About the feature sets of devbuilds and release schedules

[Blzut3]

I think you misread what I said since I effectively said one month freeze.

[Rachael]

Ah, so I did. Sorry.

[Arctangent]

I can't help but feel like waiting six-ish months for a new feature to be exposed to the proper release is a bit excessive, although I suppose most people on here that play mods will likely be on the dev builds anyway so it's less "be cautious about releasing" and more "be cautious about releasing to places that aren't these forums."

[Rachael]

We've really been spoiled rotten by devbuilds compared to past release schedules.

I will say this though - Graf has a track record of working with some of the high profile modders who need GZDoom releases in order to properly release their work. This has happened before at least once that I can certainly remember.

There's no guarantee that he will do it, but if your project is pending release and dependent on features that are soon to be released, he might be willing to work with you if you ask him nicely, and also depending on what his plans are.

If you plan to attempt this, it also helps if he knows in advance so he can switch gears to a "fix" mode, allowing him to try and shoot off and fix all the bug reports before that happens.

[Major Cooke]

In that case I could sure use the playerpawn size fix. But I know that will require some serious refactoring and I must wait.

[printz]

I would suggest updating the DRDTeam "beta-quality" warning a bit. People who don't come across this thread and just download dev builds automatically will flat-out ignore the warning, because they associate it with the old state of affairs, when they knew dev builds are the way to go. They may not know about the change that's going to happen to what constitutes a "beta release". Something like "IMPORTANT: Since January X, dev builds will no longer be considered stable, and any feature added in them may change without warning!! For real this time!"

Anyway, when is the new rule going to be active?

[Major Cooke]

It already is at the time of this thread's creation.

[Enjay]

Something like "IMPORTANT: Since January X, dev builds will no longer be considered stable, and any feature added in them may change without warning!! For real this time!"

at the "for real this time" bit. I know what you mean.

However, it's worth pointing out that was always meant to be the deal with the Dev builds and for a long time there has been a warning on the page. Currently it says:

These are non-release Git builds. Remember these builds are beta-quality software - use at your own risk!

And, yes, I know that the ZDoom release "schedule" meant that people did tend to go to them and treat them as stable releases. That was never the intention of those builds and I know of a number of quite prominent community members who don't use them at all.

With a more frequent and better defined release schedule, there should be less and less "need" for people who just want to play the game to get the dev builds. It should also be the case that increasingly the dev builds will be used primarily by individuals who are interested in seeing and perhaps contributing somehow to the development of features and the game.

It'll take a while for the mindset to change but I think the main factor will be the improved release schedule.

[Graf Zahl]

You know what's ironic? That Eternity is falling into the same trap, seeing heavy feature development and a project leader who either doesn't see the need or doesn't find the time to do a release...

[Graf Zahl]

A quick announcement:

As of now GZDoom is in release preparation mode. Until 2.4.0 is out no more features will be implemented and PRs that don't address bugs will be put on hold, unless they are really trivial.

[Rachael]

Sorry for the bump:

If you used FlipLine in any of your projects, it was renamed to 'FlipLineVertexes' for clarity of what it does. Since this feature has not yet appeared in a release I did not create an alias for the old function, and this is something I had meant to do sooner, although I still don't feel like enough time has passed that this rename should do any real damage to existing projects. (The function is only 2 weeks old, anyhow)

I do not want to keep the old 'FlipLine' even as an alias, because I believe it is a bit confusing to what it does.

Nevertheless, this should help to illustrate why depending on devbuild-only features is dangerous.