It's here! It is time for the very first testing of the Minkata-alpha shard. This will be the shard upon which fan ages begin testing, when I debug the issues with the client using fan ages.
This call is for testing the shard itself. There is no new content here yet, I just need to get people to use the shard to make sure it is functioning properly.
This is very early in the life of the shard, so don't be surprised if you find issues with what I will list below for the goals of this testing period. But I do want to exercise the shard so I can look through the logs and vault to see things work the way they should.
Here are the goals for this round of testing:
- Make sure you can log on with your existing Minkata account (or one you create if you are new to Minkata from the link here.)
- Confirm you can move and play in the game properly (use books, move objects, navigate)
- Confirm the state of your avatar is the same as Minkata was as of a week ago. You still have all the linking books you found, cones are where you left them Doors and the environment are as they were on your last visit.
- Tricky one: Change some state in Minkata-alpha. Then go back to Minkata. The change should not be present in Minkata. Try closing a door that was open, or finding a new book that you didn't have in Minkata. Try it the other way as well: Change something in Minkata and go to Minkata-alpha and make sure the change is not there.
- No crashing, hangs, or "Net 6"s allowed! Report here if you encounter them.
Then, follow these steps (assuming you are running Minkata on Windows):
- Download a Windows command prompt batch file: UruLauncher-Alpha.bat Put it in the same directory you created when you installed Minkata. It already should have a file UruLauncher.exe present.
- Open a command prompt window.
- Use the "cd" command to change to the Minkata installation directory. You now should have a command window that looks something like this:
- In the command window, run "UruLauncher-Alpha". The MOULa launcher window will pop up, it will download a new launcher, and start it. You should then get the usual Minkata login window. Log in with your regular Minkata account.
- The launcher will download a few new files, and check a number of your existing files. It will probably take a while the first time when you switch from Minkata to Minkata-alpha. When the update check is finished you should get the regular Minkata game window, with your avatar list. You can now play in Minkata-alpha!
- After you run the UruLauncher-alpha batch file the first time from the command window, from then on you should be able to double click on it to start Minkata-alpha in an Explorer window, just as you would do for the regular UruLauncher.
- (Note: The Minkata-alpha game client is an "Internal" client, not the regular client. That means you will see messages at times you didn't see anything before. There also is the ability to use "Internal" commands, but we will discuss those later in the testing process.)