Empires Beta 2 - Coming Soon

Let me take a moment here to bring everyone up to speed on what's going on with Empires. I last left everyone off six months ago with the impression that the next release of Empires was right around the corner. That's what I sincerely felt at the time, and shortly after that news post, we began doing a large amount of play testing to prepare it for release. The result of the play testing made us realize that while it would have been an acceptable release, it wasn't everything it could have been. It didn't have all the new features people were wanting, and it wasn't as bug free as it could have been. We decided to hold off with the public release and continue to improve Empires so that the next public release absolutely lived up to everyone's expectations.

That version, which we will be calling Beta 2 or 2.0 if you desire, will soon be available to you. After roughly twenty internal releases to our play testers, we've developed Empires into a version that is faster, better looking, bug free, and very optimized compared to the last public version (1.07). Features that people have asked for since 1.0 such as a better squad management interface, an interface to vote in a commander at map start, and others are now included. The networking code has undergone some major improvements. Many people were satisfied with 1.07's networking, but that wasn't good enough for us. With Beta 2, we've optimized the networking code to use 50% less bandwidth compared to 1.07. Our internal testing sessions have reached up to 46 players in a single game.

Thank you for your patience as we finish this version which is planned to be released before the year is over. I'll leave you now with comparison pictures between 1.07 and Beta 2 showing how far we've come as well as pictures of the new commander voting and squad management interfaces.

(Pictures available on the front page)

 

damn...when you put it that way...

 

YEAAAH FINALLY!!
Didnt we reach 56 players instead of 46?

 

56 is the limit, but we never had that many players. I'm leaning towards capping the public version to 32, and only bumping it up for the ep 2 engine. I don't want to see someone with a shitty connection try to do the max and turn everyone off.

 

I'm worried that people will see the bots in the commander voting and squad management screenshots and get the idea that functional bots have been added.

 

Yayyyyyyyy

 

leave at 40 in my opinion... it makes a massive difference ingame between 16 v 16 and 20 v 20... and it didn't seem to lag too bad at 40 players from what i remember...

 

Add a warning that 56 player servers are only for good connections?

 

It's......alive!

 

Finally something officially new in the Empires front. :p I hope the new "soon" is closer to the general term "soon" than the old one.

 

Wow, wasn't Airplanes meant to be in this version

( I Know they're not, but the name change may confuse people...)

 

Lol...there's always one. I think the community's gonna be wowed by this, kudos to Krenzo and the dev team for their time and effort.

 

Awesome beans. Should get this out to the news sites or something

 

looking good

 

Finally a news post. :D

 

Gotta say that with all the positive cumulative enhancements which includes bug fixes, new features and optimisation (while the 2.0 = aircraft might confuse some) called the final public release is great news as i believe Krenzo and the gang really have pushed this game forward in strides of the last 20 betas and months.

Once 2.x is released i'll be putting a game server back up.

 

I want Empire Beta too ^-^

 

Nice but people may get confused about hose bots. They may think you can get them in this version even you can't.

But anyway, finally some news. <)

 

Cap it at 42.

(2 commanders and twenty on each side)

(Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)

 

Give everyone towels!