0.12.0 RELEASE ANNOUNCEMENT POSTS:>> 2. Make an announcement on the forum and Discord channel that we will be releasing 0.12.0 in a few days -- and that testing and bug reports (or even reports that everything works fine on a specific operating system) is especially appreciated. > No problems with that, and I definitely can see the point with #2, given > that I am still finding event-dispatch-thread related crashes. What would > be really good is an intense burst of testing. Where is our publicity > manager--- you there Blake?
Opps, sorry Mike! All my FreeCol dev emails go into a sub folder otherwise my main inbox gets a bit crazy. I usually only check the subfolder on weekends and I think I checked on sun night right before you sent this last week. Was busy this weekend but have seen all this now!I also see that Stian made the 0.12.0 incoming announcement on the Col Discord and then Caleb posted the 12 release there and also on the Col Facebook group too. However there are other big communities I can still take care of... So I've just gone and done my Reddit Col group too (which I think I told you guys before has now exceeded the FB and Discord groups in member size) here:https://www.reddit.com/r/ColonizationGame/comments/ugkrlu/freecol_0120_stable_release_is_here/ I've then shared that with the 4x gaming reddit groups as there's thousands of fans there too.https://www.reddit.com/r/4Xgaming/comments/ugkwqk/freecol_0120_stable_release_is_here/ I've also updated our IndieDB page with the new 0.12.0 release. And since this is a big occasion then I think it's finally time to use the IndieDB article area which can be used for posting announcements, dev diaries and project milestones etc. These articles go onto the main IndieDB front page where thousands of visitors browse.https://www.indiedb.com/games/freecol/news/freecol-0120-stable-release-is-here Oh and BTW cheers for sticking my name in the 0.12.0 contributors list for that big map job a while back, much appreciated. :) FREECOL WEBSITE:I see you've already taken care of the freecol website announcement which is good as I never figured out how to add news articles, although I see you had some troubles yourself... > I have uploaded 0.12.0, but mucked up the files that needed changing on> the > website. Can someone remind me of what needs to be kicked before > uploading from our www.freecol.org directory? You can see the failure on > pages like: https://www.freecol.org/download.html > Sort of fixed. I found a post about the jekyll config in our mailing list > archives. I may have missed a file or two, as the upload script is out of > date, so I would appreciate it if the website wranglers would take a look > at the current state. Yup you got it working as I'm able to load that page and use the download links. I'm also able to see your new news post there too. I think those mailing list Jekyll instructions were the oldest ones. Winter posted new ones in the actual news area itself here if anyone needs them:https://www.freecol.org/news/first-steps-for-contributing-to-freecol-website.html Which I think was created from the discussion between him and me a while back when he attempted dumb the whole process down for me as I had no idea what was going on lol: https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/e78a6df83d/?limit=25#c3c3/ee20/6536/6977/bd1f/efac/7ba8/1b81/6c34/5677/af5b/8cc4/b0be ADDING A 3RD PARTY MOD TO NEXT RELEASE:Oh and regarding the 0.12.0 release, I notice Mazim's popular New Nations mod that not only adds more nations but also allows people to play 12 player Col games (which is a handy line when I'm marketing the game heh) didn't make it in so I guess I better get off my butt and do it myself to make sure it's there for the next release haha! As I did originally promise I'd do that however I wasn't sure if Stian was checking and approving mod additions himself these days so I held off, but I'll go ahead and get it sorted.https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/discussion/141200/thread/658935e76f/?page=1#0a18 However before I submit his work into github there's an issue I need Mike/Stian guidance on. Stian posted in Mazim's thread that the mod needs to be in zip format for the game to use it which was a bit of a surprise as all the existing 3rd party mods with freecol are not zipped and are just loaded from folders. So if I need to add Mazim's mod in a zip instead of a folder then should we be changing all the other existing 3rd party mods included with Freecol into zips as well? If so then FYI there's some sort of problem with the zip loader which I've posted about here:https://sourceforge.net/p/freecol/bugs/3249/ JAVA 11 REQUIREMENT ISSUES:The other thing is the whole recent requirement for Java 11. While most programmers have modern 11+ java dev kits most regular Jo's (ie your fan base who just want to play the game) do not and just have the regular Java 8 runtime edition that no matter how many times they hit that update button they're still gonna have Java 8 lol. There was some confusion on the Discord a while back and sure enough someone's just posted on Caleb's FB announcement about not being able to run the game (and getting a very generic error message that doesn't tell him what he needs) and no doubt more confused people will appear. And the people saying something are the nice ones, most won't be able to run the game and if their isn't an easy solution than they just won't bother. I already said this on the Discord but here's probably a better place:"I watched this happen a year or so ago with the Master of Magic multiplayer fan remake. Once the game required something newer than the regular java 8 runtime edition many people have we started getting bombarded by user issues with...A - Finding newer ones because no one ever googles anything lol, and the various java download pages are quite intimidating to regular people.B - Getting it working as i think a lot of the dev kit releases don't automatically associate with java apps (especially if 8JRE is already there) resulting in people having go into system settings and play with environment variables to force java 11 or so to be the chosen app.. urgh it was a nightmare. In the end someone came along and showed MoM-IME creator Implode how to include Java in his releases resulting in the game having the required java environment it needed regardless of peoples systems and all the user issues went away. Of course it added like 30 or 50 megs to the download sized which sucked a bit.. but it was worth it as it stopped all the player confusion and devs having to waste time answering endless help questions." I'm not a programmer so I don't describe things well so I asked the creator of the master of magic remake project Implode for a better description of what he had to do and he sent me this:"Yeah adoptOpenJDK you can get a JRE that's just a .zip file, so you don't have to "install" it as such, so I just package that up with the download and then the .bat files that run it just point to like jre\java to make sure it uses the packaged one even if the user has some other ver of Java installed on their systemI mean I don't like doing that > because one of good things with Java is you should in theory be able to run it on anything. So what if someone is downloading and running it on a Mac, in theory I should also provide a version with Mac-JRE pre-packaged too. Doing that for Windows-only is like saying "Hey you should only run this on Windows". But yeah I know 99% of people are running Windows and many aren't very technically capable so figured I had to suck it up and try to be helpful lol" I've seen that FreeCol does Mac releases so yeah maybe you guys will have no interest in including a JRE within FreeCol. However then we need to give these fans better info than just "go get java 11 or newer" because its friggin mess out there of multiple companies doing java stuff, multiple types of releases to chose from, and lots of versions. Can you guys recommend a modern java package to me that is DEAD EASY to install in that it'll just put itself where it needs to be and most importantly it sets up all that windows environment variable stuff on it's own (so all java apps use the new java instead of the usual old 8 JRE) so no fans have to go through trying to do all that environment variable stuff themselves. Then we can just tell people to go get that recommend easy to use package with a link in our welcome thread and release posts to reduce confusion. Regards Blake
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