Hard Light Productions Forums
Announcements => Announcements => Topic started by: chief1983 on August 30, 2008, 12:50:27 am
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The time between now and its release depends entirely on how much support the SCP can get from the community. Most of the staff is busy cracking down on bugs like crazy, but there are many things anyone can do to help them in this quest. First of all, understand that the main code base is under a feature freeze, meaning that at this point, any of the builds being released for testing on the Recent Builds (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/board,97.0.html) forum should have all planned features implemented. From here on out, no big additions (excepting possiblities in which they fix a serious outstanding bug).
But, there are a lot of bugs. Even as they get squashed, more bugs are being reported. We need your help to keep these numbers shrinking. But, you can't code? Well, just finding unknown bugs is important. Even after a feature freeze, new bugs can still be discovered. Just play the games and pay attention.
Want to do a little more? Many bugs have sat for some time, either waiting on feedback or have just been plain forgotten. Dig around on mantis, look for coders who are waiting on additional info from a forum member. Track down that info for them, it would save them a lot of time. I guarantee you any coder wouldn't mind someone stepping in and hunting down a bug reporter for them, when they've been waiting on additional feedback from that member for a month. Coders like to squash bugs, but they hate looking for them.
Be sure to support your platform too. I know there are several issues with linux and mac builds, and if we can just get up to date builds, and detailed system info and bug reports, it would help wonders.
Keep in mind there's never a such thing as too much information. Before submitting a bug report, ask yourself: What's the person who reads this likely to ask me for next? If you wait for them to ask for it instead of taking the effort to add it then, you're only increasing the turnaround time on that bug.
The more bugs that get squashed now, the better 3.6.10 will be. And the better it is, the sooner subsequent builds will be able to be released, along with many features that haven't made the cut now.
When a coder fixes a bug you noticed, be sure to thank them. There's nothing like knowing your work is appreciated, considering this is entirely a volunteer project, and most coders would rather be working on new features than fixing bugs in the first place.
edit: Just to make sure people see this, Karajorma's 'How to Report Bugs' (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,51801.0.html).
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considering i have said this update will be out because of subtle things you all said about it and its arrival, this came as no surprise.
i will help out in any way i can. the only things i can do is play the game, look through mantis and check a few of the files for any irregularities at least those i know of, but would it be wise to report a very minor bug which has no real baring or wait for a few more minor bugs again with no relevance and post it? i would hate to overload your website with "al tarket: minor bug"coming up 50 times filling the screen of every page you look at?.
i thought you already had 3.6.10 out anyways? or was that a beta release?
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i thought you already had 3.6.10 out anyways? or was that a beta release?
Umm, dude. Concerning builds, there have been a lot of them around for some time now. But not an official one just yet. This announcement confirms that the official release is finally getting closer.
In regards to the MediaVPs, yes, the 3.6.10's are at beta stage. The previous release, 3.6.8 Zeta, is the latest official release.
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http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,51801.0.html
I wrote that a little while back when I wanted to explain how coders go about picking bugs to fix.
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thanks lobo dude. that all i needed to know, 3.6.10 b media vp release. i havent been playing much fs2 the past week, been attending to other games that are being neglected however i can spare some time for this version in-between other tasks.
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Thanks for the linkage kara, that'll help a lot.
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All,
I am willing to help.
Problem is I don't know which build I should download for testing.
In the recent builds forum, there is all this mentioning about the trunk and committing to SVN... etc...
Should I just go and download the 20080830 build or wait till it is committed to SVN?
The reason I am questionning this is that I don't want to end up reporting bugs which have already been fixed.
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'Trunk' is the name for the main code base in SVN, which is just what we're using to store the code. Any recent build should be tested for bugs, however if you test a build that has features not in SVN yet, you will want to report them to the person who made the build, in the thread it was released in. My builds are typically trunk-only code, so any bugs should be looked up in Mantis, and if they're not already known, reported. WMC's 20080830 build is a good candidate for testing, as anything in that build was committed shortly after. It's probably a good place to start.
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Nightly builds will now be posted for Windows, Linux and OS X are still to come.
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Panning hat switch is sweet!
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It makes me dizzy. Can we turn it off?
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It's part of the changes related to the TrackIR code I believe. I think you'd have to take that up with Swifty. I'm not sure if it's necessary or if it can be separately disabled.
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What new changes are in 3.6.10 that will make it different from 3.6.9 ?
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The Big, Obvious Change is OpenGL Shader Language support, or GLSL, which will enable normal map support through a shader package available separately. The other Big Obvious Change is FS2NetD lobby support is finally back. The scripting engine has been rewritten (including a ton of new camera code for making cutscenes), many new SEXPS, bugfixes that have existed since before 3.6.9, etc. There's many other notable enhancements, too many to put into one post, and probably more than their should be in one version bump, but we'll be working on that for future releases. There's a dev roadmap here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,48559.0.html) too.