
Hello Everyone!
It’s that time again, time for the weekly update and there are a variety of topics to cover! If you haven’t seen our previous updates I encourage you to not only read them, but encourage others to do the same. Since we don’t have the ability to spend as much time on the forums during the day as we’d like, we could use your help in spreading the word if questions surfacing from players can be answered by what we've posted so far.
In order to provide some context to our topics today, let’s start with some clarification on the different environments used in our development. I've seen some comments expressing concerns that we don’t have a live environment to test in and that’s not an entirely accurate statement. We have 3 environments (4 when HAB is running):
- Our High Velocity Development Environment
[*]Our Stabilizing Environment (updated once we've branched an update - all updates are generated from here)
[*]Our Live Environment
[/list]Each environment essentially has a different build of the game, with occasionally different platform service versions active, different database versions and of course, different user accounts. Each must remain isolated to an extent to prevent contamination and improve the quality of testing.
So when I say that the only true testing environment for live is live, it’s not that we aren't able to have an environment similar to live, but it’s that live has conditions that can only be simulated up to a certain point. We can simulate thousands of users hitting the service all at once or players using different account versions but reality can be very different from a simulation. It’s true of any aspect of software development unfortunately. For example, we've had individual accounts not have voice working and very specific accounts have an “empty” mech in the garage. These aren't global issues, just weird combinations of strings of events that can result in different outcomes which can’t be reasonably simulated. The moral of the story is, please don’t assume that a problem you may be having is a global one, so file those tickets! Our support team has a very quick turnaround and are great at doing their best to help make things right.
So let’s transition to the connectivity issues that are still outstanding (as indicated by the yellow bar still present at the top of the screen at the time of writing). The platform team has spent the past couple of weeks on this issue and it’s still under investigation, being looked at in multiple environments (not just live). There was even a little bit downtime this week to push something out to the live service to aid in debugging. Since properly looking into this issue requires the use of multiple environments and as close to a mirror of what’s currently live as possible for testing, we've had to put a hold on updating our stabilizing environment with new content. As a result this pushes back the next update by about a week. It was originally scheduled for this month but has moved to a new tentative date of December 3rd. It’s of the highest priory for us to fix these connectivity issues and we’ll update the community when we have additional information to share.
Now some may wonder why we're even thinking about a new update when the connectivity and online performance issues are still present. It’s a fair question, but it’s also important to remember that a good number of team members here at the studio are unable to help with fixing such issues. We have artists, animators, designers, gameplay programmers...a huge amount of great talent that can continue working on HAWKEN even though online performance and connectivity is the highest priority for the team as a whole.
We haven’t tied the final bow on the next update yet and even though the content is locked, there is final testing and polish to take care of. We have a few more weekly update posts in front of us until the next patch arrives so we’ll wait until another post to go into details on what’s coming. We mentioned in a previous posting that this update is more content focused than feature focused and until we specifically say what’s next, speculate as you will about this concept art for next month’s release:

Thanks Everyone!
Jason Hughes
Producer || Adhesive Games || twitter: @digitalHUGHES
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