This is an exclusive call out to the jME community asking for a few people to help Alpha Test HeroDex ready for the Closed Beta to start Soon[tm].
We are looking for reasonably technically knowledgeable people (i.e. ones who won’t have any trouble finding logs/telling us what hardware/OS/etc they are running/etc) which is why we are putting out the call here.
Ideally we are looking for a good spread of:
OS: We use windows in development so that’s fairly well tested but we still want to get as good coverage as possible. People using Linux and Mac are particularly sought after though.
Different graphics card types: i.e. Radeon/GeForce/etc
Different form factors: i.e Tablet, Desktop, Laptop, Ultrabook, etc
If anyone is interested then please either post here or PM me with your OS, Graphics Card and Form Factor. We are doing some last testing on the new release now and I’ll start sending out invite codes tomorrow.
Depending on demand and the level of overlap in configurations I can’t promise that everyone will get an invite code in this round. It will be first-come-first-served for each combination. We will see how that goes though.
I’ve had a fair number of people sending PMs so I’m just going through them now…
Ok, going through the mails in my inbox we have good coverage of Windows and Radeon. Some coverage of Windows and Nvidia. Some Mac coverage.
We still have no takers for Linux though.
@jmaasing unless you are Windows/Radeon (which is already well covered) then actually just having someone run the game up and run through the first 6 tutorial matches would be very helpful as that will have exercised all of the various custom shaders, tried out the New Player Experience, etc.
That’s understandable, everyone has a lot going on - particularly at this time of year
The main focus at the moment is to have a range of people & hardware play through the tutorials to get feedback on the new player experience and to make sure there are no silly glitches/crashes/etc.
Obviously if people want to stay on and do more testing after that then that would be great too but the main focus is to get some feedback on the New Player Experience & Stability ahead of the Beta.
If you turn the graphics settings down (I turned off shadows on my laptop and FPS doubled!) then it should run on fairly old hardware but performance on older systems would be useful to know too. At some point we need to work out some sort of baseline for recommended and minimum hardware specs.
I’ve just finished sending the people who PMed me an invite code, I’ll send you one now too as well @Zzeugg.
Thanks to those people testing so far, we’ve already found a few Shader issues on various platforms (including one in the jME Shaders so having that fixed benefits everyone!) along with a few flaws in the tutorials that have been corrected.
If anyone is still interested and has a few hours to spare we have a couple more spaces available for alpha testers. We are still particularly looking for more people on various flavours of linux, people on a mac or windows with nvidia graphics cards.
Thanks to everyone who has tested so far. We’ve just made a new release for HeroDex with a number of big features so hopefully people will check it out.
I do have one specific request though - we’ve added new crash reporting code and would like to test that on a range of platforms and in both windowed and full screen mode. Even if people don’t have time to play if they could spend 5 minutes to test the crash reporting that would be extremely helpful.
Log into game
Bring up the menu
Press the: CRASH GAME - TEST REPORTING button
Check that the Crash Report window comes up fine
Press the “Send Report” button.
See a popup saying “Thank you, your report has been received and recorded”.
If you don’t get through to the Thank you message then please let me know. If you do then no need to contact us, we have the crash report
If you can try this in both windowed mode and full screen mode please then it would be extremely helpful.
In hindsight Christmas Eve wasn’t the best time to make the request, but just a quick reminder that if some more people can try the test above out it would be really helpful. I have nowhere near enough yet to have any confidence it’s working correctly. Can people try it in both window and fullscreen mode too, to make sure it works correctly in both!
I’d be more than happy to help. I know NOTHING about these types of card games… I think I played Magic once (was cool… but I didn’t have anyone to play with lol). Is this a requirement? Or can I just bring my stupid self?
EDIT: Ooops… missed that you needed an invite code. Just PM me one if you need me to go through it.
Yeah, its closed alpha atm while we get the last few features ready for beta. People who don’t know card games are actually very good testers as it helps us find out if we made any bad assumptions about prior knowledge
Gonna post things I have trouble with here if that’s ok. I’ll forego mention the stuff I like or I think look cool for now… because I’m fairly sure that info won’t be as helpful.
I’m a little confused once I open up the starter deck… for a couple reasons.
The left/right arrow navigation + the X button are sometimes behind the guided options.
When the option to open up the deck designer came up, the option beside it was “Continue”… soooo… being an evil tester, I hit continue instead and I got to a screen where I see a single card (which I am not sure what type of card it is) and the hero card + 3 target pile queues (I guess they are— one has the silhouette of a hero… the other I think is landscape). At this point, I can’t do anything as the guide text hasn’t changed and there are no options. If I click on the queues, the cards move to them, but the guide text doesn’t change and I still have no option to continue.
Will edit this post as I go.
EDIT 1:
When you click the menu button… this isn’t critical by any stretch, but could be misunderstood. The first option is “Exit HeroDex”, the second is “Close”… I would change the text of the second option to “Close Menu” so there is no confusion as to what it will do.
EDIT 2:
Since I had to restart to get out of the place I got myself into, I used the Crash Client option in the menu to test this. The report comes up with a stack trace and other relevant info… this is good. The text above says you can either cut & paste this into a bug report (not sure what a bug report is in this context, unless this next point is hiding this from me) or click “Send” to have it sent automatically. The window had no send button.
EDIT 3:
Some good news! Smart client… smart programmer… the game remembered where I was in the process and the guide text told me what to do next. So, point 2 in the initial post would actually be: The guide text did not process past Select your hero’s portrait… though I had gotten to “Your hero is ready to play. Zoom in on the card to… etc…etc”
EDIT 4:
All is going well through the setup of the first tutorial… the guide text explains what to do. But at the end, it say “Press the Accept Challenge button to conitnue” and I’m not seeing an accept challenge button.
@zarch I can’t seem to progress past this point atm as the accept button never appears. I have plenty of time to help, so just let me know what to do. Oh, speaking of this, if it requires a fix to the client… how are you handling updates/patches/etc? And also, where should we be discussing technical aspects of what you’ve made here? I’d love to pick your brain to see how you decided to handle other things as well.
Stalls in the tutorials are one of my main fears at the moment so thanks for finding one! I think I fixed it for the next release (I definitely fixed one potential cause of a stall). I don’t suppose you took a screenshot? That would help me be more certain about where it happened.
E1: Good point, wording will be changed in next release.
E2: This is odd. The send button should always be added. Is there any chance it was off the bottom of the screen?
E3: Thanks From what you just said I think I’ve fixed the correct stall…
E4: What screen size/resolution are you running on? I’ve just realised that at 800x600 or lower that menu option will be off the bottom of your screen.
At the moment patches etc are handled by downloading a new version from the server (the client alerts you that it is out of date). One of the other testers has suggested using GetDown for automatic updates and investigating is on my todo list but I haven’t got to it yet. Feel free to PM me/post here/post on the herodex forums. Wherever is easiest for you really
I’ve just released a new version of HeroDex with a brand new installer using getdown to fetch updates with much smaller initial downloads to get things going. If people could give it a try that would be much appreciated, the mac one in particular we’ve had trouble testing.
Even if people only have time to check it installs and gets to the point of the login screen without trouble then that would already be a big help, although If anyone who hasn’t so far could also try the error reporting too that would be great
