Re: [Wesnoth-dev] Aiming for 1.0

[ott]

On Sat, May 28, 2005 at 09:40:44AM -0500, David White wrote:
> Nils Kneuper wrote:
> >6) LEADING THE GAME TO 1.0:
> >I do really think we do need someone that leads the game to 1.0 it has
> >to be done with a rather hard hand.
> >I would really like it if Dave could continue until 1.0
> >is out and hand it over afterwards?
>
> However if this were to happen I think I would have to be rather 'tough' 
> about cutting off new features and so forth. It is likely many people 
> would strongly dislike the approach I would take. :)

I agree with Ivanovic, and fully support Dave's proposed "tough cuttings"
approach.

How about an even more radical approach?  Let's release 0.9.2 in about a
week, and set a feature freeze, aiming for 0.9.3 as an interim bugfix and
balancing release the following week, with 1.0rc1 the week thereafter,
and 1.0 on Monday 4 July -- with preannounced string freeze and release
dates for all of these.  Then people can work on cool stuff for post-1.0
during the northern hemisphere summer.  This could only be achieved by
having Dave leading the project, but it would also mean we have a nice
1.0 game out there, and Dave could then bow out of being project lead
in the short term.

I support Dave making some tough decisions to make this happen.  This may
mean that some of my own pet projects are lopped off, like the Afrikaans
translation (it's unlikely to progress much in the near term), TDH
(Circon has vanished, and I don't have time to finish and playtest the
two scenarios I have been toying with to wrap up the campaign), or a
nice solid Mac port that is integrated into the mainline (Sithrandel's
build will have to do, since the commandline build now works fine).

For a short term 1.0 release, I'll commit to bringing SotBE into a
properly playable state, and will continue to help to fix bugs, help
Ivanovic with translation updates, commit EP's level 2 and 3 revised
costs (if agreed), finish the en_GB translation and backport its text
fixes into mainline, help the Hungarian translation reach 100%, and do
proofreading of all translatable strings.  We also need decisions about
all outstanding bugs and feature requests -- I could re-review these
and make recommendations, for final review by silene and the mailing list.

The reason I got involved here is that this project was clearly heading
for 1.0.  If we are going for a longer timeframe for 1.0, like late
this year, then I'm probably not going to be able to commit to being
around very much longer -- I have better things to do than spend time
on a project that asymptotically approaches but never reaches 1.0.

Finally, I don't understand Jetryl's comments that people are contemptuous
about BfW -- the feedback I have seen has been unequivocally positive,
with the occasional comment that turn based strategy isn't something a
particular person enjoys.  The work that has been done, in all spheres,
is way above where a 1.0 release should be in my opinion: it may lack
complete stylistic coherence, some stuff is missing, and there are little
glitches here and there, but take a look at a commercial game and try to
tell me those issues don't exist there.  We already have something good,
we have confirmation from the people playing the game that this is so,
and we need to show it to the rest of the world instead of agonising
about little glitches.

Your friendly Wesnoth janitor,

-- address@hidden