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First snow feature freeze

Nearly one week late

Our self-imposed deadline for the first-snow feature freeze was last wednesday. And we did what creative people do with a deadline: let it pass by.

But now we are ready to announce the first-snow feature freeze of build 17. What does that mean? It means that we commit to not breaking anything that is currently working and not changing any strings anymore so that translaters can work their magic. Mainly, we will no longer

  • add new features
  • fix style bugs
  • make functional changes to campaign maps and scenarios
  • tag or change strings

Only minimal invasive bug fixes are allowed for pressing bugs. And the media guys can add an image here and there (though I know that they have no immediate plans to do so).

What happens now?

We will test drive this release for another week. Winter time feature freeze is in roughly one week (scheduled for 26th March) - if there are no new problems. We will then offer a release candidate which is open for public testing (scheduled for 2nd April). This one will be in the open for at least two weeks. Then we will push the final release build 17. Assuming there are no further problems of course.

So people: get on it! Translate and play, test and report problems. In the freeze time it is more important than ever!

Update: One critical bug was fixed this last week. Otherwise we feel we are good to go and instantiate the feature freeze today. So, one more week till the release candidate must be ready. This means one more week to translate some more!

11 comments Posted by SirVer on 2012-03-19, 19:45

Comments on this Post:

simplypeachy

Dear developer,

Unfortunately you may not begin a Snow Freeze on your project as winter finishes on 20th March. We will be putting away our snow shoes and scarves and will be ready for spring face-tongue.png

Thanks for all the hard work!
SirVer

Maybe the seasons are reversed in Widelands face-tongue.png


Nasenbaer

Great, great, great :)!

I restarted my dedicated server "FreeForAll" for all of you, who want to play a quick and easy game (without having to set up the firewall and the port forwarding) and/or want to help testing the dedicated server feature.

Using it is very simple, it is basically exactly the same user interface as if you would set up the server yourself on your machine.
Tino

I am missing the optimize_pngs on http://wl.widelands.org/wiki/ReleasingWidelands

When (before/after freeze) and where (trunk or rc branch) does that happen? I am just asking because chuckw has pushed so many great new buildings/animations that widelands has grown enormously the last weeks...

I am running the python script with optipng over all pics atm, if it is ok, i can push the changes to trunk...

Nasenbaer

Generally the png optimization is a very good thing, however in some small cases we already faced some strange problems through use of it (like misscolored granite resource markers in the editor). I don't know how likely such a "graphic breaking" is, but I don't feel that fine with pushing the optimized graphics shortly before release.

So let's either do it directly (enough time to get response from the users, if a graphic looks strange), or only after build18.

But maybe this discussion should better go to the mailing list or the forum... I doubt everyone is reading here.

chuckw

For everyone's information, as of bzr rev#6334, I am now DEFINITELY done with ANY more graphics changes for Build 17. So, AFAIK you may proceed with any optimization that may be necessary without having to worry about MORE graphics changes. I apologize for any inconvenience I may have caused.
Tino

You are right, Nasenbaer. Lets postpone this, the space saving is minimal in any case. Don't want to break any image (especially the alpha ones)... But >35k png files in the widelands file tree screams for some resource packaging with b18.

Nasenbaer

I began to upload new promotional screenshots (e.g. see http://wl.widelands.org/wlmedia/wlscreens/screens/Current%20Developments/To%20the%20sea.png ). If you have some nice screenshots, that your would like to share and could fit in the screenshots section, please send them to me (Nasenbaer Ät Drehatlas döt de)
oibaf

It would be nice to have it released in time to be included in Ubuntu 12.04: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/ReleaseSchedule
Shevonar

I think it is a little late for that? They already have released Beta 2 and won't change any packages for the final release (if I understand correctly). Packages are only updated until Beta Freeze which was on March 22nd. Correct me if I am wrong.
oibaf

Final Freeze is April 12th, they are still accepting updates for non critical packages if well tested. If widelands and the debian package will ready before the 12th, I'll backport to my PPA, test it and do a requestsync.

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