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Is this going to be a stand up fight Sir, or is this going to be another bug hunt?
Hudson from Aliens
Hudson from Aliens
and put together a buglist for SMAC. That buglist proved to be quite successful, and firaxis fixed most of the items on it. Quality Assurance is one of the most labor intensive parts of computer game development making it a fairly expensive item; not only that resources earmarked for Q/A are determined by how well the game sells and how long its sells remain strong. Firaxis has a good record of supporting their games, but even firaxis has a limit on how long they can use resources to support a game. This means that the sooner bugs get found, the greater the possibility they will get fixed.The one resource overflowing here at Apolyton is free time. By harnessing our free time we help alliveate Q/A labor needs for firaxis. While bug hunters at Apolyton could not replace Q/A team members at firaxis we could prove to be a very useful resource for them. For one thing we work for free! Additionally we are some of the most civ players, and we know a bug when we see it. With some cooperation between firaxis and Apolyton, the community and the developers could work together in the same way they for for the past two years and really accomplish something great! I really hope that civ3 is flawless, I realize that this isn't possible, but I think it can come very close.
I have contacted MarkG and DanQ about this, and it appears that we will have their support in this project (like always! thanks guys!). Also I mailed the following document to Kelly Gilmore yeterday, and a reply said that I Kelly was off from work right now but would be back on monday. I would have mailed this to Jeff Morris, but I don't have his email address.
Firaxis (Q/A in particular),
We here at Apolyton know that Firaxis will do everything within its power to find and quash all of the bugs in Civ3 during the beta; however, some will make it into the final release. With SMAC, it seemed that bug lists created by the fans helped make the job easier. With that in mind, we at Apolyton would like to focus our efforts on creating the best bug report we can for you at Firaxis. All we can offer you is a group of enthusiastic (rabid) fans who are willing to volunteer their spare time to finding and verifying bugs. All we ask is for you to tell us how you want this data organized and presented. We want to work with you as closely as possible to ensure our efforts will be of a great benefit to you, because the greatest reward for us is having the best possible Civ3. So if you would be kind enough to tell us how you would like for us to classify, verify, organize, and report bugs to Firaxis we will follow your instructions. Any other suggestions or advice you might have would also be helpful. Our process will be completely open over at Apolyton so feel free to drop in as much as possible! Thanks for your time.
We here at Apolyton know that Firaxis will do everything within its power to find and quash all of the bugs in Civ3 during the beta; however, some will make it into the final release. With SMAC, it seemed that bug lists created by the fans helped make the job easier. With that in mind, we at Apolyton would like to focus our efforts on creating the best bug report we can for you at Firaxis. All we can offer you is a group of enthusiastic (rabid) fans who are willing to volunteer their spare time to finding and verifying bugs. All we ask is for you to tell us how you want this data organized and presented. We want to work with you as closely as possible to ensure our efforts will be of a great benefit to you, because the greatest reward for us is having the best possible Civ3. So if you would be kind enough to tell us how you would like for us to classify, verify, organize, and report bugs to Firaxis we will follow your instructions. Any other suggestions or advice you might have would also be helpful. Our process will be completely open over at Apolyton so feel free to drop in as much as possible! Thanks for your time.
The one lesson learned in the past two years is that organization makes all fan efforts more successful. It is much better to create an Apolyton bug list, than for each fan who finds a certain bug to fill the firaxis Q/A team's mailbox. So here is what I am proposing.
In our bug list efforts we need a few positions. First thing we need is for the community to post the bugs they find. This is the basic bug hunter position. All you have to do to be a bug hunter, is when you see a bug goto the correct forum, and describe the bug. If you have a save game that would be great! The next position we need is for people to verify the bugs. They look at the bug list, see a bug that hasn't been verified yet, then they try to recreate the bug. Once they have done this they will post a savegame of the bug. The next position is the bug list administrators. They need to scurry the forum looking for new bug postings, then they need to take those bug postings, make sure they are really new bugs, then post them to the official bug list, which will be topped in the correct forum. The last position is the most interesting, and that is the game breaker. Thos who want to be game breakers will try to do crazy things to induce bugs. If they are really creative, then hopefully this can really speed up the process. All the community needs is a just a little bit of your free time.
Until we hear from Firaxis the exact method of describing bugs is unknown. Hopefully they will give us a form to follow, but if they don't we will work out our own form, so that the list will be as easy to understand as possible. I really hope that Firaxis participates, if they do then they will get even more benefit out of it.
Just remember that we have one goal, and that goal is to make Civ3 the best quality game possible!
If you wish to participate please, say say which things you would like to do and put the email address you want to be contacted at in your post. As things get nailed down a little bit better, I will update you; however, if we are going to be ready and have this organized from day one we need to start now.
Is this perhaps the first bug? Do I get a T-shirt for that?
WOW!
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