Moving on ...

[zuzuf]

so 0.5.0 is released , now we're going to switch from Allegro to SDL and rewrite a few things that need to be improved.

Since 0.5.0 is current stable release and the previous one is very old (0.4.2), we'll release a small(minor fix, no new feature, keeping multiplayer and saved games compatibility) fix for 0.5.0 if needed.

I am wondering if current version system is adapted ... currently next release number is set to 0.5.1, but it may not be good since we're going to rewrite lots of things and 0.5.0 may need some small fixes. What about a 0.6.x ?

[Balthazar]

Well, maybe you could write the goals for next release so we could consider what version number is more appropriate?

[zuzuf]

goals for 0.6.x are:

• - switching from Allegro to SDL
  - improve networking support (add compression, etc...)
  - optimize some code (particle engine is slow, shadow code is slow too), using SSE optimized code where it can help (but leaving a C version of that code in order not to lose portability ...)
  - add some online services
  - improve the multiplayer Lobby (would be great to have chat rooms, online statistics, etc...)
  - improve scripting
  - create a free set of resources (yeah, it was a goal for 0.5.x already but we have nobody to work on it)
  - ...
  - anything we can think of that would improve the game

and I think we're goind to release a 0.5.1 soon because of a bug identified while playing online : there is a TCP buffer use bug, when it's full, it doesn't wait long enough (in fact it doesn't wait more than a few nanoseconds depending on the CPU) before retrying, resulting in data being lost ... on a TCP connection , this results in game losing synchronization or even simulation freezing (everyone waits for the others if tick sync packets are lost).

[Balthazar]

I`m agree. That will be more informative.