Workshop Report 2020.1
Welcome my patrons and thank you for still being with us in 2020. It means a lot.
At the moment, I am quite satisfied. Genesis 6 has been released and it went fairly well. Of course it hasn't been without bugs, so I had to make new versions on every second day, but finally it seems to be running. Also, the mechanism for separating Staging and Release versions of plugins is working and I was able to deliver a hotfix for a problem of not being able to load a character and let the user test it, without needing to immediately deliver it to everyone.
Genesis 6 features a more refined approach to custom data for Splittermond and Shadowrun 6. I was pleased to see, that the german Shadowrun community was eager to use the feature, adding custom mentor spirits and gear. Perhaps the documentation could use some improvement, but the users got it running.
I also announced the availability of Discord and Slack channels and slowly users show up there. I was afraid that having chats would prove to be time consuming/distracting and that users would use that channels for reporting issues - none of that is the case now.
Oh and on a side note: I got the first bug report for Coriolis - so there is at least one user for that RPG ;-)
The big issue I am currently fighting with, is the XML serialization. I have discovered a shortcoming in my implementation, that leads to conflicting requirements between Splittermond and Shadowrun. Currently I can either fail to load Shadowrun 6 characters with complex equipment or have a 90 second start up time for Splittermond. I made an attempt to change the way SR6 characters are saved, but that lead to more problems than it solved. So my high priority ticket currently is this. Unfortunately that means re-implementing my 5 year old XML deserialization code, which makes my head ache just thinking about it. And while I am struggling with that, the bug reports for Splittermond and Shadowrun pile up. Well, no rest for the wicked.
On the organizational side, I am thinking of ways to better document what is happening in Genesis. Before Genesis 6, I could write release notes for every Genesis version, which appeared in our blog. For the future there will be releases of Genesis and every plugin I am working on - so there will possibly be more releases in the future.
Since the issues for the release notes are taken from JIRA, a better idea would be to have a special URL that contains a live list of issues fixed in every plugin or Genesis. I made an attempt for the Shadowrun plugin, that lists all fixes in the 1.0 version (meaning 1.0.1, 1.0.2 ...) of the plugin.
What do you think about it?
This concludes the current report. Let's see where we are next month.
Regards,
Stefan