CommonCore (page, repo) R6 is now released… and that means something a bit different than previous releases. There’s been a slight change in nomenclature, as you may have noticed, and with that change in nomenclature come some changes in how releases will be done going forward.
This is a very small release compared to 5.0.0, because it’s really more equivalent to a preview release than a final one. VNX (visual novel extensions) is now part of the core framework and the difficulty system has been partially reworked, but other than that it’s just minor fixes and additions.
There’s now an R in front of the version number, and though there may still be patch versions, generally the written version number will be written shortened. Version codenames (Firene for R6) are now formally retired with the actual release, although I’ll probably keep using them out of habit. The R stands for Revision or Release, but it also stands for (or at least symbolizes) Rolling or Rapid.
New releases, major or minor, will come out when it feels like there is a reasonable amount of new stuff to package up, and there really won’t be an exact science to it. Preview releases are a thing of the past, as is any pretense of special pre-release testing. More frequent releases are intended, but not promised.
This new approach better reflects the nature of the project and how it’s used internally. It’s a hobby project being worked on sporadically, and almost every game is built on the latest code in the repository rather than the most recent formal release.
I should make it clear that while CommonCore isn’t dead or formally in maintenance mode, it’s definitely entering its final chapter. I talk about this more in my post on the Unity shake-up and a follow-up blog post, but the long and short of it is that I’m only planning a handful more games on CommonCore. I don’t know what’s next after that, but for the time being, I’m focusing on building those games themselves, and only putting enough into CommonCore to make those possible.