Most of the oxp releases are Trunk only these days

[Duggan]

I figure that this is in anticipation of a stable Oolite 1.77, which is great, I love that developers are planning ahead.

So just how far away is the stable release version of Oolite 1.77 ?

[Capt. Murphy]

I figure that this is in anticipation of a stable Oolite 1.77, which is great, I love that developers are planning ahead.

As far as the OXPers are concerned I think it's more some excitement at having some new scripting tools to play with. Certainly for me when I joined and started scripting, Oolite was in an extended feature freeze which started with the release of 1.75 - so nothing new was being added to trunk and the focus of the dev team was searching out and fixing bugs. However there have been a spurt of new scripting features added recently (mostly courtesy of cim), and I think it's a good idea to get some OXPs out that use them sooner rather than later, if only to make sure that all is working as intended. If it encourages a few more people to play using nightly builds so much the better, as they will also be testing some of the other non scripting changes that are being introduced such as cim's improvements to the AI and the partially finished new planets code. There is also submersible's project to have fully shadered planets, and Ahruman was/is working on new graphics code to make it easier to use shaders. It's a shame that no-one as far as I know has released any test OXPs for that feature.

Having said that my next little project is planned to be for 1.76.1, but will use techniques I've learnt making some 1.77 only OXPs.

So just how far away is the stable release version of Oolite 1.77 ?

Who knows, but I'll hazard a guess that we will see some test releases of 1.77 (like the 1.75.x) before a stable version is labelled as such. I certainly wouldn't hold your breath expecting an imminent release of 1.77 whether that's a test or stable, but again who knows, I may be proved wrong.

[another_commander]

1.77 is not planned as a stable release, but as a test one. The new release scheme followed is that odd numbers are test (1.77, 1.79 etc), while even will be stable (1.78, 1.80 etc).

When 1.77 is coming out? Month and year are still under discussion, but it's decided it's going to be on a Thursday. Maybe.