0.2.4 Dev Blog and 2015

Happy new year!

While we don't feel that 0.2.4 is quite ready for release, we thought that a development update was at least in order for now!

New website

As you may notice this is the new website that we will be migrating to in the near future! The old one had some permission issues and was difficult to work with, so we're moving here! (Note that the forums will still be used the same)

Next release

The next update 0.2.4 will feature a completely new revamped gui, sound effects for a variety of things happening in the game (although not yet for everything) and a number of other minor changes as well as technical improvements that won't be as visible.

With the release of 0.2.4 we want to do some amount of outreach to get more people interested in helping build the project and therefore we think it is important to have some level of polish and gameplay ready, which is what we will focus on until release! This means that the next release will have some more stuff to do in a more progression orientated format to make it feel more like a game and less like a proof of concept!

We have been working more on the cell membrane lately but It's unlikely to be ready for 0.2.4 as it would probably introduce too many delays, but the necessary demo code that was written in Java has been ported and needs some interfacing with our Ogre rendering engine, additionally we'll have to figure out how the physics will have to interact with the more dynamic cell membranes. The ultimate goal here is to have some cool soft-body physics for when cells bump into each other.

Why are things so slow?

In our last release, we promised 0.2.4 shortly after but that didn't turn out that way. What we really wanted in 0.2.4 was the new gui and sound-effects, which ended up being bottlenecked by some unforseen design issues and the artists learning the gui system such that programmers won't have to help with every little change and detail!

In general the limiting factor is programmer hours, for quite a while between release 0.2.1 and 0.2.3 I was the sole active programmer but some time before release 0.2.3 moopli stepped in and helped a great deal! Although we are still only two consistently programmers doing this in our spare time! Though we have had a number of other programmers helping out from time to time.