Hi Philip, Well, I think you are right. The primary mistake I made with beta 19 was simply that I didn't explain to the end users that this was to be considered an experimental release only and not in anyway a full production release. Beta 18 was an official production release were beta 19 wasn't. Beta 19 was an experiment to see how well the cross-platform engine run on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 which I should have been up front about from the beginning. Plus I didn't say why I had removed joystick and mouse support, and people assumed the worst and thought that I was intending on taking it out of the final release when it was only intended for that specific release or build only.
The thing is, and I wish I had made this clearer from the beginning, what we have is two different engines more or less in production at the same time. I've got the Windows specific version of the engine which is definitely production quality, has been in development for a couple of years, and is fairly stable. Then, we've got the cross-platform or Linux version of the engine that isn't yet production quality mainly because I haven't found something comparable to DirectX I can replace those components with. I've not actually converted the full Windows engine over to Linux yet so there are a lot of things that need doing like adding joystick support, for example, before it is 100% up to par for writing production quality games as is in evidence with beta 19. Plus I confess when it comes to writing applications for Linux I'm still largely in the dark about many of the libraries and APIs it uses. I've been writing both private and professional software for Windows for probably 10 years so when it comes to Windows core APIs and components I pretty much know what I'm doing so I can put together something pretty quickly and it will be pretty stable because of my past experience. With Linux if you tell me to write an application using one of the graphics toolkits like GTK+, QT, WX, etc I'm going to have to study up on it, write some experimental code, etc because I have no background experience working with those APIs. The only times I've been called upon to write a professional application for Linux such as a graphical front end for a MySQL database I wrote it in Java using the cross-platform Swing toolkit, and since Java is all pretty self-contained that doesn't count as practical experience for what i'm doing now with this cross-platform engine. So its all pretty much experimental code at this point as far as the cross-platform engine is concerned. I think the best thing to do right now is to finish MOTA using the Windows specific engine since it is production quality, get the game sold using that technology, and put off finishing the cross-platform engine until that is out of the way. That way when I say I've got an experimental release that might be cross-platform people aren't going to be as upset with me because if they don't like the experimental cross-platform version they can fallback on 1.0 which is stable and up to their personal standards. The lesson I've learned is this. First, be up front about my intentions, long term goals or plans, and people will understand what I'm after. Second, attach, if possible, a buglog.txt file to the release so people will be informed what problems are in the release and what is on the todo list for the next upgrade. Third, don't try and remove a bunch of features after you just released them in a prior release as some people aren't going to respond well to bleeding edge code regardless of how temporary the removal might or might not be. Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
