New release (version 0.4.4)

[andrewbuck]

This is a thread to talk about what has already been changed since the 0.4.2 release as well as what else people would like to see in the next release. I plan to do a reinstall on my development computer tonight so I can get back to working on OD and it has been a little over a month since our last release and we had planned to do one every 1 to 2 months. So with that in mind here is a brief overview of what I have changed since the last release and what my goals are for the next one.

The changes so far:
* Creation of the AttackableObject system allowing rooms/creatures to be treated the same by AI routines (and traps/doors when we get them).
* Making it so creatures can destroy enemy room tiles.
* A bunch of camera movement refinements and the addition of hotkeys to allow the camera to "fly to" a saved location on the map.
* The addition of portals.
* Some work on the colorize creature routine to make it work better although it is still not fully functional.
* The beginnings of the creature alignment code (although this may change as it is still being discussed).
* Several misc bug fixes.

Planned Changes:
* Now that the room template class is fully functional I plan to add some more rooms (training room, foodery, etc) please list below what you think would be good ones to add.
* The addition of tile colors to the level file (this level file change will mean the version gets bumped again to 0.4.4, so there will be no 0.4.3 release).

-Buck

[svenskmand]

Could make a thread explaining the version numbering? I think you told me once but I forgot again

Of features I would like to see normal mapping working And maybe the initial coding on audio. But I do not know if the audio is too ambitious for this release (I am not saying that it should work completely but being able to playback some sound would be nice

Something else is the trap system, I think we should use pretty much the same system as in Evil Genius regarding how you connect triggers and such for all traps. This should probably be allot easier to do - I think - if you decide to work on this then let me know so I can start making some specifications of how the system should work.

[andrewbuck]

The version numbering is quite simple, I just bump the version number everytime the level file format changes. The first line of the level file contains the version of the client that wrote it and the game will refuse to read a file from a different version.

As for sound I thought I might try to do what you suggested where I just put in some simple playback for testing. I probably won't start on traps yet but there is some info on the wiki from way back when.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

What do you mean by bumping the version number? I mean you have three numbers 0, 4 and 4, so what does each mean. I just think that we should not hit 1.0.0 before the game is complete

[andrewbuck]

I bump the third number up by one, so far I have been rolling it over when it gets past 9 so they are all 1 digit (so after 0.4.9 will be 0.5.0). If we start getting close to 1.0 before we get the game done (which is unlikely since it is only when the file format changes that I bump, not on every commit) we can start having numbers greater than 10 like 0.9.37 so we will never run out.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

I think the numbers greater than 10 should be the way. And then have the second number for something really major, and the last number for anything else. Generally I think that open source software where the version numbering goes from 0 (not at all done) to 1 (completely done) is much better than software that does not follow that line. It gives some sort of trust and confidence in the software. Can you follow me on this or am I making no sense?

[andrewbuck]

Yeah that makes sense.

-Buck

[Bodsda]

I think the numbers greater than 10 should be the way. And then have the second number for something really major, and the last number for anything else. Generally I think that open source software where the version numbering goes from 0 (not at all done) to 1 (completely done) is much better than software that does not follow that line. It gives some sort of trust and confidence in the software. Can you follow me on this or am I making no sense?

In a lot of cases, and certainly in Ubuntu, the versioning is of the form <major relase>.<minor release>.<patch level>, the patch level is likely to go beyond 10, but the major and minor versions wont. If you are moving the versioning up too quickly, then you need to redefine what counts as major/minor or a patch, not just keep counting.

OD is already different in the way our versioning works, and I don't really see an issue with the speed, I think we are more than half way to a proper full release, considering that the main AI code is in place and the level file has already been heavily worked upon. To be honest, I expect us to make a fair few jumps towards the end, going from 0.8.9 to 0.9.3 or something like that. There is also no reason why we must advertise the full release the moment we hit 1.0.0, we could get to whatever number we choose before we decide that that is version 1.

Bodsda

[svenskmand]

Ubuntu goes beyond 10, the current release is 10.04 and not 1.0.04 (or what ever it might be if you only count in base 10 for the two first numbers).

