The development wiki has been reorganized. It should now be much more navigable and comprehensible. If you have checked it before, and turned away in disgust, please take another peek now!
I personally have been away from the project for a couple of months, and was pleasantly surprised by the better structure and more readable pages – I had no idea this was taking place. So big thanks to XuaXua for stepping up, grabbing a shovel, and wailing away at the mess!
--Eino
A significant refactoring of combat code, by Cryp71c, has recently been merged into master. This is a call for testing and bug-hunting, in preparation for .10 release. The changes are live in development builds and on the servers (the testing versions).
List of significant changes for the Unified Combat Control branch:
List of things for players to be aware or mindful of for bug-reporting purposes
Report bugs here! Thank you in advance!
If you ask me, heavy armour is the most important topic for 0.8. It doesn’t need to be restored to its former overpowered glory, but the fact that wrapping a piece of bedsheet around you provides better defence than a plate mail set is a bit sad. And you get spells on top of that.
So, here are some recent changes: More: Read the rest of this entry…
Things have moved forwards, and the FR categories in Mantis have been disabled. Dive into the Code and Development Wiki, noble Feature Requester!
–Eino
edit: Feature Request categories have been disabled in Mantis now, please use the wiki to send in your ideas!
Contributors no longer need to ask for page-creation privileges to add new pages to the Code and Development Wiki. This should make contributing your ideas easier.
Note that when we moved our development resources to crawl.develz.org, the intention was to use the wiki for brainstorming and the tracker for ready proposals. We haven’t really enforced it so far, but would like to see this in action. FRs tend to turn into discussions and rot in the tracker, which limits the usefulness of tracker functionality. Discussion (and rotting) will happen in the wiki as well, but we think it is a better tool for that, as developers can summarize and reboot the pages more flexibly. We also hope that related issues get grouped better, so that contributors are more aware about related issues surrounding particular features.
Arguably, having categories called “Feature Request” in the tracker is pretty bad for the intended workflow. We are working on sorting this out. :-)
I’d like to add that the DCSS development mailing list is also a tool available for discussing ideas and issues with the development.
Below is the current tracker/wiki HOWTO for reference:
The time has come to finally close down our SourceForge bug, patch and feature request trackers.
We have migrated our bug and feature-request tracking to a Mantis Tracker – please sign up there to contribute! In addition to the tracker, we have created a DokuWiki for play-testing feedback and for suggesting and discussing new features and ideas.
Also, the official home page for the Stone Soup project is now http://crawl.develz.org – if you haven’t yet checked out our development blog, you should! Mailing list and git repository are still located on SourceForge.
Thanks to Jude for covering many of the major changes in 0.6 in the play-testing posts, Darshan for his history blog-post, and Johanna for the post covering tiles and tides! And last but not least, thanks to develz.org and Napkin for hosting us!
I had a pretty good run with two Naga Transmuters of Che recently. The first go first found all the bookshops one could hope for, then stupidly died to a D:11 hill giant before finding the Mines and indulging in bibliophilia.
The other run managed to grab two runes. This was a long enough game to let me see a good bunch of the new content in a real game. Slime creatures, ugly things, I can’t remember a time I was glad to see one of either! While I didn’t get Shoals or Wizlabs, I did have a Treasure Trove. I think the trove itself had more gold than I paid for it though, that was strange.
I didn’t have a lot of trouble starting out. I think the key to getting a naga off the ground is to spit, spit, spit that poison. Transmuters might have a hard XL1, but the very first level gain unlocks Evaporate (and Sticks to Snakes, which I opted out of), which makes matters both easy and fun. A lot of the game was spent e’x'amining if the encounters had poison resistance or not.
Lately we’ve been pulling together a short document to describe how the Stone Soup project operates. The aim of this is to enable people interested in contributing to quickly learn how they can. It’s also about writing it down for people already contributing, of course. Recent growth of the team and increased contributions (yay!) inspired me to start writing this, and it got major feedback and contributions from dpeg, jpeg and due.
I’ve committed it to the repository now for public scrutiny, and hopefully, benefit to current and future contributors. (Wow, am I making a speech here..) It’s in the docs/develop folder.
There’s still room for improvement. The following could (should) be added:
And of course, needs to be updated for the new Mantis/Wiki once it’s official. Any feedback is very welcome!
Steady progress on the Mantis and wiki. There’s still a good bit of work to do just figuring out how we are going to use the tracker. I’ve posted a writeup about different categories in the tracker (bugs, features, etc) with thoughts on how they could be used.
Stone Soup switched to git for version control a while back. If you’ve been following the subversion tracker, and wondered why the activity suddenly seems to have stopped – that’s why. :) We haven’t really made noise about the change outside the mailing list and ##crawl IRC channel – thanks to people on the latter for pointing this out!
Darshan wrote a fine quickstart guide to using git on the mailing list; check it out here.
We now have a DOS build of 0.5.2, courtesy of Rugxulo of BTTR Software.