Hey everyone, long time no see!
Today, we would like to talk about the next AMX Mod X version, what is happening, and what our future plans are.
What was taking so long?
As you may already understand, AMXX as a project is past its prime. Not many people are actively working on the code base, a direct result of reduced interest in the project specifically and GoldSrc games in general. Since we moved the project to
GitHub, development has become quite a bit more active, but the pace is ultimately still slow. Our primary goal still is to once again provide an up-to-date release, including many bug fixes and long-awaited features.
Due to the waning interest in the games it supports, it is only natural that contributors would dip in and out of active development. So without a core team available to push through issues and keep the project on track, the contributions became a bit chaotic from a scheduling perspective.
My mistake as a maintainer was not setting clear targets that could be achieved with the limited time that both our contributors and I could put into the project. This meant that the number of changes got larger and larger as time passed (and oh how quickly it passes). I failed to get help from the community to process and test new changes and failed to tighten the scope of what we could ultimately deliver as an official release.
However, please keep in mind that all of the contributors are volunteers, and we can't force anybody to devote more time to AMXX than they are comfortable with.
Where we are now
As of 1.9, we have put the development version of AMXX into a feature-frozen state. This means that no new functionality and improvements will be accepted into what is going to eventually be the next release of AMX Mod X. Development will now focus on bug fixes and our time spent preparing for the next release.
We know that we still have a few exciting improvements and even the odd new feature in the pipelines, but we have to make a commitment to a release at some point. Once we have wrapped up the past couple of years into an official release, it will be much easier for our small team to get new stuff into the hands of users.
What is new?
AMX Mod X has had numerous fixes and improvements across all facets of the project:
- Stability and performance improvements
- Official support for ReHLDS and ReGameDLL
- Much improved UTF-8 support across the project
- Significant improvements to modules and the official plugins
- (Almost) completely revised and completed documentation
- Tons of new functionalities for plugin developers and admins
The full detailed release notes are currently work in progress, and can be found in the Wiki:
https://wiki.alliedmods.net/AMX_Mod_X_1.9_Release_Notes.
What is next?
We need you!
As outlined above, this release has gotten pretty large, and we somewhat neglected including the community in the development. We are in sore need of more people that are willing to test and verify the new version.
Check out the
release notes and give our new features a try, if something does not work as you expect it should, please let us know.
AMXX 1.9 latest build can be downloaded here:
https://www.amxmodx.org/downloads-new.php.
As usual, AMXX should retain full backward compatibility, so if existing functionality breaks after upgrading, file a bug report.
How to report bugs or request features?
We've decided to complete our switch to
GitHub and use their integrated
issue tracker for all future bug reports and feature requests.
While this will require you to create a GitHub account to get in touch with contributors, we hope that it provides us with similar benefits as moving our code there. Having everything in one place for development should be more intuitive and get more eyes on the project. Also, quite frankly, the old issue tracker was barely used and still contains numerous outdated tickets that might not have been relevant for years.
The old tracker will still be publicly available, but new AMXX tickets will no longer be accepted.
The forum will remain the place for general support, help, and discussion.
The Future
First, starting from the next AMX Mod X release we will follow SourceMod in switching to a rolling-release cycle. We will provide more information at a later date, but this essentially means that we will be able to provide you with more frequent stable releases. It is simply not feasible for a mature project like AMXX to focus on big iterative releases that take years to come together.
Secondly, future changes will be focused on user-related issues, such as new/improved tools for managing servers and customization. This has been the primary area we have left out of this planned release, mostly because of missing time, but also because we needed to get the internals right before we can improve our user-facing tools.
Finally, we will try to get the community involved more. Even though we aren't nearly as many as we used to be, people still care about the project. We would like to thank every one of you for that.
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