Hello and welcome to the latest beta information update. For those of you from the US, we hoped you enjoyed your Holiday Weekend! We spent ours hard at work for you!
"Now what exactly is Tripwire doing" is the question we are starting to see pop up frequently now. And I shall answer!
Working on the game!
What? That wasn't enough details? I guess we can spill the dark dirty secrets. All the teams at Tripwire are working through our bug list based on priority of the bugs. That priority is helped to be set by you the testers based on your reports and observations of you playing.
The QA team is working to get reproductions of some of the more "awful" reports that testers have put in without an actual reproduction. Beyond that they are helping to sort the crash dump files we are getting in as well as testing the fixes as they roll in. These have included "making it so only Germans can win Firefight". Of course that wasn't what he intended... or so he says....
The previously mentioned Code team is busy working on the priority bugs and looking into the crash dumps as they come in. As a heads up, our top two are people running out of memory (Trying to run the game on high and ultra settings with only 2 gigs of ram or a 32 bit OS. You don't want to do this.) as well as a condition where users joining a map after it had started would not get set up properly on the clients.
Level Designers are busy tweaking the maps based on the information coming back from the beta. Where spawn protection need it is being added. Time and manpower is being adjusted. General level bugs are being squashed. Ways to win TE-GrainElevator in 30 seconds are also being fixed :(
Art is busy optimizing effects. This will be important for many of you who enjoy 64 player servers! Code is also working on a few optimizations, so we expect to see some frame increases across the board. Just remember, Ultra means Ultra. If it doesn’t run well for you (especially in a 64 player server), knock your settings back. There are few machines on this planet that can run with every setting on Ultra.
We are working with our hardware partners to find other areas we can improve in as well, and we’ll continue to improve this as we can over the life of the game. We are working to get a new build together for the testers, but are not ready to commit to a time when it will be released (you remember the last time we did that right? Thought so.)
Last thing I want to say is thank you to all those who have opted to help us create a better game by providing invaluable feedback and resources.