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Never ending beta state

Never ending beta state

Postby frank_li » 14 Oct 2016, 10:40

Hi,

I must say that I feel kind of cheated here. 3 months ago I bought a software that isn't even ready and unusable for production. Now I've seen that the estimated time for a release is 'a few months' which is very vague. I'm not willing to wait any longer for what I've paid for, so I'd like to have a refund now.
Again, I've paid for a finished product and wasn't providing you a loan for the development of one!

It seems that the devs spent more time working on their internet presence to make it look like a big company, but they are not able nor willing to deliver a working product for the money I've paid. When I look at the road map, it's kind of ridiculous. How do you plan to achieve this with only 2 developers in a reasonable amount of time?

Regards

Frank
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Re: Never ending beta state

Postby SolarPortal » 14 Oct 2016, 13:28

Hi Frank_li,
Sorry to hear you feel that way and you are having problems with skyline.
We can assure you that we have not cheated you and have provided everything we said you have. the reason for its Beta state is simply because of the odd bug and issue. Beta to us represents the finished product that has a few unpolished sections.
We have not disguised anything about the engine and have kept it all above board :)

If you are having problems or crashes, then you need to post on the forums with the problems you are having and see if we can resolve this for you first before asking for any refund. Providing information to fix crashes is needed rather than endless crashes....

I've paid for a finished product and wasn't providing you a loan for the development of one!

When you purchased skyline, it does say its in Beta across all websites and the actual product on the store that its BETA: http://www.chi-ad.com/Skyline/AssetStore/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=55
We did provide a free version for trialing with all the features and workings of the full version which is why sadly there is a no refund policy on the commercial version which you can find at the bottom of the skyline product page.

And have faith, as you say, we are only a 2 person dev team, but we are still throwing all of our time into this software as it is our passion, and we will eventually leave Beta. All good software conmpanies once started out as backroom coders each with their own problems.

We admit after last years bad things happening to us, that development did slow, but we are still fighting on and Gen2 is nearly ready for a preview by select users before starting the greenlight campaign which should lead to us exiting beta.

Having a good looking website is the only way to attract potential users as no-one is going to buy something with a 90's looking website.

I feel we have not cheated you and are here to help on any of the issues you are having :)

Edit: We have not updated the engine as much for Gen1 since we have been developing Gen2 which all Commercial users will get for free when it is released :)

As for the roadmap, it displays what we want to put into the engine over the years, but has no timeline for when it will be added.
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Re: Never ending beta state

Postby epsilonion » 14 Oct 2016, 13:38

You got in here just before me.

Sorry to hear that you feel this way, it is clearly displayed that this is a beta and under development, it has also been well posted that the next update is a big one and that it fundermently brings skyline upto the standard with pbr and dx 11 among other updates.

This update has taken extra time because of personal issues that have been clearly stated in the blog.

The update is to drop any day now for alpha testing before it hits the production branch.

There are the main development team of 2 and there's tatty that is doing video tutorials, myself documentation and other users that help out in the way of moderation of the forums and helping other people with scripts so in essence the team is bigger than you think.

With us users that help out from the goodness of our hearts because we believe in the project and it's potential.

The progress of the features that are coming from the trello board is progressing in leaps and bounds over the past year such as the qt plugin system. Visual mechanics and loads more plus loads of bugs and crashes fixed.

The system has seen a massive increase in features over the past year and will commence to increase over the next year once we have the next generation of skyline update running stable and bug fix list completed and it put on the production branch.

With any software that is a work in progress you expect bugs etc with different system setups and these get addressed very quickly by the devs

All in all I personally think they are doing a great job with the support of the users.

This is my personal opinion.

Sorry for the spelling mistakes wrote this on my phone
Last edited by epsilonion on 14 Oct 2016, 13:44, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Spelling fixes
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Re: Never ending beta state

Postby lordalmighty1 » 14 Oct 2016, 14:42

hi frank,
not to mirror what has already been said I feel you should read the following info..
many people assume an alpha/beta software to be complete and functioning like a full released and finished product and this isn't the case all the time. steam early access is a prime example of user expectations of a dev team.
yes the software is taking time to complete but without the aid of you and other buyers reporting issues this will never help the devs complete there work. however the 2nd generation of skyline is a vast improvement over the gen1 software which as stated is on its way for testing and release soon.
gen1 has bugs but without you posting about it who would know your issues?!. how would they get fixed?
I in the early days of using the software couldn't do much at all, but with the help of devs and tattiebojangles tutorials have limited the number of crashes and bugs of the software.. anyway read below for a idea of what a beta is.
thanks for your time and hopefully your understanding.

Beta Software

Beta software refers to computer software that is undergoing testing and has not yet been officially released. The beta phase follows the alpha phase, but precedes the final version. Some beta software is only made available to a select number of users, while other beta programs are released to the general public.
Software developers release beta versions of software in order to garner useful feedback before releasing the final version of a program. They often provide web forums that allow beta testers to post their feedback and discuss their experience using software. Some beta software programs even have a built-in feedback feature that allows users to submit feature requests or bugs directly to the developer.
In most cases, a software developer will release multiple "beta" versions of a program during the beta phase. Each version includes updates and bug fixes that have been made in response to user feedback. The beta phase may last anywhere from a few weeks for a small program to several months for a large program.
Each beta version is typically labeled with the final version number followed by a beta version identifier. For example, the fifth beta release of the second version of a software program may have the version number "2.0b5." If a developer prefers not to list the specific version of a beta program, the version number may simply have the term "(beta)" after the program name, e.g. "My New App (beta)." This naming convention is commonly used for beta versions of websites or web applications.
Since beta software is a pre-release version of the final application, it may be unstable or lack features that will be be included in the final release. Therefore, beta software often comes with a disclaimer that testers should use the software at their own risk. If you choose to beta test a program, be aware that it may not function as expected.
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