Welcome to the Ryzom Core Developers Blog

One of the problems that Ryzom Core struggles with frequently is the perception that it is dormant and no longer developed. There are a lot of reasons for this throughout the long and tumultuous history of the NeL and Ryzom Core history but the fact of the matter is that we're pretty terrible at two big things: communication and releases.

The group that runs the Ryzom game make their fair share of releases and have a lively mechanism for getting that out. That's part of their business and it is their obligation to their players. Getting releases out is also an obligation to their players. Most people who use Ryzom Core are still running pretty bleeding edge and haven't expressed a need for a regular cyclic release cycle. There hasn't been an outcry of desire for long term stable releases. This just isn't a reality for us right now so we don't bother releasing "early and often" as is so often suggested. This is a big reason why there's a perception that we're dormant - that we don't have very many releases. Our last major release was 0.8.0 and that was probably more than a year ago now.

We also don't have a lot of big "news" to talk about so we very rarely post new items on the Ryzom Core developer site. This means that the new is concise and really limited to big deal items. I think that this is kind of important but it also means that there's only a handful of posts per year. There are a lot of tiny initiatives and efforts that go on behind the scenes. Things that following the commit log and the issue history will tell. Most people won't do this. It's often too difficult to try and troll through the myriad of commits explaining what's been changed and then try to make a summary of what those changes amount to - unless you are one of the people making those changes.

So for these reasons I've decided to make an official Ryzom Core developers blog. Here's a place where myself and other Ryzom Core contributors can come and post updates of projects they're working on, announce new patches that have been applied, provide mini-tutorials or use cases in Ryzom Core or sometimes we might just use it as a sort of bully pulpit just to rant.

This past week a couple big things have come. So in the next day or two expect a post here about what those things are what it might mean to you as someone using the Ryzom Core platform. In about two weeks we'll be able to announce who our Google Summer of Code students are and then we'll take the time to highlight each one of their projects. Hopefully the things you find here are useful, informative and go a long way to proving that Ryzom Core isn't dead or dormant.