Re: 7.5 release?

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

>Is the xconq 7.5 release going to be soon? I am running from the current
>xconq cvs release, and I have been playing the standard game without
>crashes. The recent improvements to the tk interface make the game look
>nicer, and overall a 7.5 release now would probably improve most people's
>impression of the app. Are you planning to do a release soon?

If I can spare the time. However, I will be very busy with other things in
the next few months :-/.

When I started to work on xconq again one year ago I had two objectives: to
fix the network game and the Windows app. This is because I thought these
two things are essential if xconq is going to survive. See the thread on
this list entitled "THE problem with xconq (long)" from January last year
for a discussion. I also said I thought these two problems could be fixed
within a year.

In fact, this estimate was overly pessimistic. The network code was free of
synch errors by the end of the spring (thanks to Jim Kingdon for help in
debugging it) and we also had a Windows app that could run the network game
by then (thanks to Juergen Ruehle for critical help with this). So in
effect, 7.5 could have been released six months ago. All that needed to be
done was to update the docs and game files (no small task) and then of
course prepare and release the various packages.

However, all sorts of other things popped up. This list, which had been
dormant for almost a year, came alive with frequent bug reports and
questions about game design from Lincoln Peters, Erik Jessen and others. Ed
Oskiewicz made the sources C++ compatible. MA Dunzi contributed several bug
fixes and improvements to the tcltk interface. Stanley Sutton added Doxygen
support and fixes to the Windows builds. I made the tcltk interface run on
the Mac, after which I carried on with a major overhaul of the tcltk
interface itself. I have also been tinkering with the Mac interface a lot
and done some work on a new game module. And recently, Stan came back to
xconq and carbonized the Mac interface.

All this stuff kept me quite busy. Maybe I should have focused on getting
7.5 out of the door instead of answering emails, fixing bugs, and checking
in new code. But since I am doing this for fun in what little free time I
have, boring stuff like updating the docs has not been a high priority :-).

So the situation is pretty much the same as six months ago. There has been
a large number of bug fixes and interface improvements since then, but we
still need to update all the docs and game modules before a 7.5 release.

>Also, is anyone working on the standing orders code? This seems to be
>entirely undocumented, and I only found out it existed by reading the
>mailing list archives... Just the ability to have the computer
>automatically move pieces to a certain hex is helpful, but I can't find it
>in the documentation.

No. This is a partly implemented and seldomly used feature in xconq. But I
agree that it has a strong potential.

>Thankyou for the recent improvements. (has development really picked up
>recently, or am I imagining it?). I am unable to do any practical
>programming myself. In theory I can program in C, but I don't know any
>tcl/tk at all, and I don't have time at the moment to learn the xconq
>sources, so I am grateful to the people who can.

Development has indeed resumed after being dormant for most of 2001 (both
Stan and I ceased to work on xconq in the early spring that year). If you
want to contribute to xconq development, you are welcome to do so. You
don't need to know tcltk for that. The entire kernel is written in C, so if
you want to tinker with, for example, the standing orders code, you can
easily do that. Another good way to get started with xconq hacking is to
write a new game module. This helps a lot in understanding how the kernel
works.

Hans