Oolite Bulletins

Is Oolite 1.79 released already ?

I was not sure because many are releasing 1.79 oxz / oxps , Are we to write off 1.77 then. and just play trunk nightlies.

As much as I am looking forward to a stable 1.79 release, there remains a wonderfully brilliant stable release. It's mostly always the same though.Once a trunk comes out for testing , the stable release goes into the background and the new and innovative expansions get released for trunk.

I think this is a bit lamentable as in some way the stable build gets de prioritized, even though I appreciate the need for testers and developers in trunk for future releases, I feel the current stable release should not be overlooked or relegated before it's time....

Or is that just me

The main reason I'm using 1.79 is because of the new JavaScript AI and the fact you can do a lot more with it. However I'm sure there's a lot of people still using 1.77.

I expect most players (the silent majority) use 1.77.1 (the watermark in the trunk nightlies can be immersion-breaking, btw).

I use 1.77.1 and, like Duggan, often get the sneaking suspicion that the stable release gets a little forgotten at times.

Cody wrote:

I expect most players (the silent majority) use 1.77.1 (the watermark in the trunk nightlies can be immersion-breaking, btw).

I have it turned off much better that way!

I certainly don't think that 1.77 has been 'forgotten'.
There are probably more OXPs avialable for it than any previous version of Oolite, and I'm sure there are probably a few more in development - my current project is 1.77-friendly although I am also involved in the HIMSN project which is being designed for 1.79.
I think that the reason there is currently a lot of discussion about 1.79 right now is because it is still in development, so as well as general updates on progress, those starting to write OXPs for 1.79 are posting here to resolve issues etc. And of course some complex OXPs can take a long time to develop - months or even years in some cases - so designing them for a future version makes sense as that version would be current when the OXP is released anyway and it makes sense to release an OXP that can use new features in the latest version.

Wot Smivs said...

In addition to which, the other thing to bear in mind is that, compared with the last few releases, 1.79 is a huge leap forward in features and capabilities, and a side-effect of that is that the extensive changes break quite a few current OXPs. It is not going to go over well if a lot of people's favourite OXPs suddenly stop working when they upgrade to 1.79 upon release. Thus, as trunk matures, (which it is now starting to do, and very nicely, at that) OXP authors need to get their already existing OXPs ready. That, in turn, is kind of a two-part process. Before updating their OXPs, the authors need to become familiar with 1.79 itself, the new and/or changed functions, and the radically different AI, which they are starting to do by playing around with the new possibilities that 1.79 presents. Thus many of the authors are in a sense laying the groundwork, in preparation for the big update-fest that they will soon have to embark on.

Naturally, this means that to some extent, OXP development for 1.77.1 will slow for a while.. but it certainly won't stop.. in fact, we've had quite a few newcomers of late, who've begun (or even already released) some quite exciting new ideas in the way of OXPs.

It's a tricky thing to balance: we want the nightly versions to be stable enough for at least some test pilots and OXP authors to be using them and trying out the new code features so that both minor bugs and major conceptual errors are found before release - but we also don't want it to be so stable that people are pointed towards builds which may on any given day still be seriously broken (or worse, contain subtle bugs) when that's not what they want - especially since we only guarantee savegame compatibility one way: once you've gone to 1.79 we don't guarantee you'll be able to get that commander back to 1.77.1 if you realise it was a mistake.

We're now also in the second part of the release cycle: all of the planned major features are in, and now it's a matter of fixing the bugs, tidying up loose ends, balancing the difficulty, and testing everything still works. It's still going to be a while before the actual release - I have a page full of one-line descriptions of the bugs and loose ends which need sorting, and that's just the ones I know of already - but it does make it safer (though not safe) to try 1.79.

Diziet Sma wrote:

and a side-effect of that is that the extensive changes break quite a few current OXPs.

The only ones that I know of here are:
- the old Energy Bomb OXP: there is now a new version compatible with both 1.77 and 1.79
- arguably replacement shipset OXPs: there is a compatibility OXP available.

There are a lot of changes which mean that best practice for OXP development is different and people should update their OXPs to take advantage of that - but everything should continue to work approximately as it did before: it's not as if on release day there'll need to be hundreds of OXP updates released too. If you know of other OXPs that break, that may well be a bug in trunk, since they're not supposed to: which were you thinking of?

Well.. "break" may be too strong a term.. but throwing errors and/or causing weird behaviour..

Off the top of my head, there have been about half a dozen I've encountered.. some of which I've mentioned.. I'll have to dig them up for you.

Diziet Sma wrote:

Off the top of my head, there have been about half a dozen I've encountered.. some of which I've mentioned.. I'll have to dig them up for you.

Weird behaviour - depending on exactly how weird - might be unavoidable. But please, let me know. It's possible some of them just use older features in a way that I either didn't expect or had forgotten about.