Weekly development report: 2021/01/02

At the start: happy new year for everyone :) Let's hope this one will be better than the old.

Back to the topic: This week work was completely focused on the development version of the game.

• Generally, the most of the work this week was done on trade screen redesign. It is "almost" done, but some polishing is required. Thus, no screenshots this week.
• As almost always, some small code tweaks, mostly related to the code documentation were done too.
• A few bugs were fixed and probably a few new "features" added.

But the main change to the project this week is related to its organization. Long story short: the game has the new development home. It not only moved from GitHub to my server. It also changed version control system from Git to Fossil.

By a long time I was using Git as my main VCS. I was aware of existing a few alternatives like Bazaar or Mercurial but none of them was interesting for me. Around one month ago I discovered another alternative: Fossil. After reading its documentation and some small tests, I felt in love to it. :) Its commands are very similar to these used in Git, thus migration isn't too hard for muscles memory. But Fossil was designed for managing small projects, when Git was created for support creating the huge project called Linux. Also, Fossil is a lot smaller (especially on Windows and macOS) than Git. Plus, the best things: it has build-in web UI, is deadly easy to deploy on a server and easy to set up. Even on a free web hosting :) The whole observations about the Fossil SCM deserve a separated blog entry, which probably soon or later I will write.

By the earlier month I was slowly moving my other projects to Fossil from Git and in this week I finally moved Steam Sky too. Not everything was done perfectly, for example the stable version of the game is still hosted on GitHub. But I'm still much happier with Fossil than with Git. It makes the project management a much easier: having everything in one place, even the development forum is a very nice feature. Plus, I started thinking about using Fossil even as the main page for the game: it is very customizable and uses a lot less resources than any common solution like WordPress or phpBB. But this is still food for thoughts. The link to the source code was also updated thus, everyone can see how it looks now :)

Generally, as Steam Sky was always an experimental field for me with some programming related technologies, now it is a unique project: not only written in Ada and some parts even in Tcl, but also stored and managed by Fossil :D