T4 official and practical status?

[LordBucket]

BTW lord bucket the engine class and methods are documented.

Thank you. I've glanced through it, but honestly like I said, I'm not feeling completely enthusiastic about starting the learnign curve over. I suppose I probably will eventually...but I think I'll wait for a formal release before I dive headfirst.

Someday I'll probably ask myself how easy will it be to port my T3 modules to T4...but until that day, I think I'm going to avoid committing.

I'll post a picture of me when I get back

So where's that picture?

Personally I always imagined you as early twentyish, slender but toned, short dark hair casually tossed, and with a perpetual hint of a smile on your face like you know something really funny that you're not quite ready to tell everyone yet.

[darkgod]

Ah yes: http://www.net-core.org/tome/me.jpg
This was at my wedding, the woman is obviously my wife

Yes obviously you should NOT start now anyway.

As for T3, yes there is no plan to make a ToME module for it because as you say there are plenty of nice modules already.
I prefer option 1 too, if only as a token of gratitude toward module makers yes.

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

Wow... you look much cooler in real life than you do in my head. Also, I like the suit.

On topic, I do think that T3 should continue to be maintained and have at least a bit of support.

[LordBucket]

This was at my wedding

Wow. Looks like none of us got it right.

I'm surprised though. That you would go skiing came as no surprise, but personally it never even occurred to me that you might wear glasses.

So anyone want to make some guesses about what the rest of us look like?

I do think that T3 should continue to be
maintained and have at least a bit of support.

As do we all.

But who is going to do that? Our collective desire is mostly irrelevant is there is noone amongst us who is both willing and capable.

Can we do the following and then release an alpha20?

* Fix the blackscreen of death in non-SDL
* Add Shigerello's implentation of window rezing for OSX
* Check to see if that resolves the same issue for windows, and if not implement resizable game windows for windows too
* Fix this bug
* See if fixing that bug allows Nerdanel to get randarts working. If not, get randarts working anyway
* Physf
* Remember to include zlib with the distribution
* Confirm that memory leaks are resolved by esteven's uncommitted changes

I hold no illusions that doing the above would be a magical bandaid that would make T3 all nice and better. But it would reasonably address the most immediate issues that seem to be of the most concern to everyone right now, and I think it would be enough to keep us sufficiently interested to keep looking for more bugs.

[madmonk]

Can we do the following and then release an alpha20?

* Fix the blackscreen of death in non-SDL
* Add Shigerello's implementation of window resizing for OSX
* Check to see if that resolves the same issue for windows, and if not implement re-sizable game windows for windows too
* Fix this bug
* See if fixing that bug allows Nerdanel to get randarts working. If not, get randarts working anyway
* Physf
* Remember to include zlib with the distribution
* Confirm that memory leaks are resolved by esteven's uncommitted changes

I hold no illusions that doing the above would be a magical band aid that would make T3 all nice and better. But it would reasonably address the most immediate issues that seem to be of the most concern to everyone right now, and I think it would be enough to keep us sufficiently interested to keep looking for more bugs.

A minor point, perhaps, but I do not believe it should be Alpha20. The time for implementing ideas is past for T3, we are in bug fixing mode for this engine so we really should think about it being the first beta. And, yes, it seems a reasonable list of stuff that needs fixing before we can go forward to beta!

Bucketman: You made comment in a previous post about us closing old bugs reports, I will hold up my hand to clearing them because no one knew if they had been fixed or not. So we felt that we should clear them and then if they re-appeared people could re-log them.

I do think that T3 should continue to be
maintained and have at least a bit of support.

As do we all.

But who is going to do that? Our collective desire is mostly irrelevant as there is no one amongst us who is both willing and capable.

And there lies the hard question... We all agree it should be maintained and so on.

Who is going to do the work?

[LordBucket]

we are in bug fixing mode for this engine
so we really should think about it being the first beta.

Ok. So we call it T3 beta. I'm ok with that.

Perhaps the plan should be to fix the bugs, release beta, update modules for the beta version, and then once things are functional, package a couple modules with it and call it version 1.

