v1.13 is dead, or isn’t it?

Where is the progress? Is there any progress? Little things have changed since the last major release in April. Sure, there is the usual fixing a bug here, tweaking something there. But apart from that both the forums and the repository log aren’t featuring any serious improvements to be in the pipeline.

The discussion about a milestone is now called “Stable Modding Platform” and there even is a dedicated official forum in the 1.13 section over at Bear’s Pit. “Finally”, one might think, but if you take a deeper look you’ll notice how vacant it is. Some half-baked ideas, a call out to all the programmers to join, that’s it. The feature request forum however is busy as always…

“We don’t have enough coders”, they say. “And those who are still active do what they like to do – not what should be done”, they say. Seems that by definition things that should be done never actually get done if anything is done at all. “We can’t force the coders to do anything. We are thankful that they spend their precious spare time contributing something at all”, they say.

They are right. Of course they can’t force anyone into anything. Of course the coders prefer feeding sweeties to the community instead of investing less glorious code into the long run. This describes pretty much how additions find their way into 1.13. Make something the community can see – let it be a bloated new inventory or some hilarious description boxes, anything will do – and they’ll love it. Love you.

You know what? The community sucks.

The community successfully prevents any real improvements. That’s how they got educated. There has never been a leader who drives 1.13 into one particular direction. A decider who separates reasonable ideas from all the bullshit. A visionary who knows the value of a moddable platform. There were people who constantly voiced their opinion. Who didn’t remain mute about the evolution of 1.13. But they were unheard over all the yelling by the masses which demanded that 1.13 produces yet another pointless feature. This is how we got to what we have today.

Because no one was inspirational enough to make the community accept less glittering advancements. If that had been the case I’m sure there would have been coders who’d have enjoyed implementing those things in question.

I tend to doubt that the 1.13 project can regain the fire of the early days before it lost all its potential at some point. Maybe it’s okay to call 1.13 officially failed.

2085 – New version released feat. New Inventory

All waiting is over. Finally, the new JA2 v1.13 version has been released.

Here is an excerpt from the changelog:

- New Inventory
-  A lot of new shortcut
- Items and Weapons
- Full German and Russian translation
- Allowed militia to wear camo
- Enabled music in windowed mode
- New options in ja2.ini
- New options in ja2_options.ini
- Added missing description texts for IMP skill rooftop sniping and camouflage

Installation packages are available for English, German and Russian versions at the v1.13 Wiki.

Congratulations and thank you very much for all your great work, dear 1.13 team!

Own personal rant: Still only stupid installers …

Do we need a milestone?

Time passes and 1.13 constantly evolves coming up with more and more features. Everyone seems to have a public beta of their new developed stuff and feeds it to the masses. Clearly, they do it to test their stuff and have a chance to eliminate bugs before they merge their code with the official code base. That’s perfectly fine. But with every new feature appearing confusion increases and people demand a unified release with a definite set of features to have a base to build upon – a so-called milestone.

Do we really need one? According to the reanimated discussion on what to include in the milestone over at BP’s, a milestone “is a version or package of the 1.13 project, that incorporates as many new features that work 100% as intended and as few bugs as possible”. Is this a good definition? Or is this even desirable?

Let’s see. “As few bugs as possible” sounds good, doesn’t it? Definitely. On the other hand there are “as many new features that work 100% as intended as possible”. Do we really need every single feature – even if it’s tested and all? Well, if it works it won’t hurt. At least if it’s optional. But what about those serious features required for modmaking? Which are mentioned over and over again, but nobody seems to be interested in implementing them? Surely, those won’t make it into a milestone.

Let’s see again. How is a milestone of any use if it doesn’t incorporate any features of any value regarding modmaking? At least it includes bug-fixes. We know the primary goal for the next release is fixing bugs and keeping out any major new features. Isn’t that a milestone already? Even without nonsense features.

So please take all this milestoning serious, that means get the necessary stability, hunt the bugs and find some appealing things for modders to even consider going with v1.13. The forums are stuffed with requests, you can’t miss ‘em.