Tuesday, June 29, 2010 12:59 PM
Dearest fans,
Today is the another special day for us. We have decided to start the single-player closed beta testing phase. We are inviting all our loyal fans that received any medal award and all the players that have won our best 24 pilots competition. In addition to that we will continue inviting every person that will receive a medal for any contribution to the game. Every person invited to this beta test will receive a veteran badge in the final game and some special treats such as a special ingame veteran ship or ship pimping and other very interesting stuff. We are very grateful to all that are helping us finish this project.
The places in the closed beta testing are limited! Please act quickly if you wish to participate. We will announce on our website when we fill all our closed beta testing slots.
We have split this release into public build and private build. Public build is available to everybody and features the well known flythrough of the game with some new graphical features. Its basically an upgraded version of the game flythrough. All that have the demo flythrough already installed just need to run the game and it will patch automatically. For every person that did not install the public build yet now is your chance to see it with upgraded graphics and sounds:
Private build is the actual closed beta-test that every contributor can gain access to. All users of the private build will already be able to create their own sectors with our ingame editor!
Its really easy to gain access to the closed beta-test. Just check our rules how to attain a medal:
The development of the game is going fairly well and this is the reason why we have decided to move up a notch. We have not yet decided to release a full demo of the game to general public. What we need now is our loyal fanbase to help us with polishing the current game and content.
Every medal holder and every competition winner should check his registered email for further instructions how to install the game. The game testing will be under NDA and as such information from testing will open to general public.
The current features present in the private build are basic and will be upgraded every week in order to test the different features of the game. This is a great chance for every person out there to watch the game in all its development phases.
We have also released new screenshots of the game for your viewing pleasure. We hope you will like them.
Pictures can be found in our gallery here:
Minerwars.com
Or individually:
Your Miner Wars team
www.minerwars.com
amazing
Wow, this is impressive.
However having a malware detection, even if a false positive, during the download is not really something you'd want.
TR/Crypt.XPACK.Gen [trojan]
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. . .
Now, onto some criticism about the installer.
There is no mention of space requirements, this is a problem.
What I remember
Original file = 643 MB
Game = 458 MB
*TEMP 649 + 455 = 1204 MB
*FILES 890 MB
*Files are always on the windows partition, TEMP refers to User/Local Settings/Temp, FILES I have no idea about my index searcher did not find them and I have done enough file surfing for today.
Let me go through the process.
The downloaded file is an executable extractor, which decompresses the necessary installation files into the TEMP folder, see above. To run the Setup windows creates another .msi installer file(the 455 MB). This alone causes the space requirements on the user folder's, which is usually on the windows partition, to be a minimum of 1204 MB. That's even before any installation takes place.
Setup goes smoothly until you need to choose a destination, most won't even pay attention here but there is something strange going on. The destination you choose is filled with 458MB of game files, however there is another destination that can neither be changed or viewed. This likely goes somewhere on the windows partition, not the User directory, which may be on another partition. There is no explanation or proper notice of this. Still, as the destination is fixed it brings the space requirements up, to 2,1 GB.
If you include the game files and original file the final space requirements should be around 3,2GB.
Now for something to be nitpicked about, the TEMP folder and cleanup. The setup does not remove the extracted files, EVER. Upon my first arrival after 4 Setups, none of which even reached the actual installation, there were 4 folders worth of installation files, that's 2,6 GB of wasted space. Fine, must be a glitch or bug, but no. Even after successful installation the files remain there, waiting and waiting until either windows somehow realizes that it does not need them or they are manually removed.
Bullet point time!
*Prompt the user for an extraction folder
*What exactly are the 890MB files for, where are they placed and do they have to necessarily be there?
*Well over two hours of my time, plus download, minimum of 6 install attempts, 2 of them successful, all the file hunting, stress, writing, editing etc. Will the game actually be worth it?
Hi. We know about this issue and were solving it as we speak.
Tried that and we dont have any malware in the software.
So how does one get into this closed beta or is it even worth the hassle of even trying?
Its quite easy. You just have to get 250 affialiate clicks. Were doing this because we dont have any marketing budget yet. Were using our community to help us with that part.
A good place to get clicks is reddit or digg.
Wow those new screens look very good for a Pre-Alpha!
it may not be a true pre alpha ^^
generally you don't see gaming companies showing off the untextured, unanimated, 3d models in their early versions.
allright what is a pre-alpha? Pre alpha is a semi finished game with furnished textures and models. A game without models or textures is called prototype. Our game is pre-alpha because we still lack some critical content.