Roadmap - Release 0.1.0

[nemesis]

Okay, I finally managed to get the editor running. I have generated a Makefile semi-manually, which was finally the fastest way compared to adapting everything from the autotools to Windows.

Where should I place the Makefile? I can add it into the forum, but it is several 100 lines. Better way would be to add it to the win-32-depends zip. The steps (to possibly open the discussion how to make it better):

• I have used cygwin and the 32-bit Mingw compilier i686-pc-mingw32. The gave the best compatibility to the exisiting lib in the depents directory.
• Since using cygwin rather than the MinGW installer, some more packages were missing (which are available within MinGW). I would suggest adding those into the depends.zip or create an additional depends_add.zip (or just provide the download links). One can also use MinGW/MSYS directly, with possibly less issues. However, I want to have only one system on my PC (Cygwin since it provides much more packages) and use cross-compilation to the MinGW-compiler if required.
• I didn't the the program compiled with the provided QT version from the depents.zip. I needed to compile it from source. I anyone has issues with compiliation of QT, please report. We can also add it to the depends_add.zip.
• Running the Makefile and praying to god...

EDIT:
I have create a new zip: allacrost-i686-pc-mingw32-depends.zip including all include, lib and bin files as well as the Makefile required to compile and link both, the game and the editor with cygwin and i686-pc-ming32 cross-compiler for Windows (tested on Windows 10, but should be working at least with Windows 7 also without any issues). Tell me where to upload or how to share. Would be a good idea to add this here.

[Roots]

Awesome! Glad you succeeded where everyone else has failed. Can you e-mail me the .exe file (roots at allacrost.org), and I will put it on our FTP so that others can use it? I care more about getting people an editor they can begin using right now rather than one that they need to compile.

I am totally okay with building a new Windows dependencies folder/chain/build/whatever we call it. The current one is unfortunately not easy to setup and use, as evidenced by so many people asking for help with it. I also do not hold a high opinion of MinGW at this point considering I had to modify some of their own header files to fix bugs in their product so that things could compile correctly. I don't mind if we remove MinGW entirely from our requirements and use Cygwin instead, or even if we go back to providing Visual Studio build files. What I care most about is that whatever system we use for Windows is:

• Easy to setup for new programmers
• Easy to maintain

Other things to consider: we're going to be upgrading some libraries soon-ish (moving to SDL2, and hopefully QT5 for the editor). I'm looking in to moving our Linux build system to Cmake due to the difficulty with maintaining the autotools build, and I believe Cmake is better for cross-compiling to Windows. In an ideal world, we could use CMake for both Linux and Windows and only have one set of build files to maintain instead of two (OS X will probably continue to be its own special case). We'll see.

This is something we should probably figure out by the year end release, but isn't critical for this month.

[nemesis]

I don't mind if we remove MinGW entirely from our requirements and use Cygwin instead

Actually, this was my first approach. However, the editor did not work due to some issues with Qt4 for Cygwin and Cygwin/X-Server. Therefore, as far as I can say we need to stay on MinGW.

or even if we go back to providing Visual Studio build files

Without me.

I also do not hold a high opinion of MinGW at this point considering I had to modify some of their own header files to fix bugs in their product so that things could compile correctly.

Yepp, I came accross the same issues but the actual version of the 32-bit original MinGW can be used without modifications (using -std=gnu++11 instead of c++11). The both (32-bit and 64-bit) from the 64-bit MinGW fork did not work.

Can you e-mail me the .exe file (roots at allacrost.org)

The files are on the way.

Regarding CMake and cross-compilation. As long as we have some zip with all required files, we don't really need any Makefile-generator, since we are fairly limited in the architectures (i.e. we know where the files are).

[Roots]

I'd like to put our windows dependency files into the repository under a different branch so it's easier to maintain/update than just having a random zip folder laying around on our FTP that you have to find and figure out the correct folder to put it in. Haven't gotten around to this yet because I don't know enough about mercurial branching to be confident about what I'm doing there.

[nemesis]

Sounds fine to me. I don't think this folder needs much maintaining (only after switching to the newer releases of the libraries) but I can take over this if there is no other volunteer for Windows.

[Roots]

Here's the editor, now available on Windows :

http://www.allacrost.org/staff/public/a ... 32-bin.zip

Take all the contents of this folder and place it in the base directory of where you have allacrost files installed/located. It may prompt you if you want to replace some of the DLL files. The old DLLs you have probably won't work if you try to run the editor or game binary provided here, so go ahead and do it.


If you're a developer, here's the updated build libraries, headers, etc are so you can build the editor on Windows:
http://www.allacrost.org/staff/public/a ... epends.zip



I don't expect the editor code to undergo any major changes anytime soon (probably not until next year), so the provided binary should be all we need for now.

[Roots]

We have about two weeks left in September now. I'm thinking about delaying our release until next month. The main reason being that from July until now our focus was supposed to be map design and scripting so that there was more playable content. Instead, we ended up having a lot of productive discussions and design changes regarding the battle system for most of this time. I have no regrets at all about that. But I do want there to be a significant amount of new content in the next release compared to the last, and with two weeks left I feel like that won't be the case.

What do you guys think about delaying the release until October? We'd have the same goals, and possibly would have time to continue refining some of the rough edges of the battle system. Although our primary focus definitely needs to be content development. I'm focusing all my attention on map scripting at the moment and don't intend to do any real work on the code until the next release is out.

[nemesis]

Sounds reasonable. I guess nobody out there is wait that strong on the release that one more month is no issue. I will go through the list in the roadmap if there is content were I can contribute.

[Roots]

Yeah, plus this is a development release and not an official one. Development releases, by design, have a lower play rate than official ones do. Also moving this out to 6 weeks should give me time to make that video to help explain map development to you all. Also, working on this coding issue could really help improve maps:

https://bitbucket.org/allacrost/allacro ... or-on-maps

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

Just checking in -- I'm still around and alive. Just rather busy with life, and testing some things with combat code to make sure I can do the experiments I want to do regarding abilities.

[Roots]

Same here. I'm just taking a small break from the grind. I'm focusing 100% of my time on map development and scripting right now. It's coming along fine, just slowly.