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My comments regarding UFO: AI development

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misiek:
Hello,

First of all couple of important things:
1) I really admire your project and i'm very grateful for doing this. I know that it's hard to develop such project when you have work and real life (i recently started to develop a website in my free time).
2) I don't have experience in developing and managing open source projects, so my comments and ideas may be incorrect.
3) I don't want to criticize anyone or anything and i'm not demanding anything - i only want to help.
4) It's your project, so it's your decision how do you want to develop it.

Now my comments:
1) Releases
I think that release cycles are too long. You should develop it in smaller steps. Frequent releases can be good for publicity - people can see that this project is developing, more people can join in (especially artists, because there aren't many - i think). 2.2 was released over one year ago and you have made so many changes for 2.3 that you will probably won't be able to describe everything in release notes ;)

I think that it's time to concentrate on releasing 2.3. In next couple of months you should concentrate on fixing bugs and disabling functionalities which aren't working properly (postpone it for later releases).

For reference look how frequent Battle for wesnoth releases are:
http://libregamewiki.org/Battle_for_Wesnoth_release_history

2) Project management and issue tracking
I don't know if you're happy with sf issue tracking system. If not, maybe you could try to switch for example to trac. I've noticed that it's used by many open source projects. It has nice roadmap functionality, in which you can assign issues to milestones (so it could replace your todo page on wiki).
For example:
http://developer.wz2100.net/roadmap

Canuck77:
I'm not a dev, but I know there has been a lot of discussion back and forth with people feeling the 2.3 cycle was too long.

On the other hand, it seems as though there's a stretch goal of making the game completable (ie. you can win, which is really far from possible in 2.2) in this release, and that's why it has taken so long. Certainly, nobody has said that, but when I look at the TODOs and things of that nature, everything appears to be there. If they disable the things which aren't done, then 2.3 isn't able to be played until the end, either.

You can either compile the dev builds yourself, or download the binaries from whichever platform's forum you like... I know that isn't the point (you're referring to PR), but...

BTAxis:

--- Quote from: Canuck77 on April 01, 2009, 05:41:22 pm ---On the other hand, it seems as though there's a stretch goal of making the game completable (ie. you can win, which is really far from possible in 2.2) in this release, and that's why it has taken so long.
--- End quote ---

Not really. The thing that has kept us from getting into a release track has been a lack of coders. There are some issues that are showstoppers, and there are only a few people who know anything about that part of the code, and they aren't exactly working around the clock.

misiek:

--- Quote from: BTAxis on April 01, 2009, 06:32:44 pm ---Not really. The thing that has kept us from getting into a release track has been a lack of coders. There are some issues that are showstoppers, and there are only a few people who know anything about that part of the code, and they aren't exactly working around the clock.

--- End quote ---

That's bad situation :( I'm afraid that if you won't concentrate on fixing bugs (instead of implementing new features) it could lead to situation in which current showstopers will be fixed, but other will occur because while someone was fixing current showstopers someone else implemented half working new features. This way ufo:ai can be in constant development stage. Maybe some kind of solution is to announce feature freeze from now, until 2.3 is released.

BTAxis:
That's the idea. The 2.3 branch will essentially be a feature freeze, with only bugfix commits. But we can't do that until pathfinding is working, or so I'm told.

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