That is why I got really upset about. There was a definite way to 1.* version (1.1 or 1.2 or 1.5), and suddenly that changed. "WTF!" was the first thought seeing that.
There was a plan of getting that intermediate versions, at least one, with dozens of gameplay fixes and changes being made (not only crashes), and know what? - they gonna never be released until TFTD! "F that", I would say! It's not they way how things should be done! That really pissed me off, and STILL doesn't let go.
There should be really "stable" release with all noticed issues being fixed. You know, there was no stable releases. At all. 1.0 was full of hilarious bugs.
For the God sakes, let LPers and modders rely on some milestone stable release for the next 1/2 years until 2.0 come...
Sorry.
You got a lot of nerve.
First, may I remind you, that
you were the one that pushed into renaming the stables as milestones, because you always found them "old and buggy".
You were the one that pushed into making the nightlies more prominent on the site, if not just make nightlies the
only way to download the game.
You are always pushing for major changes and features for the sake of "vanillaness" which often lead to a lot of problems and bugs to be fixed later down the line.
You were involved in all the recent major structural changes to the game just for TFTD vanillaness, like map scripting et all, which create a whole lot more issues. In fact if it was up to you 1.0 would never have been released because it wasn't "good enough". But sure, act surprised, insult the devs, slander our work, claim only you know what's best and just want "stability".
Second, "1.0 was full of hilarious bugs". That's funny, we've had over 100k downloads of 1.0, and I've never seen anyone suffering from such major game-breaking bugs that completely ruined their experience and made it impossible for them to play and enjoy the game. But I'm sure you're right, people everywhere just can't stop denouncing our bug-ridden mess. We would've saved a lot of time if we just hadn't bothered. After all, 0.9 was feature-complete, we could've just left it at that. Instead we spent over an year just on fixes, quality of life changes, reworking the options, mod support, saves, even including a lot of stuff
you called for like integrating the Adlib music player which took a lot to get everything right, all so the community would get the best experience the deserved, a worthy milestone they could look to without needing to keep up with changes. But I guess instead we should just leave them with the nightlies, even though there's only 10 nightly downloads to every 100 milestone downloads.
After 1.0 we thought of just settling down and putting out quick releases with just little fixes and changes, but the demand for TFTD was overwhelming, and soon development just darted in that direction, so we made that our goal. This is not news, all the major changes since 1.0 have been done in the name of TFTD and moddability. The engine and battlescape changes, externalized UI, externalized globe, dual fixed weapons, map scripting, etc etc. The actual vanilla gameplay experience is largely the same. This doesn't mean we just mindlessly put out feature after feature, it means we're working towards a goal. A lot of these features have major impacts to the game, requirements brought on by TFTD keep changing them up and we may need to rethink our solutions over and over until everything's straightened out and we reach "stability". I think just stopping and leaving all these associated features half-implemented is much more dangerous and prone to bugs, as we have to support and live with everything we made for the release, and will just upset people further if we keep pulling the rug between releases.
But I also don't like reliance on nightlies. If you look at most games you will not see nightlies, at most you can only get the latest nightly hidden away somewhere. That's it. The goal of nightlies is testing and experimenting for people that can't compile code. If there is a bug in the stable, they can check if it's still in the nightly, and if so, report it. You can also use them to get testing before a release or experiment with new features. But they are a programmer tool, ever-changing with the code and should not be relied upon.
However, OpenXcom has a slow development cycle, so I conceded and let people have nightlies to get to play with stuff earlier. Now the community pretty much lives by the nightlies, and every request is answered with "get the nightly". The problem is nightlies are not releases. They are automated builds made from the latest code. These code changes can have huge to no visible changes to players. The commit logs might make sense or they might be complete gibberish. There are no instructions or installers. New nightlies might come every hour or every month. So this often just leads to tons of confusion and bewilderment as players are repeatedly told to grasp something not designed for them.
On top of that, it limits the dev team too. We can no longer do big sweeping changes and experiment as necessary, we can't do lots of small iterative changes, because every public change we make to the code is expected to be stable and working. We often have to keep adding in workarounds and compatibility for WIP changes that people ended up relying on. If we have to make anything big, we have to keep it in private for days or weeks until we're sure it's all good to go, during which none of that code can be collaborated upon.
And that, I consider a personal failure, and I am deeply sorry the OpenXcom release cycle has come to this. OpenXcom has always had a big focus on the community, and I always do my best to provide you support, but the nightlies are a big thorn in that. Not everyone may agree with me. Reading this thread, it's pretty clear not a lot of people agree with me and I don't see eye to eye with a lot of issues going on, and my posting just seems to incite more arguing and misinformation. So I'm out, I'd rather stay behind the scenes doing what work needs to be done. Warboy will handle the release schedule however he sees fit.
