[crossfire] Release schedule/notes

[alex_sch at telus.net]

Quoting Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net>:

> Doing somewhere between 3 and 6 releases/year seems roughly the right rate - 
> not so much time is being used making releases, yet is it often enough to get
> changes out there, but not so often than a release might only have 2 changes.

This rate seems to make sense to me.

> Other thoughts:  I'd say there is nothing prevent some micro releases of some 
> components between now and then, if a change warrants it.  For example, map
> and archetype changes are quite quick to do and contain perhaps some of the
> more noticable changes to the player, so doing a micro release of those
> between now and then may make sense.  Likewise critical bug fixes in either 
> the server of client would warrant a micro release (1.10.1).

To me, it seems more sane to reserve micro releases solely to bug fixes of
particular note (affects gameplay significantly or affects security). Generic
quick changes seem like they wouldn't be worth doing micro releases for really.

> Main trunk releases:
> The server is going under some major changes - I'm not sure it makes sense to
> do releases until that is sorted out.  Just from my experience with the 1.10.0 
> release, it would seem that someone could otherwise be spending a lot of time
> getting it so the release aspect of it works, only to have a lot of that work
> go away as files and other paths may change.

Agreed. Also note, in terms of finishing major changes first, though the current
going code changes are among them, we should also think about gameplay changes,
think about what frusturates players, and think about how to change the game
mechanics to improve that. Those things are even more important IMHO to
warrenting a 2.0 release and we should remember that code restructuring while
important, is largely so the gameplay changes and features are easier to deal
with. I suggest in terms of gameplay changes/improvements, before we look at
things like adding a character creation menu, we should look at things like
movement/attack speed which are easier to change the algorithm for but require
greater testing and thought IMHO. (Ok, done drifting off from Mark's topic :))
 
> maps & archetypes:  These are almost one piece, as they depend on each other
> pretty heavily.  I don't believe there have been any server changes required
> for the maps & archetypes as we have them now, so releases on those could be
> made. OTOH I also don't recall seeing any major changes, so making releases of 
> pre 2.0 releases of just the maps & archetypes would be confusing.

Well, recently Ragnor did remove some depreciated parsing code from the server
for things like "flying", and changed the arches accordingly, thus we'd need pre
2.0 arches and probably maps along with a pre 2.0 server release.

> I really thing, relative to the trunk, this is a brief outline of steps:
> 1) Finish with the major overhaul of whatever we plan to overhaul in the trunk 
> server for 2.0
> 2) Set up some test server(s), see how they work.
> 3) start worrying about making pre 2.0 releases once we have a pretty good
> idea that what we have will have some semblance to what final 2.0 will look
> like.

A quick comment on this, is once #1 of that gets to a certain stage, #2 and #1
should probably go in parallel :)