Naming of Releases
From BlinkenSisters
On this page, the inofficial naming of the BlinkenSisters releases is explained.
Contents |
Background
BlinkenSisters major releases are named after successfull space vehicles, both manned and unmanned, that helped us better explain our universe and pushed out the frontier of our limited horizon of knowledge. This naming was choosen in honor for all those who spent all their live exploring space, both from the ground and the ones going into space, sometimes not even coming back alive...
Minor releases are named after moons in our solar system that revolutionised our understanding of our universe. This naming was choosen in honor of the early explorers like Galileo Galilei, who discovered the first four moons around Jupiter (named appropriatly the "Galilean moons"): Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto.
The Naming of Versions 0.1 to 0.3 are backdated. That is, they where given names after we released them. Current name-giver is Rene Schickbauer.
Names
BlinkenSisters 0.1: "Sputnik 1"
Status: Released 1st Alpha 2005-12-29
Status: Released 2nd Alpha 2006-01-04
Named after the first man-made satellite, BlinkenSisters 0.1 was really just the beginning of a wonderfull adventure.
From Wikipedia: Sputnik 1 (Russian: Спутник-1, Satellite 1) was the first artificial satellite to be put into orbit, on October 4, 1957. Coming at the height of the Cold War, the launching of Sputnik caught the West by surprise, and in the U.S. led to a wave of self-recriminations, the beginning of the space race, and a movement to reform science education.
BlinkenSisters 0.1 was released on the Chaos Congress 2005 in Berlin and, while not a success shared by the public, was the basis of everything that followed. And yeah, we got our first artist with that release, too: 5tarbuck!
BlinkenSisters 0.2: "Apollo 11"
Status: Released 2006-02-04
Named after the first manned moon landing, BlinkenSisters 0.2 was a stepping stone for future development.
From Wikipedia: Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon. It was the fifth human spaceflight of the Apollo program, and the third human voyage to the moon. Launched on July 16, 1969, it carried Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to land on the Moon, while Collins orbited above.
The mission fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth" by the end of the 1960s.
BlinkenSisters 0.2 was (at least for us) a similar milestone: We finally released a basic, working game engine to the world with dynamically loaded levels, more sound, better performance and a great number of supported operating systems and hardware plattforms.
BlinkenSisters 0.3: "Voyager 2"
Status: Released 2006-03-17
Named after one of the most spectacular space missions ever, BlinkenSisters 0.3 gave us new insights into our project future.
From Wikipedia: Voyager 2 is arguably the most prolific space probe ever launched from Earth, visiting four planets and their many moons with powerful cameras and a multitude of scientific instruments, at a fraction of the money later spent on specialized probes such as the Galileo spacecraft and the Cassini-Huygens probe.
Voyager ist also currently the only probe having successfully conducted the "Interplanetary Grand Tour", visiting all of the four outer gas giants in a single mission: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptun. It returned data so different from our expectations that it changed our whole understanding of our solar system.
BlinkenSisters 0.3 was a similar revelation to the BlinkenSisters team. While we added many new features, like, for example, scripting support and some levels, it was mostly a porting effort to better support various plattforms.
After release, we expected a hundred or so downloads within the first month. It took about three hours to reach that mark... BlinkenSisters even got into the official FreeBSD ports tree. Wow!
While we never expected it to become that big (~3500 downloads as of November 2006; and thats a LOT when you're writing a new game with a non-new concept), it greatly helped us better understand our user base.
BlinkenSisters 0.4: "Sojourner"
Status: Released 2006-12-02
Named after "The Little Rover that could", BlinkenSisters 0.4 set high expectation for future development of our game engine.
From Wikipedia: Though completely successful and completing real objectives, the Mars Pathfinder mission can be regarded as a "proof-of-concept" for various technologies, such as airbag-mediated touchdown and automated obstacle avoidance, both later exploited by the Mars Exploration Rovers. The Mars Pathfinder was also remarkable for its extremely low price relative to other unmanned space missions. This was an important achievement, considering that approximately two-thirds of the spacecraft destined for Mars have either failed to launch or were lost en route.
We hope that BlinkenSisters 0.4 will be just as successful, altough it too can be regarded as a "proof-of-concept" for many of the new subsystems we will include in this release. We have an improved collission detection, support for movie playback, downloadable add-ons, much enhanced scripting support, better operating support, uncountable bugfixes und performance improvements and last but not least a switch-over from the commercial Visual Studio to the free MinGW/Bloodshed Dev-C++ studio for windows development.
BlinkenSisters 0.5
While, at first, we planned to only do one (1) 0.5 release, we changed plans to make sub-releases to approach the 0.6 release in a more carefull way with more user feedback. The original 0.5 release is a major release (hence the "spacecraft" name) while subsequent 0.5.x releases are minor version, the first to use the "moons of the solar system" namespace; for 0.5.x we will use moons of Jupiter.
BlinkenSisters 0.5 "Giotto"
Status: Released 2007-10-09
From Wikipedia: The spaceprobe "Giotto" from the European Space Agency was designed to study Halley's Comet. The spacecraft was named after the medieval Italian painter Giotto di Bondone. He had observed Halley's Comet in 1301 and was inspired to depict it as the star of Bethlehem in his painting Adoration of the Magi.
