This release is the result of about 10 months of development, featuring 771 commits, 70 closed pull requests from the community and something like 80 issues and feature/requests closed. Thanks everyone!
The main feature of Evennia 0.9 is that we have finally made the move to Python3. And we burn the bridges behind us; as announced in previous posts we completely drop Python2 support and move exclusively to only support the latest Python3.7.
Overall the move to Python3 was not too bloody (and much work towards a never published py2+3 version was already done by Evennia contributors in a separate branch earlier). The main issues I ran into were mainly in the changes in how Python3 separates strings from bytes. This became crticial since Evennia implements several connection protocols; there were a lot of edge cases and weird errors appearing where data went to and from the wire.
A regular user has it a lot easier though. So far people have not had too much trouble converting their games from 2.7 to 3.7. The biggest Linux distros don't all have Py3.7 out of the box though, so that may be a concern for some, we'll see.
... but Py3 is nowhere all there is to find in this release though! There are a plethora of more features in the latest Evennia, all to make it easier to make the text-based multiplayer game of your dreams.
You can see a summary of new features in the ML announcement and even more details in the actual CHANGELOG file.
So what's up next?
Now follows a period of bug-fixing and stabilizing. Maybe resolve some of those long-standing "tech-dept" issues and overall make Evennia more stable.
Eventually work will then commence (in the develop branch) on version 1.0 of Evennia. For this next release I think I'll step back from new features a bit and focus on refactoring and cleanup of the API as well as other things around the library's distribution, documentation and presentation.
But for now, onward to summer vacations.
Evennia is great, muchhhhhh freedom to create any game system :)
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