The most important issues before the open beta can start are now out of the way. I must thank Honno and 1-Up Nuke for their tests bug reports and suggestions. And the suggestions of theirs that do not make it into Star Story will certainly make it into the next production (yes, there will be one more, and if you want to know what I’m gonna do next, follow this game as I will announce it here, eventually).

One note about the demo version. There are some bugs in the demo, I know. Most notably one that may cause a crash uploading starting a new game or loading a save game. Well now just before the open beta comes out, I found out why that happens, but I ain’t gonna fix it, for a VERY good reason. The demo is nothing more but a playable alpha, and next month is very realistic to have the first open-demo and then the bug will “fix itself”. Trying to fix this one in the demo now may only damage the full version. In Dutch we got the proverb, “de genezing is erger dan de kwaal” (lit. “The cure is worse than the disease), and since the full version has this issue fixed “automatically” it will only cause more trouble. If you still wanna try the demo, go ahead, if the crash happens, just try to do it again, and the game will run eventually. It’s just a bug in the security routine, or rather, some data in that routine that doesn’t belong there but only in the full version, making the game searching for data that doesn’t exist. Om the full version the data DOES exist.

When the “open beta” begins, this version will replace the demo, so client users who have installed the demo will get it automatically replaced by the full beta version, and once the “final” version is released this will replace the beta, so basically client users will have a full “flow-over”.

My primary concern is to make sure it is not possible any more to crash the game. Well 100% guarantees do not exist, but the game appears to be pretty stable now. A few enhancement and polishing appears to be what it needs most at this moment.

And then the first ETA for the open beta release can be set and that will be somewhere in September. A later announcement may predict a more specific date (no promises yet).

For those who want to try this demo yet (despite its flaws). Don’t worry about your savegames, they should be completely compatible with the full beta, and the stable release.

So hang on folks.