On Week 9/2012
skyjake:
Last week saw the end of the first real Candidate phase and the release of the stable 1.9.7. We spent eight weeks in candidate mode, which is far too long. It tells us there were more problems with the code than could be fixed in a reasonable time. This means we are still feeling the effects of the big ringzero merge that united our two biggest development branches. However, focusing intensely on just bugfixing gets old real fast, so it was better to move on than risk destroying team morale.
I spent some time going through the open bugs in the Bug Tracker, rephrasing some of the summaries and prioritizing them according to the current situation. We're going to be keeping a more watchful eye on the Bug Tracker in the future, as an important part of upcoming Candidate phases.
A couple of bugs caught my eye in the tracker and I managed to fix them for today's build 430: Hexen environment Wind sounds and the missing barrel model slime with jDRP. The problem with the former was that the SFX subsystem was behaving incorrectly when it tried to prioritize which of the ~6 Wind sound sources was supposed to be audible. It ended up playing two of them simultaneously, and they weren't even the two nearest to the player. In short, it sounded rather odd -- now only one Wind plays and it's always the one closest to the player. The barrel slime, on the other hand, was caused by the model setup setting an incorrect alpha value (0) to the slime part, when it was supposed to set a semitransparent alpha due to the shadow1 flag.
My plan is to spend some time investigating startup performance bottlenecks in a work branch, and then move on to my next roadmap item: upgrading the Windows autobuilder to MSVC 2010.
DaniJ:
With the heavy lifting out of the way for Doomsday 1.9.7 I spent most of my time last week working on various changes and improvements to the homepage in preparation for the release.
The most significant change is a revised master server browser. The old master server web interface was somewhat limited and certainly lacking in style. The revised browser is implemented as a dengine.net plugin and makes use of various features to provide the user with a far more pleasing interface. This page is automatically updated with the latest server status for all servers published to our master server.
You may have noticed that when you visit the download pages on the homepage that the install packages are not immediately visible. These pages now employ jQuery to dynamically request the details of the latest available packages and are updated accordingly. Consequently, other than the Get It Now text string on the front page and the source package download link on the source code page - our homepage is now updated entirely automatically when we release a new version via the autobuilder. I expect I'll automate the update of those remaining components at some point.
Since then I have begun work on the next big set of changes I have planned for Doomsday 1.9.8 - Adapt changes from the mapcache branch.
Last week saw the end of the first real Candidate phase and the release of the stable 1.9.7. We spent eight weeks in candidate mode, which is far too long. It tells us there were more problems with the code than could be fixed in a reasonable time. This means we are still feeling the effects of the big ringzero merge that united our two biggest development branches. However, focusing intensely on just bugfixing gets old real fast, so it was better to move on than risk destroying team morale.
I spent some time going through the open bugs in the Bug Tracker, rephrasing some of the summaries and prioritizing them according to the current situation. We're going to be keeping a more watchful eye on the Bug Tracker in the future, as an important part of upcoming Candidate phases.
A couple of bugs caught my eye in the tracker and I managed to fix them for today's build 430: Hexen environment Wind sounds and the missing barrel model slime with jDRP. The problem with the former was that the SFX subsystem was behaving incorrectly when it tried to prioritize which of the ~6 Wind sound sources was supposed to be audible. It ended up playing two of them simultaneously, and they weren't even the two nearest to the player. In short, it sounded rather odd -- now only one Wind plays and it's always the one closest to the player. The barrel slime, on the other hand, was caused by the model setup setting an incorrect alpha value (0) to the slime part, when it was supposed to set a semitransparent alpha due to the shadow1 flag.
My plan is to spend some time investigating startup performance bottlenecks in a work branch, and then move on to my next roadmap item: upgrading the Windows autobuilder to MSVC 2010.
DaniJ:
With the heavy lifting out of the way for Doomsday 1.9.7 I spent most of my time last week working on various changes and improvements to the homepage in preparation for the release.
The most significant change is a revised master server browser. The old master server web interface was somewhat limited and certainly lacking in style. The revised browser is implemented as a dengine.net plugin and makes use of various features to provide the user with a far more pleasing interface. This page is automatically updated with the latest server status for all servers published to our master server.
You may have noticed that when you visit the download pages on the homepage that the install packages are not immediately visible. These pages now employ jQuery to dynamically request the details of the latest available packages and are updated accordingly. Consequently, other than the Get It Now text string on the front page and the source package download link on the source code page - our homepage is now updated entirely automatically when we release a new version via the autobuilder. I expect I'll automate the update of those remaining components at some point.
Since then I have begun work on the next big set of changes I have planned for Doomsday 1.9.8 - Adapt changes from the mapcache branch.