[2020] Friday Facts #331 - 0.18.0 release & Train pathfinder changes

Originally posted by sedontane

With this in mind, it wouldn't make sense to mark 0.18 stable before most of the above is finished. We made 0.18 a major version because it will break mods with all the changes we are making, and while initially it hasn't broken that much, many things to come will have a bigger impact, such as the Character GUI.

As a software developer and game programmer myself, surely this is the antithesis of the version system

1.2.3

1) most major of content changes, Will quite certainly break derivative works
2) Major content changes, including new content, will quite often require refactoring of derivative works
3) Bug fixes, content balancing, derivative works safe

I suppose I am somewhat prone to forgetting that factorio isn't at "version 18" but actually "0.18", but would still expect mod breaking changes to tend to get restricted to level 2 changes, where not absolutely necessary.

That said Unreal Engines build pipleine complains at me every time I compile that my SDK version is (numbers just for example) 1.2.3.0041 and it wanted 1.2.3.0001

Originally posted by ubekame

Why not simply make a 0.19, 0.20, 0.21 etc then? I don't see why you have to go from 0.18 to 1.0 in one go.

Originally posted by ubekame

Maybe I missunderstood it, but from reading the FFF I got the impression you would introduce major API changes (for example due to GUI changes) in going from 0.18.23 to 0.18.24, as a made up example. Is this not so?

I know it's tricky to make everyone happy, but such big changes should really be more than a minor patch number increase.

Originally posted by PatrickBaitman

There is literally a widely used standard for versioning designed precisely with dependencies in mind

https://semver.org