And perhaps the worst tidbit is that there has been no dev commentary in this thread. Please, let's just have a concentrated effort to clean up 2.5. I'm finishing up my quest, so I'll be able to help beta test like no other.
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And perhaps the worst tidbit is that there has been no dev commentary in this thread. Please, let's just have a concentrated effort to clean up 2.5. I'm finishing up my quest, so I'll be able to help beta test like no other.
You are aware of the intention to redevelop ZC from scratch after the next release right? Likely using something other then allegro or redoing everything in a more optimal way for current versions of allegro. sure there may be slight bug fix releases like a year or so after the official release, but anything major would be kept out of the release grade product for implementation in the freshly developing version.
Anyways yes I agree that 6 years is way too long, script additions and half working features related to scripting, should be ignored. Scripting is what sent the product along this 6 year joy ride and script development should be stopped to end this joyride. How long was it between stable releases before scripting was implemented? how long was the time gap between 1.90, 1.92b183/4, 2.10 and even older versions?
If you like to script either use what you have or continue to wait, all your doing is making it take an eternity to release a stable version because your always after a script language that can do everything and you want it done for a product that was never originally designed for scripting.
edit: I still think random corruption protection is worth more then saving disk space since people have said, they spend aaaages, years even, developing quests for us. Most quest authors who are good at ZQuest, likely know how to use Windows Expllorer and manage files also and can choose to delete old backups if they wish. Heck you could add a culling system that culls backups that are older then 'x' amount of months or something and have it enabled by default, but allow people to disable it if wanted, allowing infinite amount of backups of any age.
Make it so when a backup is made it is marked as "read only", that way future or current versions can't modify them in any way making them a true backup.
Alright, I guess I'll reply here about some of these responses.
Something good: A few days ago I upgraded my quest file 'Grikarugun' to the newest build from build 887. The quest file is around 7MB and the script files alone are 3/4ths a MB. You might say there is a whole bunch of things going on inside that it could be easy for something to break. ...Well, I opened it in the player and played through it in it's entirety. Perfect. Not a single bug to speak of. In fact, I rarely come across any issues in zc lately. If people didn't report them, I might not even believe that they existed. Freedom, you might of just had some bad luck where 1121 didn't like you very much. I *think* all those problems have been since fixed and it at least shouldn't crash anymore. If it does you just have to post it and then the shit cabbie makes another detour. It's not perfect but it's the best that there is right now.
Something else: I don't know when it will be at a 'release candidate' stage. I 'hope' it will come soon. As long as any part of the main engine gets changed there is a chance that bugs will emerge from it's dark depths and development time will lag even more, thus entering into a seemingly endless tunnel in which the path to daylight becomes a slow and torturous crawl. I believe we are above this though, and while sometimes to fix a bug it is easier to just add feature X to take care of it, I think everyone (I hope) is in the mindset of gearing for release by now. Another problem with lag time is just plain and simple arm strength.[Insert 'Tim Allen slogan' here]
..I don't even know where I'm going with this anymore. :\ To sum up and rant about the whole adding features thing at the same time...
I'm all for 2.5 being finished sooner rather than later for two reasons:
1) Personal selfish reason 1: I don't like fixing other peoples bugs. I have no idea what dev X during year Y was thinking when he/she implemented function Z then another dev W added additional feature Q to it that caused bug 403-1b. It takes me like 10 times longer to fix than if I did something that caused it. Nevertheless, in the long run it all adds up and a stable version will come sooner, so I endure.
Personal selfish reason 2: I'd like to add lots of new cool stuff and develop the functionality further. I can't do this until a release happens, therefore it is in my personal interest to try and see 2.5 come out without being delayed [insert some form of witty time frame comment here].
2) Then half of you get to say "I told you so" and all of you get to answer an onslaught of dumb questions from a bunch of new newbies. Theys be crazy gud wit fonics lol..
