Hi Degas,

It's an optimization problem, combined with higher texture resolution for our avatars than many other games. With Pirates, we have a lot of natural clothing that requires more texture resolution and more polys to look right than other games. But that's not to say that we can't do a better job than we have with it, and we are working to improve it.

Actually, there have been a lot more reviews than have shown up on Metacritic. And they're all between 80 and 90. We live in the "Great stuff, needs some polish" land.

/runs off to polish

Oh, and did you guys read the New York Times today?

I don't know what's causing it, but I've been working on it.

Accuracy is from the heaviest loaded gun.

Yes, this is something we intend to do. I don't have firm estimates on the when, and I'm not prepared to discuss the details on how, but this is something we want to do.

Boarding combat would be the most difficult place to add avatar to avatar collision. If we were to add collision we would probably turn it off completely in non-combat spaces, just to prevent people from trying to blockade doorways.

Generally we operate in 3 logical source control branches simultaneously, called build, next, and testbed. We determine which branch to apply fixes in based on a number of factors, primarily the urgency of the bug and the anticipated impact of the change.

There's also a live branch where we keep the source for the build currently on live servers. On occasion we apply a server-only fix in the live branch.

Currently build has 1.2, next has 1.1, testbed & live have 1.0.
Soon, probably this weekend, I'll be shuffling the branches, putting 1.1 on testbed, 1.2 on next, and starting the label for 1.3.0.0.

We've had ~47 builds in the 1.1 branch, with additional fixes in each build. QA has been poring over these builds, ensuring the fixes work and don't have unintended consequences. At this point we feel confident that the vast majority of fixes that will go in to 1.1 are in and working.

Bolbis: I can't say 100%, but we did fix a bug where you could get stuck on an infinite loading screen when transporting between ports via the Harbor Master. Some people who hit that bug also crashed. We also fixed a bug that could cause you to crash if you zoned while a tooltip was displayed, which could also happen if you left your mouse over the transport button for a few moments before clicking it. So: maybe!

simiant: Should be less than two weeks, depending on how things go on the test server.

We'll be leaving this build up on Testbed for a week or more, probably, as it's a big, scary change. We appreciate any feedback you have to offer on issues we should resolve before pushing this build to live.

Pay particular attention to the changes we made that Rev described in his [url-http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10591]DevLog[/url]. He'll be posting another DevLog soon that's worth a look.

The Steering Committee doesn't review/approve/reject flags. FLS devs do.

As only one participant I can only speak with certainty for myself, but when reviewing flags/sails I usually check for transparency issues in a graphics program. I also have some browser tools that can check colors in a submission, if I can't confirm by eye that they're in a good range.

We don't currently have specialised tools for previewing content, but we DO have intimate knowledge of how flags and sails get translated into and displayed in the game.

Actually I have spent the last 2 weeks refining the rapier anims. And this week just went through florentine. It's pretty high a priority for us. Rapier feels pretty tight to me know.