Featured Happy 7th birthday, Terasology!

[Cervator]

And first formal news post in a while, although it is starting out pretty small. It'll grow over the next week!

The first project post is still around, and it sure has been an adventure since, and continues to be. Hard to keep on top of all the happenings these days as the project has expanded and more things need to be kept track of. Need more automation

For this year I'm proposing a bit of a week-long celebration of sorts, starting slow with some preparations this weekend (in 12ish hours) and building over the week to a big multiplayer event with several concurrently hosted servers running some of our different gameplay templates for the next entire weekend. Our usual play test is scheduled then, but lately the play tests have been somewhat scattered since we switch the server around, something is usually broken, etc. Time to try something a bit different with a longer warm-up.

I'll be aiming to cover several topics over the week and have some write-ups prepared and others coming. Hoping to do some architectural discussions as well, along with bug fix marathons and an issue/task creating bonanza for Hacktoberfest and Google Code-In. Primary focus for this immediate weekend is on bug fixing and stability improvements on the stuff we'll aim to be playing next weekend, as well as submitting a bunch of good issues on GitHub for Hacktoberfest. I welcome any help in moving forward on all that

Ideally at the end of the weekend we'll have some sort of release candidate for Alpha 11 with a limited number of last-minute fixes before formally releasing before next weekend. At the moment I'm unaware of any blockers. I'm dusting off https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology/projects/4 to cover research and pending thing to either fix or move to a proper issue. Maybe we can also do another release for the TerasologyLauncher, and how about some DestSol PRs as well?

I hope to see as many next weekend, and any time from now until then, helping out or just hanging out to be social. Here's to 7 more years and 7 more posts coming

 

[Cervator]

Bump - something funny happened this weekend: before I ever had a chance to post birthday celebration notes on social media and start formally we got so busy with project activity and new people arriving that we never had time to really celebrate! Only got one event server online before getting tied up.

Many PRs were merged, especially for Destination Sol, various bits of feedback accepted, new issues written up, some of them even were fixed right away. The Alpha 11 RC looks pretty solid right now with no known blockers. TeraMath v1.5.0 got released. Dagger 2 is being concept proven for DestSol. Considering simply delaying the formal celebration till next play test (Nov 3rd), rather than just a week away (GSOC Mentor Summit) or two (will have only just returned from the overall trip including GitHub Universe at the end). But the Alpha 11 release will be out ASAP (effort allowing)

In the meantime our GCI announcement post is up and tasks are being prepared. The Monday immediately after the GSOC Mentor Summit a few of us will meet up at the Aloft hotel to spend a day together on Terasology, probably including more GCI task write-ups, Hacktoberfest issues, and so on.

I guess it is a good thing to be too busy doing the thing you're trying to celebrate that you never get around to the celebration itself? So long as the work itself is good and enjoyable, at least. Which it has been - there's just a lot of it!

 

[brylie]

It might be worth it to cross-post these types of announcements to the Terasology blog. That way they will show up on the Terasology front page. From the current front page, it is hard to get an idea of how active this project actually is!

 

[Cervator]

Absolutely agreed @brylie! We should be posting to all kinds of different places and keep up more regularly. It is one of the things that has mostly fallen on the wayside as I've gotten increasingly more occupied with other stuff, as it was usually just me posting all the things in various places.

In this case it sort of worked out since it was hectic enough even without more announcements, but we do need more help at better spreading the word

 

[brylie]

Would you mind that I try posting it to the blog, putting you as the author?

 

[Cervator]

(belated reply to @brylie in addition to a poke on chat: of course yep please do!)

On related news I'm out of town on another business trip, and will be unable to host tomorrow

So unless somebody else can step in I'll aim to run something usual time next Saturday instead. We've got Alpha 11 released so the goal would likely be testing it (possibly across multiple servers at once) to hunt various outstanding issues we should aim to fix in the near term.

After that soon it looks like we'll be merging some big stuff like a serialization overhaul, some optional module stuff, an extraction of Inventory to a proper module and so on. Plenty of stuff coming