There’s an important change this year:
due to the second tourney we had in May, duration of the official tournament has been shortened.
It will last from Aug 13th to Aug 28th, sixteen days.
In other news, the tentative date for 0.9 release has been changed to the first week of August.
Also, Debian trunk builds have been automated, so you might see them updated regularly. This is not the case for Mac builds though, sorry for that.
1. Comment by cheleez
1/Jul/2011 at 08:54
In 0.9,lots of things changed. Need time to accustom…
2. Comment by igor
2/Jul/2011 at 03:54
The speed of releases has accelerated. Is this due to developers having more time for Crawl during summer vacation?
3. Comment by Excerpt
4/Jul/2011 at 08:15
Hey, this is a little unrelated, and mostly an inquisition of curiosity; is it at all possible to make the game part of WebTiles more client-side, so as to reduce that awful input lag?
4. Comment by KiloByte
4/Jul/2011 at 10:12
Excerpt: to some degree, yeah. It can be optimized more, but not better than a single round-trip per move — ie, parity with console.
Doing more would mean rewriting nearly the entire game in Javascript, and removing the whole reason for a public server: controlled games that don’t leak information to players. If you don’t care about comparing your accomplishment to other players, you would be better off playing tiles locally.
This said, you can greatly speed up server play by setting travel_delay=-1 in your config file. People balk against that because they feel they “lose information”, but that’s just an illusion since the game stops at anything that could possibly affect your play, and the uncovered layout is shown on the map.
5. Comment by RFHolloway
4/Jul/2011 at 16:10
Why the shortened touranment? – are you only allowed a months worth of tournament per annum? Band width restictions or something else?
6. Comment by Excerpt
6/Jul/2011 at 07:29
Ah yeah, fair enough. That makes a lot of sense. It’s just a pity being in Australia and not being able to get less than ~300 ping. ^.^
7. Comment by dpeg
6/Jul/2011 at 21:20
Igor: no, not really. For some time, the goal is to have bi-annual releases. One before the august tournament (so in July) and the other something like half a year earlier/later.
Releases are good because they force developers to address bugs instead of only adding cool features!
And no, there is no sudden increase in developer spare time. To the contrary, we have lost some heavyweight developers to Work & Real Life. Pity, that. On the upside, that has made us write up more Implementables on Mantis. If you know how to code and want to help, there are some pointers.
Regarding shortened tournaments: most players felt that a full month is too long and too demanding. Three weekends seems to fit with most, so here we are. I would still like to see players organise their own mini-tournaments, like “weekend of the Fedhas Ogre” or somesuch.
8. Comment by Regnix
8/Jul/2011 at 00:19
dpeg, weekly mini-tournaments like you mention are held on: http://www.reddit.com/r/roguelikes/
9. Comment by RFHolloway
8/Jul/2011 at 15:18
Have also put up a suggestion here
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2079.
Regnix – is it worth puting a link or something on the forums here for the weekly tournaments?
10. Comment by Bryan
9/Aug/2011 at 23:36
Is there a new tentative release date for 0.9?
11. Comment by Tiara
10/Aug/2011 at 18:09
uhh…. 0.9 isn’t out, and the first week has passed. Is this just me or…
12. Comment by wanderdown
14/Aug/2011 at 09:24
I agree with Tiara. I think everyone understands and respects how much work goes into a new release, but it’s only human nature to want to know what’s going on after a self-set deadline has passed. i don’t think anyone really cares about when 0.9 is actually released, i just think everyone would like to be updated on the process.