Frozen development

[Stan`]

17 minutes ago, elexis said:

Did you get the crash with Tobbis image or with one that you compiled yourself?

Tobbis dmg just above.

[Rolf Dew]

All was fine on my end, I tried some multiplayer earlier and everything was fine. Tried 3 mods and that worked as well. Loading an old save game and an old replay and it worked too. Jebel Barkal and Hellas worked correctly.Finally the ingame downloader worked correctly and downloaded properly. No lobby lag at all, hosting and rejoining a game worked correctly too. I tried hosting a team multiplayer game 4vs4 (with just ai and myself) and it worked fine.

 

MacOS Sierra

Mac air (2017 13.3 inch)

Processor: 1.8 GHz Intel Core i5 

Memory : 8 gb of 1600MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory

Intel HD Graphics 6000 1536 MB

[feneur]

11 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

 

@feneur @Itms can we post on social media to say we need mac users to test the RC

1

Definitely, could someone suggest what to write though? Especially since we haven't really told people that we are working on a re-release, so it might be good to begin with that

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

1 hour ago, feneur said:

re-release 

It's been so long since the last Alpha, you might as well call this Alpha 24.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

It's been so long since the last Alpha, you might as well call this Alpha 24.

If only the letter for 24 was “G”. 

0AD 24: GDPR Compliant (hopefully)

Not sure this rerelease would qualify as a new Alpha. Such little changed that people with 23 and 23.1 can play together.

[Sundiata]

On 11/13/2018 at 10:59 AM, stanislas69 said:

• Launch a random game
• Launch a normal skirmish.
• Connect to the lobby
• Play on the lobby with someone
• Launch Atlas 
• See if everything works there.  [anytime I type something in Atlas, it repeats every letter twice, so "Kush" becomes "KKuusshh". It's always been like that for both my macbooks]
• Open Unit tests demo (To see if there any breakage in displaying entity's) [wut is Unit tests demo?]
• Try mods 
• Enable feedback and see if it works (Main menu) [What is feedback, where in the menu?]

 

Thank you @trompetin17, @Itms and @Tobbi! Thank you soooo much.....

 

[Gurken Khan]

42 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

 [What is feedback, where in the menu?]

On the title screen is a box in the right bottom corner.

[feneur]

46 minutes ago, Sundiata said:

wut is Unit tests demo?

Choose Scenario as the Map Type, Demo Maps in the Map Filter, and then select the map called Units Demo

[Sundiata]

1 hour ago, Gurken Khan said:

On the title screen is a box in the right bottom corner.

Ah... Feedback enabled.

 

1 hour ago, feneur said:

Choose Scenario as the Map Type, Demo Maps in the Map Filter, and then select the map called Units Demo

Thanks. Everything seems to be displaying fine. 

[DirtyHanz]

On 11/13/2018 at 10:49 AM, elexis said:

Looks like trompetin17, Itms and Tobbi are saving the day!

To all macOS users: Please help us test this 0 A.D. Alpha 23 release candidate! Try to find and inform us of any bugs (in particular bugs that prevent you from actually playing the game)!

macOS Alpha 23 re-release candidate:

0ad .dmg 840.3 MB

https://mega.nz/#!Jcd2EaqB!uX5NiOYuaIzfdliy10nOZx9T2vsQK8AKltStDbE5IQs

the first attempts at playing worked well. Meanwhile, the Internet connection is severely affected as soon as I start 0ad.
 do not know why. my system kicks off completely. Now I can not go into the lobby anymore, I was banned or something. 
the server does not allow me.

Edited November 15, 2018 by DirtyHanz

[Nescio]

On 11/13/2018 at 11:29 PM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

It's been so long since the last Alpha, you might as well call this Alpha 24.

Yes, I agree, it's been half a year. From A1 (August 2010) to A20 (March 2016) the average time between releases was 3 to 4 months. Not every release has to change as much as A23 did.

[Stan`]

2 hours ago, Nescio said:

Yes, I agree, it's been half a year. From A1 (August 2010) to A20 (March 2016) the average time between releases was 3 to 4 months. Not every release has to change as much as A23 did.

I don't have any strong opinion on how to call it and I will stick to the team decisions for that one. We really want to reduce release time between releases but the very nature of this project makes it complicated because of the team member different schedules.

A lot of bad things (And some good too) happened behind the scenes these past months and we've been trying to keep the ship afloat and most of us are sorry you had to pay the price. 

