Saturday night, my gaming group took Alpha-15 for a spin. There were a couple issues related to…well, related to my coding on Alpha-15 until 10 minutes before game time. Despite that, EpicTable pretty much stayed out of the way and just let us play, which is my heuristic for beta worthiness. I’m addressing those couple issues, and then I have some mapping work to finish. At that point, I’ll transition to beta.

One concession I’m making to time–I’m going to start the beta before the vision-related tools are integrated. I know, for some of you that’s going to be a downer, and I won’t feel bad if you want to wait for the vision support. There’s a lot of functionality that’s in pretty decent shape, though, and starting early with people who aren’t as concerned about vision will give me a gentler beta ramp.

I’m going to start reaching out to folks over the next few days to gauge interest in beta 1. Stay tuned.

I’ve been hard at work on EpicTable, trying to make good on that prediction of a Fall beta. (Hey, I have until the 21st! )

We tested out Alpha 13 and 14 today/tonight. Alpha 13 fixed the character transfer issue from Alpha 12, and it reintroduced some long locked-down UI customization capabilities like changing the visibility of the chat, character portrait bar, and dice tray, dragging panels to secondary monitors, etc.

Brennen, who’s on a smaller display, has been needing that auto-hide feature for the various EpicTable panels, and immediately noticed that the panels were slow on his machine. That was this morning (um…Saturday morning, that is) on Alpha 13. By this evening, Alpha 14 was born, and its auto-hide panels are considerably snappier.

I have a few things I still want to take care of before the beta, but some of you die-hards are apt to hear from me before I’m officially past my Fall deadline.

For those of you interested in the kinds of things going on in the alpha tests, the release notes for the alphas are actually here on the site: http://www.epictable.com/whats-new/