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"
