MageGuild 1.1 out the door

And it is done, MG 1.1 has been turned loose. Got a flood of last minute bugs in, fixed them, and got it turned around.

Two New Tidbits

Two new bits of information to share...

The first, I've released the code for the display library that MG uses, after renaming it Phasma. If you're developing some sort of tile-based (be it ascii or bitmap) game in C#, it might be worth a look.

The second...The code that will become MageGuild 1.1 is caught up. All of the ugly little bugs  that were reported about 1.0 have been caught and squashed, and I've gotten in a little bit of tweaking for balance and so forth. Added a few new things as well. The question becomes...how long do I wait before chunking it out? I'd like to give people more time to play with 1.0 before I go throwing a new version at them. Partly because I don't want to push people to constantly download new versions of things, and partly because I want more time to let the bugs sift to the top.

This really brings up a bigger issue...in a stable game, how often does one release patches and fixes? More to the point, regardless of the general process, how often do I want to release patches and fixes?

MageGuild Out of Beta

MageGuild is out of beta. It's about all I can say, I'm currently too busy plastering the internet with announcements to add much to that. Check it out: http://glistenimages.com/Lukos/lukosMageGuild.htm.

Finally Here

I'm putting the finishing touches on what will be 1.0. I'm currently assembling a list of places to post the announcement about 1.0, the first non beta release. Nerves are setting in. But it will be finished, and it will be finished soon, and it will be released. And then...some other project. :)

The Last of the Bugs?

0.7.3 is out, now. So far, so good: no bug reports. I've got some balance and minor feature issues to iron out, and I think that (plus squishing any bugs that crop up) will constitute an 0.8 release. Depending on the reception for it, I'll probably just renumber 0.8 to 1.0 and make it the first non-beta release. That's if all is well with 0.8, of course.

My thoughts are increasingly turning to the next project; I've got enough ideas (both submitted ideas and ones I've come up with) to get to at least a 1.1, probably a 2.0. But I think I'd like to take a break from MG after 1.0 is released, work on something else for a while. The other roguelike that I've been toying around with is a potential to be that next project, but I'm still not sure.

Another day, another release...

I went ahead and pushed out a quick 0.7.2 release, mostly to fix a pair of crash bugs. I was hoping to avoid having too many more releases before a non-beta, but I'd like to nip swarms of people crashing at the same point in the bud.

Incidentally, another bug I ran across was one relating to the game pegging the CPU at 100% usage (or less, if you had a multi-core processor, but either way, it pegged whatever core was running the game). Apparently, this is normal behavior for an application that uses a loop of Application.DoEvents calls to simulate a pause for user input. I found a quick hack that works well enough, but I'd like to do better for the next roguelike project. .NET has some support for asynchronous method calls, maybe I can get some traction there. Hmm.

Too long in coming...

Well, it's been a while (again) but 0.7.1 is about ready to roll. I'm doing some last-minute testing, then it'll be out the door.

I've been banging around a little with what I think will follow the GA release of MG; a roguelike of a more epic scale, more focused on number-crunching...more Angband, less NetHack. Is that actually going to be the next project released? No idea. Time will tell.