Towards Northstar 2.0

[GeckoEidechse]

Intro

We have been on 1.X forever. Initially we said, Frontier Defense would be 2.0 but while there has been massive progress¹, it seems that Verified Mods / Mod-auto-download ²³ is gonna be the defining feature of 2.0.

In fact given the recent progress, we might even be able to get it in before the next Northstar anniversary

So turns out Frontier Defense also made a huge jump recently with jump links in navmeshes being fully reversed. While there's still finishing touches to be done on jump link generation, we are getting really close.

At the same time, there's a few other changes happening that will result in some form of breakage compared to previous releases.
This means we can combine both the big feature release (Frontier Defense) with the breaking changes to get a true 2.0 :D

Upcoming changes

• Frontier Defense (real?)
  • Navmesh updates
  • Integrating FD changes from @Zanieon
• Handle multiple mod versions NorthstarLauncher#757
• Change mod loading location NorthstarLauncher#746
• Big rpak loading refactor NorthstarLauncher#766 -> v1.28.0
• some more things I'm forgetting rn

Roadblocks

Before we can consider a bump to 2.0 we need to figure out and eliminate potential issues that could interfere with the version bump. This includes:

• Version number checks for mods:
  At the moment, server required mods need to match on their major version. As Northstar.Custom is required by virtually every server this means bumping the version number to 2.0 would result in 1.X clients being unable to join 2.0 servers and vice versa. Even if we decide to not have any breaking features in there. ⁴
  So we might want to consider adding an exception to Northstar.Custom or removing version checking entirely and replacing it with a warning in order to allow for a smoother transition from 1.0 to 2.0 as while clients tend to update pretty quick, servers are usually on the slower side of things.
• Content:
  For mod-auto-download to make a "splash" we need some content for it. This means we should try to get a bunch of mods verified before the public release of the feature.
• ???

Other

We might also wanna already consider if we need to do anything else for a 3.0 when Frontier Defense releases

Footnotes

1. thanks @RoyalBlue1 for the foundations and @Zanieon for carrying on the torch as well as everyone else involved ↩

2. whatever you wanna call it, I think we change the naming every other day xD ↩

3. See also

   • https://github.com/R2Northstar/NorthstarLauncher/pull/545
   • https://github.com/R2Northstar/NorthstarLauncher/pull/595
   • https://github.com/R2Northstar/NorthstarMods/pull/761
   ↩

4. Note that while we adhere to semantic versioning for the most part we don't strictly follow it so a 2.0 doesn't necessarily have to be breaking. See also https://r2northstar.gitbook.io/r2northstar-wiki/modding-and-development/development/releases#version-numbering ↩

[ASpoonPlaysGames]

Honestly I'd like to get the mod format rework done for 2.0, current system is Not Good ™️ and consistently causes problems and hacky workarounds for things.

Invalidating everyone's mods would also be less of a kick in the balls if its a big 2.0 release

[GeckoEidechse]

I'm totally up for an improvement in our mod loading system. Maybe create an issue or discussion for it so that we can hash out the details :D

The only challenge I see is that I'm not sure if we can get it out in time for Northstar anniversary on January 8th.