Waldo wrote:
pasik wrote:
AND! If we would be punctual here, it has been Alpha instead of Pre-Alpha since 0.2

As a question of semantics, what is the difference between pre-Alpha, Alpha, and Beta? Or are they just arbitrary naming conventions?
Basically it goes like this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle.
In recent years though the whole version naming system has become rather messy, everyone seems to have their own way of using it and people invent their own version names.
My way is that Pre-alpha was something that I just barely wanted to show publicly, expecting most of the interested people to just try the game for a couple of minutes to say it launches ok and stop playing, and express if they find it promising or not. This was me trying to say with Pre-alpha that it's very very far from anything final and a lot of things will change, it's a keyword to emphasis the 0.1 state, "not even an alpha" describes it pretty well to most.
Alpha was a clear step up from it, eventually bringing a lot of must-have features like weapon change, more weapons, suppressive fire, fixing various crashes, improving visual quality, balancing stuff. With all the fixes it was something you could actually play and have fun with, maybe for half an hour straight, in some cases more, which is already quite a lot.
There will be a Beta phase starting soon. It should have very rare crashes, and no problems for most of people when installing or launching the game. On top of that it's just then more balancing, more maps, more features, more modding support.