[CF-Devel] Future development & version 1.0.

[Mark Wedel]

 I've taken a little time to think through future enhancements going towards the
1.0 release.

 Certainly the Partial Resistance code was a big piece of that puzzle.

 Looking over the TODO list, while there is lots of stuff there, a lot of it is
probably minor.  To me, the big points (harder to do) on the TODO list are (in
no particular order):

 1) Re-do object structure into type/subtype setup.  This really does not affect
gameplay in any way - it really is more of a code cleanup - it should allows
some other features to be done more easily than the current object setup.

 2) Automatic map tiling & increasing outdoor scale.  Increasing the outdoor
scale is not really dependant on the first, but map tiling would make it
easier.  This will affect gameplay some, but probably not in major ways.

3) Increase the viewable map to 17x17 or 21x21 or some other size.  This is a
very visible change - it probably does not affect balance much, but the player
will have a bit more visibility on monsters.  Also, this may make some maps much
easier, as you can now see the target of some goal that otherwise was not
noticable before (ie, before you open that great, you can see wherey ou need to
run to).

4) Transportation objects.  What I really mean by this is taking a
transportation object that lets you go over terrain you normally could not - ie,
a ship over water.  With this change, the ships that instantly transport you to
other places should be removed.  This probably isn't a big deal/high priority.

Client contacting metaserver and prompting for which to play on is on my near
term list of things to do.  It of course does not change play balance in any
way.

 The above said, if version 1.0 is our most immediate goals, my main concerns
would be:

1) Stability of the server.  The server really needs to be able to run for days
under heavy loads with no problems.

2) Scalibility of server.  I don't know the most heavily loaded a server has
been, but potentially if we are trying to make crossfire mainstream, this could
be tens to hundreds of users.  I'm not sure how well it currently does - even on
my slow sparc 10 running the tavern, a couple players did not seem to chew up
much cpu, so I think we may be OK on that.

3) Playability - how easy will it be for new players to play the game.  Even on
some of the current public servers without many players, you can get into cases
of various buildings/dungeons having bee ncleared out.  With 30 players on a
server, I could see it being quite difficult to find available dungeons.  The
only real solution to this I can see is just have a lot more maps/choices.

 Now onto some personal thoughts:

If possible, it would be much better to grow the user base slowly and not a
sudden 10 or hundred fold increase.  The former will let us address some of
these points above as we see them - maybe it turns out that after 15 users, a
server becomes unplayable - if thats the case, we can then investigate ways to
fix that and so forth.

 But also, I really don't want to get inundated with hundreds of misc question
or bug reports of minor nature.  Or if I do, I probably won't have the time nor
inclination to respond to those.  I think the increased user base can be used to
that advantage, as hopefully they will find some of those issues, but also be
around and hopefully willing to answer more questions.

 As far as a technical basis, the way this would probably need to work out is
have 2 cvs versions - a 1.0 and a 2.0 (or 1.1 or whatever).   The only thing
done on 1.0 would be to do bugfixes, and I personally do not want to do that, so
someone else will need to volunteer for that.  the 2.0 branch would be for the
other great upcoming features, some of which I mention on the list above, and
others I'm sure to be brought up by the new players.

 Anyways, thats just some words of thought.