With a release again being out, it is time to talk about the next release. As I don’t expect the few difficult marked things on the 0.8.x roadmap to still being actively worked on, I predict the next release to be called 0.8.4.
I’ve created the milestone on GitHub already and put some of the leftover stuff from 0.8.3 into it (though I threw out again some issues that don’t seem likely to be ever done): https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/milestone/49
So if anyone is looking for something to do on the game, those could be something to consider.
Other than those we still have some items on the roadmap left we are trying to complete by the end of this year so that we can release the big 1.0 microbe update.
As for me there’s some backend technical stuff I think I need to solve first for this release cycle before any new features. That’s because I don’t want to leave them for the absolute end of the microbe stage development as they are sadly likely to cause some regressions that will take an extra release cycle to catch and fix.
So here’s the things I need to finally get done:
- Refactoring the MP calculation system to finally fix problems with the tolerance sliders getting stuck
- Investigating / switching to a more efficient ECS framework that can be up to 10% faster than the one we use currently (we didn’t directly switch to a high performance one as those are only compatible with latest C# versions so we actually couldn’t use one before the Godot 4 upgrade got done)
- Moving to a custom binary save data format rather than JSON because the JSON serialization is super complex to tweak and make sure it works correctly. This causes problems basically in any pull request that tries to add new complex data to saves and I need to step in to investigate how that data should be saved. A custom binary format that requires a bit more manual code to define how stuff needs to be saved will be a bit more work than the current automagic system, but it will be understandable thanks to the code doing the saving being much easier to follow and reason about.
So those will take quite a bit of time from me this release cycle, but I think I’ll be able to tackle at least a couple of items from the roadmap. That should be enough that then we could release a 0.9.0 (after deciding to move the patch terrain feature out of the primary roadmap, as at this point I think it will be just up to luck whether that gets done anytime soon or not) in early December with the remaining “necessary” roadmap items. As long as some other people keep helping with some of the roadmap items, I think we can complete the microbe stage this year to a satisfying degree.
What is everyone thinking of working on for the next release?