Future releases: an idea

[TC01]

So the way things worked up to and including 1.7 was that at some point, I said "this looks like we've added/fixed/improved/balanced enough things for a release. Let's release!"

This worked fairly well for 1.0 to 1.5, which were pretty rapid releases.

Then, there was a year between 1.6 and 1.7. For the first half of that year there were bugfixes and patches; but after that, because I knew I wasn't doing a lot of work on it, I was never really ready to release 1.7. Early this summer, I finally had the patience to do everything we needed to release (merge BUG and tidy things up)and then actually release.

Now, for 1.8... I have no idea when 1.8 would be ready, because I don't really have any idea of what new things should be in 1.8.

So here's an idea I came up with that might make things better. Let's say every three or four months, we'll take everything in the subversion repository, test it's stability, and release it as the next version. (Assuming that there had been some changes over those three months, of course- I don't want this to become the Firefox release system ).

Quick hotfix patches would be released within the first month or so to fix any outstanding bugs, of course, just like now.

Thoughts?

 

[God-Emperor]

Sounds like a plan.

At the moment I think we already have enough for a 1.73 release, with the enabling of multiple production, the bug fixes, and my just committed adjustments.

I have a few ideas for a 1.8 release. I've mentioned at least some of them before. One is a new Advanced Shielding (or something like that) tech that comes shortly before the Fusion Weapon tech. It would probably be set to be the enabler for the 3rd shield promotion and a new shield related promotion (possibly "hardened shielding") that helps resist the damage from radiation clouds and supernova damage area (not the supernova itself) and also allow travel through nebula terrain (which probably ought to be slightly damaging, perhaps 10%). Plus two new units, radiation hardened construction ships and colony ships that are allowed to move through radiation clouds and start with the hardened shielding promotion. The hardened construction ship would be able to build routes through radiation clouds and also be allowed to harvest the radiation clouds, like chopping forests, perhaps for a very small amount of production and some commerce after a pretty long time spent doing it (rather than wiping them out, this might just reduce their strength, decreasing the damage per turn). This would require some DLL changes for the promotions, at least.

 

[deanej]

If this were the Firefox release system you would release FF+ 2, then FF+3, then FF+4, etc.