Today, we’re announcing a slight restructuring of our development process when it comes to Arkenforge Toolkit updates. Don’t worry! We’ll still be releasing regular updates. These changes are about ensuring ongoing and long-term stability of the Arkenforge Toolkit.
What’s staying the same?
First of all, the core development loop will remain the same. All new features will go into the Beta version, and once the Beta version is polished, the entire Beta update series will be moved into the Public version all at once. This is a system that we’re quite happy with, and it ensures that all new features come across to the Public version as polished and bug-free as possible.
We will also be continuing with a large number of smaller updates in the Beta version, rather than a small number of large updates. We enjoy releasing new features quickly, and a fast turnaround time on bug fixing is something we are quite proud of.
What’s changing?
Some notable issues appeared during our last update cycle. The biggest one is that with such a long beta update series, a lot of bugs appeared in the Public version that we were not able to address. From now on, we will be restructuring our development process to allow us to continue putting out bug fixing patches to the Public version.
On the Beta version front, each Beta update series will now begin with an incremented version number. For the upcoming beta series, this will be v0.5.1.
This change will make it clearer that the Beta version contains new features and functionality. It will also allow us to continue incrementing the public update version without overlapping update numbers with Beta.
We will also be endeavouring to reduce the duration our Beta update series in future. Ideally, we’ll have update series that are only a few months long at the absolute most. This means a tighter update series with a smaller feature set, but also that these features will end up in the Public version faster.
We hope that these changes will lead to an even more stable and feature-rich Toolkit moving forward.