[Scummvm-devel] ScummVM 0.12.0: Missing builds

Neil Millstone neil at millstone.demon.co.uk
Tue Sep 2 22:32:42 CEST 2008


Max Horn wrote:
>
> Am 31.08.2008 um 23:49 schrieb Neil Millstone:
>
>> Hi sev,
>>
>> As I mentioned in my last message to scummvm-devel, the DS port is not
>> ready for release yet.  There were several issues found during testing
>> that I am looking into.  I am nearly ready to release another beta to
>> the forums, after which I will be ready to release once the beta has
>> been tested for a week or so and no major issues found.
>>
>
> All in all it seems we'll just have to make a 0.12.1 release soon, 
> with the DS, PS2, PalmOS, and possibly more missing ports in it... At 
> least I would guess that PS2 and PalmOS may need extra love before 
> they work, considering the lack of recent commits by their maintainers?
>
> Also, I think we really need to discuss what went wrong with this 
> release. This time, we took great care to allow for porters to update 
> their ports, test, and everything. We started on July 3, and on July 
> 11, Eugene made this timeline public:
>
>
>  July 14th: Feature freeze
>  July 21th: Branch, trunk is unfrozen
>  July 21th: Start of playtesting
>  August 18th: All ports should be frozen, prerelease binaries built
>  August 25th: Binaries uploaded to sf.net
>  August 31th: Release
>
>
> I.e. that meant 6 weeks for port updates and testing, plus one extra 
> week for last minute stuff. Yet it still ended in a total disaster for 
> quite a big number of bigger and smaller ports. Now, I have various 
> theories about this, but I'd really love to hear from the affected 
> people as to what you guys think why it failed, and whether you have 
> ideas to do better.
>
>
> Bye,
> Max
>

Hi Max,

I would say that six weeks isn't really enough.  It took me quite a 
while to get a build I was happy releasing as a beta, as there were many 
changes and many thing broken.  Except during release time, I usually 
play only the Lucasarts games, so there were problems with the rest of 
the code that hadn't been noticed.

After I released my first beta on Aug 12th, there were a few rounds of 
changes, but lots was discovered late on.  There's just too much to 
test, and I can't play hundreds of hours of games on my own.

My current issue is that Inherit the Earth is now about 100Kb over the 
available memory.  This seems to be mostly code size gained since 
0.11.0.  While we can't really prevent the binary from growing, I can't 
imagine that I'll be able to get this game working if the same happens 
next time.  If anyone knows how I can save 100Kb in this game, please 
let me know!

- Neil






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