Dev Branch on Steam

[DancZer]

Hi,

I think it would be great to have a dev branch of the game on the steam->betas section. Many games have these(e.g. Arma3) where players could help in testing and give an early feedback of the game.

Do you want dev branch?

[vexx32]

It's probably not a good idea. Before the Experimentals team was formed, dev builds were publicly available. As a result, people took this to mean they ought to be stable. :/

It was... a fiasco. It's basically the original reason the Experimentals team and subsequently the QA team were formed.

In addition, there are some things that are added as experimental features that are then removed for various reasons (instability, needing to be recoded from scratch later, completely breaking other areas of the game, etc.) which are probably best left a mystery to most; there are enough people clamouring for various things to be changed, added, removed, or brought back already. If these same people decided they liked a little feature that had a truly nasty bug in it, the devs would never hear the end of it.

It's not worth the trouble, in my mind.

[DancZer]

In case of Arma they don't put experimental things on the dev branch. Dev branch should be the pre release state, with some bugs in it. I bet (just as other companies) Squad make experiments and new features on separated branches and not in the dev. Then they merge it into the dev if the result is satisfying. Basically this 'pre release' dev branch is what i talking about.

[KrazyKrl]

For this feature to really work; the only thing able to be put in there should be RC (Release Candidate) builds. Experimental alpha/beta builds have no reason to be publicly available; if there is a dedicated QA team for early builds already.

[r4pt0r]

I've done this for gnomoria. It works when peoples expectations are tempered.

Edited April 12, 2015 by r4pt0r