Hint about next patch from Egosoft? CBJ just posted this...

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

It's not open for everyone to view.

It should be. Are you saying you can't access this forum?

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=141

But there is no 1.30 there, so maybe he means some other subforum.

For reference, the quote comes from within the following thread in that forum:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=363684

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

The general consensus amongst the community here seems that the reason for the wall of silence before release was that you folks wanted to keep under wraps just how badly progress had gone

I do not know where you get that idea, there has only been a few very vocal posters putting forward that premise. There are still those of us that hold the view "no news, is good news" where Egosoft is concerned. In short, there is no consensus.

In software development it is not unusual for change lists to be flexible up until the point that they decide to release. We have already seen that Egosoft get a lot of backlash for delaying features because of 11th hour issues which are not resolvable in time for the release.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

Roger, are you talking about before the release of Rebirth or before release of patches for Rebirth? Or perhaps both?

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Roger, are you talking about before the release of Rebirth or before release of patches for Rebirth? Or perhaps both?

Both in actuality, but the state of the initial release (and reasons for it being so bad) is moot now.

[Sparky Sparkycorp]

Thank you for the clarification.

[YorrickVander]

It's not open for everyone to view.

It should be. Are you saying you can't access this forum?

http://forum.egosoft.com/viewforum.php?f=141

I can, and do post there. What Xenon appeared to be implying was that there's a forum for whats going on in testing that all can read - I may have misunderstood him. Frankly a read only access to this info would make a lot of us in the public beta forum happy. We won't see the patches or be able to post terrible things, just read whats happening internally.

Make us happy? After all it's not like we can apply to join devnet anymore.

[khartsh]

The general consensus amongst the community here seems that the reason for the wall of silence before release was that you folks wanted to keep under wraps just how badly progress had gone

I do not know where you get that idea, there has only been a few very vocal posters putting forward that premise. There are still those of us that hold the view "no news, is good news" where Egosoft is concerned. In short, there is no consensus.

In software development it is not unusual for change lists to be flexible up until the point that they decide to release. We have already seen that Egosoft get a lot of backlash for delaying features because of 11th hour issues which are not resolvable in time for the release.

Head in sand is not evidence. However the reviews, numbers and general tone of the forums (plural) would say he is right. The general consensus is the silence was to hide how poorly development went. Sorry if you do not agree or like that answer.

[Trialbyfire]

The general consensus amongst the community here seems that the reason for the wall of silence before release was that you folks wanted to keep under wraps just how badly progress had gone

I do not know where you get that idea, there has only been a few very vocal posters putting forward that premise.

A "few very vocal posters"? How about an overwhelming majority? The only "very few vocal posters" are those defending this atrocious mess, and the company that produced and released it under a continuing wall of silence. Whether this was a "cover up", simply an old school (obsolete) method of working in secrecy, arrogant disregard for customers, or all of the above, I don't know.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

I think that the "doomsayers" can be counted easily using just one hand, possibly two (at least if you disregard certain individuals that are blatantly and indisputably anti-ES/anti-XR). Either way, it is a moot discussion that typically ends in inappropriate name calling and/or direct personal attacks.

Let's be frank here, I am up for hearing new information as much as the next person but ES have never been overly vocal in these forums. I would much rather them concentrate their efforts on getting the job done and providing accurate reports at appropriate times than simply keep posting throw away updates of meaningless information.

If you want more info, then you have the option of applying to join the inner circle (L5+ presumably) that has been involved in the recent non-public Beta testing. Otherwise you are better to cool your heels and wait for official public news, like I am.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

I sent the L5 application in August 2013, still havent recieved anything

[Zippo342]

The games own debug log might give some clue that this idea of constantly reading XML is complete rubbish. When the game loads the xml, it also checks your extensions folder; this can be validated by any player using mods as your mods would break if the game continued to reload without checking that folder too. So far so good Any mods that modify the original xml via diff patch throw a debug log entry as unrecognised tags upon save game load or new game start; this is also good - we don't want this code to be actually run by the engine after patching. Which brings me to the nub of the evidence - these errors don't show again until another load/new start, and therefore pretty much disproves the idea that the xml is constantly reread in a manner that any player can verify with no need for profilers.

Does the game not store objects in xml format? Wouldn't it then be plausible that anytime something is modified, destroyed or created the xml file in question would have to be read, processed, modified, reloaded into memory and validated? Smarter people than I seem to think so.

You are confusing how data structures work in memory versus how they have to work on disk. XML formats are used on disk primarily because they are easy to read and link into a data structure in memory. However a data structure cannot be written to a disk in it's natural form due to the fact that files on a disk cannot reference themselves the same way data structures in memory can.

No sane programmer would ever use an XML format for a data structure. It is useful as it is easy to build a data structure based on, and easy for a human to read, but as a data structure it is a nightmare. You would in effect be storing everything as a string, and having to parse it every time you needed some information from it. Instead as they read the data structure in and parsed it, they would convert it into a more productive data format. This allows them to better reference data without having to go through all the parsing again.

Looking at this, if their program is spending resources on the XML module, it is likely either reading XML files from disk or creating data structures in memory. It could be that the module is responsible for more than XML as well. There are a lot of things I do not know lacking source code. However personally I am confident that they do not rely on XML during runtime data referencing. Such a thing would be limited to loading times.

