As those of you who lurk in #scp may know, there have been a few changes internally. Chief1983 has decided to step down from SCP leadership due to RL commitments, and in his stead, I have been appointed.
This of course means that there are going to be a few changes I want to make in the way the SCP has been conducting its business.
The biggest thing I want to address is our orientation. For the past couple of releases, SCP's focus has been mostly internal; Fixing up architectural or functional bugs. While this is of course necessary work, it has taken away attention from what I believe should be our focus: Our customers. Those come in two large, and partially overlapping groups; On one hand, we have the players, who just want to play FS2 or Diaspora or WoD or whatever with a minimum of technical issues. On the other, there are content producers, people who want to use our engine to tell stories and make fun games.
While the first group has been helped a lot by making the engine more stable, more efficient, it's my impression that the second group has suffered a bit. There's a backlog of features that have been requested and that should be implemented, and we should get started on that.
To that end, I want to reintroduce an old rule: Any feature a programmer wants to introduce has to be accompanied by a bugfix or a fulfilled feature request for one of our hosted projects (or one of the unaffiliated projects).
Finally, here's my roadmap for what you can expect over the coming months:
- Release 3.7.2. RC phase should start in a week or two.
- Merge SDL Everywhere into trunk.
- Adopt m!m's work regarding CMAKE and the corresponding changes to the project layout
- Adopt git as our primary source control repository
- Release 3.8. If possible, by August.