Zombie Horror and Bone to be Wild could probably be updated for a new version relatively painlessly. Dragonball T would be more effort, but it could be made practical if I truncate plot to end the game at the defeat of the Red Ribbon Army insead of Buu. I'm also working on a Crime Squad game for the people at b12games (but need this bug fixed), so that would be potentially four modules. Five if Nerdanel resumes work on Zothiq once randarts are working.

all agree it should be maintained
Who is going to do the work?

I don't speak C, so I'm out.

Of the above list, most of the items already have a name attached to them: estevens on the memory leaks, Physfs and zlib, Shigerello on windows resizing, and randarts has always been Nerdanel's baby.

I propose the following:

1) I nominate Xandor and madmonk to do the gopher work, getting people CVS access, generally making sure changes that have already been made succesfully work their way into CVS, and pestering people as needed.

2) DarkGod has already stated that he'll look into randarts for Nerdanel. Let's politely remind him that he said so, and hope he takes care of it. Incidentally, while I dont' really understand the problem Nerdanel is having, I still suspect that it might be resolveable by adding two lines to load2.lua that would allow it to save items in the savefile, which is already on our to-do list anyway.

3) Blackscreen of death. Estevens, elcugo and DarkGod are the obvious candidates...since they're probably the only people who can fix it. I therefore propose that one of them volunteer.

[Xandor Tik'Roth]

1) I nominate Xandor and madmonk to do the gopher work, getting people CVS access, generally making sure changes that have already been made succesfully work their way into CVS, and pestering people as needed.

Oh hell no. I know absolutely nothing about anything except this particular forum since somebody (madmonk?) helped me install the new software. But... if someone could show me how to work CVS, I'd be happy to provide access privileges and pesterings when necessary.

[LordBucket]

I know absolutely nothing about anything
except this particular forum

I was nominating you for more for coordination efforts than anything that requires knowing anything about anything.

For example, in this thread Shigerello said that he had implemented some SDL tile support and window resizing. Two and a half weeks ago he asked how to submit his changes. Nobody ever answered him.

So if his changes work, then the windows resizing problem on our list may already be resolved. The changes just need to be committed and tested.

So, somebody needs to either give him CVS access, or tell him to email his changes to somebody who can.

I'm simply nominating you and madmonk to be the gophers. Maybe you can't give him CVS access and don't know who can. Maybe you don't even know what CVS is. Doesn't matter. You simply ask who can give him CVS access. And maybe somebody tells you to talk to DarkGod and/or Pav to give him CVS access. So you do. But when you do, it turns out that Shigerello isn't comfortable working with CVS and would prefer to have somebody else do it. So you have him email his changes to you, and then start asking around who can submit the changes. When somebody reluctantly says "I suppose I could do that" you then email them the changes, and when they don't say anything about it for a week, you then pester them and ask what the status is. To which they respond "Oh, sorry...I haven't done it yet." So you pester them to do it. So then they submit the changes, but they can't actually test them because they're running Linux and the changes need to be tested under windows. So...you get somebody to compile a windows binary and have them email it to you and you ask who can test it and get volunteers and email them the binary, and when you don't hear from them in a week you ask them why not and...and...

Etc.

See? We don't actually need you to do anything. Just keep track of what needs to be done, what's already been done, and relay that information between people and pester them to do what they say they will and pass their results on to the next person in the chain, until eventually everything on the to-do list is done, and then say so, because each individual working on their own little part won't know that it's done until you tell them so.

[madmonk]

Ummm...

My bad! I already got volunteered for that role!

Just so you are aware (for future reference) we are using Mercurial as our DCVS and Elcugo and Nerdanel are the gatekeepers.

So my understanding is that if Shigerello sends the fix to Nerdanel it will get committed. I will post on that thread and fix it!

On a side note, I am getting increasingly concerned about Nerdanel's silence... I hope that nothing has happened to her, although given how cold it is in Finland perhaps she is hibernating!