The Tavern

Hello,
anyone has any idea what the main changes will be in 0.22? When are the devs planning to release it?

Thank you

There's no set release date, and the main changes are whatever the main the changes are in the crawl repository:

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commits/master

Currently we have (From January till now):

- Spell Library
- LRD doesn't destroy walls
- Swamp worms and Iron giants have the 'Harpoon Shot' ability
- various bugfixes and quality of life changes
- BVC removed from Necromancer starting spellbook, and nerfed slightly

(some other stuff, I probably forgot)

That harpoon shot is serious juju.

It puts some real ranged "nip" into the previously patient swamp worms, and can really mess up your "I'm hanging back here" day.

Iron giants too?
Damn.
Yeah, it can seriously mess your day.

I've been away for months and THIS is what I come back to?

*pours one out for LRD* RIP most fun spell in the game.

This is totally me flaunting my own vault, but there's a new special room in Depths where you'll get dogpiled by casters: commit

Is development slowing down? Asymptotically approaching something? Will DCSS become 1.0 in our lifetime?

Commit frequency is lower now than it was a few years ago, but commit frequency is a very crude measure of the amount of development activity.
DCSS's development is also open to almost everyone, so if you think it's going too slow you can always make some pull requests yourself.

Seriously - judging development by number of commits? What are you, my shitty manager from my first job out of college?

How about by a quite-reasonable measure of development activity?

(No aspersions to devs meant at all -- a slowdown would be expected if DCSS approached its consensus ideal self.)

Below are the results of measuring devolpment activity by version number via the number of lines in its changelog entry, excluding bug fix versions like 0.19.1, and starting from version 0.9 (which I chose for the arbitrary reason that I started playing with that version).



By this metric, development activity in 0.20 was about half that of versions 0.13-0.17, and activity in 0.21 was about half that of versions 0.9-0.12 and 0.18-0.19.