Hey Guys!
I’m a new contributor to Cataclysm DDA! I was wondering if there’s a structured release schedule for the game or if the releases are kinda arbitrary based on CleverRaven’s gut feeling? I just wanna make sure I focus my efforts properly and i’m not trying to make massive changes to a polished product.
It is a free for all until the race to next stabe release begins. Then the code enters various freeze states and only pull requests that add features that are “required” or fix bugs are accepted.
Currently there is no serious work for stable release being done. So whatever ideas you have you are free to implement.
(Well there are the projects that are kind of loose plans for the future https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/projects)
There is an intention to have a roughly 6-month release cadence from now on.
0.C to 0.D was painful ( 4 years or so! )
0.D to 0.E will be less painful.
Do not base your contributions on what may or may not be stable in the near future, if a feature you are working on is considered too risky when it comes time to a new stable release, it will be frozen and then applied to the new experimental version afterwards.
Just contribute what you want, and the maintainers of the repo will decide when and what a stable version is.
There’s probably going to be a feature freeze and new stable release sometime in the later half of 2019. There’s no scheduled release, but the senior devs don’t want to 4 years between releases again.
If you’ve got a good idea and can execute it competently, go ahead and make massive changes to a polished project. Just make things better than they were before.