In the current state of affairs a Mac développer came back and is helping us to bring back Mac Os 10.9 Compatibility so we can finally put this behind us and start adding stuff (At least on the art side)

The current issue with Mac is that without the fix no one below 10.12 will be able to join the lobby without disabling SSL on both sides which is a GDPR requirement.

We brought back the feedback server which was also a security / GDPR concern so that by knowing more about our users we can better help them (Like if nobody is using XP anymore drop that (The lobby won't work with it anymore in the next version)

Me and Itms will be in Toulouse giving a talk this weekend about the game and hopefully meeting new people and potential contributors. So stay tuned. And still sorry for the inconvenience.

 

 

 

[Sundiata]

@stanislas69 I don't think any apologies are necessary, at all... We should all rather be grateful for all the headaches you guys (and gals?) put yourself through so we can all play one of the world's greatest historical RTS-games! 

[elexis]

8 hours ago, Nescio said:

A20 (March 2016) the average time between releases was 3 to 4 months

Alpha 17 and 18 took 5 months, Alpha 19 took 6 months.

But comparing early to  late releases is like comparing apples with potatoes:

1. On the one hand: The more features there are, the more code has to be maintained, fixed, rewritten, improved. For example it took me 6 months to rewrite 65+ random maps during alpha 23 development. So many maps and bugs didn't exist back then.
2. Secondly the capable motivated and available developers went down.
3. Thirdly we put more emphasis on quality now than was done before from what I can tell (for example we try to balance the game so that it can be played competitively on the lobby, which wasn't the case until alpha 14-16 when the lobby was introduced and scythetwirler started trying to fix the balance. But the quality in other areas was neglected too. I recall alpha 18 was about to be released with an OOS, nowadays we would fix it). Another example are the trailers, which consumed up to 2-3 weeks.
4. Very early releases often were only a new snapshot of the most recent state with sometimes only few and small addtions. In the last years we try to add at least 3-4 new impressive features that have  distinct, memorable character to call it a release, so that people actually get excited about the release (rather than just installing something that doesn't differ from the predecessor).

The 4th reason is also the reason why this should not be called alpha 24 but alpha 23b. There is literally not a single new feature unless you call privacy policies or connection encryption one. It's a classic maintenance release. An update to an existing product as the existing product had some serious defects.

So if one wants to target 3-4 month release cycles, that will come with a serious quality or feature reduction unless there are some supermen coming. I think we should continue to keep the quality, use our time more economically / productively. People have kept piling hacks and workarounds. It seems we currently add more contributions the way they should end up in the final version of 0 A.D. and pyrogenesis. So the end of having to rewrite historic spaghetti code might come eventually. After that, we can provide the same quality and same new impressive features in a shorter timespan. I don't see how we can change the rest of the restrictions (in particular if we want to use the time most productively). Alpha 23 rerelease in particular had some weeks of timewaste unrelated to above argument as everyone fled the dirty GDPR work. That is more a problem of negligence.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Not features not new alpha. Simply.

[Nescio]

First of all, there is no need to apologize. We all know you're volunteers who devote your free time to 0 A.D. and we're grateful for that. Also, it's human that things tend to take more time than one expects beforehand.

Although more frequent, smaller releases with fewer changes would be nice to remind everyone development is continuing, it is not really important whether the time between alphas is three months, six, or twelve. What discourages me more is that there has been a feature freeze in place for about seven months now.

Something I really appreciated was the “0 A.D. Development Report – January 2018” posted on the play0ad.com homepage on February 2. However, that appears to be a one-time update. Only two more official posts have appeared since: “New Release: 0 A.D. Alpha 23 Ken Wood” on May 17 and “0 A.D. Financial Report, September 2018” on September 8.

A bit more official communication would be nice. I was under the impression the reason for the re-release and its delay were difficulties with the GDPR. Only on November 3, thanks to elexis' posts in this thread, I learned that the current issue is the lack of Apple Mac OS users in the team.

Ideally there would be one official announcement on the official homepage each month, to inform the general public what's currently going on. It doesn't have to be long nor complete. E.g.  “October 2018: still working on making 0AD GDPR compliant.” or “November 2018: currently we're experiencing difficulty with checking the Apple Mac OS release because none of the active team members has one.”

6 hours ago, elexis said:

Secondly the capable motivated and available developers went down.

This is what worries me most. Unfortunately, I don't have a solution.

Edited November 16, 2018 by Nescio
expanded

[Imarok]

Yes, monthly progress reports would be nice, but then we'd need someone that writes them. And if that would be one of our developers, we'd less development power.

