Decisions for the Decisive

Some things have resolved themselves in my mind from the last post. "Yes and now," to contingency, and "probably but later," to bitmap tiles. Contingency is a nice safety net for newer players, and provides a skill-testing opportunity: making the leap from "this saves my butt" to "this prevents me from taking things that keep my butt from needing to be saved" is an important paradigm shift that I'd like to encourage. Bitmap tiles are possible, but will require a near-total rewrite of the output library I wrote for MG. That's just not something I'm willing to do while trying to zero in on a release candidate. Once 1.0 hits, we'll talk. Also, if I do decide to add tiles, I'll be using an existing tileset (probably Gervais' excellent tiles), possibly with a few small alterations...I've learned my lesson on that one.

0.5 is planned to be the first public beta. I also think 0.5 is where I draw a line in the sand on new features. After 0.5 is released, the only things that will be added are bug fixes, balance fixes, and features that are absolutely demanded by usability or balance. That means the feature list for what's going into 0.5 looks something like this, as of right now:

• Spell hotkeys
• Contingency
• Overhaul mob remains effects
• Possibly try to fill in some gaps in the item mixing interactions
• Whatever hare-brained ideas I come up with the night before releasing 0.5

I've got a few small (mostly cosmetic) bugs that've been floating around for a while that are on my hitlist for 0.5; at this point, they've become proud nails that I'm damn sure going to hammer before the public sees them. God-willing-and-the-creeks-don't-rise, I don't know of any crash bugs or other major faux pas that will hold up the public release, but I'm sure my closed-beta cabal will change that for me soon.

The next big question is, "when am I going to overhaul the code surrounding saving and loading the game?" Right now, everything works (and is pretty slick, if I do say so myself...Reflection is an amazing tool) but works much slower than I'd like it to. This also, again, gets back into the lower-level display routines, as initializing the in-game windows is sucking up way more time than it should be. I'm leery of doing too much with the problem, lest I should create some bizarre little bug that I don't catch until it's found by the general public, but I'm thoroughly not happy with the performance of the code as-is. More decisions.