I download the newest weekly / monthly prebuild every week from http://emptyset.endoftheinternet.org/~r ... iz/builds/ to play with it and test the wonderful new improvements and features constantly added into the game. I noticed however there are very few servers and people out there running the builds other then the latest official release, probably because fewer people know about them and where to get them from unless someone gives them the link above in a conversation. Many things in Nexuiz are server-side then I expected... even the design of the scoreboard which is still the old one with the latest build if you go on a server with the official version. If I download the latest nightly build and go in the server list I only find a few servers with +100 ping running the SVN too. And also, wouldn't it be more fun if many people could experience the new improvements earlier and have fun with them other then those who get that link from posts or chats?

So I was wondering if it would probably be better and more fun to have the latest build also posted on the downloads page under the official one. To me it would seem pretty fair to have both the beta version after the latest stable release on the download page like most projects do, so every user can choose which to download and use. I mean Nexuiz is an open-source project which can run from a SVN and I think it might be best to give a link to the betas too officially. And if hosting the nightly builds on the same server server is a bad idea maybe at least a link to http://emptyset.endoftheinternet.org/~r ... iz/builds/ on the download page would be good so people know and many can play with the latest release more easily. Even if it's a bit more unstable it would be people's choice overall if to run it or not, and it could be fun to risk it for the new features. Not sure if this could encourage more unsafe and unstable servers on the other side, but still I was wondering why there are no beta releases on the download page and if it would be better to at least put a link to that URL so people can get both the latest stable and latest precompiled build. What do you think?

Woow newest version is sooooo COOL!

I would be a little wary of pushing out the development build publicly like that. We may not have enough servers for the development version but that could be improved by having some kind of development server running several game types and a few bots, with all kinds of disclaimers on it to say that it's not for normal gameplay.

I remember when we first had the new hook physics that there was a test server for this that worked quite well. Normally there'd be a few players in it bouncing around madly. The server was public so sometimes other players would join in which case someone would just have to give a polite explanation of what was going on and asking the player either to stay and experiment or leave and play somewhere else.

Greens, ninjaz and lazy dog all are svn servers.

@MirceaKitsune: Doing beta builds at your mentioned location, so far, was a volontary thing done by divverent.

I understand your point, however, for this there would be 3 options:

1) Find someone who regularly does the builds, upload it to sourceforge (there the files are safe and won't get lost) and update the download page each time. Either only show only the latest build link, or also the previous x ones. However, this is much work

2) Only place a link to the ..../build/ directory of divverent that contains all these builds. However, this would require that divverent regularly keeps building the packages and that he can make sure this download location is safe (no massive downtimes)

3) The best thing imo would be to put the build-SYSTEMS on the download page. For windows users it is actually easy enough to understand: simply tell them on the DL page to download the (static) build package, and executing the build.bat which will do all the work. The users stay updated whenever they want. Updating to even never versions is much faster using these build systems as well.
For Linux users there might also be such a build system, I dunno

I'd rather posting build systems there because binary builds are huge and get outdated easily, it can generate a huge and unnecessary up/downstream bandwidth usage.

I like the idea of making public the SVN version, it can give us a wider userbase for testing. This will increase the chances for a bug to happen and be detected earlier. If with this package are given enough instructions on how to fill a bug report I think this can improve a lot the quality of the system.
This method of svn up + local builds is being used successfully by big serious projects like the FreeBSD os.

Now I'm using that beautiful build package that div0 made for windows, also I saw there is a linux build script somewhere in the forum, maybe we need a Mac build script and thats it.
How hard can be to put it together and post it in the downloads section? Maybe with a little warning like this one (freebsd.org).

Yeah, build systems for the win!

Maybe a cleaned up version of my build script: http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?t=3061 would work for the Linux part. I'm thinking of an all-in-one script which takes an installation path as an argument (or asks for it in a GUI popup window), then installs everything neccessary via the package manager, checks out all neccessary svn repositories, builds and perhaps even creates a desktop icon to launch Nexuiz with. I could create scripts for Ubuntu and Gentoo. (maybe Debian and Arch)

Good idea or not?

You can try this to help your work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(software)
If in need, I can create packages for Slack and related distros which use .tgz

There's a build script in SVN already.

That script is for the official builds, and makes the Linux, the Windows and the Mac versions. It need remote access to a Mac to work, and must run on Linux, and needs some special setup. Not easy to use on your own system.

However, the script contains all the steps needed to make a build, so maybe it can be a help for making a Linux-only or a Mac-only script.