Hi all,
As most people have noticed our beta2 release has met with quite a few problems,
mainly due to the switch to cuda 3.0 which has brought a lot of driver specific issues,
and the new platform that was introduced, eg the Mac OS X port.
Before we make releases, we test them with our alpha testing group.
The issue is that people are not always available and this group is small, so not all features can get extensive testing on a wide variety of hardware before our release.
That is why we have decided to make some changes to the way we work, and we would like to do 2 things:
* reorganize the forum
* provide release candidates to our customers instead of the relatively small alpha testing team
I will talk in detail about both issues:
Forum Reorganization
As you may have noticed, a lot of people are posting issues in various forums, and we often can't see the forrest through the trees anymore. Often customer related bugs (like license issues) end up in general discussion, and other machine specific posts aren't posted in the right forums.
Currently it's quite difficult for us to manage this. Every morning there are 50 posts waiting for us, scattered throughout the forums.
We would like to reorganize things a little, to make it easier and more straight forward to use our forum.
Since we are a company that sells a software product to it's customers, we would like to focus on providing the best possible support to that group, and make the public sections of the forum smaller and only related to discussion regarding the demo version, competitions and artwork.
We are currently building a new forum organization and you will see some changes made and announced soon.
Release Candidates
As said before, it's not always easy to make sure our releases are propperly tested with the small alpha testing team, and it would not help to keep adding/removing people to it as people come and go.
Therefore, we'd like to do our pre-release tests directly with our customers.
This basically means that we will prepare our release candidates after our in-house quality control, and then post them on the customer product news and releases forum, ready for testing.
This has the advantage of getting new releases into customer's hands quicker, while enjoying the feedback of the large group of customers, and having the ability to respond to issues raised, fix the problems, and then release the next release candidate, etc... until there are no more problems and that version becomes the actual release, with the amount of post-release issues severely reduced.
That's it, i hope these ideas will make our work easier in the future, and our releases more solid.
Yours,
Radiance