That right there is the full length, 427mb Alpha version, baby!!
Don't expect it to be bug free, of course. In fact, I imagine we'll be burning up the bug tracker with new stuff, but hopefully there's no major show stoppers hiding in there. What we'll likely do it just release patches if major bugs come up that actually prevent testing. It'll give me a chance to iron out the patching code as well as save people the time of re-uploading/downloading that beast.
We'd like everyone to pay particular attention to the dialog in the conversations. Brock's acting troupe is starting up recordings again this week, and I really want to have all our conversations finalized and checked as many times as possible before I dispatch them for recording.
I just hope I don't wake up tomorrow to find out that the Alpha doesn't even work...I think that happened with the last version :p
*stays up to wait for ZP and Shacker to test it just in case*
[Jonas edit below - Apologies for editing your post Trest, but I want this to be at the top.]
Testing Alpha 1.7.5
While testing the latest alpha, there are a few things we ask you to pay special attention to apart from the usual very obvious bugs:
- Difficulty - Does an area have way too many enemies? Is somebody just way too bloody hard to kill? Does the game become an absolute walk in the park as soon as you retrieve Trestkon's pistols?
- Item availability - Did you get stuck because you ran out of lockpicks or multitools? Did you carry a specific weapon all the way through the game without ever using it because the ammo was so bloody scarce? Were you swimming in medkits by the end of the game?
- Information flow - Are you getting as much info as you need? Are you sorely missing a map of a specific area? Do you need more PM's somewhere to tell you what to do?
- Killing important characters - Did you kill somebody important without ever hearing about it again? (Remember to check the bulletin computers and don't report this one until you've played through mission 22 (everything between DXI and ABI).
- General feedback level - Did you do something important and significant which completely failed to provoke a reaction? Do you feel that somebody should at least have acknowledged your actions, possibly even rewarding them?
- Goal updates - By the end of the game, were you still carrying around any uncompleted goals from previous missions? Did you manage to render a secondary mission uncompletable (eg. by killing the quest giver) but the goal wasn't updated?
- Door strength - If you have the time, try whacking every door you come across and see if its destructability more or less matches its material.
Known bugs and omissions
In hindsight, I believe there were a few things we forgot to fix, just as there are a few things we are yet to implement.
- I'm not sure you can actually get the rocket launcher schematics from Dr. Dumb Lunatic when he offers them to you. This is because Ricemanu hasn't created the datavault image yet, and I forgot to add a placeholder. Feel free to manually add the flag HAS_QuadLauncherPlans if you know how to use the Legend menu.
- Admiral Justin's cutscene in M22 is supposed to take Kevo's body from you and place it on the slab - this doesn't happen... yet.
- Last time I tested, Ricemanu doesn't actually respond as he should when you send the signal in ABI (in the WC storyline). You will need to use the opensesame cheat to open the gates (or take the alternate route).
- Killing Hao Niu-rou effectively prevents you from entering the ABI interior, if I recall correctly. At some point we will give him a datavault image that updates your goals when you take it from his corpse, similarly to what we did with Kevo and Vavrek in mission 22.
- A couple of datavault maps are yet to be made, but we have included placeholders for now.
- In our final map, the Space Station command centre, nobody is hostile. In fact that map is still a placeholder, it will be cleaned up, polished, and completed as soon as possible.
If you receive a GPF, or a crash of any kind, upload your TNM.log (found in DeusEx\System) in addition to a screenshot of the crash window. It's quite important.
