Much to share, still terrible at keeping up with activity as it happens!
- The play test for March is scheduled to start in just past 10 hours from this thread being posted (noon US eastern). It'll be using the Alpha 12 Omega zip and related notes and bug hunting will happen on the GitHub triage board.
- Alpha 12 has been released - a fairly mundane checkpoint release before we start breaking some things (some hefty engine PRs are awaiting merge work). Seems like it may have helped performance in multiplayer a bit? At least several different server settings during the last play test seemed to do far better than Alpha 11.
- We'll be doing a dev discussion session or two over the weekend. There's a Doodle Poll for times. The first entry is likely to start in approximately 13 hours (3 pm US eastern) with possibly another session on Sunday (GSOC ideas?). First session primary topic is how to best structure complex gameplay systems like Health, extract them out into modules, and extend them with sufficient future readiness
- We got into GSOC 2019 huzzah! We moved our ideas list to Trello this year, and will likely flesh it out a bit further this weekend now that we're in, along with some more forum posts and doc updates. Probably a focus for Sunday. If interested in participating either as a student or a mentor this weekend is a great time to get in touch, ask (and answer!) questions, engage with the community, etc
- Speaking of community events there is an idea to run a Factorio server for the community with a big new recent release out plus some mods (something about a fellow named Bob and an angel? I haven't played enough yet!). That is likely to happen in the near future, maybe in a couple weeks or so.
- Another possible event would be checking out Conan Exiles next weekend as it'll be free to play for a few days. Having played ARK a lot I'm curious about this similar title with more gameplay systems to draw inspiration from, especially the handling of NPCs. I play with a group associated with the Massively Overpowered gaming journalism site which coincidentally is looking for more staff. One of said existing staff may be hanging out with us here on occasion to check out the project and perhaps stream during the Terasology play tests
- Our Gestalt library is undergoing some solid work to get ready for Android support first for DestSol and maybe one day for Terasology. There's some GSOC potential here such as helping convert more gameplay systems (and add new ones) for DestSol using the entity system
- There is a Nyan Cat IntelliJ progress bar plugin... oh and we have a plugin too!