Matrix Games Forums

Most Beta versions do not have the official. Are there any difference of 1.02.52Beta and 1.02.52?

An official can be installed over a beta, and I believe when the versions match there are no side effects to a current game.

Although I always play the beta; that's just me.

In general, my experience as a software engineer is this. If performance is an issue to you, don't use beta software. Why? In general, we usually add debugging logs into betas. This results in extra code and I/O, but is very useful when someone reports a problem besides receiving just save games and screens. Sometimes logs are created for telemetry reasons. Like there is a thread here that urban combat needs to reviewed. This is a good way to gather information for such a review. Finally, we add lots of ASSERTS (this is C/C++/C# speak; the general programing term is sanity checks). For example, you know land units cannot trace paths over water, but in a beta version we may add code when a unit is traveling to check the validity and quality of the path. Why? Conditions can creep into code that don't result in obvious bugs, but yet violate the game design rules. This let's us confirm the rules, and when the rules fail either raise an on screen issue or again log it.

What is special about debugging logs and asserts is that we have these marked in the code. By using special switches on the compile (translates high level code to low level and ultimately EXE/DLL), we can have all this stuff stripped and therefore the performance impact is gone.

So, in general, if you value performance more than newest features, don't run betas. This could be tested by running/timing GC turns between the two versions with all on screen UI IO turned off. If anyone is so inclined.

As I just described in another thread about the 76.2 Zis AT gun, there was supposed to be a difference in that the official version was supposed to include a ground.dat file correction that was not in the beta. Still trying to confirm whether it includes the fix, or if it got left off. As far as I remember, that was the only difference between the beta and official versions. Generally the official version is the same as the official version with the same number, but occasionally something comes up that gets dropped into the official version that was not in the beta, so it's always best to update to the official version once it is available.