Topic: Release 1.3

This is a the thread for everything pertaining to the upcoming release of version 1.3. As with 1.2, we are somewhat behind the intended one-year release cadence, but again we have some great new features to show for it.

I have marked some of the open issues and PRs as urgent and postponed the rest. The distinction is in several cases arbitrary, there are a number of goodies that I'd like to see in v1.3 if possible but that are not critical and might not make it; and some of the other open PRs can still be merged for v1.3 if we get a more timely response. As always, discuss if you disagree with any categorisations.
Notably, I have postponed the many outstanding balancing changes due to lack of consensus. Naval warfare will not come out of its preview status in 1.3 yet since there were no major changes that received both sufficient attention and consensus.

I want to call the first snow feature freeze for Widelands 1.3 to take place one month from now on Tuesday, July 1st, 2025, at 00:00 CEST.

As in previous release cycles, new features labelled Urgent can still be merged after the freeze. When all remaining urgent issues are fixed, we can schedule the winter time freeze and the release dates.

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As we do claim to support only supported OS Versions, and windows 10 fell out of official support 2 days ago, there is no supported 32 Bit windows version available any more.
Mingw is skipping support for 32 Bit slowly since a couple of years as well, so it might be the time to stop our 32 Bit builds.
Maybe we might build 1.3 one last time as win 10 has extended security support for one more year. But aterwards we should stop it imho.

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while checking on github I realized that macOS 13 has fallen out of support in september as well, and is already deprecated on github with the final end date of december the 4th.
Github has introduced a macos 15 intel runner to have an OSS compatible Intel runner, but they announced it will be the last of the intel architecture.

I will add the macos 15 intel runner to our config. But as Apple users tend to use their hardware very long as well, my suggestion would be to leave the macos 13 image in as long as possible in case we get the release before december 4th, to provide a last time macos 13 version.

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Our Windows 64 bit builds should continue to run on Windows 10, as there is no external dependency to OS provided data or functions, as our builds are static builds with all needed packages included.
Therefore for our game it does not matter if you run it on Windows 11 or Windows 10.
However if specific issues will arise on Win10 which won't be reproducable on Win11 we can't provide any support any longer, but the probability for this is currently extremely low. Reason is that me and most probably the other Windows devs have upgraded our machines to Win 11 already, for security reasons and so we do not have any testing environment for Win10 anymore.

so to keep it short, most probably widelands Versions after 1.3 will still run on Win10 64bit (as well as on Win7 64bit), although not official supported anymore.

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+1 for wrapping up the freeze, but IMHO the state is not that bad. We have (in order of PR numbers):

• Musicplayer: This only needs a last review of the latest changes. (there's an outstanding wishlist item that I intended to give hints on, but that's not a blocker)
• emscripten build: There's one blocker that may be trickier than it looked at first sight. (I still think it would be nice to have in v1.3 if we want to host it on the website, but not a big deal if we postpone it.)
• Warship anims: I vote postpone...
• Lua subscribers: Only one minor change request.

Also targeted for v1.3 but not marked urgent:

• fri build anims: It has some trickier parts (deep mines), but those could be left for a later PR to have the rest merged for v1.3.
• MSYS2 ARM build: It has further issues. Is it doable? How important is to have it in v1.3?

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