OpenTTD 0.6.0-beta1

[Bilbo]

I would think they would release a beta-2 before a release candidate.

I thought they just pointed to some revision in trunk (that was current at that time) and said "that's beta-1".
Basically development goes on, as no forks were done, but we have something that is at least somewhat stable and it have all the new features ...
Perhaps they'll point to another revision with the bugs fixed, call it beta-2, put up few tarballs and everybody would be happy ... till another critical bug pops out :)

Although considering how long was there before the bug with "trains crashing on bridges" (which was IMHO more serious than this) in 0.5.3-RC1 got fixed by releasing RC2 ... it may take a while for beta-2 to appear :)

[maartena]

I would think they would release a beta-2 before a release candidate.
Although considering how long was there before the bug with "trains crashing on bridges" (which was IMHO more serious than this) in 0.5.3-RC1 got fixed by releasing RC2 ... it may take a while for beta-2 to appear

There was 9 days between RC1 and RC2 in that case
Beta-1 was released 18 days ago, so maybe there is hope for a quick release.

And you are right, that was a nastier bug then this one. But still, this bug is rather nasty, especially for those running more then 1 server on the same machine.

[Volny]

I think there is no real need for "final" or "stable" release - the beta system works fine, because people download it and play it online. I think that this should be done every 3 months or so to allow use of new features in multiplayer. Just pointing on one of those more stable nightlies, so everyone downloads SAME revision and plays it online is perfectly OK. And i guess it is less annoying for devs than forking anr RCing for month or so.
oh, and thanks for good job!

[belugas]

I thought they just pointed to some revision in trunk (that was current at that time) and said "that's beta-1".
Basically development goes on, as no forks were done, but we have something that is at least somewhat stable and it have all the new features ...
Perhaps they'll point to another revision with the bugs fixed, call it beta-2, put up few tarballs and everybody would be happy ... till another critical bug pops out

Damned... Someone have discoverd our master plan
That is exact, Bilbo. Nice analysis.

[Bilbo]

I think there is no real need for "final" or "stable" release - the beta system works fine, because people download it and play it online. I think that this should be done every 3 months or so to allow use of new features in multiplayer. Just pointing on one of those more stable nightlies, so everyone downloads SAME revision and plays it online is perfectly OK. And i guess it is less annoying for devs than forking anr RCing for month or so.
oh, and thanks for good job! :bow:

Yes, basically, before beta was out there was 0.5.3, which is based on almost year old fork: 0.5.0-RC1 (2006-12-21)

Maybe doing new beta at least each 3 months or so (once 0.6.0 final would be out, it would be some 0.6.9-beta or so .... once it gets somewhere near 0.7.0, it'll switch in numbering to 0.7.0-beta) by picking some "most stable nightly from last few days") would be good to test new features in trunk. Since before beta there were either stable (0.5.3) servers or few nightlies, mostly each server having different version. But if there is relatively recent beta, more people are going to put that to server, since their version will hold from week to few months according to number and severity of bugs in it. Unlike the nightly, which is basically obsoleted next day ...

maartena: current bug is grave for serve owners. The 0.5.3 one was harmless against servers, but was grave for anybody using trains in the game (which means basically everybody)

[Rubidium]

As said before in this thread, before beta comes alpha. And we release "alpha's" on a daily basis. Furthermore getting trunk in a state where it is 'stable' enough to be released does cost lots of time, especially when doing it at large intervals. This is because you want some 'stabilization' period before the beta release, which means you cannot commit large restructures or major rewrites/features. This then generally slows down development of OpenTTD, which is something we should not aim for. On the other hand a "fairly" recent stable version, like one major release per year, is something that we should aim for.

As releasing 0.5.0 did not go as (at least) I had hoped for; first release candidate maybe a second and then 0.5.0, I wanted to try it in a different way where we basically do the first 3-4 RC candidates as betas without branching yet. This vastly reduces the amount of work that would be required for backporting stuff.

