Planning for Release

Thanks fejoa!

Announced on r/roguelikes and IVAN Discord, will do RogueBasin later.

Thanks r-k! Sixty eight downloads and no complaints yet...

Sorry for my several months long hiatus folks!
I've been stupidly busy this year at my job. It's turned into a bit of a 1.5x year, I think everyone feels compelled to work harder due to some kind of perceived existential threat to their employment, causing a feedback loop in which everyone works harder and harder and... well, you get the picture.

Travis is sunsetting their continuous integration platform for open source projects, so I've started scripting some new automated build stuff on GitHub Actions. I've got IVAN compiling on Linux so far.
Eventually we can do the whole release shebang on all the platforms, as it was before on Travis. We should also be able to build natively on windows server for windows builds.

That sounds great!

I haven't tried GitHub Actions yet (I'm mostly working with GitLab right now), how is it?

GitHub's actions were surprisingly easy to put together. Probably made easier because of the trail blazed previously on Travis-CI though.
I found the documentation to be quite general, but a quick search will help you find the right action to the specific use case.

They're reasonably snappy. Here's hoping Microsoft doesn't poop on us!

I've used GitLab runners to convert markdown/asciidocs (can't remember which) to MS Word files before. Also very nice platform, and the original one with private runners.

Sorry for delay. I've disabled Travis-CI in the Attnam/ivan repository on GitHub, since they seem to be out of service. Travis-CI has served us incredibly well, paired together with the mxe (m-cross compiler?) has delivered us many years of ivan.exe

To continue the reign of free software, we will return to gcc for our next build, ironically in the heart of Microsoft's infra.

And there was much cursing and wailing in the streets of Attnam, for it is said in the holy book of Valpurus: "Windows is Evil."

Fear not, IVAN plan to purify Windows from inside Infrastructure of Pure Evil with Holy Banana.

Let's have a new IVAN version for Atavus' Day: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/releases/tag/v059

Thank you and great work setting up the new CI/CD!

Any time. Christmas is a good natural deadline though.
It's a good thing our INSTALL file is so comprehensive, and props to the guys who set up all those macos build scripts in the ci folder. Those are definitely still actively useful.
I was stuck conceptually the day before trying to build on ubuntu-latest. It later occurred to me that I should simply select macos-latest. Silly really.
In that vein, Microsoft's ci tooling is pretty impressive. I wonder what the catch is though? I know they came out with GitHub Copilot based on everyone's code (we should run some tests with it and see if we can get it to spit out some IVAN source code - we have some notoriously unique class and function names, hehe).

The windows build is the first to be built using proper GNU tooling for a long time. More sensible than that whack-ass MXE compiler, even if it gave a fully static binary exe. I really had no idea where those dependencies came from. At least with msys2 it's easy to trace it back to trusted maintainers.
Also easy now is finding dlls using cmake, definitely solved that headache once and for all.

You are my king, fejoa

Awesomeness, thanks fejoa.

I wish I could understand any relatively long word in those paragraphs besides Christmas, but since everyone else is cheering, I'm assuming it's good, so thanks Fejoa!

I've made a PR with some minor incidental bug fixes and one big oversight with the archangel of Cruentus. We only have a few changes since v0.59, but should we maybe push a new version, especially as it will properly hide GC again?

I’m amenable to this. It will be IVAN 0.60, not that the release number makes any sense, but be ready with the beer!

When my students got chromebooks instead of PC-laptops I was so sad because I couldn't let them play IVAN anymore.

But then I just realised that there's an online browser version of IVAN accessible trough the wiki. An older version though - will it be updated to the latest version as well?
The browser version works like a charm and it's perfect for spreading the "IVAN disease" far and wide.

Heh, glad it's working as intended and spawning new fans.

I kind of left the web assembly port of the community version as a programming exercise for a future dev. If any of your students want to get their hands dirty, they could use this diff as a starting point:

https://github.com/Attnam/ivan-050-wasm/compare/383ffef341f4...

This is like the minimum changes needed to make the latest version run in the browser. But there are a bunch of additional changes to the source that would need to be ported over. The reason I ported IVAN 0.50 is because there were fewer dependencies, so it was much more straightforward.

Now the community version has a midi library, sounds, png, some other weird graphical features, and a lot more, so I don't know how easy that will fit together in wasm or whether there are any showstoppers.
For the same token I may be fooling myself and it might be really easy. I just wish I had more time for this kind of thing, it's really fun.

Many operating systems updated in the last few years. Build system went out of date, but slowly being updated. One area of struggle is macos builds, I have them compiling on gh actions again with minimal changes, but the build artifacts are allegedly not running properly on more recent operating systems.

Does anyone have some hardware and bandwidth to build and test on mac?


Edit: I should mention that with the volley of updates in the pipeline I'm hoping to get us to a 0.60 release soon.

Yay!

Unfortunately (fortunately?), I have never even touched a Mac.

Sure it's good to see some activity after so long! Thank you for all the hard work you do.

just don't do 0.666, i reserved that number!

Ha yeah that 0.666 is all yours vasiliy

Good news, looks like the revived mac build runs properly again, according to some prompt feedback: https://github.com/Attnam/ivan/issues/653#issuecomment-26688...

So I think the build system is all set and ready to go.

btw. don't you think that bumping version to 1.0 would be a good idea? i mean, why not? the game is fully playable, it has a lot of content, it's way further than 1.0 even. we all know why it is "0.x", but most… normal people still believe that 0.x versions are some half-working prototypes. so why don't bump it, and go with 1.x versions instead?

p.s.: maybe even to 1.1, so it won't look like some Huge Milestone Release, just like the normal dev process.

Well, before the market got flooded with indie devs who don't understand official build numbering, the grand 1.0 was usually reserved until after all the goals were met (or scrapped, but nobody talks about those). There were things the original devs planned, as well as things discussed during the Council of IVAN that haven't been implemented yet, so that's my guess for us not having a 1.0 release yet.