Hi all,
I'm sorry that regular information has been thin on the ground recently. Any failings are my responsibility. I'm aware that we need to do more to keep you in the loop, especially when we go through lengthy and delayed development stages as we are now. It appears that there is a danger of Oshyan being unfairly exposed to people's frustrations and blamed for the lack of information we've been able to provide. Regarding release schedules and development progress Oshyan can only work with whatever information comes from myself and from internal discussions, so I hope you'll give him the understanding he deserves while he's helping Jo and myself concentrate on other tasks.
I think most of the rest of what I want to say at the moment has already been said by Jo and Oshyan, but there a few points I'd like to reiterate or elaborate on.
For the last 6 months at least it hasn't been feasible to release incremental updates because of the nature of the changes being made to the software. It took a couple of months to restructure some important parts of the renderer for multi-threading (multi-core support) and to lay the foundation for the improved ray tracing engine. It was impossible to break this work into individual improvements to be released as minor updates. The "nightly builds" or even monthly builds would have been unable to render shadows and many of the other things which you would expect from the software, no matter how many disclaimers we were to attach. Since then it has taken another 4 months to make it all work well enough for the alpha testers to successfully render the images you've seen. We have no desire to hold back these new features from you - regular updates make us feel good too - but unfortunately we made some big mistakes in our estimate of how long all this would take. Regular software updates are something we are striving for as we move forward, but there will probably always be some development phases along the way that will prevent this occasionally.
I'm sorry that some of you have felt insulted by our decision to release (or allow to be released) some of the water transparency images. This is something that many had asked for. As soon as it became possible to render these kinds of images we thought it was one way that we could be open about the progress we had made while we were uncertain about the actual time to completion. It was never our intention to tease, only to respond to a clear and direct request from many of you and to demonstrate some progress in a way that seemed best at the time.
A few weeks I ago I promised that I would regularly report here on the feedback we got from the alpha testers. Since then there were quite a number of crashes which I had attempted to fix and I was waiting on confirmation from the alpha testers. I wanted to avoid yet more vague posts saying that there were new problems to be solved without knowing whether or not they had been solved. Well, the feedback from the last couple of alpha builds has been much more positive. We now (at last!) have alpha builds that we think many of you will benefit from, and we will make something available to licensed pre-purchasers within the next 7 days. You should consider it "unstable" - we wouldn't recommend using it in production or using it if you are concerned about new crashes and render problems - but it is ready for those who would like to test the new features and fixes we've made while the application is still a little unstable.
Thanks,
Matt