A history of Lux
I have been working on the next version of Lux. So I felt like talking about the evolution that it has gone through to get to the point it's at today. A case study of a shareware program's creation so to speak.Version 1.1 was pushed out the door 4 days later. It fixed all the horrible crashes and it wouldn't disable itself while the purchasing was still broken. It also added a few features. This should have been the initial public release.
The next update came a month later on December 26th. Version 1.2 added a bunch of new fun stuffs and a whole wackload of polish. By now Lux was pretty solid. Everything worked as expected, and the world was good.
Version 1.3 followed on January 25th and was almost exclusively devoted to new features and plugin capabilities. An AI developer's kit was released at the same time. Anyone could now create a background theme or write an AI and plug them into Lux. Of course no one has done this yet, but the ability is present.
There followed a large time gap before Lux version 2.0 was unleashed on the world on May 20th, 2003. The big things in version 2 were explosion animations and network play. Now people could play with each other over the internet, with a game finder built-in to the application. The only problem was it stank. Doing even normal network games would cause crashes and weirdness galore. This version should never have been released.
So version 2.1 was put out a day later to solve these problems. It also generally cleaned up some networking matters. This was followed by version 2.11 three days later which solved one nasty bug that had escaped. Version 2.11 marks the only point-point release to date. I couldn't justify going to 2.2 for only one bug fix.
Version 2.2 came out on June 12th. It restored the ability of people using Mac OS 10.1 to play Lux, whereas any previous 2.x release would just crash on them. As always some new features and polish were present as well. Lux had finally regained the stability it had back in the version 1.3.
The hope is that version 2.3 will be released tomorrow (July 8th). It's main goal is to make network play more usable. The act of hosting a game has been reworked to be more integrated with playing normal games. I am also planning on advertising 'Online Lux Tuesdays' (or possibly Wednesdays) in order to get some regular network play going. Plus version 2.3 has sound effects, which really do make a difference. They are just too cool for school.
What does the future hold? I've pretty much reached the feature set that I originally desired. This means that I may start work on the pure java port. This will enable Lux to be played on any platform that has java. The biggie is Windows of course, but the doors will also be open for Linux and possibly Palms and/or cell phones. The absolute latest deadline for me to finish this is the end of August. The optimistic goal is to have it finished by the start of August.
| Posted by dustin on July 7, 2003 with category tags of shareware |
Written by dustin
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