Still in Alpha...
Well actually that's sort of debatable. It's actually pretty hard to classify what this Early Access programme actually is with classic game development terminology.
Alpha stage of game development typically refers to the stage when the game is not yet feature-complete. However, Alpha stages are typically characterized by not being available to public, and usually being exclusive to developers themselves.
Similarly, games enter Beta stage when they're feature complete, and at this point there still may be placeholder assets that will be replaced during Beta stage, while testers (either public or open beta testing group) stress the game to see if they can find any bugs or problems with the game's features.
After Beta testing, the game enters Release Candidate or RC stage, in which the Quality Assurance (QA) department of the developer (and sometimes publisher's QA as well) goes through the game version by version, until they get to a version which they're happy with and which passes the QA requirements. Typically that RC is then rebranded "Gold", and sent to the publisher for production. With luck this happens before the planned launch date.
The reason Battle of Stalingrad sort of defies this classic naming scheme is because it combines features of all these stages, but doesn't really fit in on any of them completely.
The game is certainly not feature complete - we all know that. In this sense, it's in Alpha stage. However it's available to Early Access program members, which is atypical of Alpha stage of development.
It's definitely not in Beta stage either - it's not feature complete, and the Early Access members are not required to do any testing although bug reports are appreciated and obviously give the developers a solid base of testers any case - but we're not exactly closed beta testers.
It's not RC and obviously not Gold either. However, the features they've made accessible so far are
remarkably mature, both software and asset-wise, which suggest there's already been
some work done internally by QA department of 1C/777 studios.
So is it fair to say it's in Alpha stage? I'm not sure. In some ways that's what it is, but on the other hand the product is already remarkably stable and only requires more content and unlocking of features, as well as possible tweaks to things that get reported by people. In this sense, it defies the classical terminology of stages of game development. In some way, I guess each update to the Early Access version goes through its own "development cycle" in mini scale... but that makes the Early Access program more of a stage-by-stage developing hybrid of all the stages, without a clear definition of being in any of the stages, but seamlessly shaping into a finished product, update by update.
Here's an interesting screenshot I took after an
incredibly rough landing. I had intentionally shut down the engine to practice forced landing and landing site selection. I had picked a small road going through a village (for challenge) but when I was approaching planned landing site, I basically ran out of airspeed and my sinkrate got quite high. The aircraft slammed down on a three-point attitude though, didn't roll or tumble, and although I deviated away from the road into the snow, aside from the touchdown I was pretty happy with the landing... until I took a closer look at my aircraft:
Basically, what happened (I guess) is I slammed on the ground hard enough to shatter a lot of glass in the cockpit, caused some damage to the tail (not readily apparent in these screens though), broke the wings off almost completely, so they probably bent down, then came back up like a spring, and deformed into that position. The other possibility is that the wingtips touched the ground during landing, but I don't recall that happening.
In 1946, my plane would have just exploded instantly. So the crash damage model is already quite nicely done, although I don't know if the physical deforming is active yet or if the planes fall apart in pre-determined chunks.
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Topic: Share a screen BOS (Read 112893 times)
