June 2011 Development Release

[Roots]

In IRC tonight I proposed that we shoot for our first unstable release of the prologue module within the next two weeks, sometime around mid-June. Everyone who bothered to voice an opinion was in agreement, so with that in mind here's a very basic list of what I think this release will contain, will not contain, and what we need to make it happen.


The release will include two maps: the opening scene and the cave map. The Harrvah city map(s) will likely not be ready by then, so I'm assuming that we're leaving them out of this release. Both maps will be completely playable from beginning to end. Battles will be completely functional. Menu mode will remain in the state that its been in for a long time. There will be no shops, so we don't have to address anything in shop mode. This release will "end" with the boss fight in the cave.


Here's a list of things we absolutely need to have for the release that we don't have currently:

• The final event sequences for the cave boss fight need to be added
• Fixed/improved pathfinding code
• The goliath scorpion boss needs to have its data properties defined so that it can be fought
• The finish menus in battle mode need to be minimally functional (XP added to the character party, etc)

Here's a list of additional things that would be nice to have, but are not required:

• Placeholder art (tiles, status indicator icons) replaced with some better looking art
• Ability to save the game and continue (need to add ability to have map save points?)
• Sprite for Mak hound
• Various improvements to battle gameplay, generally animations, sequences, and not stopping the action when player selects a command

Seems easy enough, doesn't it?

[Roots]

• The final event sequences for the cave boss fight need to be added
• Fixed/improved pathfinding code
• The goliath scorpion boss needs to have its data properties defined so that it can be fought
• The finish menus in battle mode need to be minimally functional (XP added to the character party, etc)

The finish menu for battle code is done. Adding the goliath scorpion boss shouldn't take me more than 15 minutes or so. densuke was working on pathfinding improvements, but I don't know where he is or what the state on that work is. We may just have to do without these changes. The time-consuming part will be the final event sequence for the cave boss fight. But since (I'm assuming) pathfinding is not going to be ready in time, I think I'll just make a more simple chain of events that doesn't include holding off waves of enemies and instead leads straight into the boss fight.


I think I can have us release-ready by the end of the day Friday, if not sooner. Can we pull together our Win/Mac/Linux builds over the weekend and release by end of the day, Sunday June 12th? It would be nice to get this release out there.

[rujasu]

Sure, I should be ready to go on Sunday.

[Roots]

Cool, hopefully gorzuate will be able to package up OS X for us. I hope to get the cave boss event sequence in by the end of today.


I say we go ahead and leave the debug options (Battle, Shop, Menu) in for this release, since it is just an unstable/development release after all. We can show people how easy it is to modify boot.lua to fight custom battles, etc. and maybe that will be interesting for some who want to play around.

[gorzuate]

I suppose this weekend is okay... but if we waited a couple more weeks we might be able to get in more of the checklist

[Roots]

Yeah, but you could make that argument to delay any release. I don't think the extra couple of weeks is going to buy us much. One of my goals with this release is to use it help us grow the size of our team. If we can make recruitment posts with a current snapshot of the game available for download, I think it will greatly help in attracting new people to help out. I'd personally like to double the size of our programming team, not to mention how starved we are for artists. If we want to continue our current rate of progress we're going to have to grow because I can't work on this full-time forever, plus I'm a little burned out from working so hard the past two months or so.


Anyway, we were thinking about trying to make a new development release every month so if we do that, then there's really no reason to delay this release since those two weeks of changes will be in the release next month. I think it will be great for us to do monthly releases and I hope we can keep it up all the way until the date of the final release.

[Roots]

We're release-ready as of commit #1960. I made a list of things that would be nice to fix up in the SVN thread, but I have to run. Obviously we want Windows/Mac/Linux release to all be based off the same SVN revision number. What do you guys think about getting together on IRC tomorrow night to put everything together? Or maybe even tonight, if we can fix everything.


I'm also going to try adding a quick hack into the settings.lua file to fix the input bug problem described here: http://www.allacrost.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5376 . Hopefully it will work, but I don't know if Bertram will be around in time to test it for us.

[gorzuate]

We're release-ready as of commit #1960. I made a list of things that would be nice to fix up in the SVN thread, but I have to run. Obviously we want Windows/Mac/Linux release to all be based off the same SVN revision number. What do you guys think about getting together on IRC tomorrow night to put everything together? Or maybe even tonight, if we can fix everything.

I most likely will not be able to get to this until Sunday.

[Roots]

Alright, Sunday it is then. What time Sunday? Afternoon? Evening? It will work best if all three of us release gods are in IRC at the same time.

[rujasu]

I'll be around on Sunday, late afternoon/evening most likely.

Also, you may remember Winter Knight's NSIS script to create a GUI installer for the Windows version. I've managed to find it and press it back into service. This will be a good release to test the Windows installer and see how it works for people, before we use it for a stable release.

[gorzuate]

Yeah, that's a good time for me, afternoon

[Roots]

Tomorrow afternoon it is then. I'll be around after lunch, probably around 12:30 central time.