Where is 258?

 

Oh 258, how you doth tease us so. First it was Tuesday, then it was Thursday, and now it is Friday and there is no 258 to be seen. What is going on?

The primary objective of build 258 is to drastically reduce the incidence of  out-of-memory crashes for players with 32-bit operating systems. This has meant delving pretty deeply into the guts of the game, and changing some pretty fundamental stuff. Dr Max has been performing surgery in places with names mere mortals cannot even begin to pronounce.

Fortunately, this work has been successful. The crashes are almost entirely (though not absolutely completely) banished. Unfortunately, we have a gut feeling – And that feeling is that 258 is not fully baked. Over the years, we have developed a sense for when a build is just not quite there. Playtesters crashing out of games, little hitches where there were no hitches before, graphical glitches in places that used to run just fine.

So we are holding back. This does not mean we do not think that issues with 257 are not serious – It means that we do not want to fix one set of problems only to create new ones. We are disappointed that 258 will not be ready for the weekend. Having collected good data on what is causing the new-found instability in 258, we are working hard today to restore it to the rude health both you want.

What’s more, 258 does not just include fixes for 32-bit players. There are over 40 other individual bug fixes, Andi has made some subtle balance changes, and maps have received tweaks. Our new target date is the evening US-PST on the 15th of October: next Tuesday. That will make 258 seven days late, but it will also make 258 a much better experience.

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