On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 7:40 AM, Renk Thorsten wrote: >> What version number will we give to the new >> release? Are we ready for a 3.0 or is it 2.12? > > Looking through my list of goals for the last coding period:
I also had a look through the 3.0 backlog article (http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_3.0_backlog), and I was pleasantly surprised at what I was able to tick off: - We now have a unified weather UI that is much more usable. Thanks to Vivian for his help on this. - ALS is now integrated with Basic Weather. While it can't leverage all the features that ALS provides, it's good enough that IMO we have now managed to make the rendering model and weather models independent. - ALS now works much better with the random trees. I think there's still work to be done with other shaders (presumably the wake shader has still to be ported?) So, I think we've managed to polish many of the "rough edges", which is good. Vivian wrote: > A nice list and it's all worthwhile improvement, but it's all tinkering > around the edges of existing stuff. There's no step change which would > justify 3.0 IMO. For that we need something major, like new terrain (850) or > Rembrandt as the default. Perhaps we should instead look at 2.0.0 as the baseline rather than 2.10.0 and think in terms of the maturity of the features added since that point. With a 6 month release cycle, it's extremely unlikely we'll suddenly have a new feature spring fully-formed in a release - instead we'll have experimental features mature over a period of releases as we've seen with Rembrandt, canvas, ALS. For example, ALS is now pretty mature, and in general our eye-candy has moved on significantly from 2.0.0 (object masking, random buildings, regional textures etc.) Perhaps we should do the work required to make ALS the default, and declare that 3.0? It's not a completely facetious question. I've been wondering whether we should deprecate the standard rendering model (non-ALS, non-Rembrand), and instead have ALS as the default, with a modification so that the lowest quality level matches the lowest quality level of the standard model. Obviously we'd need to do some work to port any remaining standard rendering model features (wake shader?) across. At higher quality levels, I don't think that the standard model is as developed or mature for terrain in particular, and some of the features such as the urban shader have been rendered (pun intended) obsolete by other developments. That would simplify matter from a user perspective, and make it easier for them to achieve graphics similar to the screenshots we publicize. Of course, that is a completely different approach to non-OSS software development, were the X.0.0 release is a bug-ridden mess and the point releases improve quality. :) -Stuart ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
