NEWS 13-02-2019 - eXpansion² | FeedBacks & Let's prioritize & Your ideas are important

[oliverde8]

NEWS 13-02-2019 - eXpansion² we will ge there

Well, it's been nearly a year since our last "News post" and since then we have released 3 beta versions of eXpansion. But lately, things have been stalling. So I think for clarification sake we had to write this edition of eXpansion news.

First of all eXpansion² is not abandoned, we are still working on it. But few things have been going on in my life those last few months and I have been busy and well at times even a little depressed. I have gone through a lot of changes, new job, new country, alot of paper work, some health issues in the family... My new job has increased my commute time quite a lot and I have longer working hours as well; so time is more of a premium. But I believe we can finish expansion.

In order to be able to have a "full" stable release in a reasonable time, we have deprioritized some developments. The most important one being our Layout system, adding a whole layer ontop of manialinks in order to have easily customizable components that would have made any new plugin add information to existing windows/widgets easy and also make skinning a lot easier. So even though we had started the devs to implement it we have pushed it to the 2.1.0.0.

We are on the other hand thinking to reprioritize the live widget; maybe for the 2.0.1 version.

There are a few "big" goals we need to tackle for the first stable version

• Create generic BestTime Data Provider for LocalRecords & DedimaniaRecordsThis will allow us to work on the Dedimani/LocalRecords/Live Rankings widget
• Replacing the native /server command with a window displaying more information
• List all missing data providers for TM & implement the most important ones Ideally all of them should be accessible...

And for the 2.0.1 :

• Create simple live widgets There won't be as much functionality as eXp1 had.
• Stabilize Dedimania & Cleanup (definitively the biggest here)
• List all missing data providers for SM & implement the most important ones One of the strong parts of eXpansion is that theoretically making the existing local records plugin work on SM mods such as Obstacle should be easy thanks to those providers.

Ideally, we would like to have eXpansion² as a base for other plugin developers to work on, to build their own bundles that they would share. Deprioritizing the layout system is contradicting this idea as it makes the "core" less flexible but we came to the conclusion that we had to offer more functionalities out of the box instead of offering more flexibility and our road map tries to reflects that without getting to much away from flexibility. I personally believe that what differentiates eXp² is its flexibility & adaptability so we need to keep that in the DNA of eXp².

Your input, your ideas, any feedback of what you would rather see first is welcomed.

[endbase]

Great news ! Looking forward to it

[oliverde8]

Hello,

Just wanted to respond to the question we were asked on the release of the latest trackmania game.

There is 2 good news

Right now as it's stands I have been reported, that eXpansion² runs on the new Trackmania game with multiple features such as records disabled. That is logical as most of the TM data providers are disabled as they don't recognize the game.

Supporting the new game should be relatively simple as our concept of Data Providers allows a total separation on how the game works & how we do things. So such changes to the game shouldn't affect the individual plugins as long as we add the necessary data providers for translating the data.

There is also 2 bad news

I am having a lot of personal issues for the last few month, I don't know when it's going to end but right now I am juggling work & issues and have no time and energy.

The new game has only stadium, which I don't like to play. So it's not very motivating for myself to work on and pay for something I doubt I will play.

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However if any one wishes to look into the matter i have spent some time trying to list what needs to be done and created a ticket in github on the subject. https://github.com/eXpansionPluginPack/ ... issues/406

Regards,