As far as when Alden ridge will hit the point of beta, that is one thing I didn't address in the other thread. We'll be workin on it soon, but it just depends how development goes and what the staff size is at the time as to when we have a beta version available. My guess is that November would be optimistic, and January would be very pessimistic. It just depends on how much work it takes to port the game and then redo ALL of the art and levels, etc, as well as changing a lot of the core game mechanics while we're at it, etc. So right now that's all pretty fuzzy until probably late August, to be honest, hopefully I'll e able to give better timelines by then.
With Alden Ridge, it's not actually definite that the game will even have network support. Local co-op has been a key feature of that game since the start (the old version of it has had 8 months of development already), but network play isn't a top priority for me there. Keith seems to really want it, so if we can afford to bring him on fulltime then network support will probably happen. But action-game style network is very different from what we have done so far, and personally I'm not super enthused about opening that can of worms. Most network programmers seem to think that what we have already done is harder, but for me it's the known quantity, so to speak.
Anyway, that's one of a thousand details that still need to be settled about Alden ridge sometime this fall, heh.
