OpenMW 0.13.0

[raevol]

I think it's worth disappointing a few dumb people who can't read to catch the interest of a few devs who will contribute code? What do you think?

[jhooks1]

I'd say wait a few weeks after .12 is released to show off these new features.

[Greendogo]

Is it just me or is the lighting significantly different/better than that of normal Morrowind? I'm sure it'll require some tweaking once we're actually kicking around with playability, but aside from the strange lighting on the terrain (understandable since that code is still in diapers), the lighting looks amazing!

There are no shadows.

[raevol]

There are no shadows.

Right but look at the trees, bridge, and canton.

EDIT: Disregard this, you're right. Lighting is pretty terrible. But it is still gorgeous to my eyes because it is progress!

[Zini]

As I announced last week, I would like to change our plans for 0.13.0. Ideally I would have liked to wait until 0.12.0. is out, but it seems it will keep is busy for another couple of days.

With the dialogue implementation we have moved a major step forward. Also, the new water adds an important graphical element. These two features alone offer more user-visible changes than the two previous releases together.

This fact and the increased number of active developers offers us an opportunity for a faster release cycle.

For 0.13.0 I propose we take the two features listed above and finish them. We should also fix as many bugs listed for 0.12.0 and 0.13.0 as possible. Obviously anyone still actively working on a planned feature can continue to do so. We can add some smaller features that are quickly done (I am thinking of NPC Death and maybe a few others).
The work on 0.13.0 should take 3-4 weeks top (counting from the release of 0.12.0).

From there on we can at least try to keep up an accelerated release cycle (maybe not 3-4 weeks, but a lot faster than 0.11.1 or 0.12.0). I think the development of OpenMW would benefit from such a change.

The other planned 0.13.0 features can be moved to 0.14.0 or 0.15.0. Especially:

- Terrain: Looks like it might require OGRE 1.8, which is still in RC state.
- Phyiscs improvements: Somewhat pointless without proper character controls, which is a feature I would like to propose for the next release.

And there is something else I think we should officially announce with the 0.13.0 release. If you take a look at the project as a whole, it seems we have more or less reached the halfway mark for 1.0.0.


Opinions? Agreement? Violent protests?

[ElderTroll]

More frequent releases are good for the PR side as it'll give us more to do and your growing number of fans engaged. If more developers join up maybe some won't mind helping squash bugs.

Zini, for character controller in Project Aedra, Tom uses Quake 3 Arena for "pmove" character controller code. You could grab it from either ioquake 3 project or Aedra.

[Zini]

Oops. My fault. I meant player control, not character control. This task would be as much about more code cleanup as about implementing a feature. Little point in looking into other project' code here.

[Yacoby]

Shorter releases are good. I don't think we would ever be able to get it close to what I would expect in a commercial setting (1 - 2 weeks) due to the fact that non of us work full time but shorter releases (1 - 2 months), more testing if we have the people (as we have more releases) would be great.

Long times between releases don't do anyone any good.

[sirherrbatka]

Violent protests?

STOP ACTA!!!

[raevol]

STOP ACTA!!!

Regarding releases, this sounds good to me. At least we can try it, and revert if it doesn't help.