0.15 Development Planning

This page is for managing short and middle term development planning.
Features on this page are considered major or significant improvements. General bugfixing does not need to go here although major bugs could end up in a “tasks for completion” section once we near a release.
Features are divided into sections based on their stage of completion or planning.
Each feature should have the names of any devs who are actively working on, planning, or responsible for the feature and who realistically think they'll be able to finish it in time for the release date.

See the Future Versions and possibly 0.14 Development Plans for ideas, moving said entries here as necessary.

These are features which are in trunk builds for testing / feedback / polishing. They are likely to be included in the 0.15 release if they are ready by that stage.

• Acid — Acid effects temporary (N78291, reaverb) Currently uses time to measure how long you're corroded, which may not be desirable – in trunk.
• Inventory (gammafunk) — remove item inventory weight and player burden state — in trunk.

• Ranged combat overhaul (Grunt) — in trunk
  • There is some feedback that most forms of ranged combat are now much stronger, with the exception of slings which are claimed to be much weaker. (I only read about this; it's not first hand information.) — dpeg 2014-06-12 03:07
  • The higher strength bows was reduced and that of slings was increased to address the issues dpeg mentions.
  • TODO: Possibly mulching adjustment for large rocks? Any further tweaks to reduce throwing damage in general? Neither of these may be necessary, but feel free to add any other ranged attack tweaks in this list.
• Weapon enchantment merger — Combine wpn.plus and wpn.plus2 to one single enchantment. – in trunk
  • TODO: look at enchant weapon scroll generation?
• Removed Dragon Slaying Brand — in trunk; Wyrmbane will keep dragon slaying.

• Glyph reform (gammafunk, elliptic, MarvinPA, Grunt) — cf. 8242 — in trunk

• Ring of hunger/sustenance removal (ChrisOelmueller) — replaced those two base rings with ones of + and - stealth, removed ARTP_METABOLISM, ARTP_STEALTH is handled discrete steps of 50 Stealth – in trunk
• Remove permanent item destruction — Also consider other forms of item tactical item denial. – in trunk; see item generation below, and other forms of item denial are a TODO for 0.16
• Item generation – Balance in light of item dest. removal. in trunk; We've reduced scroll/pot gen, mostly tactical ones, in fe1f5a6b
  • TODO: There are some concerns that early game (e.g. pre-lair) item generation is possibly too little for some types such as identify/rc/curing/hw. –My games haven't shown this to be the case. If anyone feels this needs addressing, it should be done before 0.15 -gammafunk

• Gozag (dpeg, Grunt) — in trunk.
  • TODO: Gozag wrath. Gozag's wrath turning items into gold is bad due to the weird behavior it currently encourages. Possible rework to mark items for goldification when they're first seen. There are probably bugs with the wrath's interaction with e.g. blood potions. The other wrath effects are not possibly not severe enough. Gozag's wrath triggering is branch-dependent.
  • TODO: Bribing. Some reports that it's not strong enough?
  • TODO: Duplication ability: its main effect seems to be increasing the effect of lucky find in early game, which is when those finds matter the most, which makes the ability vary too wildly in utility.
• Qazlal (Grunt) — in trunk.
  • TODO: Remove Qazlal's 6* resist gift, since it's optimal to choose AC in any game where you have at least one level of rf/rc avail from equipment, since Q will grant the next level when you need it. The ability overall seem's like a boring version of Q's passive resist ability. – in trunk, with Grunt's permission (fear him, oh mortals)
• New Nemelex (78291, reaverb) Non-Scummy Piety rules, Plenty of New Unique Cards, other minor changes — in trunk with no current TODO items.

These are features that some developers are interested in trying to do in 0.15, or would like someone else to think about doing. These are not final decisions in any way and may not be in the 0.15 release at all.

• Attributes — consider halving their absolute values to make them more meaningful (cf. IRC discussions) – Not going in 0.15, but this still a TODO
• Eating — no more chunk eating for most species (can compensate by spawning more permafood and/or give permafood more nutrition), species with strange diets exempt (Troll, Ghoul, Vampire). Not going in 0.15, but there is a chunkless branch that is being worked on.

• Monster design discussion/review — recent releases have added very many monster (sub)types and mechanics; need to talk about monster design paradigms, see https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11250 for one point of view; e.g. few mechanics dispersed in interesting patters or many mechanically as diverse as possible monsters (dpeg) — Not going in 0.15, still a TODO.
• Spell slot rework — casting frequencies, wizard/priest/natural flags. — Not going in 0.15, still a TODO
• Uniques — more xp for many of them, higher incentive to kill by better loot. For numbers and more ideas see https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11276 — Not going fully in 0.15, but see below
  • TODO: Possible further tweaks to unique branch spawns.
• MR multipliers — remove in favor of explicit MR numbers (also round to only about 10 steps) under construction here — Not going in 0.15, might be rebased into 0.16

• Fighting reform, most notably changed delay formula. Not going in 0.15, this is a long-term plan if no one is working on it currently.
• Weapon brand distribution cleanup — Not going in 0.15, but reaverb has plans to do this for the next release.
  • The current code makes almost no sense. I'll handle the weapon brand distribution cleanup. I already have some progress on this due to an old, more ambitious project that died and a script to quickly tell me what random_choose_weighted() weights correspond to those ugly if random(foo) blocks. Also, _determine_weapon_brand() looks pretty simple to get under an ad hoc unit test, so I can verify I'm not breaking anything. — Reaver 2014-03-30 16:18

• Character hints at game start — brief race/class messages introducing their starting kit (and reminding about the more important racial traits) under construction here — Not going in 0.15, might get rebased into 0.16 if someone takes it up
• Success chance in hex targeters — together with monster MR changes, make this resist more transparent to players. Hexes are mostly binary success/fail. Could be rounded to not leak exact spell power. under construction here (pending important accuracy fixes) — Not going in 0.15, might get rebased into 0.16

• Code Documentation — Try to establish some guidelines like “doxygen comment any function you touch that has no such comment” or something reasonable. Maybe find a way to auto-generate doxygen docs upon e.g. cszo rebuilds and host the html docs if |amethyst thinks this is the way to go.

0.15 planning section started by sgrunt on 2014-03-05.
Development planning pages reorganized to separate pages by gammafunk on 2014-03-28.