New Branch System

[Tom]

One of the bigger back-end changes that we are currently in the process of completing is re-working the way our development branches work.

As you know, we have stable and testing islands. However, most of the time, the majority of the game code is identical between the two. With the new change that is currently moving to the live server (it will take a few days before it is completed), you will be able to see which code you are actually running on. This can change from script to script. So people on the testing islands (BT, Dwilight) will begin to notice that most of the time, they are actually playing the same game as people on stable, but some scripts show a "testing" tag in the top-right corner of the page. These are the pages that are actively being worked on and contain changes that have not yet been propagated to stable.

If you report the tag you see in the top-right corner when you file a bug report (there is a new field for that), it helps us in finding the bugs.

Some pages are shared and show no tag, for example the family page or the dynamic map.


On the back-end, development site, this change is a lot more important. Using a new smart dispatcher, we only need to maintain two copies of scripts where they are actually different, which makes bugfixes a lot easier. It's a really big change for us on the development side, and a huge step forward.

[Geronus]

I noticed that tag just before I read this; it's very subtle. If you want people to make use of it, I might add a blurb about it to the Bugtracker so that people go look for it when they're filing bug reports.

[Tom]

I noticed that tag just before I read this; it's very subtle. If you want people to make use of it, I might add a blurb about it to the Bugtracker so that people go look for it when they're filing bug reports.

There is a blurb on the bugtracker, and it is intentional that it is very subtle as it should not distract from the game.

[Tom]

The change is now 90% complete.