[Santi]

There was a ton of information released before launch, where you could clearly see a lot of issues, ships bouncing of walls in stations, big traders plodding throw station, OperationDX did a whole set of videos with the demo released to the press. If you read carefully the IAmA from reddit, you clearly see how much "will" and "could be" and "not in version 1.0" was present in Bernd answers to questions, still people assumed that those features they were asking about, were already present in the game. I do not agree about the "wall of silence", so definitely no consensus here about it.

[Earth Ultimatum IV.]

There was a ton of information released before launch, where you could clearly see a lot of issues, ships bouncing of walls in stations, big traders plodding throw station, OperationDX did a whole set of videos with the demo released to the press. If you read carefully the IAmA from reddit, you clearly see how much "will" and "could be" and "not in version 1.0" was present in Bernd answers to questions, still people assumed that those features they were asking about, were already present in the game. I do not agree about the "wall of silence", so definitely no consensus here about it.

Indeed. Same goes for people who blame Egosoft for lies. All they had to do was to search for available info before buying.

[khartsh]

There was a ton of information released before launch, where you could clearly see a lot of issues, ships bouncing of walls in stations, big traders plodding throw station, OperationDX did a whole set of videos with the demo released to the press. If you read carefully the IAmA from reddit, you clearly see how much "will" and "could be" and "not in version 1.0" was present in Bernd answers to questions, still people assumed that those features they were asking about, were already present in the game. I do not agree about the "wall of silence", so definitely no consensus here about it.

Indeed. Same goes for people who blame Egosoft for lies. All they had to do was to search for available info before buying.

No I think people blame the overly hopeful fans who posted things like how awesome commanding ships from the bridge like Captain Picard would be.

Egosoft was silent pre-release... you and a few others were very active telling everyone what we were going to get, just happened to be we didn't get any of it.

[Santi]

No I think people blame the overly hopeful fans who posted things like how awesome commanding ships from the bridge like Captain Picard would be.

Egosoft was silent pre-release... you and a few others were very active telling everyone what we were going to get, just happened to be we didn't get any of it.

There was a lot of discussion in the forums regarding AI, because of ship bouncing. NPC's and Yisha models complaints, as there was footage of it released before launch. Lack of turrets. Trade was discussed to death when the two "tier" trade information became available. One ship thread went for over two years. Walking in the station got even a poll. There were interviews, screenshots, videos showing different aspects of the game, a demo available for the press to dissect. Everybody chipped in, either in favour or against certain features. Funny that the most critical people against Rebirth never contributed even one post to the discussion, except counted exceptions that are the only ones whose opinions I respect.

[khartsh]

No I think people blame the overly hopeful fans who posted things like how awesome commanding ships from the bridge like Captain Picard would be.

Egosoft was silent pre-release... you and a few others were very active telling everyone what we were going to get, just happened to be we didn't get any of it.

There was a lot of discussion in the forums regarding AI, because of ship bouncing. NPC's and Yisha models complaints, as there was footage of it released before launch. Lack of turrets. Trade was discussed to death when the two "tier" trade information became available. One ship thread went for over two years. Walking in the station got even a poll. There were interviews, screenshots, videos showing different aspects of the game, a demo available for the press to dissect. Everybody chipped in, either in favour or against certain features. Funny that the most critical people against Rebirth never contributed even one post to the discussion, except counted exceptions that are the only ones whose opinions I respect.

Uh... all those people critical pre-launch were banned... What makes you think they aren't here under new names?

But that is a whole different topic, the most ardent defenders of the game pre-launch, no matter how personal they got, are still here to talk about those who can't defend themselves and claim the crown of being right all along.

[Observe]

It really makes little difference which people said what, and what they are saying now, if they are still here.

The fact remains, we've got the game in it's current condition, with evidence of bugs being fixed and needed features that were "left out" being added. Let's hope the game reaches stability, Egosoft releases a good suit of modding tools, and we can have the game running in a variety of flavors. Perhaps we'll even have some mods (or possibly DLC's) which will run the Rebirth engine in the fashion some would like to see an X4.

As a side note, keep in mind, Bernd has stated his openness to eventually having multiple payer ships. It seems inevitable to me, that is what we will eventually have available to us.

[pjknibbs]

Uh... all those people critical pre-launch were banned...

Absolute cobblers. We only ban people for breaking the forum rules, not just for being negative about the game. I mean, you only have to read the forum for about half a second to realise that, or even consider that you yourself wouldn't still be here posting if we just banned anyone with negative things to say about Egosoft or the game.

[ezra-r]

It really makes little difference which people said what, and what they are saying now, if they are still here.

The fact remains, we've got the game in it's current condition, with evidence of bugs being fixed and needed features that were "left out" being added. Let's hope the game reaches stability, Egosoft releases a good suit of modding tools, and we can have the game running in a variety of flavors. Perhaps we'll even have some mods (or possibly DLC's) which will run the Rebirth engine in the fashion some would like to see an X4.

As a side note, keep in mind, Bernd has stated his openness to eventually having multiple payer ships. It seems inevitable to me, that is what we will eventually have available to us.

Everytime someone mentions DLC's and X4, a kitten dies, just so you know....

[Alan Phipps]

This is redundant with public beta release of the patch, so locking.