We've mentioned several times that we're working towards a beta. What does this mean? Here is what I think.
Philosophically - Beta means that our mod has added the vast majority of content that will control how it plays and that we are moving to focusing on making sure that it is fun to play, has good historical dynamics, and presents an appropriate degree of difficult.
Functionally - Beta means that we will advertise for testers outside of this sub-forum. The goal here is to increase the sample size looking at the mod, allowing us to get more accurate impressions of what a typically user is seeing rather than relying on single reports. We will also slow down the rate at which new versions are released -- we have to keep our beta testers all providing reports on the same (most current) version. Those of us contributing content/code will probably move to exchanging files in a semi-private way and building them into new releases which will come out no more frequently than every week. We will also start numbering the releases, for ease of reporting.
How far are we from beta?
We are close. There is lots of work to be done on things like buildings/wonders, UHVs, stability, resurrection, etc., but most of those will benefit from the increased reports we hope a beta will generate. On the other hand, we will not rush into a beta. Our betas will constitute the first impression most people get of our mod, and it is important to make a good first impression. Appearance is important, and this means that we will want to put some effort into cleaning up artwork and text descriptions. Explanation is also important, so we will need a basic ReadMe to include with the mod.
What I'd like to do is generate a list of major things that must be done before the beta. Volunteers to contribute specific things would be great. This will be used to refine, re-arrange, and extend the
wiki to-do list.