Hi Everyone,
Thank you again for all of the questions and well wishes as we head into the home stretch. We've been extra busy this week preparing builds for PAX East for the 22nd-24th and also a new event, VEX Worlds in Louisville, Kentucky at the Kentucky Exposition Center. We're proud to be the first game at this robotics competition event and look forward to sharing the game with competitors and VEX fans April 20th through the 23rd.
On to the questions of the week!
>Will there be an open or closed beta?
We have a handful of folks providing us feedback from the RA2 community. The truth is we'd love to have more folks involved in an open beta, but managing a larger group would take more time and we have a limited amount of that remaining. With that being said we have been getting great feedback from the handful of people who have agreed to help and we are extremely appreciative of their time.
>Will objects and wheels that stick out of the chassis have an opening for them or will they stick out of the chassis's if it wasn't solid like in RA 2?
Objects that stick out of the chassis do not create negative space on the chassis itself, so we are similar to RA 2 in that regard. We totally like the idea of creating a negative space for objects that pass through the chassis, but we won't be doing that for RA III.
>What are you using for multiplayer?
We're using Unity's multiplayer solution UNET. After researching other solutions we felt this had the best potential for what we were trying to achieve with RA III.
>I wonder if bot file editing/ component editing will still be possible in RA3 without having to be a computer genius.
>Bot file editing will be simple, it's a json file you can open with notepad or notepad++. Your bots are stored in your My Documents folder. Component editing is trickier than that and currently takes some knowledge of Unity and CAD, but it should be easier than RA 2. We have no formal plans yet to release the details on customizing components - but it's on our wishlist to do for sure.
>Can you edit the chassis during building?
Yes. You can edit the chassis after you have placed components. We're trying to make building much easier, and we believe this is a big step in the right direction.
>Will there be copy, paste and radial/array or mirroring of components to make it easier to build your bot?
Copy/Paste and radial array/mirroring are not currently in the works, though we hear you loud and clear that it is something that you would like. As bot builders ourselves we know these would be time savers. On top of all the other elements of the game these seem trivial to add, but there is a good bit of user interface work and testing that would take additional time. Undo is another big one we would have liked to have, but that is also sadly not in the plans at this time.
That wraps up the questions for this week! Thank you all again for your continued support. If you're attending PAX or VEX, please stop by and say hello and let us know you're part of the Steam or Gametechmods community.
-The Robot Arena III Team