10 years of StargateEaW + Open Beta announcement
Hello dear community,
Today is a very special day for everyone involved in the StargateEaW project.
People who have read our recently updated history article will know that our project had its first release exactly 10 years ago! We has come a long way since Beta 1 which was released for Star Wars: Empire at War. Thanks a lot to everyone who is supporting us!
But what is the best way to celebrate this?
Answer: The team decided to have a major change in the release politics we agreed years ago to celebrate this milestone of our project.
As of today we open the gate to the StargateEaW open beta!
Wondering what kind of present you got there? Let us explain.
Basically the open beta is the public pendant to the closed beta we’re already running with our selected beta testers. This closed beta will remain in place to hunt down game breaking bugs and to have small size tests of new and experimental features. Once the most annoying bugs are resolved and a new feature requires some more input for fine-tuning we will release it to the open beta to gather your feedback. Afterwards the fine-tuned feature will be release to the current public version.
This means that the currently public version will still be maintained as the “stable” version of StargateEaW: Pegasus Chronicles for everyone who prefers to play a final product rather than a beta. Also this version will remain the main version of our project for which we dedicate our support to.
And why is the Stargate Modding Group doing this right now?
Times have changed. At the beginning of this project we were able to have a way shorter development cycle. Especially after the releases of the early beta versions we had the change to gather the feedback of you which helped us greatly in the development of StargateEaW. With each release the mod grow and got more stable which made the team quite happy and eager to keep up the development of versions as stable as possible. We realized lately that this focus on stable releases we’re having longer and longer development cycles with less chances to ask for feedback. With the open beta we would like to change that in a sense that we would like to move the development or our project closer to our community again.
So as stated above the development of a stable version of StargateEaW will still remain our primary goal but we think the open beta is a good middle ground between stable releases and the wish to acquire feedback more often.
Interesting…but what is the content of the open beta right now anyways?
For now the open beta contains the content of the stable public release plus the nearly complete version of Pegasus Prelude for everyone to test. This version is “feature ready” meaning that everything gameplay related is implemented. Also we fixed all the game breaking bugs found by our closed beta testers. However please note that the version of Pegasus Prelude in the open beta is of course still work in progress and that other bugs are still present including the following:
- The GC is prone to crashes. Save often!
- The Tau’ri tactical dashboard, GC space station and some other Tau’ri specific logos are still visible.
The target of this open beta test is especially to know if the balancing of the GC is alright and if we missed some bugs. Therefore we would like to encourage everyone willing to share bug reports, his opinion and ideas about the open beta and the current Pegasus Prelude version in our new open beta forums: LINK
While talking about sharing… All members of our community are free to share images and videos of the open beta in all places of the world wide web! The only thing we would like to ask for is to be always clear that you’re sharing content of a beta version of our mod.
If you get stuck head over to our new wiki: LINK
Nice! How do I get the open beta?
The open beta will only distributed via our recently updated mod launcher to be able to update everyone’s local installation rapidly with changes.
Grab the new launcher via this LINK
Follow the below installation instruction to set up the open beta:
Open the launcher -> Go to settings -> Change the user mode from “Public” to “OpenBeta” -> press “Save”
Also check out the other additions which are coming to our launcher with this release: LINK
Enjoy the open beta!
Join the birthday live stream with GB Gaming!
Yours,
SGMG
