News from Feb 22, 2016 – Mar 13, 2016

Hello and welcome to the seventh issue of This Week in Amethyst, a blog bringing you the latest changes and updates regarding the Amethyst game engine every week (or two). If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to call me out on Gitter.

No new pull requests landed this week.

What’s cooking on master?

Notable additions

• Versions 0.3.0 and 0.4.0 of amethyst_tools have been rolled out! These releases add a new feature and fix several annoying bugs.
  • The amethyst command-line tool now supports the --release flag in the same manner as Cargo (#19). Thanks for the pull request, @LucioFranco!
  • The package was re-published to work with the latest version of Cargo (#17).
  • Creating a new game project no longer reports “bad file descriptor” on affected systems (#18). Thanks again to @LucioFranco!
  • Cargo’s exit status is now reported back to the shell rather than dropped. This resolves certain issues with our integration tests reporting certain faulty tests as successful (#13). This bugfix was made by [@White-Oak][wo] back in issue 5 of TWIA, but was delayed due to testing.
• The ECS design and implementation has been undergoing heavy churn lately. Feel free to drop in and contribute on our Gitter channel.
  • On the ecs branch, both Simulation and SimBuilder were prototyped (see the wiki page for the design proposal). Processor error handling got a little Rustier, using Result instead of Option.
  • @Oflor has been working on his own external multi-threaded ECS library called Zircon that aims to easily integrate with Amethyst. Check it out!
• The release guidelines have been codified in the wiki. Though we already follow Semantic Versioning, there are certain cases not covered by the standard that needed to be defined explicitly (how to treat major/minor changes in the tools vs. in the engine, when to increment meta-package version numbers, etc). This should enforce consistency and keep breakage to a minimum, which will be especially important after 1.0.
• Along with this, the project may also adopt a more uniform Git branching workflow, possibly Git Flow by Vincent Driessen (suggestion by @LucioFranco). Stale branches and merge conflicts need to be kept at bay, and this looks like an effective way to keep our repositories clean and iterate more quickly.

New issues

• Engine
  • Migrating to a GitHub organization (issue #27)
• Tools
  • Issue using cargo to install (issue #17)
  • Add support for --release flag (issue #19)

New contributors

• LucioFranco

Other announcements

These past few weeks, I have been struggling to keep up with both my university studies and work, hence this unorthodox double-length issue of TWIA. I apologize for the lack of public activity. Thankfully, my daily workload is starting to decrease, so my development pace is picking up!

Some meta-news: we may be getting a real website soon! I’m in the process of rewriting past TWIA posts as Markdown files so they can be hosted on the open on GitHub, much like This Week in Rust. I have purchased amethyst.rs to be our official domain. So far, the main page points to nothing. @LucioFranco (this guy has been really helpful lately!) put together a preliminary pull request where we can get this working. We’re running into some issues with Cobalt.rs, but we hope to resolve them soon.