Beta advice

Play the game, report obvious bugs, for example if you crashed let them know exactly what you were doing etc. Try to see if there's obviously broken stuf like freezes if you click on a certain menu tab while having a unit selected. That kind of stuff.

Also if you think some things could be done better or you think an aspect of the game would benefit from a change in mechanics you can report that as well.

If possible, try to reproduce the bug (re-do what you were doing before it went foobar) to narrow it down for the devs.

If it's useful, take a screenshot.

Make sure it's not already reported in the forum before starting a new thread.

Try to be clear and concise in your report:

-version of the game the bug was detected in,

-Area affected (GUI, controls, audio, etc),

-Description of what happens, and what you did at the time.

-Description of what *should* happen,

-Is it reproducable? If so, how exactly, step by step.

When a new version comes out, check if the reproducable bugs are fixed (especially if the devs say it's fixed! Heheh).

thanks for the advice

what exactly do I do to report bugs/ make suggestions do i submit a error log or something and where do i send it or will they tell us what to do when the beta is released 

Here's what I think how it will happen. Since I've never been in a SD-Beta before, this is only speculation:

They will open a Beta-Forum, where we will have a pinned post at the top with all the important information. I don't know if the bugs shall only be reported in that forum, or also either in-game or with an extra site for entries into their bugtracker.

I've been in two betas from different companies before. One had a beta-section in their forums where bugs were posted in the bug-subforum. The other one had an interface to their bugtracker and also an forum where (possible) bugs could be discussed with the other players.

To the devs: If you give us an interface to the bugtracker, please don't let us have to reenter our system-specs every time. Just pre-fill these fields with the data from the last time.

Keep a pen and notepad close at hand.  Try to write down your EXACT steps to reproduce the problem.

I'm not sure if we'll have access to Stardock's bug tracking tool... usually you have to sign pages of NDA agreements because what goes on in there doesn't make good publicity. So I guess we'll just have a forum section for the beta, organized as one thread per bug.

For the error log... someone on the dev team will have to answer that. It depends on the program.

Also, i forgot before, attach your dxdiag log to your bug reports. It helps finding bugs specific to hardware and drivers.

To do that on winXP, go in the start menu, Run (or execute... my windows is not in english), type dxdiag, press enter. This opens the directX diagnostic tool. Click the 'save all the information' (or something similar) button, save as a text file.

I think it's safe to assume that the good people at stardock will provide us with some clear instructions.

Cool thanks everyone just have to weight for the beta to be released now i cant weight the suspense is killing me

It's been mentioned several times, but it really can't be mentioned too much:  If at all possible, find a way to consistently reproduce the bug, and then write the steps to do so down in such explicit terms that nobody could possible misunderstand.

It is easier by several orders of magnitude to fix a bug when you can consistently get it to occur, so if all of us testers do a good job of including the steps to reproduce it, it means that everything gets fixed faster.  Which means that a coder has more time to spend adding useful new features than fixing things!

Of course, this isn't possible for every problem encountered, but even for the intermittent bugs the more info the devs have to go on, the better.

I see people keep mentioning 'bugs' and how to report them. I would say: that's true, in case there is enough content to go bug hunting on! 'Cloth map' type of releases usually don't have enough content to even warrant reporting such detailed stuff as 'bugs', apart from crashes that prevent you from testing. I have no idea however what state Elemental is in.