Also I am not saying that we cannot go to version 1.x.x or 2.x.x at some point, but I think that we should end up at 1.0.0 when we have made the game as we originally intended it to be. Then the version number will bump up when new features is decided upon, and such. Firefox is a example (but not quite good) of what I am talking about, it was initially released at version 1.0.0 and then it has been improved since, as there has been allot of new decisions on what features to include. OD will probably not have allot of features added after version 1.0.0, but will probably be added some. A much better example than Firefox is Inkscape, see their roadmap, I think we should do it the way the Inkscape team is doing it. When SVG goes beyond 1.1, say to a 2.0 specification, then Inkscape will have to go beyond 1.0, as Inkscape 1.0 will support the full SVG 1.1 specs. But W3C is likely to make a SVG 2.0 or some future SVG version, and when Inkscape implements it, it has to go beyond 1.0.

I can also try to state my idea/concern another way. When OD hits 1.0.0 it should be mature enough to be comparable in quality to a commercial game. But no one is saying that we cannot add features and improve OD after that point, which then makes the version bump up above 1.0.0.

A completely other thing: Bodsda have you look a the backstory lately? I think it has changed quite allot since you where last with us (that is the actual wording, but not the story), good or bad?, suggestions? (I really liked your wording of it last time ) I have also begun to make the backstory for the Mecenaries (it is in the alignment backstory page of the wiki - I will merge the two at some point).

[andrewbuck]

Ubuntu goes beyond 10, the current release is 10.04 and not 1.0.04 (or what ever it might be if you only count in base 10 for the two first numbers).

Ubuntu uses a different system, 10.04 means that it was released in the 4th month of 2010. We had a big discussion about version numbers on the old forum and now we seem to be having a big discussion again. I have no further interest in discussing this "problem" as we have ~60 version bumps to go before we get to 1.0, this is totally a non-issue. If we get to version 0.9 or above and we are still not near a playable game then we can start worrying about this but for now I have no interest in discussing it further.

Regarding the upcoming release, I finally got my computer reinstalled back to Ubuntu 8.04. I had upgraded to 9.10 to get the bitcoin binary to run, however my ATI x1650xt video card is not supported past 8.10 (stupid closed source drivers). After reinstalling to get back to 8.04 and then spending about 4 hours compiling and installing OGRE, CEGUI, and Boost, I finally had a working build environment (sort of). I say "sort of" because I that since I was custom compiling OGRE and CEGUI manually I decided to go for the latest versions of each so OD would be prepared for when these new libraries take over. What I didn't realize when I chose to do this was that the transition to the new libraries meant I had to make significant changes to the code to bring the codebase into agreement with the new way of doing things (the patch produced by git-diff is ~2300 lines long, most of this is due to the fact that for some reason the OGRE devs thought it would be a good idea to implement their own versions of std::vector, etc). Anyway, after approximately 7 hours of compiling libraries and porting OD code I finally have a working build environment on my computer again. The only thing I have left to get working is that the game engine doesn't seem to be loading the CEGUI overlay properly. I will look into this tomorrow as it is now 1am and I am ready for some sleep. Hopefully I should be able to get some actual coding done on the game engine over the weekend to start working towards the next release but I don't know how long it will take to finish out the last of the fixes due to the new library versions.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

Glad to hear you are almost up and running again. But what is the bitcoin thing used for in OD? Or is it unrelated? Edit: Ok it is a system for transactions of real money, then it must be unrelated to OD (I thought it might be to maintain game-economy)

How about the open source drivers are they a no go?

[andrewbuck]

Both the opensource and closed source drivers seemed to have the exact same issue. When you would scroll a page in firefox, only the bottom inch or so of the page would update, to get the rest you would either need to scroll exactly 1 page at a time (like with page up and page down) or switch to another virtual desktop and then back again. A similar thing would happen when you drag windows.

-Buck

[Bodsda]

Ubuntu goes beyond 10, the current release is 10.04 and not 1.0.04 (or what ever it might be if you only count in base 10 for the two first numbers).

I was referring to the package numbers of debian packages, not ubuntu itself

Bodsda

[svenskmand]

Ubuntu goes beyond 10, the current release is 10.04 and not 1.0.04 (or what ever it might be if you only count in base 10 for the two first numbers).

I was referring to the package numbers of debian packages, not ubuntu itself

Bodsda

Ok