The Bevy Monthly Update Template

[BlackPhlox]

Here it is, the first draft of the monthly update for Bevy. Any feedback is highly appreciated and very much encouraged.

Here a few points we should make clear/discuss prior to the first publication.

• A catchy name for the updates (I've come up with The Bevy Brief, but the more suggestions the better

• Any section that doesn't have any new updates does not need to be included.

• I've added some examples for some of the sections, the final template should have either a description about what to put or removed any examples/text beside the text of the sections entirely. Other suggestions is very welcome.

Template based on The Bevy Brief PoC:

The Bevy Brief - 001 - Hello World!

Introduction

Community

Pride Month Discord Logo

François now have merge rights! Woohoo!

Bevy Development

Engine-related development progress, the same categories as in the Discord channel. Keeping up to date on what aspects of the engine is undergoing development. In the case of a recent release, the new changes/addition should also be mentioned first for each subsection or reference to the bevy news like with 0.5. Arrange in order of major changes or else alphabetical.

Rendering

🎉 Introducing the new Render Pipeline! 🎉

UI

AI

Animation

Assets

Audio

Documentation

ECS

Editor

Input

Modding

Networking

GGOP for bevy is now in the works!

Physics

Rapier has gotten a major update!

...

Scenes

Website

Bevy Awesome is now Bevy Assets, get your plugin or game featured!

XR

Asset Highlight

Newly added assets to Bevy Assets or things that undergoing new major/minor updates that are worth mentioning.

Learning

Unofficial Bevy Cheat Book update!

Assets / Plugins

bevy_transform_gizmo

bevy_editor_pls

bevy_ecs_tilemap

bevy_pixels

bevy_mod_raycast performance improvements!

Apps & Games

Tools

Showcases

Display what people have shown off since the last update.

TheRawMeatball's fruit ninja clone on Android:

Maybe some useful backstory etc... with videos, gifs, or images, everyone loves seeing progress visually.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25123512/121220284-c4ec7080-c884-11eb-814e-be43bda21af6.mp4

[alice-i-cecile]

Awesome! Is this intended for June 2021?

[alice-i-cecile]

Do we want this to be opt-in, or opt-out, with the editor scraping the showcase and dev-announcements channel since the last month?

[cart]

I think the categories are maybe a bit too specific / noisy now. I think we can get away with less bucketing (especially given that some things belong to multiple categories).

• Community Updates
  • Assets, Crates, and Plugins
  • Learning and Walkthroughs
  • Observations and Thoughts
  • Miscellaneous
• Engine Updates
  • Merged PRs
  • Open PRs (noteworthy open prs ... tag with things like [new] or [feedback requested])
  • Merged RFCs
  • Open RFCs (noteworthy open rfcs ... tag with things like [new] [feedback requested])
  • Discussions (noteworthy github issues and discussions)
• Website Updates
  • Merged PRs
  • Open PRs (noteworthy open prs ... tag with things like [new] or [feedback requested])
• Organization Updates (bevy org updates ... things like policy, project management, or role changes)
• Showcase (visual things)

A catchy name for the updates (I've come up with The Bevy Brief, but the more suggestions the better

I think using an existing naming convention is probably better than coming up with a unique name. "This Month in Bevy" makes it much clearer to people what the contents of the newsletter are.

Do we want this to be opt-in, or opt-out, with the editor scraping the showcase and dev-announcements channel since the last month?

I think it would make the process a lot easier if we could roll up discord showcase content without explicitly asking everyone. I think we should update the showcase description to inform people that they are consenting to being showcased by posting content there?

So discord showcase would be opt-out and people can opt-in additional content by creating a PR for the current newsletter branch?

[alice-i-cecile]

I agree with the categories and "This Month in Bevy" proposed above.

I think it would make the process a lot easier if we could roll up discord showcase content without explicitly asking everyone. I think we should update the showcase description to inform people that they are consenting to being showcased by posting content there?

I like this a lot; this will make the process very easy. We should have a clear bar for "what goes in the newsletter"; some of the content in #showcase is just cute little screenshots, which is fun (and I want more of it!) but not really worth including.

[cart]

Yeah I think we should leave it up to editors to pick what shows up by default (to account for volume and quality). But if people manually submit stuff, I think we shouldn't turn them away unless theres a good reason. I don't want to tell people excited about working with bevy that their content isn't good enough :)

[cart]

Added a disclaimer to the #showcase channel description, so anything past this point is fair game :)

[cart]

Anyone interested in driving this forward? Doing this soon-ish might be a good way to ensure people we're still alive while we wait for 0.6.

[BlackPhlox]

I'm first available after the 20th of August, so it depends on the release plan for me.

[Kanabenki]

Is there still a plan for a regular Bevy newsletter to be published? I'd be interested in giving an hand if that's the case :slightly_smiling_face:

Would the release cycle be fixed ? There might be a lot of content to go through if the release is montly, but a weekly release would put an additional maintenance burden on the editors, and might end up with some smaller releases depending on the week. For example, Veloren seems to do a variable length release of a few weeks at a time, but I don't know if this is due to waiting on enough content or if it's simply dependent on the editors availability to publish a new entry.

[alice-i-cecile]

I'm definitely open to it, but it would need to be community led: bandwidth among maintainers is tight. Current feeling is that monthly would be a better cadence for readers :)

[Kanabenki]

I think that in addition to having the possibility of submitting issues/PRs for content inclusion in the current month's draft, it could be good to have a discord channel dedicated to submitting possible entries for the "Community Updates" part of the newsletter, that could lower the barrier of entry for submitting content. I saw there are already several channel under "Showcase", but it seems that people are mainly posting their own work in it, whereas a dedicated channel could incite people to propose content they found/liked.

Would the work on the current month issue by done in the bevy-website repo by the way? I feel it may drown out the issues/PRs relevant to the rest of the bevy website and add triaging burden, so it may be better to set up a dedicated repo in the bevy org?