While we haven't done any other store (other than for Steam keys) I must say I'm pretty happy with how the Steam stuff works here. While not perfect (some settings for uploads can't be overwritten on the command line for example so you have to have your build infrastructure create config files for SteamCMD ... but that's not a major issue either) it allows very good automation and has everything you need for your daily life like delta patches so not uploading the whole thing all the time (and users only downloading patches too), different branches that users can select from or be used for internal testing only with passwords etc.

The only thing I could really see lacking here on our end would be better control of who gets access to branches instead of a simple plain password. That gets leaked once and you neither know of that leak (unless the people who get access do some terribly stupid stuff like sharing that information publicly) nor do you know who got access or who leaked it. And changing the password affects everyone, both those that should be able to access a branch as well as those who should not. Having something like SteamID whitelists or similar could help tremendously in some situations :)

But at least it's fully automated, for all three target platforms, and the only manual thing for us to do is set a build public every now and then :)

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Yeah, just wanted to be sure. Thought that if one machine had the bug in 2018.1 but not now it would be fixed ... didn't expect it to be yet another different issue :(

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The famous Unity double-input bug is here to crash the party!

Did you actually test it or was that a generic assumption from other games? Just curious because I had an eye on that Unity issue and while I never got it myself one of our QA got this when we were running on the 2018.1.* release cycle. But that issue was reported to be fixed in Unity 2018.2 and no one was able to reproduce it after we updated.

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Quoting: NanobangWait---what? This is a public beta of an alpha?

Well, yes. You see there's a difference between the regular (static world) FPS where each time you get into the game you start clean (or at most keep some kind of skills or item selection). Not much of an issue if such games change stuff in between because you start a "new game" anyway. With games like 7dtd and the like changes required to fix issues can just as well lead to breaking saves and this is obviously very annoying for players. That's why we do an experimental first that's hopefully *primarily* opted in by people who are aware of the implications and also willing to provide feedback before the masses get the regular build.

As for the other stuff ... as I said I'm not much into gameplay features, I love to just play it myself ;)
But do you really want materials that are impenetrable by zombies? I know I wouldn't because that would make the game stale at that point as you'd just have no threat at all anymore once you got a building of such a material. Sometimes logic has to be reduced in favor of more interesting gameplay.
I'm sure you'd also not like if you couldn't carry any blocks but would need some kind of (pushed/pulled) vehicle to e.g. move a single block of stone :D

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Quoting: BeamboomThe one big question remains though: Can we start a new coop session on this patch and expect to survive an upgrade to the final A17 patch, or will we need to regenerate the map (and characters) between now and the final A17 patch?

Map is most likely gonna be fine (though obviously any fixes made there might not apply to your already started map). Characters though *could* receive a reset but noone can tell you at this time.

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Quoting: liamdaweSeems like Sin will be happy then! What is your role on the pimps team?

Third-party integrations (Steam and EAC most of the time), network layer, admin stuff, modding support (though that's mostly what I do on the side, officially that's planned for post-gold), some UI work etc ;)
Nothing gameplay related, I suck at gameplay dev.

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Quoting: silverMy favourite game. ^_^ I hope they have managed to fix it so it doesn't crash that often anymore. It uses Vulkan now I think (?)

Well, technically Vulkan is in (as far as Unity's support goes) but the shaders haven't been updated to work with either Vulkan or Metal yet unfortunately. So for now it's basically still only GLCore, but that will change at some point.

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Quoting: WorMzyWill be interesting to see if The Fun Pimps actually come through this time. Historically they've been very lousy with their Linux/Mac support, uncommunicative when they break the various builds, and pretty shitty to people who ask them about what problems they're facing. It would be nice to see that they've grown as developers and actually test their builds before they release them, and are open and communicative when things go wrong. They might actually make it off my blacklist if they can demonstrate that.

Suppose you're talking about pre A10? From that time on I always tried to make sure no one was left out with new releases and I definitely gave as much support to everyone on the forum as possible considering I also have to work on my dev tasks ;)
(Yeah, there was this one alpha (14 iirc) that had a broken OpenGL shader for a while ... would have liked to fix that but no clue about shaders myself and the graphics dev back then was busy with other stuff unfortunately. But it was communicated)

So far this release seems pretty stable though :)

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Wish everyone was targeting Vulkan only and either the OSs would support Vulkan or players would move on to something proper that doesn't do such crap. With ("real") Windows supporting Vulkan that might actually work but I doubt any big dev would go this way unfortunately.

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Don't really get the big use of it anyway... If a game is build around Steam's networking it's highly unlikely that none of the other Steamworks features are used. So it's not like this release means "Steamworks based game, rep,ace Steamworks with that library -> Steam independent game". Yes, it *might* make ripping out Steamworks from a game a bit easier. But from my experience the networking layer is the easiest part of Steamworks to get rid of, compared to the other (more tightly integrating) things that it provides.

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