Doom III beta testing going very well...

While boasting about his Armadillo space project, John Carmack threw in some very interesting tidbits regarding their upcoming game. Slashdot reports:

For those of you that are underwhelmed by the 310 pound vehicle, do note that the big vehicle (1500 lbs) that can actually carry people is also flying. Look back in the Armadillo updates around April 19 for testing video. We have since reworked the propulsion system to follow what has worked so well on the subscale vehicle, and should be testing it this weekend. If it works well, we will be repeating the boosted hop with the big vehicle next week.

The flight time is currently limited by federal law to 15 seconds of rocket burn time. We have a waiver coming to extend that to 120 seconds, but beyond that we will need a full launch license.

The significance of all this is that the vehicles are intended to fly up, come back down and land right where they took off from, all without ablating, expending, or separating anything. It should be possible to have turn around times under one hour even for quite large vehicles.

BTW, Doom beta testing is going very well.

John Carmack

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid...ead&cid=9461296

http://d3c.ngz-network.de/news.php

Well, then we're still pretty far away from Release day I guess.

Disorder said:

Well, then we're still pretty far away from Release day I guess.

Depends.

Activision testers do a lot of little things like checking that the installer script works and generates valid start menu links, for example, and this usually doesn't take too long.

Arioch said:

Activision testers do a lot of little things like checking that the installer script works and generates valid start menu links, for example, and this usually doesn't take too long.

nice snipe there

Arioch said:

Depends.

Activision testers do a lot of little things like checking that the installer script works and generates valid start menu links, for example, and this usually doesn't take too long.

I`m not sure, if that`s what was meant by "beta testing".
Beta testing is about playing the game and finding bugs and inconsistences, rather than optimizing the installation routine.

Rule of tumb:

1/3 design
1/3 development
1/3 testing & documenting

Zoost said:

Rule of tumb:

1/3 design
1/3 development
1/3 testing & documenting

I would say the rule of thumb is

1/4 design
1/4 development
1/2 testing & documenting

Testing takes a lot of time to polish the game.

1/3 design
1/3 development
1/3 testing & documenting
1/3 finishing

Fredrik always gives that extra 33%.

concept -> development --> alpha ---> beta --*D3 is here*-> gold --> release

timeline

Doom3's time...as far as I can gather, anyway:

1/8 Concept
6/8 Development
1/8 Testing

1/8th is 6 months.

Well, the testing is part of the whole development phase.
And while testing, the results are beeing documented in detail and if necessary it has to be debugged...this takes a lot of time.
No mentionable software project completes the whole thing and starts testing at the very end.
That would cause too much bugs at a time, and thus it would be very hard to isolate them. Then it could be faster to rewrite the whole thing than to debug.
I guess they are testing the overall thing now. Engine and the functionality of the menu, editor (and so on...) should be working at this point.
Its more like checking for story discrepancies, bugs in the level design, spelling errors, adjusting the difficulty and other stuff like that.

*sorry, my english is getting rusty, I haven't written eng for some time :P*

"from what i have seen with most companies there are 3 testing periods. first one is pre alpha where all the major bugs and game tweaks are made. basically once a section is done they go run through it over and over until they've got rid of bugs or found something that just didn't work.

alpha testing is usually game balance and minor bugs but no major redoing unless something just horrible starts to happen. usually it's having independant players (probably from activision) come in and play through sections of the game and give feedback. this usually fixes those problems where the game developer gets too creative making the game frustrating for the player to figure out where they are supposed to go. or if something is way too hard for the average person.

beta testing is more game balance testing as well has mass hardware testing. like if the game won't run if certain programs/drivers on your computer and 90% of that is done at the publisher. so i imagine they are probably working with a release candiate right now."

ark_angel
http://www.forumplanet.com/planetdoom/topic.asp?fid=2308&tid=1397966&p=4

I'd say they are working with a release candidate too. Id has said that they were really going to polish the game up and have had lots of extra time to do that since the game has been content and engine complete for a while now. Let's hope for a "Doom3 Gone Gold" accouncement in the next 10 or 11 days.

It's close.

ps - Has anyone heard about a "special edition" version of Doom3 upon release that I've read on some UK forums and game stores?

High

What I think is that they've already been doing a sufficient amount of hardware tests with Activision and various vendors.

It is my belief also that they're in release candidate stages now, where what's left is very slight amounts of polish (and fixing up the installer, etc) in preparation for going gold.