Steel Beasts 4.3 Thread

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16419-leopard-2-r%C3%BCcksteuerung-not-working/page/2/#comment-231789

I expect an update in the second half of January. We need to wait until Wibu Systems releases an update to fix an issue for some Windows 11 users where the debugger detection erroneously trips the container lock. Until then we're adding minor new features and test them, so you'll get a bit more than just a bunch of bugfixes.

[Rinix]

The update has been delayed to February: https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16686-is-it-time-to-update-the-armor-model-on-the-leo2a4/page/3/#comment-232445

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16766-new-here/#comment-232760

That being said, we're pretty confident in the Steel Beasts side of things. What's left to do is to update the CodeMeter side of things and to test that; there's a good chance that the fix will be ready by next weekend.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16766-new-here/#comment-232791

If you subscribe to the Web Shop's newsletter, you will receive a notification when the update is available. Expect nothing before the end of this new week, and don't be surprised if it takes longer.

[Rinix]

Next version of Steel Beasts, version 4.375 or later, is coming, most likely on March 1 or March 2: https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16795-sb-pro-pe-4375/

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16795-sb-pro-pe-4375/#comment-233046

It will be at least a full installer. Maybe also a patch installer, depending on whether major artwork resource files have changed. No point building a patch installer if it doesn't conserve a lot of memory/download volume compared to the full installer. Also, we want to avoid the concatenation of patch installers so you don't have to keep a long chain of them that must be applied in exact order.

[Rinix]

Next version is version 4.377, release notes will be released later today: https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16795-sb-pro-pe-4377/#comment-233073

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16795-sb-pro-pe-4377/#comment-233081

I expect the new version to be made available by Thursday (this might mean Friday in Australia); we want to give the web installer a final check before the release (and it needs to be built first). Sean will post the Release Notes as soon as he's ready, possibly ahead of the actual installer.

[Rinix]

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16817-patch-v-4377-only/#comment-233648
This is a small part of a long post. The post as a whole does illustrate why the code of Steel Beasts needs to be rewritten to improve the ease of maintenance.

Even now we are at a crossroads about what to do for a patch release. It could have been last week, but we felt it would have been rushed. It could be this week (tomorrow) but always one more week would be better. But then, there might always be another week, and another week after that. When it comes to developing software, weeks can pass like days, days like minutes. In the end, very tough decisions must be made by those who thankfully aren't prone to panic, and those decisions are never taken lightly. So, the short answer here is, the patch will be ready soon, and it will always come with inherent risks. I guess we will see how that goes - maybe we can get lucky and make everyone happy, occasionally.

[Rinix]

An interesting note: https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16817-patch-v-4377-only/#comment-233728

This happens rarely when humans are present to observe it (if there's no human player around and something weird happens with a civilian car of the Purple party somewhere up in the northeast, it might be the most astounding or frightening event, but we will never know). Which makes us believe that these things don't happen at all when maybe we're just blissfully ignorant. And then we happen to run across a freak event right after we updated a software, and to our brain it's absolutely clear that "the upgrade done it". And in all fairness, there is an elevated chance. But the trouble with rare freak events is that there's no economically feasible way to test for them.

You test as much as you can. If nothing happens, maybe it's because the code is safe. Maybe you just didn't come across the conditions that will reveal it. As a reminder, Steel Beasts is commercial grade software. It gets tested as much as we can afford it, so we don't feel like total frauds charging money for it. But every version of Steel Beasts released since about 2013 came with about 2,000 known bugs. Some of which you know, and even fewer about which you care. Every day we add a bug or two, and we fix a bug or three. Then, after releasing a version, we learn about the 5...20 bugs that we didn't know about, and we fix 4...15 of them in a subsequent patch, and the counter of known bugs jumps from 1997 to somewhere between 1998 and 2002 again.

[Rinix]

A patch will be released before the weekend: https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16892-sb-pro-pe-4379/

[Rinix]

Version 4.379 is released. I will make an announcement once it is clear whether there will be a patch in addition to a full installer.

https://www.steelbeasts.com/topic/16892-sb-pro-pe-4379/#comment-233863

I know it's tongue in cheek, but for those missing the snark:

This isn't how this works.
Version 4.3, now being "the stable branch", will no longer receive feature additions (it may still receive patches).
We've already begun working on version 4.4, which is now "the experimental branch".

By the time that it's time for a new PE release, we may have advanced the version count to 4.5, or 4.6 even.
4.499 could be followed by 4.4100. It hasn't happened in the last 20 years; typically we stop between the high 50s and mid 70s. Still, just because the counter reaches 99 doesn't mean it couldn't go to 100, 200, 900 even.
Also,
- there's no law that we must go through 4.5, 4.6, 4.7, 4.8, and 4.9 to reach 5.0
- there's no law that you will ever see 5.0; may well be that, to mature enough for a public PE release, it'll take until 5.2 or 5.3.