Development has been rather quiet lately, so it's time to brief you on the current state of the project and let you know our goals for the near future.

Next release

I don't expect the development to pick up speed over the summer as everyone will probably spend their time doing stuff outdoors or sitting in the shade and watching the life pass by with a chilled bottle of Czech Budweiser like myself. That said, at the very least we will release ET:L 2.71 RC 2 - probably within the next couple of weeks. Like other release candidates, it will include only bugfixes and no new features. If there won't be any major issues, ET:L 2.71 will follow shortly.

New team member wanted

Our sister project ETLive has recruited a community manager which I think is a good idea for us to do as well. More details will follow in the forthcoming news article.

Repository reorganisation

Currently, our git master branch contains ground-breaking changes, most notably a new OpenGL 3 renderer which is not yet production ready. Some time ago, I chose a repository structure where the stable code was put in its own branch and the bleeding edge stuff was kept in master. It was a bad decision, a very bad decision. Hand picking bugfixes and merging them with the stable branch is tedious and automatic versioning is broken because git tags are not shared among branches. Therefore, from the version 2.71 onward we will use git the way it was meant to be used, i.e. stable code in master and medium/big new features safely separated in branches until they are stable enough to be merged.

ET:L Master Server

I have begun rewriting etlMaster from scratch. It will be programmed in C++ with the use of Boost::Asio again, but this time I know what I am doing, so I will make it much cleaner. Some of the features I would like to see:

• synchronise server list with etmaster.idsoftware.com
• public API that anyone can use, e.g. to make their own server tracker
• server filtering by supported OS & architecture - will require ET:L server part

Reporting and banning malicious servers will be a piece of cake through etlMaster webinterface. I will write another article about it with some screenshots when I have something to show.

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