And you'd be 100% wrong on pretty much all counts. Our enthusiastic team of DevNet testers (well over 100 of them) have had access to Alpha builds for several months now, and have been providing us with lots of useful feedback.BarrenEarth wrote:I am almost 100% sure there are no DevNet members here involved with testing Rebirth at the moment, I am about 99% sure they do not have alpha builds available yet for that kind of testing.
I am also 100% sure that the making of videos clearly show portions of the game being tested separated from all other portions of the game, which is a nice feature test but is far from any kind of DevNet level testing phase.
The making-of videos all show in-game content. Some, showing off a particular asset or feature, may indeed do so in a limited environment in order to best demonstrate what the developer is talking about, but others use the full game environment. All the assets and features shown are available in the full game environment, whether or not that environment was used for presentation purposes. Obviously certain things such as path visualisation are only available to developers and testers, but builds that just have the normal game features are also available and being tested.
I'm afraid you're also wrong, largely. X3AP 3.0 really is fan-made content, and while they had a small amount of support from a couple of our developers here and there, this did not have any significant impact on XR work. We have more than enough DevNet members to test more than one thing at a time, especially since the testing of X3AP 3.0 was not under NDA and was open to literally thousands of people if they wanted to take part.Cowski wrote:And I'm guessing that egosoft, to protect their main application, will have to run all fan-made projects through their QA department to make sure it runs well before distributing it. I'm sure they just don't take what is sent to them, slap their name on it & distribute it.
With that being said, focus is taken away from XR. I know how this industry works. When a project is behind schedule, as XR is, they don't redirect resources to something like an older product with new fan based content. That weakens the architecture for the new product. A product that is going to make them money. Not a new, free download for an older game.
As for whether there is any benefit in supporting our older products with new, free content, I'm pretty sure a lot of players would disagree with you. From our perspective, of course we want people to keep playing our older games, because when they play our older games they also tend to stick around and buy our new games when they come out. Providing new content is a good way to achieve that.