Hi Will,
I certainly understand and respect your point of view, but there are
other issues to consider here.
First, right now Mysteries of the Ancients is currently alpha software
not a beta. What that means in programmer lingo is a program functional
for testing, but is known to have bugs and is not a complete program.
Betas are more or less complete programs, but are known to have bugs.
There is a big difference between an alpha and a beta.
For example, Mysteries of the Ancients 0.4 alpha only has the first
level complete. So even if you guys got it you would come to the end of
level 1 and that would be it. no more levels. Of course I plan to add
more in the coming days and weeks, but for now obviously the game is
still lacking a large portion of the game. This is one reason it is only
an alpha not a beta.
Here is another case in point. Not too long ago one of the private
testers tried saving a game. When the game didn't save his game he asked
on the testers list why it wasn't working. I explained that while the
Genesis3D engine has that feature it was currently disabled because I
am currently rewriting or updating large portions of the engine itself.
If you save a game and you try and load it using a newer version of the
engine, like the one I am working on now, the saved game will get
scrambled in the process. i don't want bug reports on something i
already know needs to be fixed.
Second, the Genesis3D Engine uses a different product key system than
Montezuma's Revenge. That means bbefore everyone who paid for
Montezuma's Revenge can upgrade to Mysteries of the Ancients I will have
to generate a couple hundred keys, and process all of those orders.
Given the amount of time I have had lately to devote to USA Games stuff
it would take me a week to process all of those orders. Personally, I
think I would be more productive just working on the game, trying to get
a decent demo ready, than processing all 200 orders.
Third, the Mysteries of the Ancients documentation is still incomplete.
Yes, i know people can figure a lot out by playing around with it, but I
believe before I release anything to the general public the
documentation should be as complete as possible. By supplying good
documentation with the demo i can cut down on the number of general
questions people are likely to ask.
Finally, Mysteries of the Ancients is currently undergoing some major
changes. I am presently working on integrating a newer version of the
Genesis3D engine into Mysteries of the Ancients 0.5. There are some
extensive changes in the newer Genesis Engine such as SDL support
instead of DirectX support. I've dropped support for DirectX in the
newer Genesis engine not only to make it easier to go cross platform,
but installing and setting up SDL is much much easier than installing
and updating DirectX 9.0C.
However, I've not yet done a lot of testing with the SDL based version
of Genesis myself, and I have no idea exactly how Mysteries of the
Ancients will perform until i do the upgrade. In a case like that it is
better to do some testing with a small group rather than releasing a
possibly unstable demo on the general public. If it turns out i need to
downgrade to the previous release it is easier to work with 10 people
rather than 150 people.
HTH.
---
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