first of all - thanks for the feedback.
you are not wrong but stating that we should release more often. but to be honest we are not in a stage where i would like to do that. we are lacking a lot of things here and there. also there is no 2.3 branch yet as i don't see the point in creating one (don't get me wrong, there will be a branch someday). releasing 2.3 in its current shape (besides the bugfixes of course) would in no way satisfy my personal quality requirements. maybe you have seen that we introduced some nice features to increase the visual appearance of the game itself (especially in the tactical missions). the code is there, the examples of how to use the new stuff is there. just nobody (except me) had the mood to use them. there are still some missing images for the ufopedia. our storywriters still have to check the research tree - tweak values here and there and so on. creating a 2.3 branch would only result in a lot of merging work that i'm not willing to waste my time with. it was already stated that i put a lot of time into this game - that's true - but wasting my already quite rare time is no option for me
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so once the showstopper bugs are fixed we will polish the game (almost every map should have a material definition, and we have normalmaps for most of our textures) and fix some of the smaller bugs.
and once this is done we will release 2.3 - but don't expect this to happen in the next few weeks (
or contribute and speed up the process).
i also agree that we would get more publicity with regular and shorter release cycles. but releasing a version that is as unpolished as trunk currently is would also not lead to good but only bad publicity.
for all of those that want to be on the bleeding edge of development some nice users create unofficial installers from the most recent trunk versions from time to time. and you still have the chance to compile it yourself, too.
and one more sentence for those that plan to contribute. i really think that it should be possible for everyone to create a heightmap (see data_source/images/textures/...) of a texture that we can use to create normalmaps, or to normalize the volume of some sounds. or even to write basic material files (though this might already be a little bit complicated). there are a lot of possibilities to ensure that the waiting for 2.3 is getting shorter and shorter.