(The following text is Sushi's and Landil's subjective point of view about the current situation.)
Some people say teeworlds development got stuck. Others even say teeworlds is dead. Few actually say modificatons destroy(ed) teeworlds. Let's do a fact check: is this true?
TEEWORLDS DEVELOPMENT GOT STUCK / IS DEAD
The last official teeworlds release was spreaded in November 2009. Indeed it seems justifiable to say that development stopped or slowed down. But just because you cannot see development does not mean there is none. Actually there is more development activity than ever before. We recently even reached a peak of activity since the project moved to github. After matricks' decision to confide the development responsability to a new teeworlds team, some people held their breath, but (!) as we can see they do a really great job. Oy is pushing one fix after the other. m!nus is caring about the forum very well and Landil is recruiting and training a new graphic team to give teeworlds a nicer look. In addition there are plenty of other people participating in development who are doing a great job, too. The only problem is the normal player does not see these efforts because they are not part of the development community. Just to give you an idea about what happened: the whole code was refactored to provide a better readability, the engine was rewritten in C++. Douzens of new features were added e.g. the dm score hud, colored nameplates, changeable nameplates size, a new font system, an auto-save screenshot function, which saves the scoretable at the end of a match and many many bugs were fixed.
MODS DESTROY TEEWORLDS
At the official forum and in several other discussions we can see a groundswell of opinion against teeworlds modifications. They fear that vanilla teeworlds fades into the background. In fact, one cannot deny a decreasing share of plain vanilla players. But what is the reason for this effect? When we think about the reasons we found one reason: gameplay.
Plain vanilla is imbalanced! The gap between high skill players and casual gamers or rookies is enormous (which does not have to be a problem itself, but makes the balancing and game play problem quite visible). They move faster and have nearly perfect strategies for fighting on the "one and only real ctf map" ctf2. This leads to boring matches which always follow the same procedure *yawn*. Some balancing is needed - we have to think about weapons, power ups and gameplay itself.
Back to the mods: they do not destroy teeworlds, they just show us that vanilla teeworlds is not that intersting to play. Mods represent the innovative force of open source development. New ideas can easily be tested. Thus we are supposed to use these capabilities in a constructive way to advance teeworlds. E.g. DDRace shows us that people would like to have a real coop mode. Do not fight them, as they could become vanilla players again.
WHAT WE CAN DO NEXT
We think the time has come to push teeworlds 0.5.3. Even though there are many good ideas waiting to be implemented, there are good reasons to release now.
it is already much more stable then 0.5.2. All known crash reasons are fixed.
several security loopholes are fixed. It's incredible not to release a patch or a new release, after fixing it.
original and simple game play innovations are needed. 0.6 seems far from release and noone wants to touch the network stuff at present, which has to be altered when we want to add new gameplay features.
the community will see that change happens and official development is still active.
AND THEN?
Teeworlds places great demands on itself and so do we. We do not want to reinvent the wheel, there are so many open source projects which face similar problems as we do.
One of the coping strategies we favor is the following: twice a year there is a standard release (no need to set a certain date, but a certain month would be fine). One month before the release there is a feature freeze, which means no new features are allowed to implement. The main focus lies on bugfixing and finishing current features. In addtion extraordinary releases are supposed to be spreaded, when security issues get public.
Regarding new features, developers should stay in touch with the community to get inspired and be able to advance teeworlds. For sure we need to think about how to manage this process as the teeworlds community grew quite fast and forum discussion could become chaotic. Thus we would like to see a developer who is responsible for the game design who sets a focus on trying to balance and improve plain vanilla gameplay. One idea which came to our minds is to make it easier to move fast. Something like jumppads which accellerate players with bad hooking skills or a higher standard movement speed on platforms.
We (Sushi & Landil) would be glad if you join the discussion.
