I just realized that since I finally opened the beta, I can now post the release notes for the new builds here publicly without getting a torrent of “Send me an invite!” blog and facebook comments and tweets! Yay, I am so happy to be out of the invites business!

I’ll do a post with numbers from the open beta launch sometime next week, but it’s going great, and I’m super happy and relieved. I was really worried about the community, and all the new players are blending into the community really well, and it all feels very healthy. Phew!

This build was almost exclusively bugs and minor features for supporting lobby rooms with lots of people in them. Most of these were discovered as the result of the human load test we did right before opening the beta. The main problem was that with lots of people in the lobby, you couldn’t really mouse-over somebody to reliably invite them into a game, so I struggled with how to solve this until somebody in the lobby said, “hey, there’s a problem because the player under my mouse keeps changing”, which pointed me to a reasonable and obvious solution: keep the player under your mouse fixed, even if they’re moving around in the sort order (due to other players joining or leaving, or due to them changing state). This is slightly weird, because it means you can get into a state where the lobby has scrolled such that there’s a blank space above or below, but it works pretty well.

Edge behavior for fixed-point mouse selection.

I created a new “release notes” tag, so you’ll be able to find all of the posts about new builds. I’m also going to start “streaming the release notes”, meaning I’m going to start up a live stream on the SpyParty twitch.tv channel, and walk through the changes in the build on video. Then I can put that up on the SpyParty YouTube  channel for later view. The idea here is to capture a bit of the coolness of a well-edited video of changes, like the Overgrowth folks do, but without spending the time editing the video. It’ll be rough, but it will keep me from triggering my perfectionism neurons and fiddling forever with the clip. So, hopefully it’ll be a good comprimise. I wanted to do a stream for this build, but it was 2:30am when I finished it, so I couldn’t pull it off. Luckily, drawnonward and canadianbacon were streaming when I was working on it, and they convinced me to add 3 Known Missions on Veranda for craziness. You can see that video here, it’s pretty close to the kind of release notes streaming I’m going to do…casual, chatting in TeamSpeak, but previewing the features in real time.1

Here are all the changes for version 0.1.2758.0:

• k3 enabled on veranda…k3 hard tells anyone?
• true up the triangles and the text in selected but not necessarily enabled missions
• better /who /stats formatting
• /help take command for single line help
• shrink lobby a bit more to avoid red text and make /away visible
• fix 00:00 event time bugs in pending mission state
• stop accidentally filtering suspected da cast events
• make lobby details a tiny bit more compact…user /stats username for full stats
• practice mode on lobby escape menu
• invites beep on whisper settings or chat settings
• make –console –logstderr dump log to console window for debugging startup problems
• better /who stats, idle, away on own line for copy
• /statsroom /whoroom /wr
• sort by column in lobby by clicking on the column titles
• sort /who clients correctly, by current lobby sort
• new fixed-point list ui for list stability, the player under your mouse will stay under your mouse, even as they change state, it’s weird, but will avoid misclicks
• fix bug with not setting changed number on destroys
• don’t output warning if can keep current completion string
• fix whisper (lobby) bug
• correct single-line chat paging with room masking…goes back in time in all rooms simultaneously, which is slightly weird
• beeps respect room mask too
• allow tab room changes in lobby settings and room chooser
• make lobby say messages room based, so can be masked
• only change chat usernames for completion if clients join/leave
• clients stick around exiting if leave lobby, and leaving room for 2 seconds
• sort lobby list by state with invites and exits in prev state, playing by timestamp

Those are just the raw notes I post in the private beta forums,2 so they might not mean much if you’re not a player. The way to solve that problem is obviously to become a player!

Up next, a couple super-minor fixes to this build, and then a brand new mission! I haven’t added a mission in a long time, so this will really change things. I’ll talk more about that in another post, but I’m hoping to have it stood up this week.

1. And, watching it myself from his point-of-view I just found a couple bugs with the update system! [↩]
2. …which I might make publicly read-only some day, they’re such a wealth of information about the game! [↩]