Wrt naming the rerelease A24 or A23b: Until now all releases have been incompatible to each other. The rerelease however will be compatible with A23 (in general), so it would be counterintuitive and counterproductive to call it A24.

[Stan`]

4 hours ago, Nescio said:

A bit more official communication would be nice. I was under the impression the reason for the re-release and its delay were difficulties with the GDPR. Only on November 3, thanks to elexis' posts in this thread, I learned that the current issue is the lack of Apple Mac OS users in the team.

That's something I'd like to have as well. Unfortunately while Imarok is right and it takes Dev time the main issue we have is internal communication. We have members going AWOL, people working like madmen on their own but not advertising what they do and people that simply don't talk

We are working on our AFK skills but it's a long way to the top if you want to rock'n'roll

[Servo]

I have this crashlog yesterday and I was playing the 0ad dmg. I'm not sure if this user report text is helpful too and can't remember if I was using the same DL

userreport_hwdetect.txt

crashlog.txt

[Stan`]

7 hours ago, Servo said:

I have this crashlog yesterday and I was playing the 0ad dmg. I'm not sure if this user report text is helpful too and can't remember if I was using the same DL

userreport_hwdetect.txt

crashlog.txt

When did that happen ? Did you have any mods ? Which DMG was it ?

[Nescio]

19 hours ago, Imarok said:

Yes, monthly progress reports would be nice, but then we'd need someone that writes them. And if that would be one of our developers, we'd less development power.

It doesn't have to be as complete or as elaborate as the January progress report. One or two sentences would suffice.

For the team as a whole it's probably more time efficient to have a short official statement rather than half a dozen team members replying to different forum threads because people keep asking questions.

If you don't inform the public, you're less likely to receive additional help.

17 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

That's something I'd like to have as well. Unfortunately while Imarok is right and it takes Dev time the main issue we have is internal communication. We have members going AWOL, people working like madmen on their own but not advertising what they do and people that simply don't talk

We are working on our AFK skills but it's a long way to the top if you want to rock'n'roll

Surely at least someone knows what's going on? If not, that's quite worrisome. You're supposed to be a team.

 

 

Of course, it's completely up to you to decide what to do. I'm merely an uninformed person who's worried by how things look from the outside.

[Servo]

Mac OS 0ad dmg re-release

[Stan`]

9 hours ago, Nescio said:

For the team as a whole it's probably more time efficient to have a short official statement rather than half a dozen team members replying to different forum threads because people keep asking questions.

I don't think it would change anything because people don't usually read those so I would just end up copy pasting links which I find rude.

9 hours ago, Nescio said:

If you don't inform the public, you're less likely to receive additional help.

True. 

9 hours ago, Nescio said:

Surely at least someone knows what's going on? If not, that's quite worrisome. You're supposed to be a team.

Not really. We usually know most of it but there isn't someone that knows everything. We are not tracking our team members. So some people might go AWOL and that's fine. We have an Absence thread but not everyone think to use it, nor has the time to. We all have external life constraints.

 

 

[sarcoma]

maybe you should consider deploying 0ad binaries as a linux virtual machine for mac or just drop mac support

[WhiteTreePaladin]

3 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

13 hours ago, Nescio said:

Surely at least someone knows what's going on? If not, that's quite worrisome. You're supposed to be a team.

Not really. We usually know most of it but there isn't someone that knows everything. We are not tracking our team members. So some people might go AWOL and that's fine. We have an Absence thread but not everyone think to use it, nor has the time to. We all have external life constraints.

Yeah, I think most of the devs are aware of what's going on in general. Sure, it's possible someone that hasn't been as active is working quietly on something, but that's less common and not really a problem anyway.

I know that before I officially joined, I savoured every bit of news released hoping that the project wouldn't be cancelled. Right after I joined (a decade ago) there was talk of ending the project do to lack of developers. (Talk about discouraging!) Extended discussion ultimately lead to the open source release. To ensure success as an open source project, Philip rewrote the entire (rather unmanageable) simulation from scratch which resulted in the nice component system we have now. He also added the original AI (as it wasn't really a playable game at that time). All of this took awhile because he was the only one really available to work on it.

While development has ups and downs, we're in a better overall situation now than we were back then because we have a fully playable, open-source game, and more developers. Once this next release is complete with much of the GDPR stuff, I think more visible progress will start to be made. (The holiday season may interfere somewhat, but that's not really a bad thing. )