Starting to look for beta-testers

[Springheel]

My mission, "A Reputation to Uphold" is hopefully going to be ready for its first round of beta-testing in about a week. I'd like to start recruiting a few testers now so they're ready to go. Instead of typical difficulty levels, this map has three different types of gameplay to choose from, at least two of which have not been done before in TDM (to my knowledge) and may be so difficult that they're not even fun.

 

For the first round of testing I'd like to get people who are veterans with a lot of knowledge of TDM gameplay, to help me balance the gameplay options. It will require playing at least two of the different options, if not all three.

 

Interested parties, let me know.

[Araneidae]

I've played (almost) all the downloadable missions, and so would like to help if that's of use. Guess I've played TDM for about a year or so now?

[Airship Ballet]

Same with regards to the missions, also as my signature says I'm a QA tester for realsies (although I don't think I'm the only one).

[Xarg]

If you need more testers, I've been playing since late 2009 and have tested (from memory) 15 or so FM's, can help out if needed.

[Airship Ballet]

Xarg has been on the scene of many an industrial sabotage. Might want to watch it with him.

[Xarg]

Hey now, I just happened to be walking past at the time.

[Airship Ballet]

With a duffel bag full of USB drives loaded with the map? Suspicious.

[kyyrma]

Airship was invaluable during the testing of of my latest FM, especially because she was willing to record her first blind playthrough which gave me more information than any detailed forum post ever could.

[Airship Ballet]

D'awh shucks

[Springheel]

That would be very helpful indeed.

[Bikerdude]

You can count me in.

[Springheel]

Ok, had a weird pathfinding issue on a playtest last night. Going to try a few times to reproduce it, but barring that it should be ready to go in the next couple days.

[Springheel]

Ok, Biker, Merry, Xarg and Araneidae, the beta-test thread is ready:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/16155-a-reputation-to-uphold-round-1/

 

Please let me know if you don't have access to that forum.

[Araneidae]

No, I don't have access (yet?; please).

 

P.S. How do I record a playthrough? Not sure it'll be worth doing as can imagine the result being deathly boring, but am willing to give it a go.

[Airship Ballet]

P.S. How do I record a playthrough?

 

I'll be doing one but don't let that discourage you; the more perspectives there are the better. I use Bandicam (10-15x better compression on average than FRAPs and no quality loss despite that). Basically all you do is acquire the full version and then start it up. It'll be in hook mode by default, I think, and what that means is that the next game you open up will become its target. You'll get an FPS counter in the top left, and you simply press the record button and it starts capturing. The output is written straight into one file that you can then just stick into Youtube. As a raw output file it'll be larger than it would be if you put it through an editor but if you have decent bandwidth it's a non-issue. Bear in mind you need a stronger set-up to record than you do to just play or you'll get poor FPS. Not likely with TDM though since it's generally well-optimized.