v1.76.1 Deployment Trial release

[another_commander]

A trial version of Oolite 1.76.1 has been released on Berlios for testing by the community. The purpose of the release is to evaluate Oolite's Deployment configuration, which is the way upcoming stable releases are expected to be made. The Deployment configuration build is an end-user product, aimed mainly at those who just want to load up the game and play, offering the highest possible levels of performance at the expense of debugging features. It is planned that future stable versions of Oolite will be released in this configuration, together with a small binary patcher program that will convert them to Test Release configurations, suitable for OXP developers. Test Release is the configuration in which Oolite has been published until now and we believe that the game's development has reached a mature enough stage to attempt the switch.

Deployment is different to Test Release in the following ways:

1. Debug OXP and Debug Console are not supported.
2. OXP Verifier functionality is excluded.
3. Localization tools support is excluded.
4. AI Graphviz support is excluded.
5. Debugging information functionality (e.g. AI stack, collision, entities, memory usage, dump target state, script tracing etc. information) is removed.
6. FPS info (Shift-F) displays just that: FPS.
7. JS monitor support is disabled.
8. The JS method takeSnapshot() is disabled.
9. TAF is disabled (remember - this was originally designed as a debugging feature).
10. A lot of sanity checks are ommited deliberately, resulting in slightly better performance.

Feel free to download and play for a while using this version. We would like to receive feedback on how it runs on your system and - very important - whether it works as advertised or not. If you find differences other than the above, we definitely need to know because they will most likely be unintentional and could mask bugs. Note that this build is watermarked in order to distinguish it from the current official release and if you report any bugs about it, please state clearly that you are using the Deployment Trial build.

Download available at: http://developer.berlios.de/project/sho ... up_id=3577. Due to the testing nature of this release, it has not been made available from the official download locations at oolite.org.