[crossfire] Crossfire 2.0+ features/priorities

[Alex Schultz]

Mark Wedel wrote:

>  With the current discussion regarding modularization, the topic of new 
>features also came up.
>  
>
Discussions do that :P

>  For 2.0, it was mentioned do a general code cleanup to removed old crufty code 
>that is only there for compatibility reasons.  Fair enough.
>  
>
Yes, I agree. We can't keep much of this old compatibility cruft around 
forever. Yes we don't need to do a major release for it, but IMHO doing 
it at a major release will confuse the players less and therefore would 
be of benefit.

>  but relatively to players and developers, what do people see as the top 
>feature(s) that should be added (or things fixed) to make crossfire a better game.
>  
>
Features added... well... here's some ones I think would be neat for a 
2.0 release (though doing all isn't too realistic):
-Land plots (I plan on working on those some time)
-Colored lighting and more lighting levels
-More layers
-Revamp/fix sound
A few ideas/proposals on those are at 
http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/dev_todo (feel free to contribute to 
the todo list there)

Also I would really like to see the weather fixed up. The issues with 
that are:
1) Some disappearing tiles and such ugly bugs (might be a bug in the 
overlay code instead of weather code). (Also, no this isn't just Mikee, 
I've seen this on my private test server too)
2) Too much granularity right now. For this I think strange elevation 
values might be to blame. Might also be some simulation parameters. Not 
really sure. But in any case, you shouldn't see things like so many wet 
and dry spots speckled right beside eachother, that makes it seem almost 
as if there is little rainclouds speckled all over the place looking 
like they could float individually over player's heads
3) Once the granularity is fixed, perhaps some new rain pictures would 
also help that look even better

>   I'm somewhat curious to see what the thoughts are.  I think this info may 
>indirectly help drive the modularization discussion - it may be that some of 
>these features require significant rewrites or cleanups of the code that make 
>sense with modularization.  It may also be that some are relatively easy to do 
>and don't require such changes.
>
Personally, I think modularization and better organization would be 
something good to do, however I do not think it is worth doing major 
rewrites to archive such. Perhaps rewrite some parts, but IMHO there is 
plenty of organization that can be done with the current code without 
major rewrites.

Also, out of the modularization discussions, there has been some 'game 
engine' talk. Personally, I do not believe separating into a game engine 
would be a good goal within/for the project, though I do believe that it 
isn't harmful if such separation comes as a side affect of other goals 
such as making the code more maintainable (not saying engine separation 
would necessarily have that affect, that is for another discussion).

Alex Schultz