Zex to Beta 1

After a lot of effort, finally, the Zex beta version is posted on the Lightsoft web site http://www.lightsoft.co.uk/zex/ and we can finally relax. Well sort of - guess we will need to start working on Beta 2.

From my point of view details of other's projects can be quite illuminating but so can analysing your own projects. Let's start with what went badly:

• A last minute bug that needed to be fixed when we thought it was finished.
  
• 'Universal' deployment build (to produce proper application) doesn't work on my machine - still! (Good Stu's does!)
  
• It felt like every other change I did made an additional bug over the last couple of weeks!
• My cvs access was playing up for a few days before I figured it out what was happening - arrghhh...
  
• Some of the crash bugs were a real pain.
• There are still a few yucky bugs we know about that I wished we could have found in time for beta. But so goes these things - they weren't critical.
  
• We had to make a decision - primarily because of lack of testing with the old compiler - to drop the OSX 10.2 build for Beta. (Let me know if you are interested in Zex for 10.2 by emailing me: rob at lightsoft.co.uk)
  

So not so bad overall. Things that went well?

• I feel quite proud of Zex. It's a good game.
  
• Alpha testing by two (poor) volunteers was massively helpful. I really am glad they helped out.
• Buy graphics got finished in record time (with some baby-sitting by me).
• Stu and I worked together really well on this.
  
• We were both totally committed to this release and prioritised the bugs aggressively to make it happen - but without compromising people's Beta experience. We did slip a few weeks (hey, who doesn't ;-) but overall I'm pleased with the schedule.
  
• All the porting work and extensions written recently worked well (with a good amount of effort obviously) .
  
• We have an Intel build (as well as PowerPC)! Something I thought would be impossible for Zex.
  
• cvs and cvstrac give us good control (the bug tracking and source control) and proved again that they are good tools. This is the first time we'd used cvstrac for bug tracking in Lightsoft.
  
• I got lots of good work done over the last few months (not easy since I have an 8 month old baby to play with - it's good she goes to sleep at night!)

That's all that occurs to me at the moment, but it gives a flavour of the project so far. I guess other things might get posted later.

Anyhow, what are you still doing here! Get playing!