MV3D 0.44, 0.50, and beyond.
MV3D 0.44 is ready, and 2 days ahead of schedule! The release was focused around building an asset tool-chain to facilitate adding content to MV3D worlds. In that respect, it was an outstanding success. The sprint only lasted about 3 months, which is a lot shorter than most MV3D releases. I’d like to keep up that pace moving forward. The most amazing thing to me for this release is that for the first time, you can spin up an server and populate it completely using tools!
The Good:
- Solid asset tool-chain!
- Much more stable than 0.42.
- Guide (the GUI data-binding library) is awesome!
- Overseer cluster manager really speeds up iteration time and should really help managing servers.
- MV3D’s Client now works on Linux!
- Users can download server, client, and tool binaries for Windows which makes it incredibly easy to try out MV3D.
The Bad:
- Performance is pretty horrible on the client and server.
- More tools still needed. Plus, the new tools are just at a bare minimum state.
- Even though there were many bugs fixed, quite a few big ones remain.
- Not enough work was done on guidece and guideweb, the CEGUI (in game) and web versions of guide respectively.
- Even with the GUI, it’s still really hard to set up a cluster of MV3D servers. Partly due to bugs but mostly due to all the settings that have to line up exactly.
- Still some bugs that can cause datastore corruption on upgrades.
All in all, it was a solid release and a lot was done in a short time. For next release, which will be 0.50, the current plan is bugfixing, performance, and properly functioning areas with gateways.
Including the plans for next release, there are a few major features missing which are required for a 1.0 release. The ones I am currently aware of are load balancing an area across multiple servers and pathfinding AI. I’m starting to put together a roadmap for these. It will be updated more soon.
Head on over to MV3D and get the new version! Binaries will be up there tonight. If you are in a hurry, you can grab them hot off the press from the Hudson builder.