Tue, 06 Jun 2006
Runnin' Around the Beta Corral
Howdy again pardners. It's our first post-beta blog update. It's been mighty busy here at the Ranch but things are settlin' down a bit and I reckon we got some fun stuff to share with ya.

Firstly, there's the release notes for our beta update today:

• Added a new practice mode in The Ranch. This allows ya to practice with a particular unit and learn the ins and outs of its capabilities.
• Added a fancy post-game stats display that shows how everybody earned their points (nuggets collected, cattle rustled, etc.) and a whole bunch of other fun stats that we keep track of during the game.
• Made further progress on improvin' performance and improvin' our support for lower end graphics cards. If things are runnin' slow for ya, press the Escape key and try lowering that detail slider to medium or low. Soon we'll make the game figger out when to do this automatically, but for now you can give it a whirl yerself.
• Fixed the broken support for MacOS X. Sorry about that one pardners. Unfortunately you're going to have to reinstall to get things working again.

We got a new programmer workin' on the project, Mark. You can thank him fer the practice scenario and the fancy new post-game stats display. He's workin' on some other improvements to the basic gameplay now so I reckon we'll have more fun stuff for ya next week. Andrzej's still hard at work on our graphics engine, makin' it work better on low-end cards. We've also got two new artists helpin' out: Josh and Ian. They're workin' on Indian Trading Post unit models and animations. Meanwhile, I'm workin' on wiring up the purchase of gold coins. That's gonna be pretty important if we want to keep payin' the bills here at the Triple-O Ranch.

Hope yer havin' fun in Frontier Town. We'll be back again next week with some more info on new Indian Trading Post units.

- Sheriff Mike