Another thing to 'note' is the fact that if there are 'major' bugs in for example betaX, they would need to wait for betaX+1 for bugfixes or take a nightly. As you suppose that we release a beta every 3 months, that means people are playing with a known bugged version for 3 months. Is that what you want, or do you want us to release it even more often? Because then it basically becomes monthly, which means even more time 'wasted' with releasing. It is furthermore generally impossible to go 'back' to betaX-1 with your savegame as that is most likely not able to load the savegame. Something that is not an issue with a 'stable' branch; you should be able to load 0.5.3 savegames in 0.5.2.

So in my opinion releasing a beta of OpenTTD is not a good thing for the overall development of OpenTTD, which is not in favour of the players. It is also so that when you are 'brave' enough to try a beta release, why can't you just download some nightly, for example the one that is released each first of the month or so?

[Volny]

Major bugs in betas are bad, but I guess this is price for being able to play multiplayer with newer features. But you dont have to choose betas without testing. Openttd COOP seems to be playing on latest revisions - i remember one revision was for example completly unusable so this is good preliminary test. If it will work OK for COOP it probably wont have any MAJOR bugs.

also one idea: it would be usefull, if there was some kind of "news" message or ticker, once you start listing multiplayer servers. This way devs can communicate to everybody who is playing multi. This would be nice place to announce new features in beta, "did you know tips", or some troubles and issues. Just a little popup - ie small txt file downloaded or something like that. ( I saw this in other game, works very fine, IF used well - ie not too much, not too few, downloads itself only on change and opens... but openttd can surely think of something nicer )

[maartena]

I think a the world is getting spoiled with stable betas of their favorite software. Filezilla, Paint.NET, Deamon-Tools, uTorrent, etc, etc....they all release a new version called a "beta" which in fact is pretty much stable. So I think that a lot of people expect a lot from new releases these days, even if there still is the word "beta" in it. OpenTTD of course is a whole different breed. Its a game, and a small bug can have really weird effect.

As to why many people don't download the nightlies, but do download the 0.6.0-beta1? - The latter is on the frontpage of openttd.org and gets all the attention in a separate forum topic, whereas the former does not.

Personally the "doubleheaded train attack" has happend on my server about 5 times now, so an average of once every two days, and I am pretty sure that 1 or 2 of those were accidents, as wel all mess around with our trains in the depot from time to time. The rest of the game seems fairly stable give or take a few small bugs..... but the features released with 0.6.0-beta1 are so nice I am probably going to keep running 0.6.0-beta1 on my servers.

I am still hoping for a 0.6.0-beta2 (or 0.6.0-RC1) though that has that nasty lil bug fixed

[Volny]

As to why many people don't download the nightlies, but do download the 0.6.0-beta1? - The latter is on the frontpage of openttd.org and gets all the attention in a separate forum topic, whereas the former does not.

Good point I think it is very difficult to find for newcomer. maybe more color would help

i think the whole point of Openttd releases is to unify version for multiplayer. I guess most of the people dont care whether it is 0.5.3 alfa or r11337 or 0.666.beta or whatever.
Only thing I know is that switchig back from nightlies to 0.5.3 for being able to play multi is like travaling into distant past. And current beta helps this a lot. Btw. was this beta "tested" on coop, before released?

[belugas]

Personally, I believe users are a bit scared of using the nightlies because they fear they might be unstable. This is what i've heard a lot of times while trying to convince them to use nightlies.

True, they may be buggy now and then, but not to the point of not been playable. I guess people prefer comfort toward adventure and excitement

[Gonozal_VIII]

you could do something like that: every month you take a nightly from about a week ago (most important bugs should have been reported/fixed by then) and put it as alpha xy on the front page... that way people can have new features in multiplayer without updating every day and without the risk of completely unplayable versions

[Digitalfox]

I think it's great the system used right now in OpenTTD Development..

Nightly builds -> For testing the last changes. Is a great way of testing all the new features and bug fixes, making possible to provide feedback from users to developers on the way development is taking..

