[CF-Devel] Future development & version 1.0.

[Peter Mardahl]

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       I've taken a little time to think through future enhancements going towards 
     
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      1.0 release.
     
     
I think crossfire was a good game deserving of 1.0 years ago.  It's
been fun to play the entire time I've worked on it.  I really think
that in the last years, we've added icing to an already good cake.
It was a good game before I ever touched it.

Now it is a 3-layer cake with a lot of innovations seen in no other game.
The only major thing I think that has been missing is a real
bugkill push.  Jan in particular has done a lot in this direction:
if we're close to 1.0, he gets a lot of the credit for the bugsquishing,
though the rest of us have done some, too.

The skills are great, the PR is great, the gods system is great:
don't mistake me.  But the game was good enough before any of these
to deserve a 1.0.

That is not to say crossfire is perfect, or "finished."  It'll
never be either, and I don't think anything remaining in the
TODO list should stop us from promoting the game.

Let's finish up the current projects, make the game usable
by dummies, squash the serious bugs, and put out a 1.0.  Seriously.

Heck, we could have called the last release 1.0, and it would 
be a credit to us and everyone who has contributed.  Omega was very
fun to play, but let me tell you, it was FAR less balanced than
crossfire is right now (even with the recent PR stuff.)

Now I'll comment on the stuff below:

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       1) Re-do object structure into type/subtype setup.  This really does not aff
     
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       2) Automatic map tiling & increasing outdoor scale.  Increasing the outdoor
     
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      3) Increase the viewable map to 17x17 or 21x21 or some other size.  This is a
     
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      4) Transportation objects.  What I really mean by this is taking a
     
     
These all seem like splendid ideas for 2.0.

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      Client contacting metaserver and prompting for which to play on is on my near
     
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      term list of things to do.  It of course does not change play balance in any
     
     
"make it playable by dummies."

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       The above said, if version 1.0 is our most immediate goals, my main concerns
     
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      would be:
     
     
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      1) Stability of the server.  The server really needs to be able to run for da
     
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      under heavy loads with no problems.
     
     
The only remaining serious bug I know of is "that map bug":  the one
where you come out of an exit and end up in the sea.

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      2) Scalibility of server.  I don't know the most heavily loaded a server has
     
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      been, but potentially if we are trying to make crossfire mainstream, this cou
     
     
Honestly, I think we should make it easy for someone to play the
game by himself on his own machine.  The game is great standalone as
well as networked, and I think we'd be better showing what crossfire
can be like played locally as well as on the... few... laggy.... 
public servers.  We should rename the client "crossfire", and have
it start up a server, "cfserv" locally if the player doesn't
select a network game:  and all this stuff should be 1 package.

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      3) Playability - how easy will it be for new players to play the game.  Even 
     
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      some of the current public servers without many players, you can get into cas
     
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      of various buildings/dungeons having bee ncleared out.  With 30 players on a
     
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      server, I could see it being quite difficult to find available dungeons.  The
     
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      only real solution to this I can see is just have a lot more maps/choices.
     
     
Random maps.  This is why I DID random maps.  My whole reason for making
that huge exertion.  
This is why I once proposed making cities where, by default,
each exit led to a random map.  The random maps are pretty good.
They could be much better.  However, no one has done significant work
on them but me.   The existing potential of random maps has been only
5% exploited....  For example, I could probably pretty much duplicate
nethack with random maps.

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      If possible, it would be much better to grow the user base slowly and not a
     
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      sudden 10 or hundred fold increase.  The former will let us address some of
     
     
I disagree.  We want a HUGE player base.  We just don't want them all
joining public servers.  Start up a server on their machine for them,
unless they specify a remote one.

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      these points above as we see them - maybe it turns out that after 15 users, a
     
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      server becomes unplayable - if thats the case, we can then investigate ways t
     
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      fix that and so forth.
     
     
Well, we can try this out now.

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       But also, I really don't want to get inundated with hundreds of misc questio
     
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      or bug reports of minor nature.  Or if I do, I probably won't have the time n
     
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      inclination to respond to those.  I think the increased user base can be used
     
     
The standard response to an indundation of bug reports that the developers
cannot handle is to say, "why don't you help fix it?"  No one is paying us:
we've no obligation to do anything or fix anything.

The Tanners have provided an excellent resource which should answer
most questions, and there is the crossfire-list.  Players can
support each other.

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       As far as a technical basis, the way this would probably need to work out is
     
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      have 2 cvs versions - a 1.0 and a 2.0 (or 1.1 or whatever).   The only thing
     
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      done on 1.0 would be to do bugfixes, and I personally do not want to do that,
     
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      someone else will need to volunteer for that.  the 2.0 branch would be for th
     
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      other great upcoming features, some of which I mention on the list above, and
     
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      others I'm sure to be brought up by the new players.
     
     
Nah, I think you're taking this too seriously.  People can live with
a few bugs or instability in their free game.  Either that, or they
can help us fix it.  Right now, we've not the manpower to do what
you're proposing, two CVS branches.  I'd rather see a development-release
cycle, like many codes do.  That's not to say we shouldn't make an
effort to respond to suggestions and fix bugs.  But let's not turn
our hobby into a job.

PeterM