I just felt bored at work and decided that it would be good to give a heads up on what’s going on with things.

First, we have all the svn activity lately.  This is going to probably annoy everyone because of all the redownloading and annoy those who package VS even more.   We’re sorry.  This had to be done sometime, so we figured early on in the next dev cycle was better than later.   Basically, all the images in VS’s data repo are named based on their original extensions.  Over the years the datatypes changed, but the names remained, due to people not wanting to edit all the files that referenced that image and potentially break something, so out of laziness.   Then the switchover to DDS further compounded the problem becuase now, most image viewing apps would error because they didn’t have the dds viewing plugin and the user would see the filename as being a plain .png or .jpg and get all confused.   So we felt the need to standardize the naming extensions of the various images in VS based on usage.   No longer using the codec extensions frees us from ever having to do this again. 

Second, 0.5.1 is coming along nicely.   Code-wise, we have only a few (but important) changes left to get done.   Most of the work left to do for the release is data side.  Most of that is shader specific.  Best estimates right now put the release at a month from now.  This is a bit more trustworthy than the estimate for 0.5.0 that was about 6 months off target. 

 Thirdly, we’re working very hard at being more cohesive in direction and communication. Any users reading this, would be well informed to visit freenode’s irc network and join #vegastrike.  The plans we’re making and the directions we’re taking are being followed and taken seriously by all working on VS, and that will translate into faster and tighter releases as we approach 0.6.0.   Users who wish to have a more weighted effect on the roadmap should try and have more directed and explicit feature / bug fixes.   That is to say, rather than suggest something that has no hope of being worked on in any immediate release, try and think of things that bug you or could be tweaked that are neither vague or require rewriting huge parts of the game.   More pinpointed suggestions for pet peeves I think are better.   A list of things that bother users about how the game currently works would be neat too. 

 I guess that’s all i got to say about that.

This has been discussed for a while, but there are going to be some major SVN repository changes for all users.  As you know, we have released 0.5.0, yet our repository is still called “data4.x”!

A “4.x” is terribly confusing, so I have moved the repository from “data4.x” to “data”.  Oh great, you are probably thinking, now I have to wait for another Gigabyte of Vega Strike data to download.  Well it turns out that luckily for you, SVN will not require you to waste bandwidth if you follow certain steps that I’ll outline below, and document in more detail on the Wiki.

Also, we are making one other change as well that will help users of all platforms download the necessary files… we will make a “win32″ and a “mac” folder that you can download and have a working application.

See the Wiki for more information on how to convert an existing repository:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/Moving_data4.x_to_data

or, for information on how to download from SVN, see:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTo:Checkout_SVN