Beta 0.811-0.813 now out. (First version for Orangeshirts!)

[x4000]

Would that be Gau or Cyan? 

But if it's named after a person then there's no problem.

Gau was always calling Cyan "Mr Thou," so I guess it's kind of both of them.   "Mount Au" rhymes with that, so I for whatever reason thought that was neat.  That's of course if you read it as "auow" rather than "ayy-you."

Every now and then I find myself getting annoyed with the Arcen team: "It's been nearly an hour and there are no new release notes!"
Then I take a moment to reflect and think about how issues are being addressed almost as fast as a large and enthusiastic group of testers can find them.
Then I realise that it's 2am my time which means 8pm their time and I really should be asleep and I'm unlikely to get anything new before lunch time the next day and I get a bit sad.
But then the next day one of my Mantis issues turns green and it's the best thing ever. (Until fifteen minutes later when there still hasn't been a new release and I'm suffering with this minor text alignment bug or whatever.)

Oh, the emotional roller coaster. Keep up the great work, everyone! :-D

This made me laugh, hard -- I totally get what you mean, though.  Even though I'm not playing 7D2D right now, I still check their log every day and am like "What no new info!?!?" if there is nothing, even on the weekends.  Glad that we're making things happy, though.

[jerith]

Every now and then I find myself getting annoyed with the Arcen team: "It's been nearly an hour and there are no new release notes!"
Then I take a moment to reflect and think about how issues are being addressed almost as fast as a large and enthusiastic group of testers can find them.
Then I realise that it's 2am my time which means 8pm their time and I really should be asleep and I'm unlikely to get anything new before lunch time the next day and I get a bit sad.
But then the next day one of my Mantis issues turns green and it's the best thing ever. (Until fifteen minutes later when there still hasn't been a new release and I'm suffering with this minor text alignment bug or whatever.)

Oh, the emotional roller coaster. Keep up the great work, everyone! :-D

This made me laugh, hard -- I totally get what you mean, though.  Even though I'm not playing 7D2D right now, I still check their log every day and am like "What no new info!?!?" if there is nothing, even on the weekends.  Glad that we're making things happy, though.

On a more serious note, quick turnaround times and frequent small updates really keep the level of engagement high. I've played a lot of prerelease games (although seldom as an official tester) and waiting days or weeks for new versions kills the momentum and I move to other things.

(Can I have 0.814 now? PLEEEEEEEASE?)

[jerith]

And just after I posted that, I read the International Incidents thread. Take all the time you guys need. We know you won't leave us hanging indefinitely.

(Or we'll tell the Thoraxians where you live...)

[ptarth]

I've dealing with a lot of linguistics lately, and "surprisingly" there are differences between languages that English-centric speakers are not aware of. For example, a large number of languages use postpositive adjectives. Take the phrase 'the white horses' in English. In French it would be 'les chevaux blancs', translated as 'the (plural) horses white'. So Mount Au or Au Mount, being "natural" is language dependent. More amusingly, is that this demonstrates the differences that appear with a consistent species (i.e., the human). How would the Yali communicate given that (in some sense) they have 8? mouths/communication devices or the telepathic Evuk?

Disclaimer: This content of this entry was blatantly stolen from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositive_adjective.

[x4000]

On a more serious note, quick turnaround times and frequent small updates really keep the level of engagement high. I've played a lot of prerelease games (although seldom as an official tester) and waiting days or weeks for new versions kills the momentum and I move to other things.

(Can I have 0.814 now? PLEEEEEEEASE?)

Definitely agreed.   And yep, we try to do a release daily or at least every other day when we can.  There's a period coming up where that might not be entirely possible, or at the very least where the things in those daily releases won't be as large by any stretch, but that will only last a week or so.  That's noted in another thread.

And just after I posted that, I read the International Incidents thread. Take all the time you guys need. We know you won't leave us hanging indefinitely.

(Or we'll tell the Thoraxians where you live...)

All good. 

I've dealing with a lot of linguistics lately, and surprisingly there are differences between languages that English-centric speakers are not aware of. For example, a large number of languages use postpositive adjectives. Take the phrase 'the white horses' in English. In French it would be 'les chevaux blancs', translated as 'the (plural) horses white'. So Mount Au or Au Mount, being "natural" is language dependent. More amusingly, is that this demonstrates the differences that appear with a consistent species (i.e., the human). How would the Yali communicate given that (in some sense) they have 8? mouths/communication devices, or the telepathic Evuk?

Disclaimer: This content of this entry was blatantly stolen from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpositive_adjective.

Very cool!  I love that sort of thing, thanks a lot for sharing -- I'm a complete geek for... most kinds of science or social science.

[Zebeast46]

I thought I would share my first impressions here because this is the pAtch I came in on. So here are my likes and dislikes.

Likes
-A.I races look different from one another and cool.
-The player's city is probably one of the best implementations I have seen in terms of how it looks and how it works. However there are still a couple of tweaks that could make it better.
-The combat animations look pretty cool, however, I have not figured out how to play all the animations at once like how it was shown in the video.
-For some reason I have only found 1 graphical glitch so far which which I have already submitted a report for. I am actually surprised that my testing has gone this smooth. (I have only played about 5 hours so far however)
- Linguistics os pretty cool, however I have not found a way to see how many linguistic points I have accumulates yet.

Alright, now for the dislikes

- Military is kind of wierd as after easily destroying the Neinzul nest with my missiles so they cpuld not even firing back, I now have to apparently place a military building in range of every single remaining Neinzul building to completely wipe them out
- Some of the races cities are right next to each other which looks wierd graphically.
- Sometimes I wish that the player races differentiated a little more. Not a huge dislike however
- The linguistics part sort of pushes you away from making friends with other races.

I think that these are all my dislikes and likes. Please note that the military part I talked about was my biggest dislike and the citybuilding was my favorite.

[x4000]

Cool stuff!  And military aspects are due to be improved soon, as are linguistics.