Any Reaction to the Alpha Yet?

[shivers9 1,174]

I am not on the alpha team and what I do know...I don't understand ......and....what I understand is not related to the original question. I will give regular updates on what I don't know just to keep you in the loop🔃. I was going to start a web site so you could follow along but DUH dot Com was already taken.

[Farlis 2,300]

5 hours ago, Krakin said:

Can you dm a brotha the pics?

That is exactly the reason why NDA's exist. So that smartypants like you don't ask for the spread of information around the net that is not supposed to be spread yet.

[skully 1,046]

2 hours ago, Brandon0110 said:

hearing that tidbit about Atlanta airport makes me a little nervous.  

Nervous? About features in a new flightsim?

So far we've heard "I'm nervous" I'm concerned", "I'm worried" and on and on. Good grief...

You should be elated because I've heard that KATL is a dirt strip with a grass hut terminal replete with 50 gallon fuel drums and circa WWII hand pumps.

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

34 minutes ago, greggerm said:

After all, when the product does finally release, for better or worse, YOU will be in the crosshairs for not pointing out any bugs left over...  (heheh)

Nah, it doesn't work like that. I've been a beta tester for many games and flight sims over the years, including sims like Spectrum Holobyte's "Flight of the Intruder" and "Falcon 3.0." Both of those were absolute bug farms. Almost un-flyable on initial release, because they decided to go ahead without fixing all the stuff we testers kept yelling at them about.

They were eventually patched up, but you can pretty much assume that anything bothering you about a game's release has already been noticed and mentioned by someone, either in-house or in an outside test group before release.

[shivers9 1,174]

8 minutes ago, skully said:

You should be elated because I've heard that KATL is a dirt strip with a grass hut terminal replete with 50 gallon fuel drums and circa WWII hand pumps.

Was that from one of the "Partners"?? Do you have any pic's of a link??

[skully 1,046]

34 minutes ago, shivers9 said:

Was that from one of the "Partners"?? Do you have any pic's of a link??

No, word came from a southbound goose via Omaha.

[Julkensen 47]

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I have a somewhat belated confession to make. I downloaded a replacement EXE that circumvented the need to have the fourth CD in the tray. 🥴

Will I still be able to buy MFS20 when it’s released or am I now on a Hall of Shame list. 😉

Shame!

I'll tell Andy to add some code in the Concorde 64 bit that requires the fourth cd to be there to fly it if it's activated with your name. 

That will teach you. You monster. 

[Scottoest 1,561]

1 hour ago, Paraffin said:

So you want to hear what people who have broken the NDA have to say? Seems like an odd request to me. If you understand what the "Alpha" state of software means, it's not really all that helpful to hear anything about it, because that's not the sim you will eventually be flying. It's probably not even the current state of development, because in-house builds in this type of project are usually further along than what's released for the invited Alpha or Beta test groups. 

Is it really THAT strange, that people outside the Alpha would like to get a general idea of how the Alpha is being received by those inside it?  Likewise, do you really think everyone who excitedly signed up to be in the alpha, just did so because they couldn't contain their excitement to... provide free QA testing?  Or MAYYYYBE because they were also excited to get a first hand look at how things are shaping up?

1 hour ago, Paraffin said:

Nobody who wants to remain in the program is going to tell you anything useful. There may be one or two people who want a brief Internet spotlight by breaking the NDA, but that's going to be a single snapshot of the process, not where things stand right now.

I agree, nor would I ask them to risk it.  As I said in the OP, and repeated in my response to Ray already, the point was to ask if anything had heard anything - scuttlebutt, leaks, second or third hand accounts - about how the alpha was going.  The point was not to solicit firsthand accounts from testers, screenshots, or anything else.

And I was one of the people a few months ago, helping to explain in detail to everyone here, what the differences are between "pre-alpha", "alpha", and "beta" software - and specifically how those terms get used when it comes to game development (sim vs. game haggling aside).

[carbonbasedlifeform 179]

Some of the attempts here to circumvent the NDA remind me of the attempts to circumvent the P3D commercial license. Putting in terms of obvious comparisons to X-Plane is still breaking the NDA.

Asobo/MS, a lot of us who are not in the program would be happy to take the place of the NDA-breakers. 😋

[Murmur 3,944]

1 hour ago, Paraffin said:

I've been a beta tester for many games and flight sims over the years, including sims like Spectrum Holobyte's "Flight of the Intruder" and "Falcon 3.0."

I played FOTI a lot, very nice sim. How did it work being a beta tester back then without internet? Or did you already have internet access back then?

[Scottoest 1,561]

Just to further clarify - this is an example of the kind of responses I was hoping for:

"Yeah, my brother's buddy is in the test.  He says it's fantastic."

NOT

"I am in the test. Here are some pictures I took, along with a detailed breakdown of the things that are good, and the things that need more work".

[DadJokeCinema 145]

Yeah, my brother's buddy is in the test.  He says it's fantastic.

[Murmur 3,944]

1 minute ago, carbonbasedlifeform said:

Putting in terms of obvious comparisons to X-Plane is still breaking the NDA. 😋

Not if there isn't any obviousness and any comparison. Saying things like: "It's a good thing that LR incomes do not depend on its desktop flight sim", or things like: "It's a good thing that XP plans to improve a lot its performance", or things like: "XP smoothness/lack of scenery pop-ups is a very nice feature it has", these are things that everyone could say and technically not related at all to MFS. But don't worry, my post was just for fun and nobody is gonna do that anyway.

[Deleted 250]

I am confident that we will soon find out for ourselves. And it gets better than Alpha 1!

[Paraffin 2,197]

21 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

Is it really THAT strange, that people outside the Alpha would like to get a general idea of how the Alpha is being received by those inside it? 

That desire doesn't seem strange to me. What seems strange is that instead of realizing it's just human nature and wishful thinking, you'd want to hear second or third-hand from someone breaking the NDA.

You would have no idea how current that info actually is, or what the motivation was from the person who released it. How are they spinning it? Are they cherry-picking the good and ignoring the bad? Or vice-versa? What's their agenda, other than wanting some attention on the Internet?

Without a free flow of information from many people, and cross-comparison on an open forum like here on Avsim, you have no idea how valid any "impressions" are.
 

10 minutes ago, Murmur said:

I played FOTI a lot, very nice sim. How did it work being a beta tester back then without internet? Or did you already have internet access back then?

This was pre-Internet and Web. I was one of the two SysOps helping to run the flight sim forums on the old Compuserve dial-up BBS system. We had a Spectrum Holobyte rep active on the forum, and several of us got into an outside Beta test group through that contact. IIRC, we got disks in the mail for the test and used email for feedback. I can't remember if there was ever any downloaded content for updates -- it would have been via FTP, but I just don't remember.