[Opengamestudio-developers] Versioning schemes and current state

[Andre <and...@gm...>]

Hi guys,

I've worked a bit on the Engine again, and have now ideas about a kind
of a release cycle.

First, 1.0 means we're really done. Any new X.Y release has a
significant improvement over a X.(Y - 1) release what could be said is
the "theme" of this release. A X.Y release also means we're absolutely
finished with that theme, so a known bugs that might annoy someone are
fixed, no features left out, etc.
What comes next is the X.Y.{1 - N} releases. They're feature
enhancements over the X.Y release, that were considered not so
important, but nice to have after the release, or maybe some feature we
notice that is missing after the release (what should not happen). N
should not grow bigger than 6, because that are the pre-releases of the
X.(Y + 1) release. X.(Y - 1).7 means early preview of X.Y, X.(Y - 1).8
means alpha of X.Y and X.(Y - 1).9 is the beta of X.Y.
The last kind of releases are patch releases, named X.Y.Z.P, which fix
some bugs or provide other little patches.

I hope you understood anything, so now I explain where we are. I've got
my own to do list for the Engine until 0.1, after this one is reached,
I'll write anything in the sf.net trackers. The Engine is currently at
something near to 0.0.8, only a few bugfixes missing to get there. The
Map Editor is too early to give any number to it, but my estimate would
be 0.0.5 or 0.0.6 (0.0.5 means veeeeeeery early preview in this case,
because there was no 0.0 release ;))

Alpha means little buggy (or simply untested) and some features missing,
while beta means (hopefully) stable and feature complete, so in the best
case we don't even need to change anything to move from beta to final
release.

The theme for the 0.1 release is "Early developers version, functional
but not complete", 0.2 will be "Full 2D engine". As we're getting very
close to the 0.1 release these days (ok, may be still 2 months or even
longer, but as far as I can see it's already very close to what it will
be in 0.1), we need some documentation. I know most of you are having
enough work right now with school etc., but I think writing some
documentation for future testers (I know some, but they want docs) isn't
a that hard job and can be done in some pauses etc. The documentation
doesn't need to be very verbose, just explain some functions in the
scripting, some examples and how some internal systems work (Objects,
Sub Engines, etc.). There are already 2 pages on the wiki
(http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/opengamestudio/index.php?title=Main_Page).

Hope to see some of you in the IRC again ;)

Darkas