But as long as it is possibe to always install a legacy version, there should be no need to keep old jars with the latest release and pre-releases
@panther I think that is a very good point. Our new website, installer, and that we print the engine version in the game UI makes this all a lot easier compared to the SVN days.
will the next major release affect all the maps the same as the last one?
Likely not. We're in a better position to avoid a number of those problems now. We can still and always could introduce non-backward compatible XML changes. The last iteration required a re-download since we unbundled every map with from the game engine and we re-hosted. We took that opportunity to add in some non-backward compatible changes since all the maps needed to be updated anyways.
I think soon we will introduce an XML schema versioning system directly into the XML . That would allow us to start upadting XMLs in non-backwards compatible ways, but still play 'old' map XMLs that had not been updated. Today the game engine and XML code need to stay in pretty much lock step, doing that we could let the game engine code move forward but still 'remember' how to parse the old XML spec.
@RoiEX I would check on the live lobby a few times to get more player input on this one. I think the question at the moment is whether everyone agrees with
"But as long as it is possibe to always install a legacy version, there should be no need to keep old jars with the latest release and pre-releases"