Tick Tock

[ravenrise]

  Okay. The idea for planeshift came up around 1992. We are now in 2009. I haven't played in a while but i know there still is very little content. We can still rp and what not but items and races and customization are a key part of any game. Eventually roleplaying with the same things to talk about or same skills to enhance your characters gets old.   
   
  I realize that you must test every new addition thoroughly first, but this is a PRE-alpha, your not even at the beginning, meaning that every player and every character is not only a roleplayer or part of the story, but a tester. Tester being the key word there. We are here to help the game progress because we like the concept, so you can just add ideas if you want. skip some of the overkill testing that's what we are for.
 
  If you find a way to add a mount system test it for 3 years add it and find out the majority of the community hates it well it was a waste of 3 years. The added testing is not needed and can be removed.

[Mordraugion]

Not entirely sure what your point is, if its about overkill testing of art and content before release then that is not the case, certainly not 3 years of testing.

The single reason its taken so long to get this far is, PlaneShift is purely a volunteer project we have maybe 10 or a dozen developers working on it in their spare time between fulltime jobs. family and studying also unfortunately not many of them are artists.

[hitancrias]

I don't have the impression that new features get three years of internal testing. Usually new features (including bugs) are released much earlier. Also it doesn't really make sense to count from 1992, since they started basically from scratch in 2001 with Planeshift 3D. I like it that you delved into the history of Planeshift though. I think it's quite interesting to see how Planeshift developed over time.

Edit: what do you mean with "Tick Tock"?

[Jath]

http://www.hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=34544.0

[Lanarel]

We try to test new art as much as possible before a release, but often this is only one or two weeks. It does allow us to find all major problems and sometimes postpone a release to get them fixed. If we would release things untested, you would not have a game to run .
Unfortunately sometimes some major problems (such as the leaf replaced crash and sticky fields) get through because we just had no clue why they occurred, and they do still allow most people to play, and hopefully help us find the problem.

[neko kyouran]

Edit: what do you mean with "Tick Tock"?

when i read the title of this thread, I thought of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6M6W6PbE1Y&fmt=18

[Gravemind]

When I first joined Planeshift, we didn't yet have RP, there was only hydlaa, and no combat/magic/anything, we just walked around and collected crystals that spawned randomly. It was pretty much a visual chat room I used to hang out in. It was early MB I believe. Got old fast because back then I had a very sloooooow computer, I don't think it even had a graphics card, so crystal hunting was not an option, I left about the time the first quest was implemented and came back in 0.4.00. I think that was in 2004/2005 maybe so for this game to now have come so far to having a pretty decent sized amount of combat and magic and more quests then you can shake a tefusang claw at, as well as becoming an RP community, being merely something done with the dev's free time, is pretty damn impressive.