Netease - TX2 - FF2 - Game status

On 3/1/2007, TX2 went into open beta while FF with new game engine went to closed beta, so far both games seem to go fine.

On TX2, Netease came out with a new patch that seems to improve the game code. Games are much more playable for even average PCs. A big complaint involves little support for newbies. But it is something that can be easily cured by adding some simple programming codes. Or just write some tutorial on the game web site.

Again, I don't think Netease had really start the real marketing campaign for TX2 yet. But so far, it seems the game is pretty stable and there is no fundamental or catastrophic programming bugs. As an ex-programmer, it seems all the complaints by the players can be easily solved by modify little computer code fragments.

For Fly for Fun (FF) with the expansion pact (the one with the brand new game engine), I am pleasantly surprised by the stability of the new game engine.

The game engine is the most difficult part of a PC game (by far). There were 5 patches that came out in the last 3 days that attempt to improve the efficiency of the programming code. According to a poll on Netease's user forum, 15% of players feels the game is still too much of a resource hog, 66% feels improvement but still wish Netease can further optimize the code, 15% feels big improvement and is happy, and 3% feels extremely happy.

This is basically the first stage of the closed beta, the performance of the new engine is definitely beyond all expectation.