Update on approaching release of 0.7.8!
My steam people! I know our last update to you guys was in September. Before you guys read the below message. I sincerely want to apologize for not communicating efficiently in this community. The amount of negative feedback on this platform from reviews, to discussions really takes a toll on me mentally. So I haven't been keeping up to date with a lot of your comments and concerns in the discussions and instead my staff have been keeping me on the need to know. A lot of the things posted here can get really personal, hateful, and it really is discouraging at times. But besides that we have been hard at work and have an update for you guys!
Hey everyone! I wanted to give you all an update. I know so many of you are skeptical, frustrated, angry, disappointed, and many other verbs. Especially with my lack of communication with the community especially on our Steam Page. First of all this will be pretty lengthy so take a seat. I want to thank my Support team for doing an incredible job this month. I am not sure of the specifics of the stats but we have fixed over 250 (Two hundred and fifty) bugs since 0.7.7J. The game experience you will all have in 0.7.8 will be much smoother and stable than any update in the past. We are still in closed testing and making leaps of progress everyday. Every day new bugs are reported and are fixed but our main concern has been the game breaking issues, things that will completely ruin your experience and make you want to throw your PC out a window, and oh boy did we run into those.
Just an example of some of the issues we ran into and got stuck on, some for weeks even. Things that worked perfectly and just broke and ceased to work. Fires just stopped working and wouldn't be extinguished by water causing us to have to update the code to be more reliable, Police cars and EMS vehicles spawning system broke preventing you from being able to drive the vehicles. Tower Ladder Nozzles and Deck guns broke. Item pick up broke. I could go on and on. These are things we did not foresee but happened and caused delays in the development of not just Montgomery County but the huge update we plan on releasing very soon, like in the next week or two. Maybe even sooner, I cannot tell you guys anything concrete because who knows if anything major will break next, but we are at a point now in testing where these game breaking bugs have been weeded out and now we are just left with a list of mostly cosmetic and minor issues. Things that wont break your game and prevent you from enjoying the game. In the past we approached this process much differently.
We didn't have a support team before who goes out of there way and dedicates hours of their day to testing, writing bug reports, breaking the game, helping others with their issues, and helping me get this project done. Before we would just hope that things worked the way they should and let all our players test, and the results were a lot of complaining, frustration, etc. Now that we have a dedicated testing team, we are able to find all these bugs before our player base finds them and allows us to not be overwhelmed with issues and reports when we put an update out on the staging branch or public branch. We are hard at work everyday, just because I haven't posted much in here does not mean things are not progressing. Many people can attest to that.
Our game plan as of a few days ago, we decided we will be releasing an update on all branches which will include the hundreds of bug fixes and improvements for the Manhattan and Fire Academy maps. The Fire Academy will also include all of the new Montgomery County vehicles for you all to become familiar with while we move into the next stage which is VIP Montgomery County Map testing. We will be polishing that and making sure it is ready for you guys. Support can tell you it still needs some work but so many of you are convinced that we dropped Manhattan for this new map which is not true at all. In fact 90% of the bugs we have fixed come from the original maps.
We are down to like 3 game breaking bugs, being 1. if you have more than 5 vehicles spawned, doors and compartments start to dissapear off of trucks preventing you from accessing the items inside, 2. When exiting a vehicle you can still control it, and 3 some item positioning on the new firefighter model causing issues. Once we get those figured out which shouldn't take too much longer, we will be golden for a release of 0.7.8 FINALLY which will address so many issues you all have been having. I hope you all can forgive my absence in the community, but I have not been absent from developing. I promise you guys once this update is released, it will hopefully change a lot of people's perceptions on the game and on me. It has taken so long because I do not want to make the same mistakes I did in the past by releasing broken updates without testing thoroughly and man, this update has been tested thoroughly for weeks so it will be a much better and more stable experience than any update we have put out in the past. If you have any other questions or concerns please contact me or a staff member and I will do my best to get back to you ASAP!
Love all you guys, even the haters!
Hey everyone! I wanted to give you all an update. I know so many of you are skeptical, frustrated, angry, disappointed, and many other verbs. Especially with my lack of communication with the community especially on our Steam Page. First of all this will be pretty lengthy so take a seat. I want to thank my Support team for doing an incredible job this month. I am not sure of the specifics of the stats but we have fixed over 250 (Two hundred and fifty) bugs since 0.7.7J. The game experience you will all have in 0.7.8 will be much smoother and stable than any update in the past. We are still in closed testing and making leaps of progress everyday. Every day new bugs are reported and are fixed but our main concern has been the game breaking issues, things that will completely ruin your experience and make you want to throw your PC out a window, and oh boy did we run into those.
Just an example of some of the issues we ran into and got stuck on, some for weeks even. Things that worked perfectly and just broke and ceased to work. Fires just stopped working and wouldn't be extinguished by water causing us to have to update the code to be more reliable, Police cars and EMS vehicles spawning system broke preventing you from being able to drive the vehicles. Tower Ladder Nozzles and Deck guns broke. Item pick up broke. I could go on and on. These are things we did not foresee but happened and caused delays in the development of not just Montgomery County but the huge update we plan on releasing very soon, like in the next week or two. Maybe even sooner, I cannot tell you guys anything concrete because who knows if anything major will break next, but we are at a point now in testing where these game breaking bugs have been weeded out and now we are just left with a list of mostly cosmetic and minor issues. Things that wont break your game and prevent you from enjoying the game. In the past we approached this process much differently.
We didn't have a support team before who goes out of there way and dedicates hours of their day to testing, writing bug reports, breaking the game, helping others with their issues, and helping me get this project done. Before we would just hope that things worked the way they should and let all our players test, and the results were a lot of complaining, frustration, etc. Now that we have a dedicated testing team, we are able to find all these bugs before our player base finds them and allows us to not be overwhelmed with issues and reports when we put an update out on the staging branch or public branch. We are hard at work everyday, just because I haven't posted much in here does not mean things are not progressing. Many people can attest to that.
Our game plan as of a few days ago, we decided we will be releasing an update on all branches which will include the hundreds of bug fixes and improvements for the Manhattan and Fire Academy maps. The Fire Academy will also include all of the new Montgomery County vehicles for you all to become familiar with while we move into the next stage which is VIP Montgomery County Map testing. We will be polishing that and making sure it is ready for you guys. Support can tell you it still needs some work but so many of you are convinced that we dropped Manhattan for this new map which is not true at all. In fact 90% of the bugs we have fixed come from the original maps.
We are down to like 3 game breaking bugs, being 1. if you have more than 5 vehicles spawned, doors and compartments start to dissapear off of trucks preventing you from accessing the items inside, 2. When exiting a vehicle you can still control it, and 3 some item positioning on the new firefighter model causing issues. Once we get those figured out which shouldn't take too much longer, we will be golden for a release of 0.7.8 FINALLY which will address so many issues you all have been having. I hope you all can forgive my absence in the community, but I have not been absent from developing. I promise you guys once this update is released, it will hopefully change a lot of people's perceptions on the game and on me. It has taken so long because I do not want to make the same mistakes I did in the past by releasing broken updates without testing thoroughly and man, this update has been tested thoroughly for weeks so it will be a much better and more stable experience than any update we have put out in the past. If you have any other questions or concerns please contact me or a staff member and I will do my best to get back to you ASAP!
Love all you guys, even the haters!