[Divunal-devel] release criterea

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

I've fixed a bunch of stuff in TR in the past few hours, and I think I
know why we've got such heinous feature creep on 1.0 ... we don't really
have any sort of criterea for when it's "done".

What should our release criterea be?  Now that it's pretty clear that TR
is "feature complete", we should be focusing on what needs to be completed
before the release.  Any ideas?  Release discussions should include a
wishlist of major, API breaking changes (I want to get anything basic in
there NOW, before we have 1000 more verbs to go edit), as well as a list
of things that need to be done to make sure that our "perspectives" stuff
is 100% pervasive.  As always, bugfixes are good.  Phil has been having
some damn weird problems with the server, although after a reboot
everything appears OK... it appears that using 'sketch' can sometimes have
*very* unusual your-mileage-may-vary type results.  I can't figure out for
the life of me what the problem is though.

In other news -- there is now a file called 'socials.txt' in the CVS
repository under 'resource'.  It's sorta-kinda linked in to the currently
runnning pump (it's very easy for me to update it, I'll automate it fully
in a little while).

Some of you may have noticed that Jedin (mike) has submitted a new
divunal.door.Door, Open, and Close.  These are *much* closer to the actual
final versions of these verbs that will be in the release version,
considering they actually check properties and stuff.  Class_Door has also
been modified in the 'official' map, so you can scrutinize it and get a
look at what kind of properties you need to be setting on your doors.  I
think he'll be posting something to the author list tomorrow.  I'm really
psyched about this particular addition, considering the importance of
locked and obstructed doors to the game (doors were easy to create before,
but not terribly interactive.  This adds a few properties which make them
appear much more interactive).  A good example of what this looks like can
be found in the "grand history book room".

This gives us 5 developers (me, james, dave, phil, mike) on an "active"
status.  Things have been looking up after that barrage of emails to this
list :-)

Thanks again to everyone speeding development along. Divunal needs some
more publicity, so we need to do a release soon -- get the webpage hit and
thereby get some more development/authoring interest.

Speaking of authoring interest, there should also be some thought given to
what kind of infrastructure we need to start accomodating larger numbers
of players for when large groups of people are going to be logging into
the game.  Is there anything that needs to be changed in the server's
code, etc?

Hopefully this message hasn't been *too* meandering.  It was written late.
Happy August 8, everybody.

--glyph