That's my $.02.
tl;dr version: I don't know. Yes. No. It's not that buggy. Try the latest build. That's what she said. That's silly; there's very little scripting bugs by comparison. That's what she said.
edit:
Oh god please no more lens of truth bugs! :p
Scripting is a constantly evolving feature set, it has taken 4 to 5 years to turn an incomplete feature set into a incomplete feature set, pretty much making every single other feature "buggy" multiple times along the way. There is no end to this evolving feature set as far as I, likely Freedom, ST, DFW etc. can see.
I like that at some point the builds got much more stable on newer O/S's, but still had very buggy features and stuff making it pointless to develop quests or experiment with it.
I don't know what your personal threshold for 'bugginess' is, but anyone expecting everything to work exactly as intended all of the time has never actually programmed before. Especially for a program of this nature.
Haven't we had this thread dozens of times before already?
EDIT - I realized that my post sounds more dismissive than it meant to be, so I'm sorry for that. I have a lot more to say but I'd prefer to just react to specific inquiries for the time being.
well... yea, it's been 6 years since a stable release.
As for the rest... the developers decide the threshold and when to release a version as "stable", as for everyone else they seem to agree that 6 years is just a bit too long to wait.
As for some people pointing out the 210 fiasco... and using that as reason to not release, hell there were only what... 4 serious bugs, why didn't ya'll just fix those and do a re-release and call it good?
And you all (developers) said you wanted to do a rewrite, so why are you investing so mych time in this one, release one, start your rewrite, and continue to tweak serious bugs in this until it is as stable as it can be, doesn't that make more sense?
See, I knew when I made that edit that I'd be too late with it!
Indeed. And I've definitely made my share of mistakes. What's amazing about this is that I'm still only 23 and have quite a bit to learn about organizing a project of this nature. I came on when I was fresh out of high school and was basically playing by ear the whole time. As to be expected, many things didn't go quite as planned. Nevertheless, this whole ordeal is still mostly my fault, and I don't want people nagging on the efforts of people like _L_ and Joe and Gleeok because of my mistakes. That's the last thing I want here.
Didn't DN do exactly that ages ago? :PQuote:
As for some people pointing out the 210 fiasco... and using that as reason to not release, hell there were only what... 4 serious bugs, why didn't ya'll just fix those and do a re-release and call it good?
It's sort of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario. I've been wanting to do this for a while now but there's always been hesitation because of how incomplete the current build is. If I recall we even made that option public to people, and based on the responses decided in favor of fixing up the current code base before doing anything else. Perhaps that ended up being a mistake.Quote:
And you all (developers) said you wanted to do a rewrite, so why are you investing so mych time in this one, release one, start your rewrite, and continue to tweak serious bugs in this until it is as stable as it can be, doesn't that make more sense?
Well then, screw it, I would be more than willing to start on a rewrite, but only if people would absolutely be satisfied with a new version of ZC that's missing 90% of its intended functionality but without random crashes and quest corruption bugs. I'd have to convince myself to do things that way.
quoting on just the bold underlined here....
doesn't it have 90% more than it did when we were close to releasing the 211b10b?
People will never be satisfied that it has enough, but if you can't really build and release quests with what it does have, doesn't really matter what they want anyway.
IF they want MORE let them continue with the betas and do the testing
I'm not sure a rewrite would do anything in terms of making a better Z1 clone. zc can do pretty much almost anything you'd want a LOZ1 editor to do and way more. Plus imagine trying to get the rewrite compliant with all the backwards compatibility issues of the older quests and releases. Patching up the remaining bugs would take far less time.Quote:
rewrite
"Rewrite" to me sort of implies not even making a clone of Z1, but something that 'can' make a clone of Z1. (edit:) I meant this in a optimistic way. To me there's no point in writing a book then rewriting the same book so that it can contain the same words. You have to make it better and not limit features based on quirky nes coding.
There are very few quests designed for the ZC beta's, you won't be affecting much by removing backwards support as there is already 2.10 for 2.10 quests, 1.92b183/4 and 1.90 etc. for there quests.
If anything, stability under modern O/S's is where the problem lies for legacy quests but for 1.90 there is always DOSBox.
Thats the plan.