[Ohrrpgce] Quarterly Stable Releases?

Ralph Versteegen teeemcee at gmail.com
Thu Jul 13 17:55:44 PDT 2017


On 14 July 2017 at 02:15, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:

> I agree that potential backcompat problems also belongs in the category of
> reaons-to-delay-a-release
>
> Lets work for a 3-month release schedule. i won't fix it to specific
> months, I'll just set up reminders for the next one 3 months after each
> time we actually do a release.
>

Sounds agreeable, and hopefully we'll have better discipline than we've had
for the last decade!


>
> I would like to still aim for an RC in the first week of August, if
> possible.
>

I'll be in Australia for two weeks from August 7th, and though I'll take my
netbook it would be better if the RC were earlier rather than later.


>
> I am not worried about finishing the hero mouse controls before
> Dwimmercrafty. I don't expect them to be ready to move out of the spam menu
> by then, but I don't feel the need to disable them any further either.
>
> I actually feel pretty good about NPC pathfinding right now. Good enough
> to remove the "EXPERIMENTAL" from the menu caption in the NPC editor. Are
> there any other aspects of it you would like to see me clean up before
> dwimmercrafty, especially in the avoiding-backcompat-problems department?
>

Hero pathfinding isn't any problem. I was just concerned about finalising
how NPC pathfinding works, in particular the treatment of other NPCs as
obstacles. You added NPCInst.stillticks but it's used only for
pathfindnpcto/npcchasesnpc's stop after still ticks. I thought the idea was
to also use it to set the penalty for pathing through that NPC.
Also, the npc_ccache is populated by placing each NPC at the nearest tile,
which is different from how collision checking actually works (which is to
add x/ygo to get the tile being moved to), and I wonder whether that
matters.

Also, there were one or two more optimisations I wanted to make (though I'm
mostly done with that). Unfortunately anything that changes tile breaking
or max-search handling even slightly is a potential change to behaviour in
edge cases.


>
> I know vehicle pathfinding and pushing-npcs still need work, but those are
> both hero-pathfinding issues, not NPC pathfinding issues.
>
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 10:35 PM, Ralph Versteegen <teeemcee at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I trust you saw my reply on SS already.
>> My two comments were that first, I'm not sure about a strict schedule,
>> and second that we should also hold up releases for anything that could
>> cause backcompat problems. Although as you say, we're generally good about
>> keeping unfinished features disabled or out of sight. For example right now
>> I would refuse a release until pathfinding is better nailed down.
>>
>> Also, doing release candidates is a good. So the actual release date is
>> whenever the RC is ready.
>>
>> Although we've been really active the last 7 months or so, we have
>> sometimes gone couple month without doing any substantial work on the
>> engine. Sometimes no commits for over a month. At our current activity
>> level a 3 month release cycle could even be too long, while other times
>> there wouldn't anything to release.
>> Lets take a look..
>> http://tmc.castleparadox.com/ohr/gitstats/activity.html
>>
>> And what if we want to release in less than 3 months after the last
>> release? Sometimes we might want to release while things are stable, before
>> starting on something destabilising.
>>
>> I was hoping that we would release Dwimmercrafty this month, but actually
>> with only two weeks left even a RC at the end of the month may be unlikely.
>>
>> I don't remember if we've ever set a schedule for a release "X months
>> from now" rather than just near-term ones like "2 weeks from now". I think
>> being able to see from months away when we want the next release to occur
>> will be very helpful, and that we can manage to stick to it.
>>
>> On 13 July 2017 at 06:40, James Paige <Bob at hamsterrepublic.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I mentioned this once already in a thread on on slimesalad, but I
>>> thought this might be a better place to discuss the idea.
>>>
>>> I was thinking we should switch to a quarterly stable release schedule,
>>> rather than a whenever-we-feel-everything-im
>>> portant-that-we-wanted-to-add-has-been-finished schedule.
>>>
>>> We could do an August/November/February/May rotation, where I would
>>> branch and upload the stable release some day on the first full week of
>>> each of those months.
>>>
>>> I can set up a calendar alert that goes to this mailing list to warn us
>>> when the next release is 1 and 2 weeks away, so we have time to wrap up
>>> last minute stuff.
>>>
>>> The only things that would block a release would be critical or
>>> datalossy bugs, or other substantial problems that would make a new stable
>>> release measurably less stable than the previous one.
>>>
>>> Half finished features would not be an excuse to delay a release,
>>> because honestly, this whole program is a big beautiful muddy wad of
>>> half-finished features, and it always has been and it always will be, and I
>>> wouldn't have it any other way ;)
>>>
>>> I think we have actually been doing a pretty good job of keeping the
>>> nightly wip versions safe and stable, keeping the unfinished stuff more or
>>> less comfined to the "spam" menu, so I think this change is pretty low-risk.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> ohrrpgce at lists.motherhamster.org
>>> http://lists.motherhamster.org/listinfo.cgi/ohrrpgce-motherhamster.org
>>>
>>>
>>
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