Re: SE5 progress
 

Just to let you know David, some companies do release "Beta Demos"

Jowood, for example, released the Soldner Beta Demo
http://soldner.jowood.com/?RubrikIdentifier=726&lang=en
Look down the page to where it says "US Beta Demo"

Now to the most extent you are right however, as most companies wont publicly release beta demos (unless they are apart of the MMORPG world, but they call that "Open testing") and most of these that are found have been leaked by a beta tester

Re: SE5 progress
 

can we expect beta screenshots, (possible) feature lists, and such? maybe sanctioned beta logs from a couple of the testers?

or is there too much fear of other companies cribbing MM's ideas?

Re: SE5 progress
 

An "offical" update - say twice a month with feature lists, direction updates and screenshots would be good - it would just help with these discussions in terms of thoughts, feedback and new ideas that could be included at a late stage or a brainstorming session on how best to implement new ideas.

Re: SE5 progress
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's pretty much what we had from Starfury, isn't it? So I'd personally expect something similar for SE5...

Re: SE5 progress
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">It's probably more a fear of announcing things that then don't show up in the published game. Look at all the features listed for SE IV that never actually appeared. The ship_sizes file is full of unused options. It sure would have been great to have all those unimplemented fancy 'exclusions' and extra abilities for ships, wouldn't it? We had to wait for the Gold Version before we even got drones. If he goes announcing all his grand plans for SE V and then finds out they are too hard to implement, what then? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: SE5 progress
 

Then only list them onc things are implemented.

50+ screenshots though - should be interesting.