The spacecraft is derived from the GEOS research satellite built by British Aerospace, and modified with the addition of a dust shield as proposed by Fred Whipple and comprising a thin aluminium sheet separated by a space and a thicker Kevlar sheet. Later the Stardust (spacecraft) would use a similar Whipple shield.
Based on the proven-to-work basis of the previos version (just like Giotto was based on the GEOS programme), 0.5 "Giotto" will incorporate more (internal and scripting) features, required for future implementation of a level editor. Also, this version will include some brand-new scriptable features such as trigger-callbacks, which will play an important role for future automated code generation.
Also, much will be enhanced in other parts of the engine as well: Another level of parralax scrolling and alpha transparency will give our grahpic designer much better features to work with; adaptions of the HTTP handler will enable requests through web proxies; changes in internal data handling should the CPU requirement and last but not least, changes in the physics and collission detection will make for better gameplay.
If all goes to plan, it is also expected to showcase a whole new add-on, that, instead of using the original "retro" design, looks like it's going to be a real eye-candy (giving Cavac constant opportunity to exclam something like "I never though my engine could do THAT...").
BlinkenSisters 0.5.1 "Callisto"
Status: Released 2007-11-02
From Wikipedia: Callisto is a moon of the planet Jupiter, discovered in 1610 by Galileo Galilei. It is the third largest moon in the Solar System and the second largest in the Jovian system, after Ganymede. Callisto has about 99% the diameter of the planet Mercury but is much less massive. It is the fourth Galilean moon of Jupiter by distance, with an orbital radius of about 1,880,000 kilometers. It does not form part of the orbital resonance that affects three inner Galilean satellites, Io, Europa and Ganymede, and thus does not experience appreciable tidal heating.
Callisto rotates synchronously with its orbital period, so the same face is always turned toward Jupiter. Callisto's surface is less affected by Jupiter's magnetosphere than the other inner satellites because it orbits further away.
As Callisto is one of the more "traditional" moons, Release 0.5.1 is a more "traditional" bugfix release, that is, there are next-to-none new features but a great deal of updates to fix some bugs. We also fixed some compile-time issues on various plattforms and removed 100+ warnings. While we where removing the warnings, we also fixed a lot of C-Casts and const/non-const issues to improve performance of the engine.
BlinkenSisters 0.5.2 "Triton"
Status: Released 2008-05-12
From Wikipedia:Triton is one of the few moons in the Solar System known to be geologically active. Its crust is dotted with geysers believed to erupt nitrogen. As a consequence, its surface is relatively young, with a complex geological history revealed in intricate and mysterious tectonic terrains. Triton has a tenuous nitrogen atmosphere less than 1/70,000th the pressure of Earth's atmosphere at sea level.
Release 0.5.2 is the release with the most changes ever: More than 400 commit for a single release. Many improvements (including our own knowledge about scripting), more levels, a X-Mas addon, BlinkenSisters-to-Blinkenlights streaming and much much more...
BlinkenSisters 0.6: "Pioneer 10"
Status: Planned
Update: Release of BlinkenSisters 0.6 is currently on hold, as we decided on a step-by-step approach using 0.5.x releases until we reach V0.6
From Wikipedia: Pioneer 10 (Pioneer-F) was the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt and to make direct observations of Jupiter. It was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 36A on March 2, 1972. Pioneer 10 is heading in the direction of Aldebaran, located in Taurus (constellation). By some definitions, Pioneer 10 has become the first artificial object to leave the solar system (third cosmic velocity). However, it still has not passed the heliopause or Oort cloud.
Release 0.6 will be a so called "Quick-Release", In this case, "quick" has two meanings for us: First of all, it will be the quickest (fastest) Release we ever had. Just a little over two months. And second, while small in scale, it will give us the quickest route to many more abilities game-engine wise.
We will just a a few scripting function in LUA. But that is all we need, because, from Version 0.6 on, we will be able to override the engine built-in physics whenever we desire and work directly on the joystick input from within the script. Implementing games like space invaders, Emerald Mines and others will be easy, while relying on our trusted game engine for all the object-handling, sound and so on. Porting a newly-created game will be easy, too, cause you just don't have to: It's only a plattform independent script - and the interpreting game engine already runs on (nearly) every decent computer out there.
BlinkenSisters 0.7: "IUE"
Status: Planned
Named after the first "real time" space telescope, BlinkenSisters 0.7 will bring players and developers closer together.
From Wikipedia: IUE was first proposed in early 1964, by a group of scientists in the United Kingdom, and was launched on January 26, 1978 aboard a NASA Delta rocket. The minimum mission lifetime was initially set for 3 years, but it far exceeded the expectations of the astronomers and engineers and was eventually switched off in 1996 (for budgetary reasons, while still functioning at near original efficiency), exceeding the planned life by more than a factor of 6. It was the first space observatory to be operated in real time by astronomers who visited the groundstations in the United States and Europe. Astronomers made over 104,000 observations of different objects using IUE, including planets, comets, stars, interstellar gas, supernovae, planetary aurorae, galaxies, and quasars.
The most important milestone of BlinkenSisters 0.6 will be the development of a complete level editor, so players and level-designers alike will be able to make new levels or improve existing ones without having to learn to program. Point-and-Click will finally bring artists and developer closer together. Exchanging graphics or sounds, designing new levels, even adding complex puzzles or new monsters, will only be a few mouse-clicks away.
