You may already be aware of the iBeta story. This morning the iBeta FAQ was updated to version 1.3. If you are having problems with the iBeta patch or with F4 in general, check out their new FAQ. The link is at lower right.

A story worth reading…

When Hasbro decided to close the MPS Alameda labs (of which the F4 team was a part), the Falcon 4.0 team of programmers (Robin Heydon, Dave Power, Mike Mortimer and others), led by their Producer, Steve Blankenship, got together for an emergency meeting.

When they were finished, they contacted Hasbro corporate and asked if it would be all right to further the development of F4 in the remaining few days that they had access to the labs. Hasbro agreed, but Hasbro made it clear that 1.08us was the only version that they (Hasbro) could properly support. This was because 108us had been the only release that had been tested and approved by their in-house QA team.

Being the passionate simmers that they are, the F4 team and Mr. Blankenship devised a plan in conjunction with Hasbro Interactive to allow iBeta to release this new, far more stable, executable. iBeta agreed to support this surprise release by maintaining and updating a FAQ on its site.

Since Hasbro agreed to allow this post-final release, and no longer had the resources to test it, it was agreed that iBeta would continue to work with the engineers and ultimately release it to the public. The iBeta, and it's public testers on the F4 team agreed to help. iBeta public testers have put in literally hundreds of man-hours testing this new executable to insure its quality. We all owe the Producer, Engineers, and all the testers a great deal of gratitude.

This release is a tribute to the dedication of the producer and his team, who even after losing their jobs, decided to push forward with some more work. It is also a tribute to the iBeta public sector testers who continued to pull together as a team, in concert with programmers, to get a better final version out for all of us simmers to enjoy.

And they succeeded. The Campaign, TE and multiplayer crowd in particular will be excited about this release.

More History

A little history is helpful here. The single greatest bug plaguing multiplayer F4 since its inception, a bug so deeply rooted in the code, had been finally understood about 1 day after the 1.08us version was finalized. This was such a tremendous discovery, that the F4 team, under the direction of Mr. Blankenship, decided to pull together for this last round of bug fixes. Robin Heydon (programmer) and his team, pulled together for 3 straight days to finally sort this bug out.

And what a tremendous job they did. They had lost their jobs, but not their desire to make F4 live. The result, further stabilizing multiplayer and making the dynamic campaign more dynamic, will excite you. Don’t take my word for it. Try it. They also fixed a key bug in campaign and one in TE as well for the single player folks.

iBeta (the company and the testers who gave freely of themselves) are formed of dedicated flight sim players. We particularly love multiplayer and this effort on our part was a pure labor of love. It was also a labor of love on the part of the F4 Producer and his team of engineers. We hope the flight sim community will receive this gift as it was intended.

We also would like to give great thanks to Gabe Turk, who continues to support F4 version 108us both at work and from home with his endless patience for questions and posts in the newsgroups. He has also been a real tremendous player in this process. Gabe, and all the official MPS support people, will not be able to support Version 1.08i since their people did not QA test it.

Please visit iBeta.com for our FAQ. (Note: download the iBeta update patch below). We will continue to update this FAQ as best we can, to help everyone get as much pleasure from this final release as we have.

Respectfully,

Glenn H. Kletzky
aka “Sleepdoc” D. Eric Marlow
aka "Snacko"

To download the update patch click HERE.