A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when we thought we could release a beta version of the mod once a month, we have introduced the versioning scheme that we use now. Every big release is versioned x.y.z and any subsequent hotfix, due to their small nature, are appended by a patch version number to the end -> x.y.z.a. We are on a path to change this for good, for the better...

To What?

From now on, every release will bear the x.y.z nomenclature. That means we just dropped the hotfix version number entirely. So as of this point, 0.4.4 will be the next release, regardless whether it comes tomorrow or in 2 months, and regardless of how much actual content there is in it.

Why?

The idea for the initial style came from the semantic versioning scheme. We soon realised that it does not follow very well as we are not speaking about APIs and backwards compatibility. The distinguishing hotfix number became a meaningless indicator, that meant little to the public and caused us a lot of headache.

Maybe you have not noticed but the version number shows up in a lot of places. The names of the .bisign file, the ingame menu, our feedback tracker just to name a few. When we release a new version, these get updated to the next minor version number if nothing extremely critical gets discovered in the next few days. Development starts, commits get tied to version numbers, feedback tickets get resolved, and then, all of a sudden it is decided that an urgent hotfix is needed. This means that we have to go back and change the number everywhere. It also gets progressively harder to anticipate these things the deeper you go into hotfix territory (think x.y.z.2 or .3). Making every release sequential just simplifies things for us immensely from a management point of view.

In the end, all these version numbers do not really mean anything for the user, or for us. We are just going along until we have created everything that we have wanted to make, by which time we would probably be at 184.2.1 anyway.