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Firstly, please let me say thank you to all the people who have dropped by to check out the web site, and chat with us both here and over at Space Sim Central. Also a big thank you to all the enthusiastic people who have signed up as Beta Test Pilots. All the Test Pilots who have signed up so far and supplied a valid UDID for their iPhone or iPod Touch are in the system and will have access to the first and all subsequent Beta updates when they become available. You'll all also receive a notification from us a few days before we release the Beta with notes and info for you.

We've had a few emails recently from both registered Beta Test Pilots, and from people who are interested in ArcNebula generally, asking when the next teaser is coming and also how come the Beta program has not started yet. It's great that so many people already care about ArcNebula. So thank you again, all of you, for letting us know we don't exist isolated and alone in the vacuum of space here at Ginetix Games. Although it could be said we aspire to!! I've answered all of the enquiries about ArcNebula Beta delays personally so far. But I thought I'd just pop a quick note up here to allay any fears.

In short : ArcNebula is progressing just fine.

No-one has the Beta yet. (We are currently still at the "internal Alpha" stage.)

All of our Test Pilots will get a copy at the same time - regardless of platform.

For those that are interested, the longer story goes like this..

We are behind schedule with where we'd want to be, but we're dedicated to producing the best end product on all iPhones and iPods before we let this thing "out in the wild". We always knew with a piece of software this ambitious on a mobile device we may hit the odd bump in the road during development. That's half the fun. ArcNebula as a project overall has several years of hard work in it, and we plan to be working on it and growing it several years from now too...

In the last couple of weeks of December we took the decision to rework some parts of the Virush Engine we use in ArcNebula, with the objective of bringing the OpenGLES 1.x engine kicking and screaming a bit closer to that of it's bigger brother the OpenGLES2.0 engine on the newer 'S' devices. 

We also found we needed to be more aggressive with some of the caching and compression strategies we were using on both engines and this has a knock on effect on how both the Combat Trainer and ArcNebula work - as well as their datasets. Both have been progressing still, but any Beta release is dependant on those engine updates. These include aggressive vector maths library enhancements on both flavours of iPhone / iPod CPU thru multi-threaded procedural generation of data "on-the-fly" at run time to extremely aggressive model and texture optimisation and compression. And I have not even mentioned run-time loading and saving of data as you progress through the ArcNebula Universe.... Some of this stuff is hard on desktop machines, let alone hand held devices.

Luckily because we own the Virush engine, and are a truly independent software house (in the most minimalist way possible) we can make these kind of decisions without worrying about backers or publishers sending us nasty letters - or visiting our offices to talk harshly to us. We do care however about the people we write this stuff for. Very much.

What we can do is strive to make this the best Space Simulation you can have in your pocket. A game that we want to play too. I have to be honest and say I play it most days - and love it - Sorry!

ArcNebula is a game we will continue to support and develop throughout the entire range of iPod Touch and iPhone product lifetimes, and into the future on other devices - perhaps even on the mythical Apple Tablet!

So please be patient with us. Please please keep up the enthusiasm. We love it. And rest assured we are here working away even up to silly-o'clock each day to refine this thing to the N'th degree before we blow your minds with it. :-)

All the best,

scratt (Lead Dev.)