Beta builds with no branch -> Is a nice way of calling more testers to test and find last minute bugs, and provide last minute feedback on what could change a little before release of RC..

Release Candidate with branch -> Provides more stability since only bug fixes are inserted and no major changes are made on code, perhaps some smaller feature with no impact on stability can make it's way..

I love this system, don't know what DEV implemented this system, but i think it's very positive

And just one more think, i believe after 2 years of using everyday the last nightly, that they are always very stable, In 2 years i had what, one or two crashes maybe.
That's in part to the effort of dev's on putting small part's of code in each revision instead for making one big commit in only one revision, making the crash or bug cause and revision easier to find..

[Bilbo]

As for the nightlies, usually they are quite stable and without serious bugs (never seen in nightlies such serious bug as trains over bridge crashing in 0.5.3-RC1)

Worse problem in nightlies is they obsolete very quickly ... basically, what I meant with the betas every 3 month, that somebody will point to some revision from recent time each 3 months at least and say "this one is somewhat more stable than the revisions around it". Or somehow mark nightlies revisions which are stable (i.e. no major code rewrite currently half in progress), so people will use them more ...

[Rubidium]

As for the nightlies, usually they are quite stable and without serious bugs (never seen in nightlies such serious bug as trains over bridge crashing in 0.5.3-RC1)

That is because people tend to play more SVN revisions and report bugs so we can fix them before the nightly comes. However, with the backports that's a completely different story as virtually nobody seems to care about the stuff before the RC is released and testing *everything* is kinda hard. Furthermore backporting stuff that has changed as drastically as the bridge code is always tricky; when you want to apply 50 or so patches from the current trunk to 0.5 it is destined to go wrong.

[Bilbo]

Since there are "nightlies" only for trunk and not for older branches, the only way to get the branches is to do a SVN checkout and compile it by yourself. Many people are either unable to do that or consider it too big hassle and just download the trunk nightly if they want to test something new. Maybe including something similar to nightly build also to other actively developed branches (currently I think 0.5 and noAI branch) may help this. Perhaps weekly automated builds will help in getting more people's attention to these branches (there is less development than in trunk, so weekly may suffice) and bugs being spotted earlier in them.

[Rubidium]

"Problem" is that the 0.5 branch only gets short times of development; backporting a lot of stuff just before the RC. This makes weekly snapshots useless as it means that it slows down the release cycle drastically. It furthermore means we then have to "hope" people are actually testing it, which is usually very hard to do. Last but not least: why basically release a Release Candidate for a Release Candidate?

Sounds a little pointless to me, because when we keep making Release Candidates for a Release Candidate till the Release Candidate is stable enough to release, we basically release a Release Candidate that is the Release, which makes it 'remove' the Release Candidate part and that makes the RC1 exactly what you want to make using 'weekly' builds, i.e. making snapshots of the 0.5 branch is pointless.

[Bilbo]

Well, it would be useful if patches with bugfixes were backported at all the time, like some short time after they went into trunk. But if it is not the case - then yes, my idea is a bit pointless.

Still, it may be viable to make weekly builds for noAI branch, as this one gets some continuous development (there are some useful AI's out there, like the WrigthAI, so there are things worthy of checking out/testing in that branch)

[Rubidium]

Still, it may be viable to make weekly builds for noAI branch, as this one gets some continuous development (there are some useful AI's out there, like the WrigthAI, so there are things worthy of checking out/testing in that branch)

This is done already for like ages, and you could have known this if you had ever looked at the 'AI Main page'.

[Volny]

Also one thing on current beta system should not be overlooked - it gets lot of multiplayer testing especially when compared to "common" nightlies revisions. I think this is good from player and develepor point of view.
I guess maybe here is some "fear" to not follow TTDPatch way, where last stable was who knows when, and you can play either something point something beta some number or you can choose something point something else alpha some other number, which is certainly not good for newcomers...

[wickedgenius]

Hey all,

Is there a new industry GRF pack available anywhere that will work with the beta because I want to trythen out and see the ort of things that can be done.

Thanks in advance