read:
Thetawaves wrote:
First off, I'd like to say that pulling .49b was a terrible decision. When a player decides on a server to choose, he has to understand which version he is using. Is he using .48, .49, or .49b? that's THREE segments in the tce community. Already, that's horrid; but soon after you pulled the patch only a few days after very popular NA servers had already updated. Basically you told everybody they're **$** out of luck until you decide to rerelase the patch, which could have been two days, a week, a month, half a year? Who knows. Public communication on this was inadequate.
What you should have done is simply left the patch, and released .49c when it would be ready. Attempting to 'end confusion within the community' only drove to segment it. Another side effect of pulling a patch and releasing a fix under the same name is, what happens when your servers upgrade from the broken version to the fixed version? For me, tce would attempt to download pak4.pk3 when I knew it was already located in /usr/local/games/et/tcetest/. I then copied pak4.pk3 to /home/user/.etwolf/tcetest/ and it continued to try and download pak4.pk3 from the servers. Only this time, there was an error message describing the hash failure. I got hit with the clue stick and realized that the fixed patch must be out. I upgraded and began using tce as normal.
What I'm trying to say is, this is a pretty **$** way to integrate updates back into the community. Public servers need to be kept up-to-date. In the same hat, these servers need to tell the user that they need to upgrade to the latest release. You could provide this functionality in the tcetest client, and then it's merely a question of whether the egg or the chicken came first. TCE has such a small community, and it is very necessary to avoid fragmentation.
Basically: get to work on versioning control. Autoupdates (subprogram that brings the installed tce up-to-date with either stable or unstable branch) would be a pretty cool feature aswell. I'm confused as to why you release a beta, when you aren't ready for the entire community to switch. It simply isn't big enough to handle both a stable, and an unstable branch in it's current form. If you provided a way to easily switch between the stable (.49) and unstable (.49b) then that would also be acceptable. Forcing people to reinstall or just not play for an unknown period of time sucks for everybody!
source:
http://www.truecombatelite.net/forum/vi ... 92&start=0
see... what did i told you guys,, most people arent computer experts you know....
an update notifier would be indeed a useful feature, something that pops outta your dekstop whenever there is an update when you open tcetest.
like i said so many times, devs have to bridge a gap for non gamers/computer experts, to maintain the popularity.
and next time please release a big update only not a small tiny micro update cause its not really worthy.