[size=4]Roadmap and Remaining Issues for Tremulous 1.3 and Beyond[/size]
Over the past several months GrangerHub’s development team has been making a lot of progress on the development of Tremulous, and exciting preparations for this games future, We’ll be posting updates in new topics regarding the extent of that progress over the coming weeks.
Our overall goals with the 1.3 release is a version of Tremulous that has greatly improved ease of setup/play/administration/development, that addresses the vast majority of longtime game play issues while bringing to the forefront the best of Tremulous and Trem mods from over the years, and that is backwards compatible with old Trem clients/servers.
We are moving the remaining open issues to our public issue tracker on github for having a proper pre-release of Tremulous 1.3. There are still issues that we need to move to that public tracker, the organization of these issues on the issue tracker will be finished by the end of this month (April).
Most of what remains is game logic related. We structured the issues over 16 “sub-projects” that are generally meant to be completed in order (although some issues have already been started/completed in later sub-projects out of order). These projects can be found on this page: https://github.com/GrangerHub/tremulous-game-logic/projects?query=is%3Aopen+sort%3Aname-asc . It is encouraged that if new bugs are found, that the bugs should be posted on that issue tracker.
Our target for having the pre-release is at the end of June, 2019. When we have the 1,3 pre-release, the game would be in a sufficient state to start to actively promote Trem 1.3 outside of the community. We would be ready to have a full release shortly after some subsequent polishing.
[size=4]What comes after Trem 1.3?[/size]
We don’t have a name yet for what comes after Trem 1.3, but we have already began making preparations for developing that next major version. This next version will involve switching to a new game engine that is under active development (i.e. the OpenWofl engine developed by @TheDushan ), and will break backwards compatibility. This next project will definitely continue to be a free and open source software project like Tremulous has always been, and we shortly will be posting the new repos for that project publicly on github for on-going public development.
The focus of this next version on the new engine will include far more advanced graphics/assets with lots of nice eye-candy, more advanced infrastructure, proper physics, support for more diverse kinds of platforms, expanding the tech of the game in all sorts of ways that we could not have from being held back by maintaining backwards compatibility, and with the expectation that the game will have its development and community flourish for many many more years to come. The game logic of that next version will start from the game logic of the finished 1.3 version.
As of now we expect to continue maintenance of Tremulous 1.3 on the current engine indefinitely along side the development and release of the next versions on the new engine. So for those with older machines (who might be in the current community, or returning players, or players entirely new to trem) that might not have sufficient specs to play on the new engine will still be able to play on Trem 1.3. Although people generally update at some point, like how many players currently play trem on an IBM from the mid 1980’s, or save trem maps on punch tape from 1970’s?
We will be posting updates on the preparations for that next version in the near future, as well as on the progress of the 1.3 development, so stay tuned.