fixed a couple more cosmetic issues as well as fixed a couple more Web Admin bugs. We're also doing a bit more tweaking of default settings, trying to provide options that will suit everyone. Bots are amazing now as well. Probably the best UT bots I've ever seen. I'll quote a tester here about them that sums it up better than I could..."Just played a bit of ArabOutpost, and while attacking the two bots on my side helped with the attack, and on the way back covered me (one going ahead, one behind). As I got relatively close to the escape area the bot behind me stayed back and killed the defenders who were trying to stop me. AMAZING!!!!" 56kers, rejoice!
Sunday, September 21
We had a good session tonight. Game play seems about as solid as can be. I found myself literally sweating as I extracted on Iraq tonight, fearful of sniper fire from the windows as they had gotten me a meter from the chopper earlier. Couple of new bugs found, one or two fairly good sized ones that appear to be simple fixes, but who knows with this engine. We're all short on time this week from the outbreak of RLD (Real Life Disease) but things are still progressing. Some things still need tweaking as well...but again, hopefully simple things. A nasty Web Admin bug that would delete settings even if you told it not to was fixed with this beta and so were a few other cosmetic issues, and a couple of major things dealing with the new gametypes.
Wednesday, September 18
We've been playing with reinforcements and respawns a bit more lately, seeing what mixes work well for things to supply as defaults. It's amazing how changing a couple of numbers affects gameplay. No respawns with one defender reinforcement at 50% time elapsed is tense and preferred by a few testers while an unbalanced setup with more respawns for the attackers than defenders with defenders getting a higher number of reinforcements at 60-70% elapsed time is preferred by others. I love both for different reasons. Add in the differences between Specialist and EAS and it gives you even more variations and feels to the game. The best part is how flexible the whole system is. Change a few numbers and the whole game changes. We're also working out a few last remaining map bugs thanks to a big helping hand from erehwoN and Alpha_9 and all the rest of the mappers. I can't believe half of these maps are on the UT engine, and they just keep getting better.